Had a little extra time this month, so I decided to participate in CGTalk’s FXWars for the first time in a couple years.
The theme this time around was Tesla, the man and his stuff and I opted to do a tribute to the classic silent film Metropolis as an excuse to study the film a little better and work on my lighting/shading setups.
Final high quality Quicktime is on my motion page, or you can check out the work-in-progress thread and see it there (on page 3).
March 31st, 2009
I think most people that have used ZBrush have gotten something really cool (or at least promising) sculpted out, and had either lower levels of subdivision get corrupt, or have your geometry get mangled… either through a crappy basemesh that you used to get up and running quickly, or invisible bad topology on a mesh that you tweaked point by point.
Something along those lines happened to me last night on a concept I’ve been playing with, and I got quite a bit of detail and texturing onto a random basemesh in ZBrush, only to find out that my lower levels of subdivision had gone missing and couldn’t be reconstructed. For some people, this means that they just start over, but there’s a better way.
The following video is a half-hour step-by-step walkthrough of how you can find yourself in that situation, and how to fix it.
Strictly speaking, the workflow is a retopology technique, but I’d never seen it applied to imported meshes with new UVs, and I’d definitely never seen recovery of polypaint/texturing info from a mucked up model.
How to do it is very easy… import a new subtool and project details. Setting up the new mesh properly, and taking the projection in very small increments is the crucial part of the workflow, along with how to fix points that become unruly due to normal or geometry issues.
I should mention here that this video has nudity in the form of a topless female monster (medusa) before she’d gotten her snakes or toga. If such things offend you, please move along.
Thanks for watching, and please let me know if you have any questions. I have a companion video piece to this going up in a few days that details cleaning your basemesh’s topology and laying out multiple, clean, UV Maps for the reconstructed mesh. We’re going to a lot of trouble to fix this thing, so why not go all the way, right?
http://www.treyharrell.com/tutes-2009/medretopo-pt1/
Approximately 30 minutes, embedded Flash video @ 800×600
February 11th, 2009
My 3D Still gallery has been updated with a few more recent images. Included in the updates are another coffee fix that was a test for a new lighting rig that I’ve been working on, and the riveting conclusion to the Godzilla modeling series.
Not too many updates, as 2008 brought a ton of Web work my way, but 2009 is looking good on the CG front already.
All of the new images (the top row) were completed with Maya 2008-2009, Mental Ray renderer and ZBrush 3.1. ZBrush was used for texture paint work, even on the non-organic product models, alongside Photoshop as I’ve found that projection paint & ZAppLink to Photoshop save an awful lot of time during lighting and shading: particularly on stills.
January 27th, 2009
I love being able to triple boot Linux, MacOS X and WinXP x64 on my main Mac for 3D & web development work, however Windows handles time zone offsets differently from every other OS out there — so when you reboot into Windows, you’re looking at a 4-5 hour difference (EDT currently).
Apple’s Boot Camp drivers handle resynching the time automatically, but they don’t work with WinXP 64 (only Vista x64), so I’ve hacked together a quick .bat script that’s intended to be placed in your Startup Items folder (under the start menu).
It includes two longish pauses: the first because sometimes the startup items get invoked before the network card initializes (silly Windows). The second is so that you can read the result if the script fails before the shell window auto closes.
At any rate, just paste the following into Notepad and save as timesynch.bat in your Start Menu startup items (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Programs\Startup\)
@ECHO OFF
ECHO Preparing to resynch time to Internet time server ...
TIMEOUT 10
w32tm /resync
ECHO Execution complete ...
TIMEOUT 5
September 26th, 2008
Now available: compiled Mix20Layers for OS X Universal (modified by Jan Sandström, based on Mix8Layers by ctrl.studio).
Like the last batch of shaders, this is also available on Pixero’s site at http://www.pixero.com, under his Shaders -> Mental Ray area. The universal .so is contained within the standalone shader package toward the bottom of the page.
Big thanks to Jan for allowing me to compile these!
June 5th, 2008
I’ve been working on getting my OS X render slaves integrated into my Win64 Maya environment recently, and it’s been very difficult to find matching OS X Universal compiles for common Mental Ray libraries.
Anyhow, I’ve started compiling some of the more common libraries for other people in the community who are in the same boat as me.
Jan Sandström (Pixero) just posted OS X Universal .so libraries that I compiled this weekend for the his entire JS_ series shader libraries on his site. Pop over and check them out, (under shaders->mental ray) and let me know if there are any bugs!
You’ll need to download the main packages for each shader you’re interested in, and the large .zip containing all of the Universal .so’s (also on that page).
Also, if you’re a Mental Ray shader writer who’s getting nagged all the time by people like me to make Universal compiles, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help out.
June 3rd, 2008
Now, fully one year after the launch of Windows Vista, heading into SP1 territory, Microsoft still hasn’t provided an easy means of turning off UAC (the “Windows Needs Your Permission to Continue” nags — User Account Control).
It’s not recommended to do this in all cases (because of viruses and malware), but if you’re good about your own usage habits — you don’t install unknown software from torrents or P2P, you don’t click every attachment in an email from an untrusted source — then read below for a step-by-step instruction on how to turn the obnoxious feature off.
(more…)
February 27th, 2008
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about designing accessible websites recently, partially because the fundamentals for acessibility for the handicapped and accessibility for devices like the iPhone are virtually identical, but also because it’s just the right thing to do and takes minimal effort.
So what brings this up?
I saw a story about a freelance writer named Mike Phillips a couple of weeks ago. Without going into any details on his life which I’m not going to spoil before you see it for yourself, suffice it to say that the ‘Net is a great equalizer in the strictest sense of the word. I’ve been reading his work for years and never knew his story.
Check out this video.
Every time I think about accessibility now, I think about Mike, even though he doesn’t strictly-speaking need any design considerations besides text input and a sane interface. Having an actual face and an incredibly moving story to put a face on the hypothetical minority who might visit your site is a heck of an incentive.
I was giving a talk yesterday about screen readers and braille devices, trying to impress upon a client the need to design well for everyone and I thought of Mike again. It takes relatively little time and effort to design well for the web, slightly moreso for software, and the payoff is huge for a lot of folks with various challenges. Having these people end up on a level playing field with everyone else on the web is reward enough for me.
Mike’s been published interviewing Steve Jobs and he rolls on a PVP server in WoW (yeah, that’s hard core). This guy has infinite respect from me, and probably a will of steel.
You rock, man. Look me up if you ever make it Horde side on Detheroc.
June 26th, 2007
As a bleeding-heart Macophile at heart, I’ve become really intrigued with Growl notifications. Growl is a cool little system (similar to Twitter, I’ve been told) that allows applications and system events to display Caller ID style messages on your Mac.
My usual Maya workflow is Maya/3D work on my Win/Linux boxes, and my other work (coding, design, illustration) I do on my Macs. I was thinking it would be nice for Maya on any render machine to send a growl render notifications to my main workstation, keeping me from having to bring various machines out of sleep / change KVM settings etc to see if batch renders have completed.
After a little bit of investigation, I discovered Netgrowl by Rui Carmo, which is a python framework for sending Growl notifications over a network.
In a leap of logic, I realized… Maya has Python integration now, but with a little bit of Googling I should be able to hack it to work, and I have.
Read on to download the script and learn how to use it.
Continue Reading June 9th, 2007
I’ve got a confession to make: I held off recording today’s session in anticipation
of the release of ZBrush 3. Now that I had a day or so to play with it, I’ve
learned a few tricks that will speed up the surface detailing process.
Continue on to read today’s entry and watch two sculpting videos.
Continue Reading May 18th, 2007
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