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.

MEL Script = Headache

Ugh. I just spent the last several hours puzzling over how to do a bunch of different things for my camera rig. I've come the conclusion that a lot of the things that I put in my original rig & UI aren't really necessary any longer, particularly having two Aim Constrained locators and animation sliders for both of their weights.

I liked the idea at first. My plan was to aim the main locator at the main target of the camera and then have the secondary locator pulling it off target, bringing a little life to the camera. But if you think about how many possible animation tracks there would be in the graph editor with that kind of set-up, it gets ugly. Also that way of aiming the camera has no real relationship to the way an actual camera works. Not that a CG camera has to mimic a real world camera but I should probably have a decent reason for making it drastically different. Plus there are plenty of ways to bring life to the camera that would be more direct.

Alright. I'm tired. That's it for me. A copy of the rig will be up here eventually.

Moving Onto The Animatic

Looks like I'm on a weekly update schedule, which I'm not very proud of but it's a schedule at least.

So, the brief is in the hands of an artist I've worked with before. He's giving it a quick pass for clarity and to assess the reasonableness of what I want to get versus what I'm paying. It's not that I have no money to spend on an artist but it's more along the lines of, I'm offering one day's day rate and asking for, probably, more than one day's worth of work. Nevertheless, it's very important to me that I am offering paid work. All of the time in this industry you see "offers" for people to do free work because it'll "look great on their reel/portfolio." Now, I've done free, low-budget and work-in-trade but on this thing, I don't want to go that way. If an artist I already had a relationship with offered to do the concept art in trade I'd probably go for it, but I'm not going to approach someone I don't know hoping that they're in the mood to throw me some charity. This film is, for me, a real project and I intend to treat anyone who works for me on it professionally.

Enough time on the soapbox. One place I am planning on going for some free help is the CG Society forums. Now that the storyboard is considerably tighter (though probably not "done") I feel like it's time to get the animatic cranking. Earlier, before our change of direction, we brushed past the animatic but I think that this time it's important to make one. It'll help us really suss out our shots, it'll suggest which shots are just plane lame and can be cut and it'll give us an idea of whether or not the structure of the scenes makes any sense. In order to work on the animatic, I returned to look at the camera rig I was building a few months ago. That's what I'm going to be asking for some help with. I'm pretty happy with that I've built but it's not working exactly as intended. I'm hoping someone up there can throw some pointers my way.

I'll post screens and the MEL script once it's in a place I'm happy with.

Cheers.

Progress On The Board

Not posting anything just yet because I've not been able to run it by James, but the board's coming along quite nicely. Another sit-down or two with it and it'll be done. I'm not blocking out the shots all that completely but I'm taking them far enough to know what'll need to be modeled and what won't. I'm using this board as a chance to get more familiar with Sketchbook Pro and it's going pretty well. I'm still not as comfortable with it as I am paper but it's one hell of an app. I do wish it had a slightly broader range of brushes than it does but it's good. I like being able to add color quickly and easily, which is one thing I don't do when I sketch on paper.

Hopefully next week I'll have some progress to report on the concept artist search but even if that takes a little bit longer than hoped for, there's still plenty we can do while waiting for designs. There are matte paintings to paint and there are plenty of city elements left to model...This sucker is still a ways from being done.

Behind Schedule, Still Working

Ver. 01 of a brief is done and I've got a few initial feelers out to an artist I've worked with in the past. I'm tempted to put the brief up to give a sense of where we're going, design-wise, but 95% of the reference in the brief isn't our work and I don't know that I want to do anything that would imply that it was. I could source it all but that would be one hell of a long post and I've probably lost links to some of the stuff along the way.

One fun thing has been going through a lot of forums and blogs and putting together a list of artists we're planning on contacting for the job. I've been scouring the forums over at CGSociety and ConceptArt and spending a little bit of time on Deviant Art looking for good folk - and finding plenty. Our problem is going to be that we don't have a lot of money to spend.

Now that that's somewhat in motion, it's back to storyboards. I'll start posting them as soon as I have enough frames that are working for me to make a decent post.

Cheers.

Arrrgh! Weekend Work

Absolutely no progress to report from this weekend.

I spent most of Saturday finishing some animations for FX and right now I'm in the middle of doing styleframes for a new talk show on...I don't remember what network.

I'd hoped to get a brief written for a concept artist but once I'm done with this work, I really don't want to keep sitting in front of the computer. About the most I think I'll be able to do is to sit in front of the television for a while with my sketchbook. If I can get a page or two of sketching done I'll be happy.

Hopefully I'll have a brief Monday night and I'll be in touch with some artists over the next week. After the brief, my next task will be take a second pass on our storyboard. We have a new beat sheet/outline of the major scenes (did that last week) and it calls for some small revisions to the board. That's fun enough work and it'll be good to get done. I am so ready, though, to get back to modeling.

Bird Sketches

This is another character we're going to try to get some help with. These mechanical/clockwork birds are becoming more important in the story and we want to make sure that the designs for these ends up being as good as it can be. These initial passes are telling me more what the birds shouldn't look like than what they should look like - but that's important to know.

This is some sort of mecha-dodo bird. Odd shape, not very menacing. The bird(s) in our short need to be able to do some menacing. This one is not spooky in any way. Nevertheless, I like the placement of the seams along the body shape.

Here I've moved from paper and pen to Sketchbook Pro and Wacom. I like the combo. It works for me. The sketches though...meh. The one colored bird head is ok, but that's about it.

And this is just my menacing guard bird. It works for what it is, but it's not much more than a notion of a menacing bird. It's not yet an illustration of one.

So, yeah, hopefully we'll be getting some help on these sketches soon and then, armed with awesome orthographic views, we'll be modeling fools.

Cheers.