Meanwhile, Joe is working on...

Almost forgot about the blog, my bad. Lately in our Major project, one of the areas I have been contributing to is the modelling of our environment asset, notably establishing the scale with proxy geometry which are all done in Maya. Scene environment work in progress The general proxy geometries of the steps, floors, doors, windows, etc. were quickly modelled. Then came the railing and the lamp-pillar at the start and end of every flight. Quick concept art of the railings and lamp-pillar that I work from, provided by our concept artist Paris Jones The pillars were first approached, modelled and UV'd. To offer the director a choice, I modelled the pillar in both of rectangular or cylindrical profiles of each individual pillar element so we can mix and match to formulate the final geometry. Using Maya 2015's UV tools felt a little better than previous versions e.g. able select UV shells in the UV texture like you would with faces, edges, etc was nice. Howeve...

I've been looking more into Shotgun software for our production recently, setting up assets, task templates, shots and experimenting with other customisation features for pages to get a feel for the software more. From what I experienced so far, this is a very flexible system, very customisable hence some other people have no clue on how to set things up. Created a task template for helping quickly populating production assets list It is centred around assets, which can only be created by the manager account, which can have various files and attributes assigned to it and from that, it can be linked to other production elements such as shots, schedules and the review system within Shotgun. Populating assets and shots in Shotgun, yet to associate them with each other Currently, both the artist and manager accounts cannot setup Shotgun Desktop app meaning at the moment, Shotgun used more in a sense as a web-app rather than a full integrated system for production....

Lately for major project, I have started looking into the Shotgun using the accounts given to start looking at pipeline. The artist permissions pre-set had very limited control, obviously, but I was kindly given access to a managers permissions account which I did some test setting up assets, shots, assigning schedules and customising pages. More work is still to be done with experimenting and planning our pipeline as well as starting to layout the various pieces of our project into Shotgun. In the mean time, I emailed Greg Culp, the lead lighting artist for the short film 'Feast', for some advice on flat looks for lighting and rendering. To my delight, he managed to reply and give valuable help for us which we will surely be looking into during look dev.

Just quick adjustments the the force fields (turning down turbulence and keying various field's magnitudes) and changes to the custom aim expression/script. Still not convinced on the general behaviour of the butterflies, I think I will write my own flocking system to deal with them. At the current state, they are most useful for long shots and when the butterflies may need to collide with objects due to the use of nParticles. I think creating a custom flocking system will be to mainly provide a more realistic flight behaviour, with less sharp changes of direction which is an artifact of the current solution and also to allow for butterflies to follow and go to certain positions defined by the user. At the current moment I am unsure of how to do such things with nParticles and expressions.

Did some really quick render test today with Mental Ray and Maya's ramp shader, definitely an improvement in terms of hardness of the edges over V-Ray. Soft edges can also be created too.

Been trying to simulate a flock/crowd of butterflies using Maya nParticles and instancing a simple animated geometry. So far I had to add a better butterfly pointing vector as the default set is limited, butterflies do not pitch or dive steeply which the most usable default option available, aim by velocity, does. I had to write a custom expression to get the butterfly to get them to fly flatter. Wasn't too pleased with the result at the moment, looks like a mess, especially the flapping which does not relate to the speed or change of direction of the butterflies. Also, as expected, they behave like a bunch of particles, which is random enough for shots such as when they are collecting underneath the umbrella, obviously needs more tweaking for that.

Been rendering the Maya ramp shader using Vray for the lighting and rendering test for major project animation. May be considering using other renderers as so far I feel Vray is not really designed for non-photorealistic rendering.e.g. the edge cut off is still softer than I wanted it to be. I tried to imitate this render setup but in Maya but have been unsuccessful so far, the VRay materials does not seem to map the colours correctly on the lightMtl or the geometry shadow color and fall off does not get affected at all by the ramp shader. One of the first tests piping outColor of ramp to VRay materials I may investigate further into geometry shadow falloff in VRay shaders later on but we'll see how others go.