After 2.5 years of working on this, it’s finally out and doing well in the box office. It’s crazy to think how much work I did through out this film. From rigging a tree, a water cart, hiccup’s flight suit, and many of the characters hair, beards and mustaches. Whew! I’m so proud to had the chance to work on this film and even more so since it’s my first film credit…and doing well. Go see it. I know you’ll enjoy it.
Monsters vs. Aliens is out today. It’s a fun movie so check it out. I had a very slight hand in the movie….actually…only a thumb. In this sequence here there is a lady that Susan talks to before she gets married where her right thumb is shorter than the left. There is a very quick gag with it. Anyways, the 3D is really good and overall a fun movie.
My idea for a great SNL skit to spoof iphoners.
[upbeat music playing]
[man holding an iPhone at the park]
[closeup of him browsing through apps]
Narrator: Have you ever wondered if your wife has been cheating on you?
There’s an app for that.
[man pushes on icon that showes a black and white video of two peoples feet
then you see underwear drop to the floor.]
[man looks furious and screams at his phone]
[same man at a dive bar drinking a beer]
[man notices slutty dressed woman at the end of the bar]
Narrator: Do you have a hard time coming up with that perfect pick up line?
There’s an app for that.
[man picks app and clicks on buttons to describe the mood of the bar (classy, dive, sport…)]
[man selects the type of woman he wants to approach (young, old, classy, slutty…)]
[man shakes the iphone for a random response.]
[response says “You have beautiful (fill in blank).”]
[cut to outside bar where the both the man and woman are leaving together]
[same man pulls up to a house in a bad part of town. gang members are sitting on porch looking at the man with intense eyes]
[man looks down at his iphone that shows GPS location]
Narrator: Need to find out where you can pick up some crack?
There’s an app for that.
[sounds of gun shots ring out and police sirens heard off in the distance]
[man speeds off]
Narrator: Yep, there’s an app for just about anything. Only on the iphone.
This is a short tutorial that will show how to take skin weights from one mesh to another mesh.You’ve worked on weighting a mesh but the uv’s are bad. You have a mesh now that has good uv’s and need to now get the weight from the bad mesh to the good mesh. This will show you how to do that.
To download the high-res video, right click this and save.
more about “Copy/Transfer Skin Weight “, posted with vodpod
Been awhile since I’ve posted anything. So I added a new script to the melscripts section.
Nudge is a useful script for fine tuning your skinning.
Usage:
Select one or more vertices to populate influence list.
Set amount you want to nudge.
Select which influence you want the vertice to nudge to.
Popup menu in influence list with 2 options to remove or fully weight to this joint.
Happy nudging 
Been awhile since I wrote anything Maya related so I thought I’d do a brain dump.
So right now I’m working in Maya at work for a short time. Get to work on a previz rig that has to be built from the ground up with a build system. Now I’ve written build systems and worked with them in the past but have not run into this process. The processes I’ve used in the past, the bound mesh was imported in and constrained to the animation rig. Well with this system, it will be importing a clean mesh and the joints and binding the mesh programatically. Actually this remined me that the rig is being built before building the weights. I need to flip this process.
I had to think how I wanted the scripts to create this weighting process and started looking into other scripts out there that exported/imported weight info. All the scripts I’ve come across have there own format for exporting and reading in the data. Well, I guess the easy way would to export the data with one of the scripts and use the import function in the script to rebuild back into the next maya session in the build system. However I want this to be fairly generic and be self-contained.
Now I wish I can devuldge the script but since I wrote it at work I can’t but I’ll describe the process of what I’ve done so far. So the script process each mesh selected and creates a function in an external file like “global proc weight_nameOfMesh()”. With in that function, it grabs all the joints used and the geo and binds it. Renames the skinCluster and has a bunch of skinPercent calls. One thing I had to make sure when creating this that the weights are normalised so they equal up to 1.0 before exporting the data. Great, so at this point the function binds the geo and rebuilds the weights however normalization is becoming an enemy. When setting the weights in a linear fashion, the verts are wanting to be normalised and there are times when the wieght doesn’t take with the skinPercent. So what needs to be done is all the weights need to on hold and set all the weights to zero then start rebuilding from the ground up. Hmm, scratch head. I guess what needs to happen is when I export the data and it builds each function and at the end of file I need to create another function that will get called in each funtion that calls this zero weights then unhold the wieghts. So at the end of this export function I have a file that contains many funtions that can be called from another function to rebuild the weights from the ground up. Basically a script that builds a script.
Example format:
global proc weights_l_foot(){
select joint1,joint2….;
select -add l_foot;
skinCluster -tsb -mi 1 -name l_foot_skinCls;
zeroOutWeights;
skinPercent -tv joint1 -v 1 l_foot_skinCls l_foot.vtx[1];
….
unholdWeights;
}
global proc zeroOutWeights(){
…..
}
global proc unholdWeights(){
…..
}
Last Thursday my wife and I went to the crew screening of Kung Fu Panda. The movie is awesome. Great story, animation, lighting and amazing detail. I’d have to say that it’s one of Dreamworks best films thus far and will certainly give Wall-e and Bolt a run for it’s money. The screening was at the famous Grauman Chinese Theatre with 3 other theaters there. The turn out was amazing.
There was an after party at the beautiful Roosevelt Hotel across the street. As we walked in Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife was greeting everyone as they walked in and thanking them for coming. The bottom lobby and outside pool was all ours to roam around and mingle. There was a great buzz from everyone and spirits were high as we were all commenting on how great the film was. The atmosphere was great with low-lighting and the catering help was amazing. Food trays at the ready with tasty little appetizers along with trays of signature well drinks that were super strong.
Then this last weekend I took a friend and his wife along with us to a screening at Universal City Walk where there was more kids and a general audience. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and I still laughed at the same spots like I was watching it for the first time. I really have to congratulate everyone that worked on this and should be very proud of what they created….a classic.
Pre Maya 2008 with ext 2, the only way to select the mirrored component was to run a script. I’ve been doing some research and have looked at a slue of different ways of going about it. Some use pointOnMesh, polyConstraints, storing all the verts ID or a combination there of. 99.9% of these scripts make the assumption the model is symmetrical and if not then have the user give some sort of tolerance to calculate any slight changes between the two sides. Plus almost all the ones I’ve seen have to iterate over components in same way or fashion to determine world position and such. This can be slow and may not work on meshes that are symmetrical.
So lets break the problem down a bit: We want to have the flexibility of being in any component mode and be able to select the opposite side without inputing that we want left or right, the topology can be asymmetrical,we want this mirror selection to be as fast as possible and can not affect any construction history on the mesh.
Well, I may have come up with a possible solution that is quite outside the box and utilizes a tool set that would not be really considered as a means to select components. It’s relatively mesh resolution independent. Meaning the difference in time from 1k to 30k poly mesh is relatively small in comparison if you were to iterate over each component.
And the solution will be revealed right after these messages from our sponsors….oh wait….I don’t have any sponsors…..coffee break anyone?
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So I started from scratch with my modeling project. I found some pretty good reference photos that really helped get my shapes and proportions. Thanks to all for links to artists, tutorials and suggestions. Been a great help. I think I’m at a much better starting point than I was before.
