Rigging

These blog posts will be getting shorter from now on as the deadline looms… they will probably be more frequent though.

Yesterday and this morning I have been rigging.  The first was the nuclear pore rig, tedious but relatively straightforward, the most complicated control being a “move arm” set driven key to speed up animation.

The mRNA rig was more of a challenge and much more interesting.  I initially followed a DT tutorial for a snake rig using an IK Spline, but it was really hard to smooth the weights in a way that would get the sinuous look that I wanted.  So I tried a Wire Deformer, which was nice and smooth but apt to stretch.

I eventually figured out how to combine the two – I bound a curve to the IK spline, then made this curve the Wire Deformer, as its length was limited by the joints, preventing stretching.

New Comp Test

The latest comp test of the nuclear interior. I’m really happy with this. Tried out a few new things today including Lens Blur and God-Rays (could there BE a cooler name for a node?). Digital Tutors’ Photorealistic Camera Lens Effects in NUKE course has been fantastic.

Also fantastic is the mia_bokeh node, which I used on top of some nParticles. It’s really versatile as you can add your own texture to it – taking inspiration from the Jellyfish Pictures reel I’ve connected a pentagon-shaped alpha to it. Although Nuke has its own particle system, the quality of the Bokeh effect within Maya/Mental Ray was way too good to pass up.

I hope to be able to post a moving version up tomorrow.

A Question of Scale, Part Three

So I set up a lighting test with my Nucleosome Proxies all nicely arranged, positioned a light right at the back of the scene with the intention of creating nice bright highlights with a sharp falloff into dark shadows, and hit Render…

Immediately I noticed something really weird.  The histones were all bright red, even in the places where they should have been in complete darkness.  It was like the light was going straight through them.  In fact I had noticed a similar effect on anything I had applied a Subsurface Scattering shader to.

I decided that it was time to stop hoping that the default Scatter settings would get me through, and actually do my research.

As always, Digital Tutors knew how to provide, and I found a fantastic tutorial, mental ray Workflows in Maya: Subsurface Scattering.  It took the fear out of working with SSS.

I found out why the fast_skin shader was acting in that way, and of course it was down to – surprise, surprise – scale.

The fast_skin shader is set up to work as human skin, to be put onto a real-world size human being, not a tiny cell organelle.  The Back Scatter (attribute used to control areas of complete translucency i.e. the webbing between fingers) has a Radius setting to control how far through the light can penetrate. This is the default setting of 25:

And this is what it looked like after I scaled it back to a more moderate 0.5:

So now the light only filters through on the edges, rather than the whole object.

Thumbnails

So having spent the last three weeks doing Going Live, I find out that we have to do a presentation on our personal project tomorrow.  Time to magic some work out of thin air…

As if they heard me, Digital Tutors has provided me with a way to do exactly that… well, almost.  Creative Environment Thumbnail Techniques in Photoshop with Nate Hallinan (check out his work, by the way: http://www.natehallinan.com/) explains a way to get the composition, colour and lighting of your piece locked down in precisely 45 minutes (or less, if you’re more experienced in Photoshop than I).

Following the tutorial, I started with a study.  The only problem is that there are no real-world photographs of the inside of a cell (unless you count murky black-and-white microscope slides), so I was going to have to make it up a bit.  I decided that considering how much stuff floats around in cells, an underwater scene would a be a good starting point.

I may have shot myself in the foot by picking something that was really rather difficult, and as you can see I ran out of patience toward the bottom of the image, which is not really what you want when you’re trying to keep things fresh. I didn’t time myself for this one or the inside-the-nucleus shot, as it had been so long since I’d touched Photoshop that I needed time to re-familiarise myself with the tools.  I limited myself to 45 minutes for the cytoplasm shot though, and I noticed a big difference in that I felt much more creative and less fed up with the painting.

I used what I had learned from making the study to paint the images on the left, then used Hue/Saturation to alter the colours and make a couple more tests.  I think my favourite one is Test_02, considering that the setting is the interior of a skin cell I think it makes sense to stick to warm colours.

p53 Shader Development

Did some more look development on my p53 sculpt last night, with the help of two Digital Tutors courses: Creative Development: Subsurface Scattering Shaders in Maya and mental ray with Jon Tojek and Mastering Displacement Maps in Maya.

I used the misss_fast_skin_maya shader, which utilises Subsurface Scattering.  You can see the scatter on the edges of the model – it’s more red where the light shines through. I decided to leave the scatter on its default skin colours – it seems to follow aesthetically that skin cell molecules should have a skin-like tone to them (though in real life they would be colourless). I’m really pleased with the effect it gives the model, and I think I shall be using it extensively in my film.  I’m pleased that the look’s finally starting to come together!

Digital Tutors: Introduction to Dynamics in Maya and nParticles in Maya

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.

Introduction to Dynamics in Maya

nParticles in Maya

More V-Ray fiddling…

I’ve been playing around some more with V-Ray, through the Digital Tutors Creative Development workshop Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray with Oasim Karmieh. This is my take on the cell image. It’s not perfect, but I’ve got the hang of the tools and that’s what counts. I found the use of an HDRI image plugged into a dome light particularly intriguing. This one uses an image of the Milky Way – I guess it helps with the sci-fi feel.

Cell Shading (literally)

I’ve been working through a Digital Tutors Creative Development workshop recently – Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray with Oasim Karmieh. V-Ray is very powerful and very good fun! The shaders offer hundreds of options and as it’s all done by procedural texturing it saves a huge amount of time. As a bonus, Karmieh uses a basic model of a cell to demonstrate these tools. So far, I’ve done the nucleus: