No Soliciting - May 1st

Here's the poster for my finally complete senior film, 'No Soliciting.' Be sure to check it out once it makes its way onto my site. Thanks to Jess Pom for the idea of using Where the Wild Things Are. 8)

ixg - imagine: pixel generator

Such a cool idea... until it wasn't...

So... I've always had this idea of "what if you could generate every image that had ever, does ever, or would ever exist.... ever...". It was such a cool idea, because you'd be generating every frame from every movie ever made, all your family photos, and anything you could think of. You would probably even generate a picture of Obama riding a penguin through trenches filled with reese's cups, and it would look totally real. The thing would generate the past present and future of images and all their possibilities, and it would only take 1 simple loop of code to do it. So after years of just thinking about how cool it would be to have that thing, I went ahead and made it. But.. somewhere along the line I miscalculated how long it would actually take to go through a cycle... I was thinking for a 16 x 16 pixel image with 255 colors per pixel it'd take maybe a few hours... but I was definitely wrong. So if you feel like spending years just to see a thumbnail of that wonderful reese's surfing penguin riding Obama, then go ahead and set the colors per pixel high and just start watching... but I think I'm gonna wait until our computers get faster...

Simple Clouds in Maya that are still pretty :D

So clouds are obviously a daunting task, no matter what use you have for them. More often than not, if it's in the background, it's just going to be an image. But if you're involving them in your story somehow, or just want them to be more in keeping with the whole look of your piece, you may want to create them in beautimus 3D. The problem with that, however, is that you'll most likely have to use some sort of volumetric shading, or even worse.... fluiiiddds 0_0. So in prepping for my thesis I've come up with a procedural shader for making clouds that are worthy of being called pretty, but won't destroy your life like a ridiculously long render will. The video explains in depth how to create the shader, as well as things to think about while making it, so that you can have a good understanding about how to customize the look of your clouds (it's rather large, 60mb). For those who aren't interested in shading tree shenanigans, you can simply download the source .ma here.

Nuke

So I've just recently been messing in Nuke (started only a few hours ago actually..) and I have to say it's pretty awesome. It's really easy to get into, and really easy to get good stuff from it. I was kind of just messing around but I ended up re-compositing my lipSync animation, and it looks much better than the one I had done in Shake. There's so many cool things I like about it, but I won't go into it now. Here's the composites from nuke and shake (respectively). Wish I could've improved the animation though...

A Link to the Past

So considering that a break from thesis usually just involves other endeavors in Maya, I've finally started something I've wanted to do for a long time. The drawing in the picture below is from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I'm recreating it in what will hopefully be beautiful three-deenesss. I've only put in about 2 or 3 hours so far, which is why there isn't any texturing yet (aside from the displaced decal and flat colors). Most of what is there is lighting. Anyhoo.. stopping to continue thesis but hopefully I can etch away at it in the breaks I take.


Oh and those triangly thingies in front of the sword (in the model view) are reflection panels that are a part of the controlled reflection set on the swords blade. They're one-sided so you can't see that theyre bright white.

Because it is fun.

thanks to tyson for the penguin model

Scripting Blog

So I've started a separate blog devoted solely to scripting and it's magical endeavors. I'll be putting any script related stuff on there from now on, and keeping this blog to just general stuff, more stuff, and other unrelated stuff.

boscripts.blogspot.com

Bűvös Kocka

After so long, I have finally defeated the daunting task that is the animateable Rubik's Cube rig.


It can use any pieces you give it, plays forward and backward, scrubable, and it's really cool. The setup is pretty much fully automated, so it's real easy to make em, although there are things I would like to improve. Anyway, hope you liked it!

So many lines!

So I was workin on boTimingCharts today, and suddenly noticed that I had reached over 3000 lines of code, making it the biggest single script I've written so far!


Intrigued by this number I decided to find out the total number of lines in all of my "bo" scripts (the ones I've written from scratch). The total thus far is over 11,000 lines 0_0. That's like a 200 page paper! I think I may buy myself a chocolate bar for this accomplishment... and later watch a movie.

Timing Charts 0.5

Just about ready for testing. This video shows some of the cool new features like default color schemes (saved to prefs) and the chart marking menus...

There's a lot here that isn't being shown, but maybe in the next video!