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.
So the feedback from my last tutorial with John is that my storyboard is far too long and ambitious. I grudgingly admitted that he was right. So I’ve taken a lumberjack sort of approach to it, hacking away everything except the bare bones of the story. The idea being that I can add footage back in to it if I have the time.
So this is how it’s looking now:
Somewhat shorter than the previous one. I’m still loath to cut the part where the proteins are destroyed, but I can’t be too precious about these things…
I also put together a very rough animatic in order to get an idea of how this would play out. The timing is a bit all over the place at the moment.
Today I went to see a very special exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, called Cells: The Smallest of All Portraits. Pupils from James Gillespie’s High School and Penicuik High School had created a profound and thought-provoking laboratory installation, exploring the meaning of identity in a post-Dolly the Sheep world. A variety of media were used, from beakers, test tubes, petri dishes and mass spectrometry to traditional printmaking and sketching. Trying to gauge how these kids felt about cloning and cell biology research overall, the impression I got was one of mingled fear and excitement. This was compounded when I listened to a tape of audio samples of the debate they were having – some felt that cloning was fundamentally wrong, others said that it was no more disturbing to them than the idea of having an identical twin.
I thought the pupils did a fantastic job at answering some of the questions I’d been exploring – particularly whether art could be used to encourage rational debate and understanding in the general public. Based on the evidence of this exhibition, I would say that the answer is a resounding yes.
I was also lucky enough to meet Jo Mawdsley, the Schools Education Officer and one of the coordinators of the exhibition. She gave me her email address and told me to get in touch, which I will definitely be doing.
The installation was part of a larger exhibition called Pioneers of Science, featuring portraits of many famous scientists throughout history. I thought I knew what to expect, yet I was fairly stunned when I came up the stairs to find myself face to face with a portrait of Sir David Lane, one of the scientists that discovered the p53 gene (and from Dundee University, no less).
The portrait was painted by Ken Currie, who spent some time getting to know the scientists, even taking casts of their faces for reference. Currie said that the portrait was “unlocked” for him when Professor Lane said, “People see cancer as a darkness – our job is to go in and retrieve people from that darkness.”
While it’s strictly optional to light the NURBS scene, I decided to use it as a chance to refresh my lighting skills – with a bit of help from Gnomon Workshop: Efficient Cinematic Lighting with Jeremy Vickery. While many lighting artists are seduced by complex, render-heavy Mental Ray effects such as Global Illumination and Final Gather, Vickery encourages restraint, limiting his palette to the more basic Maya Spot Lights, Area Lights and Ambient Occlusion. The result is a far greater measure of artistic control and vastly reduced render times.
Also, while I was perusing internet forums in my search for “the perfect shadow,” I was made aware of the possibility of using Depth Map shadows with Mental Ray Overrides applied. This results in a very realistic shadow without the indiscriminate blurriness of Maya Software Depth Map shadows, nor the crazy render times of Raytrace Shadows. Definitely a good compromise for artists in a fix. Also it allowed me to have nice soft shadows like the ones in the reference image (bottom), rather than the very hard-edged classic Raytrace shadow.
Three days and nearly a hundred panels later, it’s finally starting to look like something. Will have to wait till an animatic is put together to see how long it turns out to be, and whether anything needs cut. I’ll get some feedback on it in today’s tutorial meeting
EDIT: Just realised that I spelled “fortunately” wrong. The perils of Photoshop having no spell-check… sorry about that.
Cell Shading 