Nyeng!

True story - I’m out for my morning walk, and this woman pulled into a driveway ahead of me, strikes up this exact conversation about GPS, then pulled a nasty seat cushion out of the garbage and tossed it in the back of her car, hoping it’d improve the reception.

That’s one thing I kinda miss about living in the city - the nut-jobs.  But only a little.

Something I’d planned on doing while in Michigan, was take plenty of reference photos around my brother’s house. It’s a heavily wooded area, which is perfect for what I have in mind for the area around Mary’s cabin/shack. Thanks in part to the horse flies eating me alive, I started thinking that I’ve done this all before… and I was right. Sifting through my backup drive, I found hundreds, maybe thousands of photos from at least the last 3 or 4 years. Now I just have to sort through them all.

Speaking of repeating myself, another casualty of the reinstall was part 2 of a skin shading tutorial for Deviant Art. I had most of it typed out, screenshots were taken and ready, and none of it survived. Having to redo the whole thing is giving me bad flashbacks of all the times over the past several years where I’d have something fully animated, only to have the power blink out (or the software crashed) before I could save…

My computer caught herpes the other day, just as I was getting ready to drive up to Michigan. I don’t know what it was specifically, only that my virus scanner didn’t catch it. Once it was clear my computer was screwed, I shut everything down and started the backup process. I should have paid closer attention to what folders I was backing up, though. I had selected the wrong user folders, so now a lot of my data is gone. Nothing major, except for my Quicken database, some notes, and 4 months worth of email. All my artwork was safe on another drive, so at least none of that was lost. Still, it’s not nearly the best way to prepare for 17+ hours on the road…

Now that I’m in Michigan and my computer is more or less restored, there’s the question of what to do while I’m here. I should start sketching and photographing different plants and trees, so I can try to make some nice stylized foliage in Maya. Then of course there’s Bill, still waiting to be finished. After reading some illuminating texture tutorials, I’m tempted to at least try to give him some decent texture maps.

Another idea has been buzzing in my skull for the past couple days… The kind of idea that could be creatively satisfying if it works, but will more likely cause a great amount of frustration. I’ve been itching to finish one of my backlogged comic strip ideas, and the other day I thought it’d be fun to try it as a motion comic. Consider that rate at which I draw, though, that may not be such a good idea…

…met with a massive headache.

Roughly matching the angle of a real camera?  Easy, thanks again to the towel.  Resculpting Daisy’s breasts to help achieve a pose that her rig isn’t actually capable of?  Also easy (easier than matching the camera, in fact).  Rendering without any problems?  …crap.  I tried to simplify my approach to rendering with this one, but only succeeded in making things more difficult…

So far my re-write for Mary-Anne includes two things she’d been lacking - a job, and a hobby.  That was one of the painfully obvious problems with her, before - she didn’t really have anything to do.  Now I’m picturing her as a carpenter/handy-girl, so she might as well dress the part.

This costume change was originally just going to be for the winter-themed short I’ve been planning, but now might be a little more permanent, with a few changes.  Instead of long-johns, she’d have a t-shirt, and she’d also have heavy work boots instead of homemade squirrel-shoes.

In Maya, the costume change might also make things easier.  With more of her body covered up, I won’t have to worry as much about corrective shapes.  Baggy clothes, if I’m using nCloth, also means that I don’t have to worry about getting the skin weights just right, to prevent the clothes from intersecting her skin.  And the boots will make my life easier, just for the fact that I won’t have to worry about her toes any more.

How do you write a character that you just cannot understand, or even answer basic questions about?   That’s the problem I’ve been having with Mary, for quite a while now.  I haven’t been able to use her effectively, because I don’t know anything about her, even after working on her for a few years.

All of my other characters, even more recent ones that I haven’t drawn yet, that only exist as notes on an index card, are easier to write.  One thing they all have that Mary doesn’t - real personality traits.  Each of them represents at least one obscure part of my personality - Daisy is my determination to overcome any challenge.  Bill is my irresponsibility.  Mercy is a combination of my apathy, and barely-subdued anger.

With Mary, I can’t think of one thing that she’s supposed to represent.  There’s no basis in reality, no emotional connection, nothing that really lets me get inside her head and know exactly how she thinks.   She’s a prop.  What’s her favorite color?  Favorite food?  Life goal?  Worst fear?  Hell if I know, but I’m working on finding out, by starting from scratch.  I’m throwing out her current backstory, and writing a new one that will hopefully not only make a lot more sense, but also make it easier to place her in comics or a short film.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining to how poorly she was written up to this point - she fit in with the other characters so badly, that rewriting her doesn’t affect them much, if at all.

Of course, there is also a way that I could keep her as-is, where she would not only make some sense, but would also allow for some twisted humor - what if she was actually Daisy’s imaginary friend?  It could make sense in that she has the type of body that Daisy wishes she had, and is also completely care-free, with none of Daisy’s responsibilities or troubles.

There would still be a couple problems, though - if Mary is imaginary, then she can’t be in any stand-alone stories, and other characters can’t interact with her.  Another thing is the fact that Daisy is weird and interesting enough already, without schizophrenia being added to the mix.  And then there’s the fact that this type of thing has been done before - Calvin & Hobbes, Fight Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (according to some people), among others…

One of many things I’ve been meaning to draw for a while, to help develop my characters a little.  Bill’s a late addition, though.  The original plan was to have Daisy continue on a little longer, until Mary interrupts her with a fit of brain-freeze.  Bill seemed like a better fit, even though now Mary is little more than a prop.

A recent discussion on CGTalk has made me take a second look at how I render my scenes.  For the past couple years or so I’ve preferred to render out multiple passes/buffers, and combine them in post.  First it was with ctrl_Buffers, and lately it’s been p_MegaTK.  Now I’mwondering if it’d be better to just do everything in-camera.

I guess you could say this started when Final Gather and MegaTK caused Maya to crash.  I’ve also been a little frustrated with MegaTK’s limited light support.   Through its own light shaders, MegaTK’s buffer output supports Direct, Point, and Spot lights.  Image-based lighting and mia_physicalSky can be used for ambient/indirect light, bit not as a primary light source.

Another possible reason for my reliance on passes, could be that until recently I’d been using the wrong settings for subsurface scattering, and also because I didn’t know about MR’s linear workflow.  While I’m at it, I’m tempted to give V-ray a look as well.  Just as soon as a demo is made available for Maya 2011 (and hopefully before my 2011 demo expires)…

Not long ago I started playing with the demo of maya 2010.  Now, it’s 2011’s turn.  With 2010, I was mostly focused on seeing just how far I could push the 64-bit renderer.  I also played around with nCloth and parts of the muscle system, but that was about it.  With 2011, I’m trying to be more thorough.

One thing I was curious about was Assets.  It’s one thing to read the description, but I had to see it in action to really get what the big deal is.  At first glance, they seem to work just like group nodes, if you’re just adding objects to it.  Publishing an attribute from one of those objects to the asset node seems like it could be done with a script in older versions.  Where the asset node really shines, is in the Hypershade.  I created several shaders and utilities, added them to the asset node, and POOF!  Gone!   Double-clicking the node opens it up so you can work with the nodes.  Now I understand how this could benefit characters - rather than having the hypershade littered with dozens or hundreds of utility nodes, all those nodes can be tucked away inside an asset node, drastically clearing things up.

Animation layers are something I’m almost ashamed I haven’t tried sooner.  They were a regular part of my workflow in Max, to the point that the may have become a crutch.  Whenever I tried animating in Maya, I missed that feature.  From what I’ve seen so far, Maya’s animation layers work very similar to Biped’s in the ways that matter, and add in a few very useful tricks.

The new skinning tools also deserved some attention.  If I can finish cleaning up Bill’s model, I may have to use him to fully test out the interactive binding tool.  One thing I was able to try out now, was the dual-quaternion skinning.  Since it’s built right into the smooth-skin node, this meant that all I had to do was load one of my characters, and switch the method from linear to dual.  Here’s a comparison of the two methods on Daisy -

While it’s far from being a perfect solution, the dual-q mode at least seems to help maintain volume.  The verts will still need to be carefully weighted, the only difference now is you may be able to get away with weights that would look terrible in linear mode.  Pose deformers will still be needed in key areas, and fortunately that plug-in works just fine with dual-q.  I’m not sure why I thought that it wouldn’t…

On and off, I’ve been looking for a way to render soap suds for a least a couple years.  Now, I might finally be closer to figuring it out.

So far, the setup is pretty simple - blobby particles emitted from a sphere.  The particles are shaded with MegaTK, while the sphere uses an SSS shader.  The next step might be to sculpt some more sudsy-looking shapes to emit the particles from, and see just how many particles can be rendered before Maya crashes.