Expressions are my new best friend

Last week my teacher, Rupert, suggested I do an expression for the light flicker of my fire. So today I looked up one on the interwebs. Got a pretty good one. Having never used expressions before in Maya, I was slightly confused on how to do it. But after a minor syntax error, I was able to get it to work pretty darn good. Just a simple random expression in the intensity of the lights, piece of cake. It was so easy, I'm seriously going to look into more expressions in the future, they're so simple. Here's a sample render of the flicker with the fire. Took off the textures to speed up render time, and dropped my settings to draft and a 4:3 aspect ratio. But even at that low quality you can see the awesome shadows the flames are making, especially in the second room. The 3rd room not so much, because I didn't have the light in the fire. But I do now and it looks great in the stills.




Can't wait to see it with textures and higher quality settings. The final render will be awesomesauce!

Note to self, Compress After

So I had a bit of a frustration doing my sequencing today for my final pre-visual. Couldn't figure out why my intro and out credits were not showing up in Premiere. Then I realized that when I rendered them in After Effects, I compressed them, duh. Which made them run really slow in premiere. Plus it didn't help I was working off a network, (doh). But once I got the project on the hard drive, and got the raw uncompressed clips from After Effects, it was smooth sailing. Here's a sneak preview (in playblast form):

And here's some test renders:

N.B.

In addition to my previous post, its seems mental ray materials and normal maps are a tricky and finicky thing to work out. For now, I think I'll just leave him with a simple blinn or lambert. He looks fine with it, maybe later I'll go fancy with the realism and sss.

Hmm sss glitch

Today I made my Sss sharer for my character.  But when I went to plug my normal map into it, Maya would crash. And even worse, it causes Maya to crash when I opened hypershade or even the attribute editor for the shader. I hope its just something wrong with the computers at school. It would really suck if I couldn't get the Sss to work. I'll try to sort it out tomorrow in class.

Saturdays Spent Rigging

Today I was buzzing away at the rig for my character. I do enjoy rigging but it can get tiresome. Eventually I do have to take a break and get back to modeling and texturing. But I got a fair amount done, still tweaking the deformation. For my immediate purposes its probably too complex of a rig, but maybe in the future I may want to animate my character. I was considering some sort of fight animation sequence, but that is something to consider for later. But here's a sample screen shot of the rig:

Transparency switches.

Today had a bit of a challenge. Took the easy way for now but I hope to find a solution in the future. I have several piles of sand in my scene. Each similar in model and texture. But I need different transparency maps on each one. I thought of using a switch to drive the alphas to their respective objects but no dice. For now I have seperate materials for each. I've made a few inquiries around school. I might even post on a forum or two and see if there is a solution.

Guess I sort of solved it. Painting black and white images instead of alphas. Much better for the work flow. Thanks Russ. Though I do feel kind of silly now that I was trying to do it the hard way. Live and learn :).