Nyeng!

A few days ago I saw Transformers 2, and began to suspect something - I don’t think I have the ability to tell a bad film from a good one.  All the reviews from sites I trust lead me to believe I would hate this film.  The mere fact that these are not the Transformers I grew up with should be reason enough for me to hate both films.  But reviews be damned, it’s up to everyone to make up their own minds, and I ended up enjoying every bit of it.  Even the twins.  I do wish some concepts, like Arcee’s “one mind, three bodies”, were explored in more detail (or ANY detail), but the film was already running long…

Is it a great film?  Hell no!  But it is a fun one.

And that’s where I got thinking.  Since I like “good” and “bad” films almost equally, the 5-star or thumbs up/down rating systems just don’t cut it.  I’d like something more descriptive.  This is what I’ve come up with so far -

These are all pretty self-explanatory, and some can apply to good and bad films alike -

Fun - Any film that is just fun to watch, even if you have to completely shut your brain off.  Probably the most forgiving category.

Boring - There are many great films that I likely will never see, simply because I know I’ll be bored.

Stimulating -  These are more expertly crafted, subtle, cerebral, or intense.   Mysteries, thrillers, documentaries…  films that either open your mind, or keep you guessing until all is revealed.

Annoying - 90% of so-called “children’s entertainment”.  Teen dance competition films.  Most modern spoof films.  Pretty much any film that you can tell is completely insulting to even the lowest intellect, just from glimpsing the trailer.

Why the hell did they even make this? - These are something special.  These are any film that defies all logic or reason, leaving you wondering how it ever even got made, much less released.  These would normally fall into any of the other categories, but they have an extra level of insanity that sets them apart.

If I were to add a sixth category, it might be “No, thanks“.  These might be those films you hear so many great things about, but for one reason or another you just have no desire to see, ever.

It’s taken me all day, but all my current storyboards for the opening act are finally scanned, indexed, and ready to be timed.   Or at least they would be ready, if I didn’t still have another 10 percent or so of this section left to draw.  Even without remaining extra drawings, over the next couple days I hope to gain some sense of just how long this section of the film will be.    With any luck, it’ll be long enough that it could stand on its own…

Ever since I modeled it, I’ve had one simple problem with Mary’s shack - how to texture it.  Even if I made several different wood maps, there would probably be too much repetition.  Assuming I can learn how to paint competently, I’d rather treat each side of the shack as a canvas, rather than worry about each board.  While the obvious solution would be projected maps, I wanted to find a way to limit the projection to a single side of an object.  Now, I think I have it -

With this shading network, all 6 six directions (positive and negative XYZ) can have their own projections, with very little overlap.  Now I’ll just have to paint the maps in order to test the thing out properly…

They may not be pretty, but I’m finally getting some storyboards out of the way -

Three things I’ve learned so far - 1.) drawing on paper is faster and easier than with a tablet or a cintiq.  2.) Scanning all the cards is a pain in the ass.  and 3.) I really need to listen to peoples’ advice, and start using mock-ups and reference to make my job easier.

…well, maybe.

Now that I’m able to work on a short film, the question that keeps popping into my head is “can I finish it?”.  Based on my list of things to do just to get Mary-Anne show-worthy again, the answer is creeping closer to “not a chance in hell”. All because she has to be “perfect”.

For now at least, I’m rolling with the idea of working with a simpler, low-poly(ish) version of Mary…  one that won’t require quite so many levels of deformation and control.

I had started to create a new head, but then it dawned on me that it’d be much easier to just remove details from the original -

Already I’ve cut the polygon count roughly in half.  I could probably take it further, but for now I don’t want to push it.

Next, I tried the same with the hands -

Finally, since I had just recently remodeled them, I felt her teeth could use some special attention, if only as an excuse to try some normal mapping -

Then again, since her teeth aren’t likely to deform at any point, I could just use the full-detail ones.

Mary’s face rig being broken has gotten me into perfectionist overdrive again.  At some point that dangerous thought popped into my head - if I’m already fixing something, then why not revisit my old laundry-list of fixes?  Starting, or course, with her face -

This was actually something I started months ago, and only now have decided to revisit.  The original idea was pretty simple - close her eyes, to allow for a Blue Sky-style “sum of 10″ blink control.  This quickly morphed into an excuse to improve the mesh, regardless of whether it was really necessary or not.  I’m not looking forward to copying all the blendshapes to this new mesh though, so I might just leave it alone.

Her hands, however, are something I’ve been meaning to fix for quite some time.  Aside from the original 2D-inspired finger shapes being difficult to get proper deformation out of, when I built them I didn’t bother to model them with the proper bone lengths.

One other thing I’m toying with, is finally addressing one of the earliest criticisms - the length of her legs -

Her limbs could probably also be softened up, a bit.

Then again, considering how much time it may take to re-rig her, I’m half tempted to just create a low-polygon version of her, give that model a no-frills video-game rig, and just crank the animation out.  Kill and bury my perfectionism, rather than feed it and be its slave…

At the least, the results would render a hell of a lot faster. 

This is why you don’t do full-body, scantily-clad characters for animation…

Currently, Mary-Anne’s main mesh consists of nearly 6,000 polygons.  She has 58 blendshapes just for her face.  Having that many copies of a full-body mesh would not only drastically slow things down, but it also greatly increases the file size.

One way I tried to deal with this problem (waaay back when I started), was to separate Mary’s head from her body, but with some overlapping polygons in the neck to hide the split.  While at first this seemed to do the trick, I soon realized that it was pretty noticeable when the character is smoothed, and more so when rendered with shadows.

There’s an old method for solving this, that involves separating the head, then reattaching it.  Doing so re-orders the vertices, so that you can have blendshapes of just the head, and not have the model fall apart.  Personally, I’ve never trusted this method.  One little change can completely throw everything off.

What Mary’s face currently uses seemed like a stroke of genius at the time - make a copy of the head, apply the blendshapes to it, then use this copy as a wrap deformer for a copy of the full-body mesh, which then gets fed into the character as another blendshape.  I had forgotten two things about wrap deformers - 1.) They’re slow.   2.) Strange things can happen at random.

Now that I have to fix her (or use another character for a film), I’ve been going over my options again, and I may have found a ‘perfect’ solution.  An old trick (now built into Maya as the Smooth Proxy tool) involved copying a mesh, and connecting the shape nodes via the outMesh/inMesh attributes.  You could then smooth the copy, and any changes made to the original would be carried over, thanks to that connection.  So what if you did this with a split character (minus the smoothing), then merged the copies together?  The originals would remain untouched, but everything you do to them would instantly be transferred via history to the combined mesh.

If that doesn’t work, I’m either going to give Mary some less-revealing clothes to hide the seams, or completely remodel her as a real-time character…

Mary’s finally got a proper set of teeth -

Building Mary’s environment is no small task, but some parts of it are proving to be easier than I thought.

At the moment all I have are some simple sprouts for the forest floor -

But at least populating the ground with these things couldn’t be simpler.  All it takes is Shave and a Haircut -

And Shave’s instancing -

Now I just hope Shave makes it just as easy to fill out some decent-looking trees…

After spending half of yet another day with a workload ranging from “little” to “nothing”, I got called into a meeting.  We have team meetings all the time, but for this one I noticed that none of my immediate coworkers were getting up.  When I entered the conference room, there were only four other people seated at the table…  Right there I knew, the five of us were being let go.  And once our boss confirmed it, I was the only one smiling.

You see, I go into every meeting expecting to hear some variant of “you’re all fired.  Get your shit and get out!”.  It’s an effective way of softening the blow, and anything less is good by comparison.  “The game’s been cancelled?  Well that sucks, but at least no one’s fired!”

Aside from that, why the hell was I smiling at something that should be devestating?  Because beyond my usual approach to meetings, for almost a year I’d suspected this was going to happen.  For much of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, I had little to work on.  If I was given some assets to finish by the end of the week, I’d sometimes have them done in two days, tops.  And there were quite a few times where I’d be given a task that was meant to take me a whole day, and I’d have it done in under an hour!  As a result, there were long stretches of time where I just felt useless, like dead weight that could be cast aside.  Now that it’s happened, it’s like a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

I was also smiling because I was prepared.  Up until three years ago, I had been saving up so I could take a year or more off of work, to make a short film.  That plan got sidetracked when I had to purchase a new car, causing me to spend two of the last three years fearing I’d get laid off, because the car payments would eat my savings.  Now the car has been paid off for a month, and I have enough saved away to at least get my film started.  I may have lost my job, but that just means it’s time for me to get to work!

But just to be safe,  in the near future I may be open to more freelance character rigging, and maybe even commissioned sketches…  whatever will allow me to work longer on my film.