More Atlas stuff

So as I "promised" in the previous posting, I've decided to post some more tutorials I made during the production of Atlas. The two I'll feature are: a set of instructions I provided with two MEL scripts I wrote for selecting Atlas and Robofish's control curves, and a tutorial on rendering occlusion passes a particular way for a reason I'll describe in a caption below the image. Enjoy!

Character MEL GUI

So, this was one of my first times working with MEL scripting.
Looking back, I realize how primitive that character "GUI" was.
Still, it was a life saver (at least for me) during animation!


Rendering an Occlusion Pass
Before this film, none of us had experience with rendering passes.
I made this tutorial because nobody had been able to leave their
machine batch rendering all their passes due to the fact that the
occlusion pass would create an undesirable result due to a bug
with the visibility of objects in Maya 8.5. With this "ghetto"
technique, one was able to leave all their render layers to
batch render overnight, making things move much more
efficiently. I was quite proud of discovering how to do this
until I later learned a way to do it with half the work,
and within the Maya terminal so you didn't even need to
have Maya open. Oh well, it's all about learning, right?

It's pretty amusing to look back at these images and see the thought process going through my head only a few months ago, and how much I learned from those experiences. Growth is always a good sign (with the exception of tumors...)!

Some Atlas stuff

As you may or may not know, I worked on a short film with a class of 24 other people called Atlas' Revenge. As you also may or may not know, we were students at the University of Central Florida, which means we were even lucky a program like this even existed for undergraduates. Knowing that, I want to make it clear that I'm very proud of the piece we created.

Frankly, I'm amazed Atlas' Revenge came out the way it did with what we had to work with: 2006 Apple iMacs, Maya 8.5 Complete, and a non-functioning server to work off of. If that doesn't make sense for you, I'll put it simply: mediocre machines, Maya without all the fancy cloth, hair, water, etc effects, and a lacking of a common medium in which to store our work files and work off of.

Due to the fact we didn't have a server to work with, we found ourselves running into a major problem: the inability to use file referencing in Maya. Without file referencing, each shot had a copy of the environment and characters in it, leading to much more work when it came to having to fix something with the environment or characters. Not only that, but the file size of each shot was unreasonably large. We also had to store each shot locally on everyones' computers, making it an absolute mess when it came to compiling the entire film, as well as leading to countless other headaches.

Even faced with these problems, we managed to work with them (that's what a good team does, no?) and created a film we are proud of. In this group, I was one of three technical artists selected for production of Atlas' Revenge.

As a technical artist I created character and environment rigs, and provided help to the rest of the team when called upon. I created the Robofish and Lloyd character rigs, some plant rigs for the "gripping with teeth" shot, and helped a bit on the Atlas and window blind rigs. As with any project of this type, just about every rig in the film had an unanticipated issue come up during animation that had to be addressed with a rather low-tech solution. Since each shot had its own copy of the character and environment rigs in it, fixing a bug in a rig was not as easy as sending out an updated copy of the rig and having everyone import it into their shot - instead, the easiest solution was creating an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to fix the bug and emailing it out to everyone. I tried to make them amusing - keyword: tried. So, without further ado, I present you two tutorials!

A fix for Atlas' dorsal fin

A brief fix to a kink in Robofish's hose

I have some other Atlas-related things to post, but I'll include them in a later posting.

Blog now integrated into my site!

Hello there! I've finally got my blog integrated into my site, which means I'm finally going to give this blog the love it deserves! Up first is a post featuring some email fixes I sent out during the production of Atlas' Revenge; these fixes typically involved rig updates or how to resolve a common issue. I'm not sure how interesting they would be to you, but I figured they'd be something amusing to start with. They'll be up in the next post. Catch you later!