FogLog » Maya

Post #100 :D

Fogmann — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 03:52:14 +0000

Otherwise, this would be called Yves Vol 2, since I wanted to show some progress on Yves. I have finally finished adding hair cards wooohoooooo. So here she comes now:

Here are some viewport grabs:

If you ask how long the hair took to make, I’d probably answer “FOREVER!!!” and I wouldn’t be lying by much. Yep, it’s built card by card, and the polycount is over 20k triangles; it is pretty low poly hair, kind of like in-game hair I’ve built for some of the games I worked on, but with way more cards. The hairstyle still needs some tuning and tweaking, both in terms of geometry and shading. It will get tessellated at rendertime with mental ray’s subD approximation so it will look smooth in final render. One thing that bugs me and I haven’t found the solution for it yet (but anyone reading this who might know the trick please let me know!) – when I render raytrace shadows with mental ray, regardless of method (simple, sorted or segments) I will always get fully transparent areas of cards to drop faint shadow, and I’d much more prefer if they would drop no shadow at all. This can be fixed in post and isn’t even noticeable when cast onto an object with SSS material that will disperse the edge of alpha cards – and of course soft shadows would totally take care of it – but the second render in this post (rendered originally in only 512 pixels square!) took over half an hour to complete because casting soft raytrace shadows through shitload of alpha cards takes forever. And I couldn’t even get depth map shadows to show up, let alone cast properly through alpha cards.

Yves is still awaiting to get her clothes, but dry-cleaning was closed this weekend, so perhaps one day…

To commemorate this jubilee post, Yves is now getting some company in form of a space policeman, who went mainstream last week and now hangs out on YouTube:

Here’s the render (which is by no means final, in fact, it is QUITE unfinished):

When they heard there’s some party and celebration going on FogLog, these guys here, especially the drunk lady and lovebug, decided it would be unforgivable if I were to leave them out, so here they come:

конец!

Victor

Fogmann — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 04:53:33 +0000

Just finished this model for a friend from Budapest. It’s VIrtual aCTOR for his game, and I don’t quite know much more than that. It was fun trying to find the lines that hint at some mindful industrial design for manufactured bot-like character while hitting all the anatomical landmarks.

Entry0003

Fogmann — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:05:59 +0000

It’s a crime scene!

Order of deformations for skinned geometry

Fogmann — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 00:08:06 +0000

While working on character’s head, I ran into this problem again when skin cluster won’t work after adding blend shapes. I checked in my notes to see what’s the proper order of deformations, and here is the list:

skin cluster;
sculpt, clusters, wire etc;
blend shape;
tweak node.

The nodes on top of the list are calculated last, while the ones on the bottom are calculated first. If the geometry appears not to be moving with skeleton, as happened in my case, that is because blend shapes are being calculated last, and should be moved to the bottom of the list. Tweak node will remain even after deleting nondeformer history and should be best left at the bottom of the list, thus being calculated first.

To reorganize the input node list, click on inputs icon in main toolbar, and choose all inputs. Then the window shows up, listing all the inputs of the selected geometry. Middle-mouse drag the listed items to change their order. It should look something like this:

I have two clusters for each eye, blend shape and skin cluster. This geometry, which is a low-resolution version of the head, also has a wrap deformer output, because it deforms hi-res version of the head. Luckily, I remembered to check the input order list instead of panicking and wondering why my deformers stopped working.