I normally make custom cards around this time of year – this Christmas was no exception. I drew these three designs then scanned and printed multiple copies for my friends.
It’s been a good, restful Christmas – I’ll be getting back to work tomorrow though!
Today marked the end of Semester One and my end-of-module presentation. I think it went alright – though trying to get through fifty-four slides in fifteen minutes was a challenge, so I’ll have to concentrate on being more concise next time. Still, lessons learned…
So I broke into the massive (28-hour) long Gnomon Dynamics series for the first time yesterday. This series was made in 2001 but is still extremely relevant, and no one has gone into as much detail about Maya’s Particles system before or since. I’m only about two hours into it but it’s been very useful so far. I’m aiming to get through all of it by New Year, but that might be a bit much, considering that it’s quite a lot to get my head around!
This test uses the Instancer with nParticles – and some custom scripting to randomise the scale and rotation. I’d also written a script to make the particles tumble, but it doesn’t seem to be working just now. Considering that Alex Alvarez wrote the original script for classic Particles, it may be an nParticles compatibility issue. Here’s the script:
float $foo=rand(.5,1);
nParticleShape1.custom_scale=<<$foo,$foo,$foo>>;
nParticleShape1.random_number=rand(-.001,.001);
nParticleShape1.custom_rotation=<<rand(360),rand(360),rand(360)>>
nParticleShape1.custom_rotation+=nParticleShape1.random_number;
Lovely, isn’t it? The result was something that looked less uniform than the previous test, but with the drawback that the solid particles don’t “merge” quite as well as the Blobby Surface nParticles from before.
This second one was a bit of a departure, using Goals. It was an experiment… it didn’t work for a couple of reasons:
– The particles attach to individual vertices, meaning that I couldn’t “stretch” the geometry without increasing the space between the particles.
– The particles attach to the vertices according to their number, resulting in things occurring in an extremely odd order.
Goals may prove useful for another part of the film, but I think I’ll leave them for now.
So after all that experimenting, it may be that I end up using something quite similar to my first dynamics test. Still, it never hurts to explore new avenues.
I should add that I am doing the dynamics tests with the assistance of two excellent courses on Digital Tutors: Introduction to Dynamics in Maya and nParticles in Maya. I know a lot of stuff covered in the former but the latter is fairly new to me, having only worked with nCloth out of the nDynamics toolset.
First of many dynamics tests for the film, this one is for the mRNA construction and uses nParticles from a Water base. The idea is that the smaller mRNA building blocks bind inside the polymerase to form a strand. The final shot will show the polymerase moving along the DNA strand, but I wanted to get the dynamics working first.
This simulation uses an Omni emitter to fill a funnel-shaped piece of geometry which is then hidden in the final shot. The geometry is animated using a lattice deformer controlled by clusters.
I haven’t converted the nParticles to a polygon mesh (as is usual), because they started to look more like a liquid than individual particles. The downside to keeping it like this is that they look too uniform, so I will have to randomise the sizes and also look at particle instancing and “tumble” to fix this.
Forgot to post the research poster I finished a few days ago, here it is. I’ve blanked out Figure 1 in this post (an artwork from Cells: The Smallest of All Portraits exhibition) because – while Jo was fine with me using the photos I took in my university work, I’m not sure that I have clearance to post it up on the internet, particularly while the exhibition is still ongoing. Curious? Go see it yourself (at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, until 3 February 2013)!
So we all got a memo at the 11th hour (literally… last night) saying that the deadline for this assignment has been moved from today to next Thursday. Having suffered some extremely fraught/sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days to get this assignment in on time, I have to admit that my feelings on hearing the news were initially… mixed. But (after a perspective-inducing nap) I figured that I’m happy to just have it done, I can spend next week concentrating on making a super-fantastic animatic (and possibly fix a few niggles I have with the poly modelling/composite, but I’m trying to resist my perfectionist tendencies). Here’s what I’m handing in:
NURBS Reference Image:
Rendered Still Image (Ambient Occlusion Only):
Rendered Still Image with Lighting:
Model flythrough:
Polygon Reference Images:
Polygon Model (Ambient Occlusion Only)
Polygon Model with Textures (two angles):
Render Layers/Passes
Diffuse (no shadow):
Depth:
Specular:
Reflection:
Reflection on Table:
Scatter:
Ambient Occlusion:
Fresnel:
ID Pass 001:
ID Pass 002:
(plus two shadow passes but… well… they’re black)
Background Plate (supplied):
Nuke Script (comprising blur, lens distortion, grain, chromatic aberration and a shedload of colour correction/grade nodes):
Final Render:
So there you go. Considering that it’s the first time I’ve used either Nuke or Mental Ray, I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out.
Cell Shading 