George Quelch - VFX

After several different attempts here is my first working Game of Life running in Maya, scripted in MEL! I'm so pleased that I finally got it working! All the rules are working properly, the size of the grid can be changed easily, as well as the number of lives. I wont call it 100% finished quite yet as at the moment the edges and corners are not included, for the moment they are stationary but I would like to get it finished off by looping the sides around. The whole thing involved a crazy amount of problem solving and thinking around different issues,  I went through several iterations,  optimizing and  cutting it down, or improving parts of it, before I got to this stage.

After thinking more about my offset group script I have updated it to be more useful by being able to select several objects and group them individually. For example selecting 3 controls and giving them each their own offset group. This will make the script a little easier to use, and more reliable. Thinking and then coming back to scripts is useful, I'm always keen to find little ways to improve them. I can provide copies of these scripts if anyone is interested, just drop a comment.

Over the past few days I have started, and completed, my X-Wing rig, it was really helpful for getting back into rigging properly. I ran into a few problems rigging R2-D2 when aligning controls with bones, which I remembered the proper workflow this time around. Overall it was fairly simple, it just took a few iterations in order to get it working how I wanted it to. One helpful little script I wrote along the way was a single button to quickly make offset groups of objects, select one object, eg "pCube1" press the button and it is grouped under "pCube1_GRP" This has already saved me so much time in creating groups and renaming them, and was much quicker script to write than a full renaming tool.

This summer I mainly want to focus my work on Rigging and Lighting, I think these are the two big focus areas I want to study, but often as part of my course I am not able to. I started out by downloading the Star Wars model pack from this link and I plan to rig most of them in Maya. I have started with R2-D2, which I have got to a working state down below, but it is not something I am totally happy with, there is definitely room for improvement with it in the way it animates. I haven't yet figured out the best way to rotate him, as ideally the rotation pivot needs to be in the middle of the 3 legs. That's what is causing the most difficulty at the moment. I think starting from scratch with this in mind might be the best way to achieve this. I am quite pleased with the middle leg control, it only appears when the leg is lowered via another controller, I used a condition node for this. It makes the rig look a lot cleaner as the control is only there when...

This came out of my experimentation with Maya Extension 2 and the new MASH tool, which I am enjoying using so far.  I rendered using Mental Ray, and composited in Nuke 10 (the non commercial version) I'm quite happy with this, the text was a solid mesh which was "voxelized" using MASH, this didn't work perfectly as there are some floating cubes around the edges. I also had a little play at voxelizing an animated torus object, and using the streaks node to join the MASH objects, which also creates some cool effects. I think that might be something I'll look into more as well. I'm really pleased with the floating effect, and the way you are able to manipulate it, I want to look into more of what MASH can do over summer, through some tutorials and lots of experimenting. After watching this video  I also created the result below, this was before the version above. It's a cool effect, although not amazingly unique, but all of this...

This week I have been trying to keep on top of making progress in MEL. I have gone back and made some improvements to my constraining tool, adding the aim constraint. And I created a tool to more easily playblast work. Most of the new progress I made was with creating window UI, I found a better way to create windows, having them within strings, and was shown by more lecturer a more reliable way to delete any existing copies when creating a new one. Here are the additions I made to the  constraining tool : (previous version here) I have also converted this over to the string way of creating windows. Here is my new playblast tool: I noticed every time I playblast work I turn on and off the nurbs curves. So to speed up that process this turns them off, playblasts the window, and turns them back on. This will save time not having to navigate menus.   If I find I need it, I can give the tool more controls for quality...

Having finished this years uni work I have updated to Maya 2016 extension 2, now safe that I wont have any compatibility issues with our studio version. There are a lot of new features, the one I am most keen to learn more about is MASH, a procedural motion graphics tool. From my short use I already love it, and can't wait to get into it more. The speed at which you can get something cool going on is amazing, and its very intuitive to use. I've followed some tutorials already which I'm waiting to render out, but I am really looking forward to trying the audio node, using music to drive animation is something I was interested in even before Uni, and all of the many others there are to explore.  From the start its very easy to get in and start throwing things together and you start to get ideas for more complicated things to try out, here are just some simple little things with a noise and random modifier.