Maya Tip of the Day #4

The subtitle for this post is, "Getting To Know Maya 2008."

I'd planned on being cautious about moving into Maya 2008 on this project. It started, back in the "way-before time" on Maya 8. We were wishy-washy about moving onto 8.5, so wishy-washy in fact that Maya 2008 was out and about by the time we upgraded to 8.5.

Well, lo and behold, I look at James' latest post and, "what the hell!?!" Holmes is rocking the bird in fully up-to-date '08 style. Thusly, I'm happy to present the following post.

Unlike James, who's actually working in the program, I've only opened it a few times and clicked around on some of the "What's New" links. Two things that are new, that've drawn my eye, are the Poly Smooth and the "X-Ray Active Components" shading option.

I've not yet spent much time with the new Poly Smooth but it may be usable enough to replace the Connect Poly Shape scripts that I've come to know and love. Well, maybe not entirely replace them as they do lot beyond simply creating a smoothed proxy but it looks like a nice little addition to the toolset. I look forward to putting them to a more extensive test. The ability to quickly toggle the low-poly cage on-and-off, and to manipulate either it or the higher-poly model is great.


As to the new X-Ray shading option, I think it works for me.

When I'm modeling, I spend a lot of time jumping from X-Ray to regular flat shading. I'm always having to check if I've selected an extra face here or a stray point there. The gesture to toggle X-Ray shading via a marking menu is pretty damn ingrained in my workflow at this point. But this new shading option, which doesn't X-Ray the entire shape or scene but only the selected components, it's pretty clean. One of the tenets of creating usable interfaces is, "only show the things that are important At This Moment." The old X-Ray option, when you were trying to check your selection, showed more than you needed to see. It showed you what you didn't want selected as well as what you did want. Too much information.

Having said all that, I don't think I'll take the old X-Ray out of my toolbox entirely. This new option won't do anything for you if you're trying to add to your selection. In that instance, X-Ray is just what you need.

Okay, I've gone on long enough on very small subjects, but stay tuned for further "Getting To Know 2008" posts in the near, or far, future.

Cheers.

Modeling Tools (Maya Tip of the Day #3)

Today we'll be looking, briefly, at two tools. The first is from the Maya Bonus Tools toolset.

There are a ton of Bonus Tools. I installed them all when I had the option to because, well, why the hell wouldn't I? They're tools and they're bonuses. I like both. But there are so many that I spent more time being daunted by the long list than I do actually using them.

(that's like 30 tools or something!)

I'm sure there's documentation for all of these but I've not looked for it. What I was looking for though was a way to pivot a piece of geometry around one of its edges. It's a window shutter on a building I'm modeling and I had it placed right where I wanted it, then decided that I wanted it open, just a little bit. I knew I'd downloaded a 3rd party tool that was built for this but I couldn't remember what it was. So on a lark, I checked the Bonus Tools.

It's in there. It's called "Move Object Pivot To Component Center." It's a long name but it does just what it says. I selected the edge I wanted, ran the command and voila, the shutter was cracked open. After that, a quick Center Pivot gets things back to normal. That one's heading to a marking menu soon.

After finding that, I was still wondering what tool I'd previously found to do this. Well, it's Local Tools by Henry Korol. It's actually in one of my shelves but because I've yet to make custom buttons for my shelves, it gets lost easily.

The good and bad thing about Local Tools is that it's way more powerful than the Move Object Pivot bonus tool. The good part of that is, well, it does more. The bad part is that it does so much more that it's really worth reading online documentation. I've not done that yet but I've bookmarked the page. I'm sure that it's going to be part of my modeling repertoire soon.

Cheers.

Marking Menus

I'm not all that stoked on my building models just yet so no pics of them today. I thought, instead, that I'd share my custom marking menus.

I have three marking menus set up, bound to Option + 1, Option + 2 and Option +3. I do 90% of my Maya work on a Macbook Pro and on that keyboard, those bindings work pretty well. They're not super-intuitive and I imagine that I'll try out some other options eventually but they're fine for now. I can't easily hit the Option + 4 chord, so this set up is limited to three menus only.

The commands in each menu are all loosely related. MM_01 (marking menu one) is commonly used modeling tools. MM_02 is commonly used viewport options and MM_03 is, well, I'm not sure what to call it.

Here they are:

So, I use these tools a lot. This menu is a bit too full for me to truly work gesturally with it, at least at the moment. With more time spent using it, maybe all of the tools will become gestures. Insert Edge Loop and Extrude are well-placed, I think but I don't know that Combine really deserves the "pride of place" of being the bottom tool. I should put something that I use more often in that place, maybe the Split Polygon Tool.


This one is nice and light. I use X-Ray all of the time and both Isolate Selected and Wireframe On Shaded are easy to hit gesturally. This menu I really don't have to think about at all.

The To Edge Loop and Delete Edge/Vertex don't really fit the theme of this menu so well but it only bothers me a little bit.


These are the, "all right, let's move on tools." The set-up here works well for when I've got an element just the way I want it, I can very quickly gesture up, down and up to the right, and then move on. Ok, ok, Duplicate Special has no place being here and, frankly, I forget that it's there. I nearly always grab that tool from the Hot Box instead of from here. Maybe I should swap Combine and Duplicate Special. That actually makes a certain amount of sense, because after Combining it's a good idea to "reset" your geometry before modeling away.

Well, there you have it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Tricksy Camera, version 01

So all the futzing and time wasting and random code typing is done for now. I've got a camera rig that I'm going to live with for a little while, see if my half-baked ideas for what would make a workable set up make any sense at all.

Here's a copy of the Maya scene file (Maya 8) and the script. To try it out, import the camera rig file into any Maya scene, position it roughly, then run the script.

(screenshot of the rig and the GUI)

Now that this is in a workable state, I'm moving onto the animatic for the film, just blocking out shots and figuring out rough timing. I'll probably have stills to show as I go along but not much very exciting as models I'll be using in it are going to be very, very basic.

Cheers.

Maya Tip Of The Day #1

Adding commands to your shelf the easy way:

Bring up your custom shelf of choice.

Hold down Control + Shift + Alt (the one with the apple on it) and navigate to the command you want to add.

Click it.

Voila! It's on your shelf.

Damn that's nice and easy.

Oh, I Know You Love My Little Updates!

This is somewhat close to where the camera ends in the final shot.



This is just another angle, showing the new brackets and maybe some other new stuff. As I model this, I re-look at lots of pieces of geometry and I worry that I'm going to have to remodel tons of this thing when it's time to UV map & texture. I may be wrong. But, let's face it, I am not "Mr. I've Been Poly Modeling For The Last 10 Years." This thing has got to be full of rookie mistakes. I just hope they're not so large as to be deal-breakers on down the line.

One or two more posts and I'm moving on, I think.

Cheers.

Another Lamp Pass

I took the night off of modeling last night, but tonight I decided to take another pass at the lamps and the main wheel. I'm digging the changes, but now I need to go back and redo the smaller wheels. They look kind of like, uh, crap compared to the new wheel.

That's about it...though I did spend some more time with that MEL script. It's pretty boss. If I'm not careful with it though, it leads to some crazy-dense meshes, much denser than necessary for hard-surfaces. But what I'm liking about it, is how you can add edge loops to your low-rez mesh and immediately see the change in your smoothed model. It's helping me understand where to use edge loops to get the shapes I want. Not so much a modeling tool, in this case, but a learning tool.

Learning is good.

How Do I Know I'm Cool?

Because I'm blogging about a MEL script written back in 2001.

Yes, it's Connect Poly Shape 3.0, written for Maya 4.0 by Dirk Bialluch, who is a certified Maya Master. Well, it may be old, but it's pretty damn swank. It provides a crazy-useful toolset for creating and manipulating low-poly meshes and associated higher-poly smoothed meshes.

Full disclosure, all I've done so far is DL the script, drop it into a shelf and play with it for 3 min. But if that 3 min. is in any way indicative of how useful this script'll be over the long haul, then damn!

Carry on.

Adding A Cattleguard

The cattleguard is the big addition for this post, not a very big addition in general, but it's what's new. It was a tricky thing to build and I'm not sure that I'm going to keep it in its current incarnation. I may rebuild it after looking at some good train reference.

Obviously there's only half a train here, but once I get it in a good place, I'm planning on mirroring the geometry over to the other side.

Okay, more to come.

2nd Pass At A New Train Body

So the deal is that I had to rebuild the geometry of the train base. The way I'd built it before, relying pretty heavily on the Bevel Plus tool, wouldn't support the level of detail this shot is going to need.

Today I rebuilt the body about three times, trying to get a decent base mesh. It's not that complicated of a shape, but I was having a fair number of issues with it. Here's the wireframe-on-shaded.

I'm not entirely happy with what I've got here, particularly the lower wheel supports. The smoothing on them is rather unattractive. But I've got an unsmoothed copy saved if I feel like I can't save this one. The railing was just done on a lark. There will be a railing, but probably not one with the snaky endings you see above.

Progress does indeed progress - very, very slowly. I'm dying to take a week off of work and concentrate on this project only but I don't think it'll happen too soon.

Maya on the Mac

...I don't know why I install Apple's software updates. All they do is f-up my Maya experience. Oh, and Logitech's dropping the ball too.

Yesterday my right-click button stops functioning properly. "Huh, that's odd," I think. "Maybe I should check to make sure that I have all the correct drivers." Bad idea. After updating my Logitech drivers and restarting, my middle-mouse button's not working. A quick trip to the Logitech forums shows that there's a known issue with their most recent software and the most recent Apple OS update.

Christ on a crutch.

My next computer is either a dual-booting Intel Mac with a copy of XP Pro, or one of those sweet Dell M-90's.

For the record, I am accepting donations for the new computer fund.

Back On The Horse

Well, the project's slowly creaking back into motion.

I'm kicking out a playblast in the background as I type this. I'm not using the camera rig that I've been struggling with for the past several weeks. Meh.

Once this playblast is finished, I'll be kicking it over to James and we're going to get started modeling buildings. Ooooooo. I'm excited to be modeling soon. The playblast had to come first, though, so that we'd know exactly what needs modeling and what corners we can cut (literally, in many cases).

I'm not going to post the quicktime that comes out of the playblast, because I just don't like the Google Video embed that happens. It's ugly. Oh well.

And the 'blast is done and I'm outta here for now.

More updates to come.

Broken Cam

It's no longer being called "TricksyCam." It's now "BrokenCam."

I've not been testing the changes I'm making to the script as throughly as I should've been. Now, several steps on down the path, all sorts of transform controls are conflicting with each other.

The major issue is that the motion path is messing with the pivot points for Roll, Tilt and Pan.
The pivots are staying at 0,0,0 - the place where the camera was created. When the camera's offset by the motion path, the pivots should leave 0,0,0 and go wherever the camera is. Centering the pivots doesn't work/change a thing.

This has to be a problem plenty of other people have dealt with, but it's incredibly frustrating to meet right now, this far into the process.

Too, Too, Too Busy

Work on this project has nearly, but not entirely, ground to a slow burn. Not to a "halt." I didn't say "halt" and I'm not going to.

I'm still in GUI mode and I'm somewhat embarrassed to show how little progress I've made in the last three days as it only represents about 3 hours worth of work. Nevertheless, I need to stay in the habit of posting here, so here's the updated GUI.


There's what, three extra controls on there?

The Wander on the camera is a really nice effect that I grabbed from Richard Morris over at The Jackal's Forge. He put up a great tutorial on building a very detailed, multi-variable camera shake utility. The Wander I'm using here is actually what he calls "Destabilize." Of the four shaking functions he describes, this is my favorite. It gives the camera a very natural-feeling sway that you don't really notice until you turn it off.

Moving on from here I'm going to add a couple of sliders to control the frequency and intensity of a more traditional "jitter" camera shake. That's not a ton of work, assuming that I can get a block of time to do it in, and from there it's back into the scene proper, using this rig to nail down the camera move.

Cheers.

I'm a Freakin' UI Designer

This week has not been the most productive week ever, but I did get busy trying to make a good control rig for our camera. It's been pretty fun and my crash course in MEL scripting is just impressing the hell out of me in terms of how usable Maya can be once you put in the time to figure it out.

The above rig is as simple as they get but it does have a check box that suggests that I may, in fact, be awesome. I'd check it.

This GUI and rig are, arguably, overkill for what we need the camera to do in this shot but this is an opportunity for me to learn how to make these things and make them useful. So, some overkill is just fine in the long run. It's all helping me in the end.

Crazy busy weekend coming up, but my goal is to make a much fancier GUI and then move on to dialing in the camera move.

A Whole Page Worth Of MEL Scripts

Edvard Toth has a whole slew of MEL scripts, several of which look very, very useful.

A search for "duplicate along curve" is what brought me here. Lord knows why doing this in Maya is a total work-around. I've been using the "animation snapshot" method, one of, I'm sure many ways to do something very simple and basic.

That's one of the quirks of Maya that I'm hitting my head against, having come to it after first learning 3d in Cinema 4d, the lack of nice, pretty buttons and clearly designed dialog boxes. Cinema is very friendly, with lots and lots of surface polish.

Maya, eh, not so much. It's a bit more like the less attractive step-sister who is way smarter and more interesting - not to mention fairly stand-offish. She's the one you want to spend time with in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it'll take a lot more effort. You just get the feeling that it'll be worth the investment.

2 more MEL scripts

The first is a camera shake expression, haven't used it yet, but I didn't want to forget about it.

2nd is a way old (2002, before I even knew what Maya was) script called GI_Joe, which may be somewhat obsolete these days but it creates a light dome for faking GI.

MEL Scripts, starting my collection

I work on a computer at work and at home and I have a devil of a time keeping things consistent between them. If I was some sort of 43 Folders/GTD guru I'd have all the answers (http://www.43folders.com/) but in terms of getting started, I'm gonna put useful links up here so I don't forget them.

One think I keep running into are MEL scripts. Someone's always pointing out this or that script that makes Maya way friendlier. I never DL them because I'm afraid I'll forget to install it on both computers, I'll forget that I even installed it, I won't remember what it does or why I thought it would be a good idea to get it. etc.

Well, hopefully, this site will make all that angst a thing of the past.

Introducing RandKey, by Mikael Hakansson (http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/animation/randKey-mel-462.html).

" This script brings up a window, which lets you randomize selected keyframes from the graph editor."

Why this script?

I came across in reference to organically deforming hard surface geometry, trying to give it more of a "real world" appearance, less crisp & CG. I suppose it has other uses as well.

More gray buildings and...Cylons?!?!?!?

The real big news is nothing at all to do with this scene. It's that I just watched the last three episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Holy crap! I was freakin' blown away.

Well, my heart rate has slowed somewhat and I've stopped repeating "oh my god" over and over again...but oh my god! That was some dramatic tv.

Attached is a tiny update, a screen grab of the alleyway shot where I've been adding geometry and trying to plus out just enough to work for the animatic. I'm modeling in a very poly-inefficient way, knowing that the vast majority of these buildings will be rebuilt for final. Still, it irks me to pump out such crap-tastic shots. The rationale, of course, is that if I polish these things, then we look at the animatic and hate them, well, then I'll have wasted my time.

Top shot is camera view, bottom is perspective camera.

So here ya go. Cheers.

The end of the weekend

Screens posted, as promised.

I had nearly no time at all to get work done on this thing today.

The biggest part of my day was spent at the rock gym, setting in the bouldering section. I climbed pretty well, better at least than I've climbed lately. After a couple rather large falls, though, my back is utterly pretzeled. Ugh.

So all that was fun, but it wasn't the film. I forced myself to open up the file and start painting up geometry. I only worked on one shot, which crashed the hell out of Maya when I first started. Ultimately I figured out that I had to turn everything off before subdividing my mesh. Polycount on the scene has gotta be out of hand, but for some reason it doesn't show in my HUD, so I don't really know what it is.

Anyway, I painted in a hill and lattice-transformed the appropriate buildings. The reference shot for this scene is:


















which isn't mine, but something I found on Flickr. Flickr = the best photo-reference site in the world. I'm browsing Flickr nearly every day looking for shots for either the film or for work.

So, yeah, the geometry in the scene is pretty crap-tastic, but that's kind of the point. Everything that we determine to be in-camera, once the animatic is finished, will be rebuilt much more cleanly. A keen eye will note that every window and door is identical, that'll change too.

...So, bummer that I didn't get more done, but I'm happy with what there is.

More to come.