Tuesday, 1 June 2010
I FORGOT THE TONGUE... !
Post Work
Well after the hell with maya it was time for some heaven. Bit complicated process tho. I had to mix ''BAD'' Maya renders with Max renders. I've decided to do my background in max and main character animation in maya.
Well from max I got quite nice render passes, I had my Beauty(or standard output as u wish), then Pass for Shadows, and for DOF (3 passes actually low/med/high range), ID for objects, ID for wire, ID for Materials. They all gave me lots of control over my image. Also the 32bit EXR depth was great to work with since it was uncompressed. Maya from the other hand had to compress my 32bit EXR and make my live more... sad.
Anyway below u can see some of the Max renders after converting to JPG for this blog.
The renders above are all the images I used for my first layer of backroung. As you can see there is no grass in it. The reason why not is because I didnt had time to render the full image with static grass, there fore I've decided to add grass later on in post wrok as a static image since it was not animated.
Now the next part was to get maya layers, I guess you already know what I'm going say here... PAIN PAIN PAIN... Well I got the Egg and Dragon on a alpha layer with no background, but there was no shadows casted on ground... It did look bad in post work. So the solution was very simple. Create copy of scene, apply gray material to entire scene and rerender it. Then use it as multiply map in after effect with curve and sat correction and that ''did'' the trick... Some kina how.. ble.
And here we got After Effect...lots of lots of layers for silly little animation.. thanx to MAYA! :D
And I end up with the images below.
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And thats it. I'm ''happy'' with the final look, even tho I'd rather to do it in max and get it better... more like How to train your dragon than this thini thing......
Maya Conclusion
Well I thought Id add this post too as a little summary.
3Ds Max - Friendly user software for CG Artists
Zbrush - Friendly user software for CG Artists
Maya - ............................................ fog CG Artists/Programmer - U cant do anything in this program without going to Google every 5 sec and goggling how to fix the damn code!
And thats it, I sure hope I wont have to work in this program in next 5 years, after that they should make it ussable for CGI artists and id love to come back to it.
Lighring / Rendering !
And no its a pain and its a terrible pain. Hate it hate it hate it. I spend around 2 days fighting with it and I just cant think about it any more tbh. Maya its bugged more than Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the release day.(which was not even working because master EA server went DOWN).
Simple problems, why is maya not using all of my CPU ? I got Dual quad core nehelem (8cpu/16 threads), guess what? Took me 2h to google the reason. Problem was simple maya was using 2/4 threads of my cpu 25%. I set up in settings to use all manually to push it up to max but I only got 2/4 extra threats maxing it out at 50%. Now 2hours later I finally found a solution to fix it and knowing maya it was not easy, I had to go to maya files, find specific file open it and use my super non existing coding skills to fix maya code to utilize all of my cpus.
Another one problem is, why on earth maya render is saving files somewhere else than maya bath ? And why cant I just pick location... More pain to manage files.
Another one, why all my extra render pass came out black ? I just need simple alpha for shadows! How hard can that be ! Guess what was the solution? Coding again ! Even tho I did it like people say to do it, it still didn't work.
Rendering issues, funny thing actually. When I render in max 400 frames max usually stay at same memory lvl. Meaning it start at 2gig and end and 2.5 gig depends from camera, scene etc etc. Maya from the other hand start from 500 mb and end up at sky rocked 15 GB ! then she crash... was fun to experience that :)
To be honest I could list lots of issues with this program that I ran in to. I guess they all can be fixed and corrected, the question I'm asking is why its me that has to do it? I pay Autodesk to do it after all...
Anyway above all those damn problems there are few things that I actually like in maya. The graph editor, rigging and so on, however rendering in maya its pain and still at level back in 1990 where all we had is F9 which was shortcut for render. (maya still doesn't have it...)
Animating !
Ok, lets be honest and just skip it shall we? I cant stand maya graph editor... well Its either stupid or I dont know how to use it. Simple problem, select 50 objects and change their scale/spread on graph editor. I duno I always got him blank, with lots of parameters and no dots/lines/curves... cant be ask to google it for 50th time and see how to do it.
Anyway even I had lots of problem with it and pain I did ''somehow'' menage to animate around 400 frames which is about half of my storyboard animation. Isnt that bad, lets hope that rendering//lighting will be easier and more pleasuring.
Rigging !
AAAA MY BRAIIINNN. Its dead. yup definitely dead with maya. Its actually not that bad tbh. Was quite fun to do it and work flow with graph editor is quite easy and fun. The problem are the bags. Double transmission killed me. Every time I linked something and then try to animated it everything were getting screw over. Also all those gimb locks and look at + helper controllers its nightmare. I had to re rig my model about 4x after which I just gave up and make it ''animatable'' so I can finish the project in time.
Well anyway, got it to end at the end. Rig was ''working'' with a lot of tweaks on the go during the animation but its a lesson learned at the end. Time to move to rendering.
Finishing out model
Great, now I have the model. Now its time to make it ''usable'' Basically what I did is re UV map it using zbrush plugins which did all the hard job in 5 sec for me. However the retoop was painful. Its quite hard to do it in zbrush because of the controls, and screen but its not that bad tbh. After a while it was quite easy task to do. Once I re UV model and Re-topology it, it was the time to start baking textures. Here we go u can see some of them below.
Now once I got these textures I did some tests in maya. The initial idea was to have entire set of them, including extra specular, transparency, reflection, and SSS. However once I saw how hard and %"£%"£% it is to do it in maya I quit that idea and just stick to Diffuse+Bump skipping normal map.
More Modeling
So here we go, more high detail modeling and texturing from zbrush. Note that none of these models have any UV or normal wire. Its all been done using Zbrush Sphere and model from max.
So here we go, more high detail modeling and texturing from zbrush. Note that none of these models have any UV or normal wire. Its all been done using Zbrush Sphere and model from max.
Storyboard
Now during the modeling I got a little bit bored so in order to keep fresh I did little storyboard.
Max To Zbrush ! :D
Well this was one of my fav moments. The workdlow between 3Ds max and Zbtush using GOZ Max is just AMAZING. Working with it is heaven quick painless and pleasure.
Screns from max:
Design research
So here we go. Little research I did to look through dragons. I looked both at drawing as well as zbrush models. I find out that looking at zbrush model helps a lot in modeling.
And thats it for my research :)
Introduction
Heya
So lets get it started. For this project I have to create a character, rig it, animate id, light it and finally render it out.
I have thought about if for a while to be hones and I end up creating a dragon. I guess the reason why is because I just saw How to train your dragon like 10x and I want to make something similar.
The plan is simple:
Design
Model - Max>Zbrush>Max>Maya
Textyre - ZBrush>Photoshop
Rig Maya
Shade Maya
Animate Maya
Light Maya + Max
Render Maya + Max
Post work After Effect
end