A snapping update!

Latest update on CG Monks/cgMonks/cg.Monks (not sure how we wanna put it in text yet:). Lots of updates in the post. The webinar went well last week and I'll post a link once they get the vid up for those that emailed saying they couldn't make the live one.

Hope everyone is well!

Face Rigging Webinar Next week...

Doin a webinar next week for Faceware if anyone would like to hear my ramblings on facial rigging. Planning on covering blendshape and joint based rigging as well as a bunch of tools from CG Monks as they relate. If you'd like me to cover anything specific, lemme know:)

Sign up here.

If you've not been checking....

There's been a whole lot going on over at CG Monks. The tools are coming along and we've gotten some fantastic contributors to the tool set. Here's this weeks vid from there as a way of enticing some more testers...:)

Also, I started up a new Best of Morpheus channel via CG Monks as it's a bit tedious hopping back and forth between accounts. There's been some fantastic reels lately so if you want some inspiriation. Check em out. Here's one with some great customizations:

Supposed to do a facial webinar in the next week. I'll post the details when I get em. Have a great day, internets!

CG Monks!

I'm happy to announce the formation of CG Monks a new venture with some good friends through which  we hope to make cool tools, rigs, and other goodies available to the cg internets. Some of our goals are..

• Creating  commonsense tools we actually use on a daily basis including our own modular character rigging system
• Creating a community collaborative site that acts as a virtual studio, place to get community vetted tools and assets, and to get questions answered
• Creating stable character (including Morpheus 2.0) and prop assets that follow common sense and animator friendly standards.

I'll probably do most of my blogging there for the foreseeable future so if you'd like to hear more of my yammering, head thataway.

Do I really need that....?

Ah, the therapeutic process of geeks everywhere. Getting a new machine setup is both annoying and refreshing. One such part of the process is thinking through the apps you had and culling out the proven useful from the 'why didn't I get around to uninstalling that'. Here's some picks that carried over:

• Bulk  Rename Utility - great general purpose renamer for files
• Filezilla - my ftp of choice for some time now
• Evernote - I come to really enjoy this note keeper after google notebook went the way of the dodo
• Wing IDE - my coding tool of choice. Just to think this time last year I was still coding some in notepad.
• Dropbox - Oh I can access my import files from anywhere, with revision history and shared project directories with friends and clients? How I ever got along without this before I have no idea
• VLC Player - great all around player that works with most anything.

  This is my first ssd drive machine so I found this post super insightful for optimization.

Hopefully I'll be able to make an announcement on another front in the next week or two stay tuned:)

Happy Birthday me, you all get a present!

I turn the big 34 in a couple weeks. Exciting, no? Back to the important bit about a present to the internets.


After a year of getting many inquiries and frankly just not knowing how I wanted to handle it, my mind has been made up. I haven't had a chance  to change the docs page but I shall when I find a second.

You may now use Morpheus 1.0 for any commercial venture you please providing:
1) credit is given where appropriate
2) Use is in keeping with the "Would-Pixar-make-this" rule (no porn, no "Killing puppies is neat" promotionals)

No fee is required though you're always welcome to donate on the official Morpheus page.

I hope to have another announcement on my site before too long about a new venture among like minded riggers and that entity where will Morpheus 2.0 production will commence from. Sorry it's been so long of the tooth on updating. Life is busy:)

Happy New Year. Hope it's not our last!

Sorry for the gibe, keeping seeing blurbs about Mayan prophecies. Hope everyone had a good New Year celebration. My wife and I brought it in playing games with neighbors and eating pancakes and bacon after the clock turned.

Like most folks, I took the time to take inventory for the year. 2011 was a great year for the studio of one on the prairie. I'm grateful for all the projects that came along and I made a lot of progress leaning python as well. In terms of projects the highlight of the year was definitely the Nintendo E3 project though there was a close one the last couple of months that I'll be able to add to the reel sometime towards the end of the year if schedules go according to plan.

Morpheus has been blazing a trail across the internets and this month saw some great entries on the 11 second club. Including number 2...

My hopeful plans for the year is....

• February - closed release of the first pass of rigging tools
• April - closed release of the character rigging system
• Learn ZBrush and start working on some new characters
• Fall - Morpheus 2.0

Oh, and whatever projects come along a well:) Wish I could find away to make money just making stuff for other people but not found a way to do it. Yet.

Blessings on you and yours for the new year.

Merry (Insert your winter holiday of choice, but for me...) Christmas!

Morphy tip of the month: If you're having slow playback, try commenting out the squash stretch expression. How do you do that? Open the animation expression editor and find the morphy squash stretch expression. At the very front, put a '/*' and at the very end, put a '*/'. Then edit. 

Morphy is one year old this month. Happy birthday, buddy.

First off, if you're interested in listening. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by a passionate animator in Austin and that podcast is now up. (Does everyone think they sound more nasally than they think they should when hearing one's voice?) - http://altanimation.podomatic.com/

Back to Morphy....

Some fantastic facial poses in this one.

From a guy who's been on here a few times. Great work!

A wip I stumbled across on vimeo.

Several shots on Stina's reel

AND this month in the 11 Second Club of Awesomesauce there were some great entries with a Morphy entry placing second. Some of my favorites were:

• Second place's fun cast
• The interogatee in Third place
• Loved the shader work and animation both on this one
• Really liked the proportions on these guys 
• Many many more good ones, check em if you're interested:)

It's gui in the middle...

My first GUI!

So, I've been learning python for the last year and have piles of tools I could use...when my brain remembered which module they were in and what the call arguments were. Handy, I know. As efficient as that was with all of our diabolical plans it made sense to have tools that were usable for other people.

Initially I looked at doing QT but after talking to some friends I had concerns about compatibility with artists all over the place. Eventually these tools will be a part of the Morpheus suite so I wanted to get as few potential blocks out of the road as possible. 

So the last few days I've been digging in to basic maya gui making and all the craziness that entails. Adding error checks (that seemingly Maya 2010 and below don't support mc.warning nor the wordWrap tag...yay....) and getting a feel for things. 

Now I've got a pretty well functioning tool in 2011 and above. 

Some of my thinking in designing a tool...

• One button/many functions - One things I love in silo is how so many tools are contextual and that's something I've tried to emulate where possible. So there's a lot of logic going on behind the scenes to figure out what do based on your selection
• Easy help - the help stuff doesn't load by default (it's the stuff with the lightest back), there's a toggle that turns it on. It's on in the attached image
• Build a base tool module that all the rest of our tools can be built from.
• Less steps. Anything created with a tool should be named intelligently. I'm using my bbAutoName stuff as a base for naming everything in the system and it's working pretty well so far.

What does bbLocinator do? 

• Makes named locators off of pretty much anything - anything with a pivot, faces, verts, edges, cvs, curve or surface points and I think that's it.
• Locators created match point, rotation and rotation order of source objects wherever possible.
• Creates locators at the pivot of objects by default (objects only, not components), option to make it use the bounding box center for point position if desired
• Intelligent naming - you'll always know where a locator came by just looking at it's name
• Create a loc at the center of a selection - objects, edges, whatever...
• Create a loc that's the closest point on a surface to a target object - works with polies, nurbsSurfaces, and curves
• Loc every cv of a curve either at the cv position or at the closest point on the curve to that cv
• Update any locator made with the tool either over time or just on the frame you're on
• Tag an object with a locator so you can update that objects position just like the locator
• Bake every frame or just keys on the tracked object

What's next?

• Get the template stuff nailed down so that any tool can call  what it needs. 
• Several other batches of scripts need to be gui'd
• Figure out how to handle older versions of Maya 

If you have thoughts, suggestions, insults or whatever, post em!

Only one month to 2012....

Where does the time go....seriously.

Morphy Tip of the Month: Please, please read the docs or check the threads on 11 second club. Most of the emailed questions are a bit... repetitive:) 

This month in Morpheus....

Some great posing here and I do believe the first cross dressed Morphy:)
Do believe this is the first cross dressing Morphy vid I've seen:)
Great showing on the 11 second club this month with Morpheus entries in 2nd, 3rd and 4th places as well as peppering through the rest of the entries. AND most of them female. Bout time:) Nice work all!

As a short update -

• Been working hard on a cartoony freelance gig (animation and rigging) for the past couple of months and locked on that through early December. Had a lot of fun with it and can't wait to see the final renders. It's NDA so it'll be a while till it makes the reel.
• Garden City is moving along as well and deep in cloth sim and shader work. Bokser has been sending me updates and it's looking awesome. The film may actually be out by next summer. Whoda thunk!?
• Hoping to get a nice block of time at the start of the year to finish up the rigger but we'll see how that shakes out with work and all.
• SO MANY GAMES. Batman was incredible. Zelda in a couple of weeks. Loved Orcs Must Die and playing suffering (seriously, a death penalty that makes sections an unnecessary time sink?) through Guild Wars just because the sequal looks so amazing.