CG Toolkit Submission: Film Reviews, Maya Tutorials, Acting & Sculpting (2016/2017 -Term 2/3)

Film Reviews:

World Animation

Australia: Mary and Max

Japan: Spirited Away

India: Sita Sings The Blues

Israel: Waltz With Bashir

France & Iran: Persepolis

United Kingdom: Ethel & Ernest

Ireland: The Secret of Kells

America: Kubo and the Two Strings

Maya Tutorials:

Lighting & Rendering

Mental Ray Part 1: Samples & Quality Control

Mental Ray Part 2: Final Gather

Mental Ray Part 3: Linear Work Flow

Mental Ray Part 4: Physical Sun & Sky

Mental Ray Part 5: Portal Lights

Mental Ray Part 6: Mia Material X Shader

Mental Ray Part 7: High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting

Mental Ray Part 8: Displacement Maps

Mental Ray Part 9: Ambient Occlusion

Mental Ray Part 10: Motion Blur

Mental Ray Part 11: Mental Ray Proxies

Pipeline 1: UV Layout & Maps

Part 1: Head & Head Details

Part 2: Body & Exporting Maps

Pipeline 1: Spine & Skinning

Part 1: Building a Ribbon Spine

Part 2: Building a Skeleton

Part 3: Binding & Weight Grouping the Mesh

Part 4: Blending the Upper Body

Part 5: Blending the Lower Body

Part 6: Adding Pose Space Deformers (Corrective Blend Shapes) Upper Body

Part 7: Adding Pose Space Deformers (Corrective Blend Shapes) Lower Body

Pipeline 1: Body Rigging

Part 1: Feet & Legs

Part 2: IK / FK Spine

Part 3: Arms & Fingers

Part 4: Colours & Restrictions

Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging (Pt. 1)

Part 1: Creating a Head Skeleton & Binding

Part 2: Creating Head Controls & An Eye Look Rig

Part 3: Creating a Flexible Mouth Rig 1

Part 4: Creating a Flexible Mouth Rig 2

Part 5: Creating a Flexible Mouth Rig 3

Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging (Pt. 2)

Part 6: Adding Teeth & A Tongue

Part 7: Lateral Mouth Movement Part 1

Part 8: Lateral Mouth Movement Part 2

Part 9: Adding Cheek Thinning

Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging (Pt. 3)

Part 10: Adding Extra Face Movement

Part 11: Adding a Blink

Part 12: Brow Movement

Part 13: Cleaning Up the Scene

Pipeline 1: Texturing

Part 1: High & Low Res Modelling for Normal Maps

Part 2: Baking Normal Maps

Part 3: Rivets

Part 4: Body Base Colours

Part 5: Head Base Colours / Sub Surface Scattering

Part 6: Head Texturing

Part 7: Body Texturing

Part 8: Finishing up the Scene

Pipeline 1: Turnarounds

Part 1: Creating a Turnaround

Dope Sheets:

Using Dope Sheets I

Using Dope Sheets II

Using Dope Sheets III

Acting

March 15th, 2017

March 22nd, 2017

March 29th, 2017

Sculpting

Traditional Sculpting Lessons

Maya Pipeline 1: Creating a Turnaround

This is the final tutorial for the Jetpack Jones character. I enjoyed working on him and I think I learned a lot, especially from errors that I made throughout the tutorials. It's nice to see the character put together in this turnaround, I'm pretty happy with how he came out overall despite some of the mistakes I made along the way. Even though I did not follow a similar pipeline during my Adaptation project, I think this character was good practice so I'm not too behind in future projects. I hope it shows I have the capability to do 3D modelling, rigging/skinning, texturing, and so on.

Jetpack Jones Turnaround from Deanna Crisbacher on Vimeo.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Finishing Up The Scene (Part 8)

This tutorial is the final one in the texturing set. I first had to clean up any extra objects and layers that were used to create the textures in Mudbox. Then, the rim highlights were edited so the ramps were connected to the texture map files rather than just being grey highlights. Since this created strange visuals in the viewport, a control was created to turn off the rim highlights when they weren't needed. An additional light was added to give the character some extra shine on his eyes as well, which was then connected to the same control as the rim highlight. I can now progress onto the turnaround tutorial.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Body Texturing (Part 7)

In this tutorial, texturing continued by using Ambient Occlusion to add some initial details. After this, the torso was brought into Mudbox for cleaning up and adding some more details such as shadows behind the buttons and the badge on the shoulders. After this, a red stripe was also added to the head strap. I ran into a few issues during this tutorial...I was unable to use the xNormal software because I have a Mac, so I tried a few other techniques to get my Ambient Occlusion maps. I tried baking them out like how the normal maps were baked out, but I got some really strange results sometimes and I wasn't really able to preview them without waiting for them to load out (although I did a few tests that were 2k maps or smaller just for preview purposes). 

I also tried using a combination of Crazybump and Photoshop to get similar results as seen in the tutorial. Even though this option required a lot of painting and layering different versions of the Ambient Occlusion Maps to get them to work right, I found this gave me better results. I also was unable to create an 8k paint layer in Mudbox, so I settled for the 4k one. I tried my best to smooth out the edges of the badge the best I could in Photoshop afterwards by selecting the layer, feathering it by 1 or 2 pixels, then copying and pasting it to a new layer. While it isn't as ideal as being able to use the 8k map in Mudbox, I think it looks decent enough.

Maya Lighting & Rendering 2: Mental Ray Part 3 - Linear Work Flow

This tutorial goes over Gamma Response Curves, RGB Profiles, and how they impact they way images appear within Maya and when they are rendered. This tutorial worked differently for me because I had Maya 2016, but I wanted to ensure I got the tutorial done so I had an understanding of the topics discussed in it. For the most part I was able to follow, the settings were just in different places and certain things didn't make a difference, such as changing the colour profile on the normal maps. Despite this, I thing I better understand what was discussed in the tutorial which was somewhat confusing until seeing it used within Maya itself. This was the last Lighting & Rendering 2 tutorial I needed to complete.

Maya Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging Pt. 3 - Cleaning Up the Scene (Part 13)

This is the final tutorial I needed to complete for the Facial Rigging set. There are a few things still in the scene related to the texturing process since I progressed to those tutorials while I was unable to create pose space interpolators. I can now return to finishing up the texturing tutorials.

Maya Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging Pt. 3 - Brow Movement (Part 12)

Now that Adaptation B is done, I've returned to the Maya tutorials. I struggled a little bit with the brow movement, but I think I managed to get reasonable results. Now I just have to clean up the scene and then the facial rigging should be complete.

Traditional Sculpting Lessons

To help us better understand how to sculpt in software, we had lessons in traditional sculpting using Super Sculpey. We had to choose what to sculpt, find reference photos/orthographs, build a base, and use the clay to get the likeness of the character as much as possible. I found some images of Darth Maul from the live action film, the animated series Rebels, and the animated series Clone Wars. I was also lucky enough to find some orthographs of Darth Maul, which I combined to create a coloured version with a dark line that was easier to see. I really enjoyed these lessons, and I wish we had more of them. I think they were very useful because it shows that if you pull the geometry/clay in the direction of the muscles, you get much more realistic results.

I liked slowly building up my sculpture, although I admit I feel I worked very slowly on it as I was nervous about messing up. It was my first time sculpting traditionally, so it made me wary as I obviously can't just go back to a previous save or hit undo. I think I did an alright job building up the basic structure of the skull, although overall the sculpture is not nearly complete yet. I do feel it was very helpful, just like how traditional drawing and painting is useful for digital painting. I hope to continue my sculpture later on during the summer and possibly do more traditional sculptures in the future.

Original Image Source

Maya Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging Pt. 3 - Adding a Blink (Part 11)

I was finally able to return to this tutorial and complete it. Since I've been away from this tutorial for a while, I made a few silly mistakes at first when adding the pose interpolators such as selecting the wrong joint. However, I eventually got the hang of it again and now I can progress onto the eyebrows...I'm glad I returned to finish this one up before I completely forgot where I was/what I was doing in the tutorial.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Head Texturing (Part 6)

In this tutorial the eyes were textured and more skin tones were added to the face, including the lips. The eyes were made in Photoshop and they were relatively easy to sort out. The rest of the head I struggled with mostly just because Mudbox would give me errors whenever I tried to open the program. I tried downloading all available versions of Mudbox but I'd just get an 'Unknown Error' and it'd crash. However, I managed to get it to open by double clicking on one of my .mud files I made in the beginning of the year...so I'm not quite sure what it is doing but at least I got it to work. The lips were tricky and I think they may need some more adjusting but overall I'm happy with the results.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Head Base Colours/Sub Surface Scattering (Part 5)

In this tutorial, base colours were added to the head, eyes, teeth, tongue and gums. This was done using a layered mila_material to create sub-surface scattering so the skin looked more realistic. I've been using this material for my Adaptation B project as well. I think this tutorial has helped me get a better understanding of the shader, so I think this will help me change/improve my models for my other project too. There was also a Phong shader used for the cornea, a Blinn for the teeth, and the ambient occlusion was adjusted on the rest of the body so it matched the skin better.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Body Base Colours (Part 4)

This tutorial began the process of adding colours to the model. First, the UV's were updated and exported because of how they changed while creating the normal maps and the gold texture from the buttons/belt buckle were added to the ear pieces. Some extra nodes were added into the shaders such as Ambient Occlusion and a series of nodes that gives the character very subtle rim light. In Photoshop, some base colours were added to the torso, trousers, and boots. I did notice that 'Refine Edge' was not in my Photoshop...it must have been removed in an update but the 'Select and Mask' option was there instead. It worked the same, the window just looked slightly different. I like how it's starting to look with the colours, it's much more exciting to look than the grey model.

Maya Pipeline 1: Texturing - Rivets (Part 3)

For this tutorial, the belt buckle and various buttons for the front of the jacket, back of the jacket, and the collar were imported and positioned on the model. The belt buckle was skinned to the pelvis and then the torso was duplicated and smoothed so a rivet script could be used to attach the buttons onto the torso. Extra geometry was deleted away since the high res mesh would not be seen anyway. I've used rivets before on my Fantastic Voyage project, but I didn't delete the unneeded geometry so it's useful to know I should do that now.