Thursday, 9 September 2010
Tools Deployment and Documentation
I came across an interesting post regarding Tools Documentation on TAO this morning and thought I'd link to a good piece by RobG: http://www.robg3d.com/?p=132
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Sculptris developments...
I'm away for a week and Pixolgic announce they are now developing Sculptris. It would be interesting to see if the features will be incorporated in a future release of ZBrush:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=090617
From a quick 5 minute play with this new Alpha 5 version, it does appear more stable than before. Subdivisions for the Standard brush appeared to be locked after a few edits, though the Grab brush created more subdivisions as the surface is pulled out. Looking pretty good so far...
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Back from Siggraph 2010 in Los Angeles
Got back from Siggraph last night and have to say the entire week was immensely rewarding - I only had one free day at the start of the conference to check out LA, so I spent it walking the entire breadth of downtown starting from the Convention Centre in the south. I saw Dodger stadium from one end of the parking lot and visited many of the filming locations for Blade Runner (3rd Street tunnel, the Bradbury Building and Union Station), Chinatown and the Mexican quarter all by foot! In comparison, my two colleagues spent the day relaxing. Otherwise it was attending talks at 9am and finishing at 6pm each day, coupled with plenty of write-ups in the evening. To say I was shattered by Tuesday evening is an understatement (though the ILM party helped) and I had an 8 hour flight back to the UK right after all the talks on Thursday! I really have to thank the HR guys at work though, they found us an excellent hotel next to the Los Angeles Convention Centre so getting to and fro was minimal hassle.
There were a lot of interesting talks including Stylized Rendering and real-time shaders for hair, indirect lighting and deferred rendering techniques. The big wins for me were based on asset management and pipelines. I thoroughly enjoyed talks presented by the guys from Weta Digital (asset management and tricks for handling the many jungle shots for Avatar, and their rather clever muscle system that didn't use joints or constraints), MPC's Furtility (for Wolfman, presented by my good friend Damien) and feathers (for Clash of the Titan's Pegasus) and asset management for Prince of Persia's vast city of Amalut; and the presentation by the Tippet guys for Cat's and Dogs 2's fur plus Disney Animation Studio's tree pipeline for their new feature, Untangled. Also worth mentioning is the great work presented by the Black Rock guys on Split Second, specifically Screen Space Classification and Motion Blur for deferred rendering - astounding considering they're running at 30fps. I also attended a production focus of Borderlands, an XBLA title called Monday Night Combat, and Prince Of Persia 2008, Mirror's Edge's unique look, an overview on God of War 3 presented by Sony Santa Monica and the visuals to the film How to Train Your Dragon. There was a great session on Colour Enhancement in film and games (Tri-Ace presented a film stock emulation process). Sadly I missed the 8 minute preview during the Tron:Legacy session and Pixar's making of Day and Night (though a bit of it was presented during the asset management and pipeline session earlier in the week). I was fortunate to attend a conversational talk with Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang though. Richard was interviewing Ed Catmull and stated he'd recorded some of the lectures presented by Ed regarding graphics programming and how they met plus some insights to Pixar and Dreamwork's formative years. Both confirmed to the audience the lectures will be made available online at some stage. Ed also mentioned how his early years lecturing and encounters with the guys now at Dreamwork's has in effect made them Pixar's main competitor. :)
The week included a VIP after-party with ILM (I missed the deadline to pick up my Autodesk ticket) where I had a blast. I feel honored to have shook hands with Dennis Muren and spoke to one of the presenters from Weta Digital. There was also a networking party held by Siggraph at the Bonaventure Hotel (itself a Blade Runner filming location) where I got to meet and chat to some film professionals and students who, like me were attending Siggraph for the first time. Note to self: make sure to bring more business cards with me next time!
The exhibition hall was vast! In attendance were Autodesk, Pixologic (where's ZBrush 4?!) and many hardware vendors and schools. Newtek's stand was unique though as on Wednesday afternoon they had... William Shatner and Dick Van Dyke sitting in front of a green screen and on an LCD screen above them they were matted into scenes featuring the Enterpise bridge and scenes from Mary Poppins. Simply brilliant! Pixar's booth was in the middle and on that note, I had the good fortune to pick up two Renderman wind-up teapots. The queues for both were insanely long and everyone who walked by couldn't believe people were queuing up for a piece of plastic!
The Emergent Technology hall was full of new ideas and conceptual pieces. I saw Sony's Autostereoscopic display (it was running a variant of Break-Out/Arkanoid, a 360 display of some female models, melons and dogs) and a sound controlled hologram display (the vendors were working with Disney, so sepculate away!) and interesting uses for optic-fibre.
I have one last thing to add to my Siggraph entry: I was rather disappointed with the game papers presented. It covered three 1.5 hour sessions and after 10 papers I came away wondering if there was too much academic focus and the need to provide quantitative data for the project no matter how tenuousness it was to "games". The areas studied had little relevance to the games industry and appeared to extended to every day activites through a game framework: competitive jogging with two people over a great distance, for example, Europe and Australia; a variant on Bust'a'Move to improve people's muscle control who suffer from "foot drop", a neuro-logical condition after say, a stroke (the speaker found the current systems in place weren't engaging enough); or simply attaching 4 WiiMotes on a person's limbs to get vibration and sound feeback in a visual-less environment. Only three papers had any real connection to the games industry: , PADS: Enhancing Gaming Experience Using Profile-Based Adaptive Difficulty System and Designing Entertaining Educational Games Using Procedural Rhetoric: A Case Study.
PADS appeared to be a variant of Valve's AI Director so it would be interesting to see if anyone uses the approaches from that paper. Design Patterns' case studies looked at many games though one was centered on Assassin's Creed 2. To be perfectly honest, all of the data gathered from the study could have been gleaned from Eurogamer's 6 page analysis of Assassin's Creed 2 that provided a wealth of information that was certainly qualitative and quantitative (story, design choices based on playtest "heatmaps", etc)! For Designing Entertaining Educational Games the speakers took to designing a game centred around management of the Earth's natural resources in an RTS framework, "Super Energy Apocalypse". They threw zombies into the mix as they eat the pollutants of the city and thus generate more pollution. Meanwhile, the player needs to gather resources to build and power homes and weapons to defend against the zombies which also add pollution to the atmosphere. While players certainly enjoyed the game (it scored #126 out of 19,000 games) it did highlight an educational aspect with one player stating they didn't realise solar-powered devices didn't work at night.
The moderator called for submissions though I must say that based on the papers presented this year, Siggraph will have to do harder to engage the games industry rather than pander to universities. Maybe they should contact gaming websites for submissions!
As I said at the start of this entry, the experience was rewarding on many levels. Now all I have to do is collate our findings and write up a report and whip up a presentation. Aside from that, the next week will be back to R&D and tools development.
There were a lot of interesting talks including Stylized Rendering and real-time shaders for hair, indirect lighting and deferred rendering techniques. The big wins for me were based on asset management and pipelines. I thoroughly enjoyed talks presented by the guys from Weta Digital (asset management and tricks for handling the many jungle shots for Avatar, and their rather clever muscle system that didn't use joints or constraints), MPC's Furtility (for Wolfman, presented by my good friend Damien) and feathers (for Clash of the Titan's Pegasus) and asset management for Prince of Persia's vast city of Amalut; and the presentation by the Tippet guys for Cat's and Dogs 2's fur plus Disney Animation Studio's tree pipeline for their new feature, Untangled. Also worth mentioning is the great work presented by the Black Rock guys on Split Second, specifically Screen Space Classification and Motion Blur for deferred rendering - astounding considering they're running at 30fps. I also attended a production focus of Borderlands, an XBLA title called Monday Night Combat, and Prince Of Persia 2008, Mirror's Edge's unique look, an overview on God of War 3 presented by Sony Santa Monica and the visuals to the film How to Train Your Dragon. There was a great session on Colour Enhancement in film and games (Tri-Ace presented a film stock emulation process). Sadly I missed the 8 minute preview during the Tron:Legacy session and Pixar's making of Day and Night (though a bit of it was presented during the asset management and pipeline session earlier in the week). I was fortunate to attend a conversational talk with Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang though. Richard was interviewing Ed Catmull and stated he'd recorded some of the lectures presented by Ed regarding graphics programming and how they met plus some insights to Pixar and Dreamwork's formative years. Both confirmed to the audience the lectures will be made available online at some stage. Ed also mentioned how his early years lecturing and encounters with the guys now at Dreamwork's has in effect made them Pixar's main competitor. :)
The week included a VIP after-party with ILM (I missed the deadline to pick up my Autodesk ticket) where I had a blast. I feel honored to have shook hands with Dennis Muren and spoke to one of the presenters from Weta Digital. There was also a networking party held by Siggraph at the Bonaventure Hotel (itself a Blade Runner filming location) where I got to meet and chat to some film professionals and students who, like me were attending Siggraph for the first time. Note to self: make sure to bring more business cards with me next time!
The exhibition hall was vast! In attendance were Autodesk, Pixologic (where's ZBrush 4?!) and many hardware vendors and schools. Newtek's stand was unique though as on Wednesday afternoon they had... William Shatner and Dick Van Dyke sitting in front of a green screen and on an LCD screen above them they were matted into scenes featuring the Enterpise bridge and scenes from Mary Poppins. Simply brilliant! Pixar's booth was in the middle and on that note, I had the good fortune to pick up two Renderman wind-up teapots. The queues for both were insanely long and everyone who walked by couldn't believe people were queuing up for a piece of plastic!
The Emergent Technology hall was full of new ideas and conceptual pieces. I saw Sony's Autostereoscopic display (it was running a variant of Break-Out/Arkanoid, a 360 display of some female models, melons and dogs) and a sound controlled hologram display (the vendors were working with Disney, so sepculate away!) and interesting uses for optic-fibre.
I have one last thing to add to my Siggraph entry: I was rather disappointed with the game papers presented. It covered three 1.5 hour sessions and after 10 papers I came away wondering if there was too much academic focus and the need to provide quantitative data for the project no matter how tenuousness it was to "games". The areas studied had little relevance to the games industry and appeared to extended to every day activites through a game framework: competitive jogging with two people over a great distance, for example, Europe and Australia; a variant on Bust'a'Move to improve people's muscle control who suffer from "foot drop", a neuro-logical condition after say, a stroke (the speaker found the current systems in place weren't engaging enough); or simply attaching 4 WiiMotes on a person's limbs to get vibration and sound feeback in a visual-less environment. Only three papers had any real connection to the games industry: , PADS: Enhancing Gaming Experience Using Profile-Based Adaptive Difficulty System and Designing Entertaining Educational Games Using Procedural Rhetoric: A Case Study.
PADS appeared to be a variant of Valve's AI Director so it would be interesting to see if anyone uses the approaches from that paper. Design Patterns' case studies looked at many games though one was centered on Assassin's Creed 2. To be perfectly honest, all of the data gathered from the study could have been gleaned from Eurogamer's 6 page analysis of Assassin's Creed 2 that provided a wealth of information that was certainly qualitative and quantitative (story, design choices based on playtest "heatmaps", etc)! For Designing Entertaining Educational Games the speakers took to designing a game centred around management of the Earth's natural resources in an RTS framework, "Super Energy Apocalypse". They threw zombies into the mix as they eat the pollutants of the city and thus generate more pollution. Meanwhile, the player needs to gather resources to build and power homes and weapons to defend against the zombies which also add pollution to the atmosphere. While players certainly enjoyed the game (it scored #126 out of 19,000 games) it did highlight an educational aspect with one player stating they didn't realise solar-powered devices didn't work at night.
The moderator called for submissions though I must say that based on the papers presented this year, Siggraph will have to do harder to engage the games industry rather than pander to universities. Maybe they should contact gaming websites for submissions!
As I said at the start of this entry, the experience was rewarding on many levels. Now all I have to do is collate our findings and write up a report and whip up a presentation. Aside from that, the next week will be back to R&D and tools development.
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Sculptris
Back in December 2009 I came across a piece of software called Sculptris. It's still in the beta stage but is gathering speed in functionality and usability.
Simply put, it's like ZBrush and Mudbox though it is not limited to pre-defined vertices on the basemesh; Sculptris will subdivide on-the-fly during sculpting. To achieve a similar result in ZBrush one has to mask and subdivide a localised area of the mesh. There are some pros and cons to this method of increasing mesh density and DrPetter, the sole developer behind this project is working to stabalise both sides.
Check out the beta at: http://www.sculptris.com/
Simply put, it's like ZBrush and Mudbox though it is not limited to pre-defined vertices on the basemesh; Sculptris will subdivide on-the-fly during sculpting. To achieve a similar result in ZBrush one has to mask and subdivide a localised area of the mesh. There are some pros and cons to this method of increasing mesh density and DrPetter, the sole developer behind this project is working to stabalise both sides.
Check out the beta at: http://www.sculptris.com/
EvolveCG - 15th/16th May
I attended the recent EvolveCG conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida a week ago. The event was aimed at students in the South Florida area and included a job fair with many developers including Blizzard and Naughty Dog. Also critique sessions were available.
Featured speakers included many of the guys from Naughty Dog: Teagan Morrison (Lead Technical Artist), Hanno Hagedorn (Lead Character Artist) and Ryan Trowbridge (Character TD). Also featured were Fausto de Martini (Art Director for the film cinematic department at Blizzard), Ted Davis (Senior texture artist at DreamWorks Animation Studios) and Jason Ryan (Supervising Animator at DreamWorks Animation Studios), Kekai Kotaki (Lead Concept Artist at NCSoft).
Teagan Morisson gave an in-depth talk on the Uncharted 2 environment pipeline, from blockmesh to in-game results. There included many hints and tips to make quick iterations, consideration of composition of the environment and also to debug at runtime.
Hanno Hagedorn presented a 3 hour sculpt he made and talked through the many tools he used and some of the processes which worked for him - surprisingly he stated he prefered the creation of textures via the Naughty Dog way (slightly hand-painted) as opposed to his previous appointments (presumably Crysis while at Crytek).
I did have a brief chat with Ryan Trowbridge before his presentation - which I missed in favour of Hanno's. Ryan confirmed he is still working on a MayaPython book with Adam Mechtley (A2M) and will focus primarily on the MayaPython and MayaPythonAPI implementations, plus a tiny bit on PyMEL. I'm really looking forward to this one. http://www.rtrowbridge.com/blog/
It was a very positive experience to see developers encouraging students through such events. More than anything it gave me insights on many developer's production pipelines and potential teaching methodologies.
The plan is to run EvolveCG at least once a year. You can find out more by visiting: http://evolve3d.net/
Featured speakers included many of the guys from Naughty Dog: Teagan Morrison (Lead Technical Artist), Hanno Hagedorn (Lead Character Artist) and Ryan Trowbridge (Character TD). Also featured were Fausto de Martini (Art Director for the film cinematic department at Blizzard), Ted Davis (Senior texture artist at DreamWorks Animation Studios) and Jason Ryan (Supervising Animator at DreamWorks Animation Studios), Kekai Kotaki (Lead Concept Artist at NCSoft).
Teagan Morisson gave an in-depth talk on the Uncharted 2 environment pipeline, from blockmesh to in-game results. There included many hints and tips to make quick iterations, consideration of composition of the environment and also to debug at runtime.
Hanno Hagedorn presented a 3 hour sculpt he made and talked through the many tools he used and some of the processes which worked for him - surprisingly he stated he prefered the creation of textures via the Naughty Dog way (slightly hand-painted) as opposed to his previous appointments (presumably Crysis while at Crytek).
I did have a brief chat with Ryan Trowbridge before his presentation - which I missed in favour of Hanno's. Ryan confirmed he is still working on a MayaPython book with Adam Mechtley (A2M) and will focus primarily on the MayaPython and MayaPythonAPI implementations, plus a tiny bit on PyMEL. I'm really looking forward to this one. http://www.rtrowbridge.com/blog/
It was a very positive experience to see developers encouraging students through such events. More than anything it gave me insights on many developer's production pipelines and potential teaching methodologies.
The plan is to run EvolveCG at least once a year. You can find out more by visiting: http://evolve3d.net/
Monday, 11 January 2010
Scott Eaton Interview
I have been fortunate to have Scott Eaton lecture a few times at my studio. He really knows the human anatomy and I urge any character artists reading this to have your art director arrange Scott to teach his "Artistic Anatomy for Digital Artists". Aside from my studio he's taught his course at Ubisoft Montreal and Sony London.
While looking for anatomy references and coming across his ZBrush Central Anatomy notes, I recalled he mentioned he was currently working on the new Clash of the Titans film. Here's an interview with CGArena.
http://www.cgarena.com/archives/interviews/scotteaton/scotteaton_interview.html
While looking for anatomy references and coming across his ZBrush Central Anatomy notes, I recalled he mentioned he was currently working on the new Clash of the Titans film. Here's an interview with CGArena.
http://www.cgarena.com/archives/interviews/scotteaton/scotteaton_interview.html
Friday, 30 October 2009
Maya Python and Python
Okay, I had to take the plunge. I took a bit of last week and this week to sit down and work through reading an XML file into Maya and operating with the data - feeding it into a UI and writing the information to a new file.
Since this exercise took place at work, I was grateful to have on hand programmers who were familiar with Python. More than anything they aided in the streamlining of my Python script which would have been naturally cluttered had I produced a comparable MEL script. The indenting in Python does take a bit of getting used to though!
Python is a really robust language, one I wished I took up back in 2008 when I discovered Maya 2008 had its own implementation. Sadly, Maya Python is unlike Python because it serves as a wrapper for MEL. However I was able to install PyWin32 for a quick test to automate Photoshop - powerful indeed!
All I can say is, if there's one language you must learn to automate your tasks, it has to be Python. As a side note, I read Blur Studio has recently developed an implementation of Python for 3DSMax. Gosh!
Since this exercise took place at work, I was grateful to have on hand programmers who were familiar with Python. More than anything they aided in the streamlining of my Python script which would have been naturally cluttered had I produced a comparable MEL script. The indenting in Python does take a bit of getting used to though!
Python is a really robust language, one I wished I took up back in 2008 when I discovered Maya 2008 had its own implementation. Sadly, Maya Python is unlike Python because it serves as a wrapper for MEL. However I was able to install PyWin32 for a quick test to automate Photoshop - powerful indeed!
All I can say is, if there's one language you must learn to automate your tasks, it has to be Python. As a side note, I read Blur Studio has recently developed an implementation of Python for 3DSMax. Gosh!
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