Saturday, August 30, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Timeline Navigation - Part 1
Here's a convenient little keyboard shortcut to use while you're animating. Hold down the Alt button, and press the . and , buttons to move the timeline cursor forward and backward one frame at a time.
Use . on its own to skip ahead to the next keyframe and , to move back to the previous keyframe.
These shortcuts can save you from having to move the mouse up and down to the play controls all the time, especially when you have a large frame range visible and it's tricky to select precise frames you want without typing them in.
Labels: Animation, Hotkeys, Maya, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 9:51 AM 1 Comments | Links to this post
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
Tip of the Week: Hardware Z-Data
Z-data can be crucial in compositing for effects like depth-of-field and environmental haze. But sometimes it is tricky to write out good, clean z-data from Maya.
Rather than try to include the z-data as a channel in your primary renders, it's often best to just write out the data as its own pass. This is especially useful if your render is broken up into a lot of different layers for characters, set, etc. Your z-pass will include data for all the layers in your scene.
One quick way to do this is to render it in Hardware, using fog.
Apply a white surface shader to all the objects in your scene and then turn on hardware fog (Shading > Hardware Fog). Set the color to black and adjust the end value as necessary for your scene. (The higher the number, the greater the distance from the camera to absolute black). Make sure also that the falloff is linear.
To get nice sharp data, render it out with the hardware renderer at double-size, and scale it down in post.
Now you have a gray-scale image sequence representing your scene's z-depth. Bring the footage into After Effects or another compositing program, and you can use the layer as the source of a compound blur for depth-of-field or for a whole range of other tricks.
Labels: After Effects, Compositing, Maya, Rendering, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 11:47 PM 1 Comments | Links to this post
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Acting in Animation
There has been an interesting debate going on over the past few weeks on Mayerson On Animation about whether or not the quality of character animation in CG matches the quality of traditional hand-drawn character animation.
Here's the original post:
Babies and Bathwater
And the one that followed:
The Vital Connection
I agree with Mark's points that it's not really valid to attack an entire medium. Every medium has it's advantages and limitations, and it comes down to what the artist does with them. There are some excellent examples of acting in some of the CG films that have come out over the past decade and a half.
As for some of the pitfalls of studio animation (both for hand-drawn and cg films), Mark's recent post is also very interesting:
The Vital Conception
Labels: Character Animation, Discussion
+ posted by Paul @ 7:27 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Sunday, August 3, 2008
Tip of the Week: The Triple Switch Node
The Triple Switch Utility Node is a great way to streamline your shading work flow.
Lets say you have a scene that contains three objects that are all made of the same metallic material, but each has unique maps for bump and specular color. You want the rest of the material attributes to be the same across the board: diffuse, eccentricity, specular falloff, reflectivity, etc.
The way a lot of people would do this would be to create one shader, tweak the settings as desired, duplicate it a couple of times, apply them to the different objects, and attach the respective maps.
This works great. The problem is that later in the production, after some initial renders, you might want to go back and adjust the shader. Now you have to open up three different shaders and tweak the settings, and check to make sure they're all the same.
Now lets say instead of just three, you have ten, or a hundred different objects, all with the same material, but with different maps. Managing a hundred identical shaders is going to start to get pretty time consuming and tedious.
That's where the triple switch comes in. Create just one shader, plug the triple switch (found under the utility nodes) into the desired attribute, and it lets you designate different maps for different pieces of geometry. The maps can be either file textures or procedural.
It's called the "triple switch," because it's used for attributes that are made up of three components such as r,g,b or x,y,z. If you wanted to have a shader use different diffuse maps for different pieces of geometry, you would use the "single switch" node. There is also a double switch and a quad switch, to be used accordingly.
These three objects all have the same blinn assigned to them to make it easier to adjust them all at once, but they each have their own procedural map:
Labels: Mapping, Maya, Shading, Tip of the Week