Nyeng!

iHurt

Jared — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:53:49 +0000

There’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from building something with your own two hands, especially when you don’t really know what you’re doing. Over the weekend I helped my friend Jim repair a rotted portion of his roof. We originally expected to have it fixed in a single day, but with our inexperience, combined with the heat and lack of proper tools, the job ended up taking three days. But at least now it’s done.

One more thing that’s close to being done, is my Gal Zero pic -

Based on the character description Shadow Al gave me, I figured a fighting game look would be fun.

What are the odds?

Jared — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:22:37 +0000

A couple weeks ago, I was asked if I’d be willing to do an art trade. I’ve only been asked once before, but this was different - this person can not only draw, but I’ve been following his work for at least a couple years, and have even wondered at times what Mary or Daisy would look like in his drawing style (spoiler - pretty damned awesome). As luck would have it, that’s just what the trade entailed - he draws my characters, while I would draw his.

So, here’s my take on Shadow Al’s “Gal Zero” -

What’s kinda funny about all this, is the limited information available to either of us about the other’s characters. Al has a few images of Gal Zero on Deviant Art, but not much info on who she is as a character. Likewise, I have images and the occasional comic of Mary and Daisy, but for the most part info on them is pretty light (more so for Mary). At the least, I think it leaves plenty of room to interpret the character(s) in unexpected ways.

Nut-up or Shut-up time

Jared — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:23:36 +0000

For six years, I animated every day in 3DSMax, using Biped. And for the first year or so, I complained on a near-constant basis about it. Maya was the superior tool in my mind, and to this day I still think a great many things in Max are ass-backwards. Over the past week I’ve finally gotten a chance to do some freelance animation in Maya, and what I’ve learned is that I actually miss Biped. Sure, an animator should be able to do their job with any program, but I must say that some of Biped’s features have spoiled me, and I didn’t even realize it at the time.

With Biped, copying and pasting poses or whole animations is easy. You select a part, hit a button, and the data is stored away. There are some very good mel scripts that bring this functionality to Maya, but finding the right one takes a bit of trial and error.
Biped’s limbs are simultaneously IK and FK at all times, with no need to from one to the other. The closest it comes to switching, are planted, sliding, and free keys. I think the closest you can currently get to duplicating this in Maya, is to have a script for matching your IK and FK chaings when you switch from one to the other.
With biped here’s also no need to worry about pole-vectors. If the elbow/knee is pointing the wrong way, you simply rotate the lower part of the limb to fix it. And then there’s the super-simple pivot-switching system for the hands and feet. I suppose somthing like that could be duplicated via a scripted character gui, but even then if would be fairly complex.

Those things aside, there are so many other reasons to go with Maya. Number one being that it lets you get under the hood, which allows you to come up with some freakish, Frankenstein-like solutions for pretty much any problem. Biped can’t rubber-hose limbs, elbow/knee pinning, IK spines, or squash & stretch. I think the main reason I’m feeling nostalgic, is that my deadline for this project was extremely short. Shorter still, considering most of my time at the moment is spent babysitting my niece… and trying to animate while she’s watching Nickelodeon is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, it’s finished now, so I can get back to whatever insane thing pops into my head.

The Drain

Jared — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 01:32:51 +0000

When you need to get some animation done, only have a couple days to do it, and just went through a hellish rigging experience, the last thing you want is for anything to go wrong. Life is not nearly that kind, however.

While I set up the primary character, the other characters on this project were rigged with… a very popular rigging plugin. Now, I’m not sure who/what is at fault, the plugin, or the guy who used it, but the resulting rig is horrible. The rig is not only more complex than it needs to be, but the locations or certain attributes, like IK switches, make no sense. I’ve come to expect IK switches to be on their respective controls… not on the character’s root.

But the biggest problem by far has to be the twist joints. The rig uses a complex, impossible-to-follow network of utility nodes to extract and distribute the twist values from the IK and FK controls. I don’t even think it’s accurate to say it doesn’t work. At some point, the joints not only point in the wrong direction, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to FIX them! It seems the only way to partially avoid this problem is to stick with IK, but flipping still occurs on the hands and feet.

On one hand, I’m kinda pissed that I have to find a way to work around this crap by the end of Tuesday. But on the other hand, I’m now glad that I was too cheap to buy this plugin a while back, if this is any indication of the quality of its rigs…

Grrr…

Jared — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:55:55 +0000

Maya is getting to be pretty persistant in making my life hell. I’m currently working on some freelance animation, and part of the deal was that I would also rig the main character. Nothing fancy, just a simple biped rig, without any face controls. When I agreed to it, I figured it would take me all of 15 minutes to set the thing up with either zooCST or JTD Rigging. Unfortunately for me, both those scripts appeared to be broken.

JTD seemed to work just fine, until I got to the arms. At first I was getting an odd error it requiring a valid RP IK handle. It’s the script’s job to set that up, so why the hell was it bitching at me? Another error that popped up later said that the upper and lower parts of the arm need to have the same number of twist joints… which they DID. Even after removing the twist joints, I still got the error.

With zooCST, I ran into a familiar problem that I’d completely forgetten about - much like JTD, everything seemed to go fine at first, but then it crapped out at the legs. It looked as thought one leg was set up fine, but then it tried to set up the other leg on top of it.

Not wanting to try out any new scripts on such short notice, I decided I’d have to do the rig by hand. Not the best idea I’ve ever had. What really pissed be off was that my own scripts now appear to be broken as well. When I tried my spline-IK twist joint script, it gave me a “not even data provided” error, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. This same tool worked just fine on Daisy the last time I used it, so I have no idea why it’s not working now.

I swear, if I didn’t think it’d take me years to become just as proficient with as I am with Maya, I’d probably switch to Blender…

Michigan > Florida

Jared — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:58:15 +0000

How is Michigan better than Florida? This is my brother’s back yard -

In Florida, it’s not a good idea to have large trees near your house or even the road, because one good hurricane will knock them down and possibly cause an insurance nightmare. The worst you have to worry about in Michigan might be the occasional tornado, severe thunderstorm, or an ice storm. I’ve also never seen a walking buffet like this in Florida… these turkeys would either be gator food, or road kill.

Break time!

Jared — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:15:02 +0000

Thanks to my 9,000 hits image, I’ve now reached 10,000 hits on Deviant Art. Nutty thing is, I only did the 9K image because I thought it’d take at least until the end of the year for me to reach 10K, and I didn’t want to wait that long.

Like all my recent renders, this one was a nightmare to complete. Maya’s just been really unstable since I reinstalled Windows. I could work for hours without any problems, but once I start playing in the hypershade or try to do a test render, it crashes. Oddly enough, though, it seems much more stable in Windows 7 than it does in Vista.

Still, the frustration from trying to get this simple image done, along with all the others, has taken its toll. I’m not giving up, but I will be taking a break from 3D for at least a couple weeks. And when I do get back into it, Bill still needs finishing, and there’s a loooonnnggg list of props and environmental models I need to get started on…

This might also be the perfect chance for me to get some of my comic ideas out of the way, and maybe even experiment with some 2D animation. Not that my nieces will actually give me enough time to focus on any of that…

Don’t Talk To Strangers

Jared — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:45:46 +0000

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.

Stuck in a loop

Jared — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 03:29:36 +0000

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…

Just in time for a road trip…

Jared — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:56:17 +0000

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…