George Quelch - VFX

Another thing we touched upon this week in Modeling and Rigging was Driven Keys. This is keying an attribute such as translate, or in our case visibility, to another attribute, allowing attributes to act as switches to control other attributes. We practiced this with visibility switchers, often used in rigs to change between proxy and high detail etc. This was another little quick technique to have a bit of teaching on in order to make rigs that bit better.

This weeks modeling and rigging session was focused on using MEL. Having used some before I did have a starting point but I learnt how to get around some problems I had before. Mainly by avoiding having specific names in more complicated commands, by adding the ".translate" onto the end of variables. We also learnt how to add selections to variables, and it helped me understand how Maya sees scripts that you have open and running in the program. This is just a simple script that connects the translate, scale and rotate values of a first selected object, to a second selected object. It's somewhat useful but could be improved upon to give it more options, but it is a good example of little quick scripts that will come in handy for rigging. When I'm doing rigs in future I will look for opportunities  to practice writing little scripts, even if it takes me longer to begin with, the more practice I get the quicker I will get at wri...

In my attempt to have a bit more practice at showing characters weight I have gone back to the Body Mech Rigs . I just did two simple bits of animation to have a bit of practice. I think  this has helped a bit but really I need to be working on longer pieces of animation I think. One other thing I would like to practice more is the performance of the characters. I might try and get back into the habit of doing 11 second club monthly challenges, but trying to think more outside of the box.

As part of our Modeling and and Rigging sessions we were shown Face Rigs, something we haven't looked at before. This involved blend shapes and Osipa rig controls. I liked creating the blend shapes with mudbox, it felt like a good way to work. We started from a neutral model and sculpted it into a happy expression. Then by weight painting the blend shape we  out the different parts of that expression, for example moving each eyebrow up individually, or moving one side of the mouth without the other. I liked the mudbox workflow, pushing the geometry round was simple and effective. The hard part however, was creating the floating controls to animate the blend shapes. Although there are scripts out there that automate this, which I do hope to look into, it is always good to know what is happening underneath. And it was quite a complicated thing to get our heads around. This is all done in the node editor, something I'm getting more used to using. We u...

This was a bit of work I did one evening preparing for our pitch to the 2nd year Fashion Photography students who have the option to work on final films. I wanted to have a bit more abstract work to show. I rendered curves out of maya as a bright yellow, for the base colour, I then used roto, transform and grade nodes in nuke to create the glitching effect which I think worked quite well but would need to put more time into figuring out how to best use the effect and what makes it most effective.

I was shown a free downloadable model of a BB-8  from the 7th Star Wars film. There is a script here  that gets it to roll properly, but it has no animation controls. So one evening I took to rigging it! ...aaaand the next few days making that rig better. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This is a quick animation I did with it, after Harry used it for a bit I think I might change how the head works to make it a bit more simple to animate but it's just a minor change. Just like how Karen Halliwell taught us, and the same as I rigged the Behemoth for Drone, I used offset groups to align the curves. I made sure the outliner was neat and made sense, and that did really help when I had to troubleshoot some issues, in my first result the head was stuck to the ball, so span round and round and round, funny, but not really what I was going for. In the end I got it working with no constraints, just connections in the node editor, as this is ...

This semester we have to create 3 more visual effects shots, at least one has to be in collaboration with students from Film or Fashion Photography courses. I will probably work on several collaborative shots for the hand in but there are a few things I would really like to learn, simply because they are important techniques in the industry. One of these is camera projection mapping. This is something we studied in first year for half a semester but I would like to learn how to do it with multiple buildings or with multiple angles. This is used a lot in films which have large flying city shots, like avengers down below. It was also used extensively in transformers, although I have lost that video! Another thing I would like to do is composite something I've made in Maya into a live action backplate, making use of  HDRI balls and lighting to render the CG element.  Both of these are massively...