Josh's ramblings and maybe a sketch or two...

A snapping update!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:39:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:13:00 +0000

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....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:22:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:44:00 +0000

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....?

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:21:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:35:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:42:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:45:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:52:00 +0000

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....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:19:00 +0000

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.

Is it really October already....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Morphy Tip of the Month - If you hit render and all you see is black. You're most likely either 1) not using mentalRay or 2) don't have the textures connected

Been a bit busy, started another project I'll be in through December and last week did a demo of Morphy at the Austin Autodesk Group - it was a fun time and nice to see some old friends. Got a link from someone with pretty sweet lookin camera rig I'd love to try out when I can. Check it out here - http://renatopolimeno.com/rp_camerarig/

Fun blacksmithing one

Some great Morphy work on a reel

From the 11 second club -

A Week in the Life Between Gigs...

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Some folks wonder what freelancers do between gigs. Well I can't speak for them but for me more than a few days without a project to work on is a painful thing - I just really enjoy making stuff. As I've been posting sporadically, since the start of the year I've been working on a python rigger so aside from doing a little animation with Morphy a few months ago, that's what I work on.

Aside from the typical things of course . Like spending time with my wife when she gets home, grocery store trips, joggin the dog, cookin dinner and workin through mountain of stuff that gets put on the backburner when those crazy gigs come - oil changes, home repairs and the like. Also reading books. I read . A lot. My brother got me caught on The Game of Thrones series so that's kept me busy about a month of reading. Should finish the last one (so far) next week or so. Highly recommended if you like the fantasy genre in the slightest - except for you, mom....maybe a little non-PG. Some characters I've loathed I've come to really like. Except Cersei, I'll be amazed if Mr. Martin can redeem her.

Back to python. Maybe other TD's work different. I've never really worked in a studio setting with other td's writting code so I don't know but I find myself circling back through things I thought I'd fixed days before. Also, my libraries of functions have gotten huge. Can't believe how long it took to figure out the traceback feature in Maya....like this week. Some days I feel like an idiot.

Here's my running log from this week so far(which I've been using evernote for note keeping and really enjoying). For code writing I'm using jEdit and version tracking via an online code repository.

Mon

bbRiggingLib

locMeSurfaceCV
setCurveByColor(obj,color)
setCurveByIndex(obj,colorIndex)

bbDistanceLib

returnDirectionSortedDict(targetObject,objectList)
returnClosestObjectsFromAim(targetObject,objectList)

bbSkinLib simpleControlSurfaceSmoothWeights

added a lot more calculating, doing a pretty good job now (though a little slow cause of all of the measuring)

bbAttributeLib

doSetAttr(attribute,value,forceLock = False)

set attr replacment that ignores locks, relocks if it was locked and has a forced lock override

doConnectAttr - see above

bbSpineRig

pretty much workin now want a better ribbon setup but the spine works with squash and stretch

bbDictionaryLib

returnColorIndex(color)
returnColorDict()
returnRotateOrderIndex(ro)
returnRotateOrderDict()
returnVectorToString(vector)

Tues

bbDistanceLib

returnClosestUPosition - made it work with compound curve objects
returnCenterPivotPosition - returns the coordinates of the pivot of a bounding box of an object or objects

bbModuleLib

returnSettingDataAsFloat - culls in the data from the settings as a float, parsing it if there are ',' to a list or to an array with the '|' divider
bbCurveLib
createTextCurve(text,size=1,font='Arial') all the text curve under a single transform
createTextCurveObject(text,size=1,name=None,font='Arial') stores info for easy updating of the text or font
updateTextCurveObject(textCurveObj) recreates the text with new text and font info sizing it the same as what was there and replaceing the shapes that were there. All while leaving the original transform node unmolested

bbRiggingLib

centerPivotLocMeObject - like loc me object, however, for positioning purposes, uses the bounding box pivot of the object instead of it's actual pivot

bbControlMaker

moved the limbControlMaker here from bbLimb

bbModuleLib

createdcreateSizeTemplateControl - which makes a template sizing object for initital sizing data

Wed

bbSearchLib

returnObjectType - fixed logic for detecting shapes

bbRiggingLib

setCurveColorbyName & setCurveColor by Index - added shape detection so that if you feed it a shape instead of a curve it just does the shape, if a curve, it does all of it

bbCurveLib

made the update text account for parent scales to ensure it maintains it's proper size and stores the new scale, also made it retain curve color info
Added duplicateShape because it's apparently not easy to do so with basic maya commands added gear, eye and teeth shapes

bbControlMaker

MasterAnim almost done working
childControlMaker which will come in all kinds of handy

Thurs

bbAutoNameLib

more fixing of the auto name logic made storeInfo default to locking the attributes, however there is a leaveUnlocked bool option now

bbMathLib

multiplyList - does what it says, ignores 0's

bbRiggingLib

parentPivotLocMeObject - takes the pivot of the immediate parent of an object instead of it's own while still matching orientation and oration order of target object, world if no parent is present
returnColorsFromCurve - queries the colors of all the shapes under a curve and order them by volume encompassed

bbCurveLib

made duplicateShape work with curves with children (yay compound curves!)

bbLimb

started the changeover to the new template setup

bbModuleLib

returnOrderedModules (redo) - Changed it to read the hierarchal relationship of the modules stored via message nodes to produce an order instead of the wonkier version I had before.

bbControlMaker

MasterAnim done
childControlMaker done

    DESCRIPTION:
    Generates a radial array of controls around a base control where things start at noon and it divides
    the clock positions by the number of controls to make.  You can also change the mode so that you can
    tell it where to start on the clock and increment which to use.Stores the children controls to the baseControl
    as a message  node and stores the parentControl info to each generated control. It also takes into 
    account the colors of the baseControl using a secondary color if it exists.
    
    REQUIRES:
    baseControl(string) - The control we're working off of
    controlTypes(list) - the controls you want created. If the type specified isn't in the base settings,
                         the control is created as a bbTextCurveObject
        Presets - settings
                  visibility
    mode(list) - (['even']) -  mode to set our values by and other information as required
        Options -   ['even']
                    ['incremental',30] - the firest term is mode, the second
                                        is the degrees to separate the controls by. Can be negative   
    baseAim(vector) - ([0,0,1]) - which way does your master control point
    baseUp(vector) - ([0,1,0]) - which way is up for your master control
    offset(int/float) - (0) - offset the starting clock position
    scaleMultiplier(float) - (.25) - multiplier for scale (default is .25) of the absolute size of the parent control
    distanceMultiplier(float) - (1.25) - multiplier for distance to travel 
    localRotationOffset(vector) - ([0,0,0]) - offset rotation for the controls if you want it
    aimChildren(bool) - (False) - aims the controls at the root of the base if True
    zeroGroups(bool) - (False) - if True adds zero transform groups to zero out the controls
    lockHide(bool) - (True) - If true, locks hides and makes unkeyable the typical transform attributes per control
    
    RETURNS:
    controlsMade(list)

bbControlMaker

Heirarchy changes to the size object

bbLimb

returnTemplateSizeObject - returns existing objects or makes them and returns them if they weren't found
doGenerateInitialPositionData

initially looked at using curves from the start but am leaning towards just orienting locators aimed where I need and using multiply lists below against standard ratios stored via settings.conf

bbRiggingLib

aimSnapUpObject (added)

bbDistanceLib

returnClosestUPosition - made it work if you feed shapes in it

bbMathLib

multiplyLists - multiplies lists of values - [[2,3,4],[2,3,4],[2,3,4,3]] = [8, 27, 64, 3]

Morphy! By a noodle....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:27:00 +0000

Morphy Tip of the Month: If you get some funky creasing in the face with a customization option don't hesitate to select the offending section and try a 'smooth skin weights' option or just manually paint in some smoothness around there.

First off a big congrats to Pairatch Lerthajornwong for their winning entry to 11 second club. Check it here!

First the classical....

Then a little more hip

Morphy struttin it

Little drinky drink

And some more from 11 second club

Everyone has a crazy uncle....
Need a little help with the candy
Man bites ~~dog~~ shark
Maybe not all of america(apologies if you don't live in America, Lee) has talent
Get that fly!
Love me some full body chess workouts
So, so many more. NICE WORK ALL

Updated Reel - Sizzlin Houston Summer Edition!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:56:00 +0000

Update of the ole' demo reel. Some new work from the last year and a test of ole' Morpheus posted a couple of weeks ago.

What else has been happening....

Next month I'm gonna be doing a demo at the Austin Autodesk group and am lookin forward to seeing some friends there. I'm just plannin on doing a general customization demo but if anyone that'll be there would like something more specific post here and I'll see what I can do.
I also did a little interview for Simply Maya should you be inclined to check it out here
Created a best of Morpheus channel on vimeo - http://vimeo.com/channels/226100
Work has been trucking along on bbThingamarig or bbRigger (whatever we end up calling it). Here's an update of what I've been working on

Curve tools - python based saving of compound and simple curves and creation and various other
The rigging process -

easy class based template creation is in place (one sided so far) with multiple arms, heads, whatever. Template has orientation and control helper objects which work well
Saving of template settings into the rig itself for easy re-creation.
Joint creation and orientation (from orientation helpers as well as the general orientation options from the settings.conf)

AutoNaming

Intelligent naming via type detection and tagging that happens in the rigging process accounting for children type names (i.e. groups deriving names from child and constraints getting their root from their objects as well).
Iterative processing in place
Absolutely unique name generation
Able to process whole hierarchy at once

Lots of other stuff:)

This just needed to be posted....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 22:31:00 +0000

Some of the funnest animation I've seen in some time....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:39:00 +0000

Morphy Tip of the Month: I'm gonna be lazy and say watch David's videos below:)

Kicking off with a tutorial/demo from a internet friend of mine. David's class are the ones working on the Morphy Wardrobe project. Nice demo Dave! Also, there's a part 2....

Fantastic bit of animation by matthewpres. Forwarded to me by Pierre. Thanks!

Great one I stumbled across on vimeo...

Some great Morpheus examples in the 11 sec club this month. An especially good one even got number 2. Congrats!

Gatekey render, and stuff!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Waiting on a stubborn NDA to lapse to be able to show my updated reel. In the meantime, here's a rendered version of that Gatekey test I did a few weeks back to test out Morphy and add some lip sync to the reel.

This here is a Morphy version of a friend of mine who's been on me to make him one for a long time.

What else is shaking....

Started a vimeo channel for best of Morpheus stuff I see on there - http://www.vimeo.com/channels/226100
Kung Fu Panda 2 was fantastic, Cars 2 hit a nail on the road somewhere to completion.
Netflix is my new friend. My wife and I have been enjoying the BBC "what if he lived today" Sherlock miniseries with the British The Offices' Jim character playing a solid Dr. Watson.
Just wrapped a facial animation gig for the company a good friend of mine works at. Animating on the joints FTW!
One of my closest pals was here for a visit a couple weeks back and we brainstormed projects to take us at least till the end of civilization in 2012. I sure hope we finish before then so other folks can enjoy the stuff for a little while. Some pretty cool stuff, we can't wait to start connecting the cg community to it.
Been busy:

Drawing robots for another of those projects
Back into my nemesis Web designing for another
Digging back into Python for the rigger.
Started squashing some Morpheus bugs.
Just too much to do...

Team Fortress 2 has had a lot of updates since I stopped playing last summer which I've been digging through. The Castle keep map with melee weapons only is a ball.

Basic problem solving - Scripting for a monotonous task....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:10:00 +0000

So, I've been working a gig for a couple of weeks now and ran into an issue that Maya's base tools seemed to provide no good solutions. When I find myself in such a predicament I invariably find myself going down a path. Before I begin, a caveat - I'm an intermediate scripter and I'm sure there's much more efficient coding methods. However, functioning inefficient tools are better than no tools:) Hope this is helpful to anyone who happens to peruse these ramblings....

Identify the need - In this case I need to ensure that a skinned mesh didn't have any vert with more than two influences. The annoying thing with maya is that even if you tell the skin to only have 2 influences and to maintain it it does the job about 98% of the time and just doesn't seem to care about that other 2%. Faced with the prospect of individually checking every vertex via the component editor for more that two skins, any other option is much more attractive.
See if Maya has any tools to fix the problem - Messed with skin settings and the various mirroring, hammering and skin options to see if native maya can fix it. Sometimes this work, in this case it didn't
To the internets! - Google and CreativeCrash check for a script or solution. If someone else has solved it and been kind enough to post the answer no reason to reinvent the wheel.
Write a tool - Think through the requirements and results you need from a specific function or functions and beg, borrow and steal (while providing credit) the pieces to make it work.

For this little conundrum, I wanted Maya to tell me if I had any vertices that had an influence above x influences and get that information in a usable format. Here was the particular flow on this problem.

For this script, I started with writing a function to return any vertices over 2 influences.
As a part of that, I found the functions I needed to use need to know the skin cluster name which I remembered having wrote a function for a while back so I grabbed that.
Then, I thought it silly to cap it at 2 influences and allowed the user to specify the number of influences the user chose
Finally, worked on the workflow so that the user didn't have to type commands into the script editor as I wanted to be able to give my client a buttonable script for their artists. In the end it made sense to me to have it both report the bad verts as well as select the first in that list to easily get to work. If I was in a fuller production environment it might make sense to make a gui or modify the function to be able to select through the bad vertices list rather than a one off end function here.

In the end, spending an hour or two making a simple tool both enables a montonous task prone to user error doable as well as provides a tool for other artists to be able to do the same which is always a boon in production.



import maya.cmds as mc
import maya.mel as mel

maxInfluences = 2

def returnExcessInfluenceVerts(mesh, maxInfluences):
    skinCluster = querySkinCluster(mesh)

    badVertices = []
    
    vertexList = (mc.ls ([mesh+'.vtx[*]'],flatten=True))
    #Find the bad verts
    for v in vertexList:
        influenceList = mc.skinPercent(skinCluster, v, query=True, transform=None) 
        if len(influenceList) > maxInfluences:
            badVertices.append(v)
    return badVertices


def querySkinCluster(obj):
    mel.eval ('$mesh = "%s";' % (obj))
    skin = mel.eval('findRelatedSkinCluster($mesh);')
    return skin
   
mesh = (mc.ls (sl=True))
if len(mesh)<1:
    print ('Please select a mesh')

else:
    badVertices = returnExcessInfluenceVerts(mesh[0],maxInfluences)
    
    if len(badVertices)>0:
        mc.select(badVertices[0], replace=True)
        print ('>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>')
        print ('%s%i%s' % ('There are ',(len(badVertices)),' verts are over the max influence:'))    
        print badVertices
    else:
        print ('No verts over max influence')

Best of Morphy for July

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:07:00 +0000

Semih sent me an image from a couple characters from his film. This is certainly one of the "fishier" uses of Morpheus I've seen. If you can't tell, the fish's face is a modified Morphy head. Really nice work.

Nice one I came across in the 11 sec club wip forum.

Playful little piece with a little girl.

A ton of great pieces from 11 second club this month. Here's a few...

Independence Day! (and Morphy)

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:47:00 +0000

First off, happy Independence Day if you're in the U.S. and if you're not - happy Monday! Smoked a brisket yesterday and man do I love slow smoked meats....

This is a playblast version of my 'let's-try-out-Morphy' anim test. Had a lot of fun doin the segment and learned a good bit about the rig. Those interested can see progressive updates on my Vimeo channel.

Voted on the 11 Second Club entries yesterday and there are a lot of solid Morphy entries. Best of luck to you all. However my high vote was for a Norman piece. No favoritism here:)

For some training wheels on customizing Morphy, you can download the customizations from my animation in their own respective scene files. Eventually I hope to have a more elegant customization saving solution but that day has not yet come.

Download em here

Included are:

Fezik - Big guy
oldGuy - Key guy
Wes - Mr. Shoves a lot
Inigo - the Spaniard!
Base scene file with my lighting setup from this piece since some folks haven't the time or inclination to set up lighting. Some just wanna animate and I can appreciate that. REMEMBER - mental ray.

Some notes:

BEFORE you try pulling one into a scene, make sure your preferences are set to cm units. Otherwise the rig will self destruct.
The customizations reference the Morphy v1.0 rig. If you try to point to one you've modified, it probably won't work
Import whichever rig you want WITH 'preserve references' checked.
With that you should be off to the races

What's good for the goose...

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Yeah, I know. It's about time I did a Morphy animation test. As I was looking to update the ole' reel last week the lack of a quality lip sync was striking so I'm gonna remedy that as I can find time between gigs. Decided to do a clip from one of my favorite movies though one I haven't seen done much because it is a pretty popular film. I had a monologue from another movie I wanted to do but I'd never done a full keyframe sequence with a lot of characters so thought I'd give that a go.

Rough Blocking

I've already learned quite a few things by using Morphy in an animation which is the best way to test stuff. So first off, apologies for some wonkiness in some places on the rig. Here's a few things I've learned:

polySmooth causing major issues with simple customization - When I changed the surface of some faces and then ran a poly smooth, the shaders go all over the place. So, because I'm using mentalRay, I just have a mesh approximation setup to use my viewport smoothing and that works much much better. When I go back I may find a way to do the polySmooth that will work, but it's annoying. Apologies.
The uiCam's pivot is nutty - I gotta dig in to what's going on but in the meant time if you select the uiCam and turn off inherit transforms, it'll behave properly
Some of my geo has flipped normals.
Turn off the face shaper's visibility after you're done customizing so you don't keep selecting them inadvertently
Locking the geo selectability - While I understand my reasoning for doing it, it's a little annoying.
Shoulder and wrist rotation orders - Still don't think I got this right. I'm playing with different setting as I'm working through my anim and will post what I think are best choices when I'm done
Eye orb mesh creasing against the cheek and in the brow when doing some customizatoin scaling - You can alleviate this to a large degree by selecting the mesh area verts that's getting wonky and smoothing the skin weights there
Limb scaling switching isn't as intuitive as it could be - having to manually change the stretch settings on the fk and ik to ensure matching isn't the best workflow. I've got some ideas at how to make that process better.
Head placement on the neck - taking the head's blue mover control and positioning the head a little more forward on the neck seems to work a lot better.
The spine blows - My pivots stink and I apologize for it. The hips are especially offensive. This shall be fixed.
Want to add pose mirroring
Want to look at the body geo to get better muscle topology
Fingers - Think I probably need to add an alternate finger setup what's more direct
Face controls - Though I like them for the most part, I think the lip roll should be on a separate control than the lip movers. One thought I had was to just pull all of that off the face and do a faceUI similar to what I have for the bodyUI (which I'm really enjoying).

When will I get around to updating Morphy? The minor stuff here I think I can do before too long but the big stuff will be a while. Bokser and I have a long way to go on our rigger which I'll be using to do 2.0.

Feel free to offer thoughts on the blocking or the rig thoughts. Thanks for all the support:)

Best of Morpheus (and one of Squirrely too) - June 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:47:00 +0000

Morphy Tip of the Month: Adding some of your own customization to Morphy via clothes adds a lot to your pieces and will help set your shots apart from others as Morpheus starts populating other people's demo reels. It's always nice when it takes me a second to figure out if the shot I'm seeing is Morphy or not. :)

Finally got a bit of time to catch up on some stuff and the Best Of post was one on the check list. A big one I wanted to point out was the great work that some buddies of a buddy of mine have been workin on. Dennis inadvertently tested out something I'd planned on doing whenever I found some time - namely to use the Morphy head to help genearte a good first pass on shapes on a new head. Thanks Dennis for the R&D. Check it out here. Can't wait to see how the project shapes up!

Here's a sample image from the post.

Nice bit of animation from Leon. Lookin forward to seeing how his 11 second club piece shapes up this month:)

Great one I came across on the 11 second club wip forums. Thank you for using the shoulders well:)

A really nice WIP piece from Katy:

A few from last months 11 second club:

Project NoName Revealed!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:59:00 +0000

Project NoName (more widely known as Nintendo's E3 2011 3DS Animation Thing) went live at the Nintendo keynote on Tuesday. This is what we've been burning the midnight oil on for a while now. It was awesome seeing it live on the internet and Bokser was in the audience so we all lived vicariously through him.

I'd like to throw out thank you's to all the people involved but I don't know whom I can talk about yet so I'll just say, "Thank you [you know who you are], for letting us be a part of this and for all your support."

The story of the how this project came about will have to wait for another day along with a clean render to put up whenever I get the clearance but I'm gonna say what I may. The clean version doesn't have that dark panel on the bottom either (it was added after it was too late for us to do anything about it...ah well).

The Pitch:Nintendo wanted a series of segments to first show off some upcoming 3DS titles and two as a bit of a show piece utilizing projection mapping.

The Limitations:

Established well known IP's - As such, how characters move and what they can do is fairly well established and must be adhered to. Also, characters from one game could not be on the screen as other characters at the same time so clear delineation between segments was a must.
Flexibility - The segments were required to be created piecemeal so that the order of them could be changed right up till the show.
Projection mapping - For those of you not familiar with projection mapping, there are certain "rules" if you will which need to be obeyed for the effect to work to it's best. The main one is that you have to "color in the lines" which on a building is a fairly large are but when you have lots of panels like in this case, require creative thinking to work around. So for example, no character or main content piece can cross a panel's edge that is closer to the audience. You can come from behind a panel but you cannot start at a front one and jump down to a lower one over the edge. It's a bit confusing until you start playing with it - but it is what it is. The reason you don't do it is that it causes major distortion in the image. We did break the rule a little on the effects but they're so fast that you don't really see it.
Assets - First off, Nintendo's support was great on this front and for the most part we took skinned characters and assets and added our own rigs. We only had so much bandwidth to make stuff from scratch so we had to use that time judiciously. Because of that many of the sets and concepts evolved based on what they were able to provide.

The quick facts:

Production time - 6 weeks
Preproduction - 3 weeks
Resolution - 3335 x 1080
Animation - 5 segments ~ 18 seconds apiece
Characters rigged - 12
Props rigged - 17
Sets - 5
Pots of coffee drank - a lot

Visuals Team (alphabetical!) - The audio and some other work was handled by some of the great people at the company I've been working with but don't know if I can mention them yet. However, I will name our visuals team and give each and everyone of them a hardy thank you for their great work. Without further ado, Team Project NoName :

Matt Berenty - Modeling, Texturing
David Bokser - Co - director, TD Lead, Schedule Master, Rigging
Josh Burton - Project Lead, Co - director, Art/Anim Lead, Animation (Kid Icarus), Rigging
Chad Howitt - Compositing
Richard Hudson - Animation (Mariokart)
Yehonatan Shai Koenig - Lighting
Matthew Ornstein - Animation (Luigi's Mansion 2, Mario)
Christine Phelan - Animation (Starfox)

What did I do?

Co directed and acted as project lead and liaison with ...the people I can't talk about yet
Acted as art director/animation lead
Segment Concepts and boards
Set Designs
All set modeling blocking (Berenty cleaned it up along with my nasty booleans)
Layout and Animation - Kid Icarus segment only
Character Rigging/TD

Kid Icarus

Pit
Eye
Gun/sword
Bullet particles
Set rigging

Mariokart

Particles - smoke, sparks
Road modeling, texturing (cave to loop only)
The poka dot mountains in the back
Set Rigging

Starfox

Fox
Arwing
Set Rigging

Mario

Particles - implemented the prep work Bokser did

Relief!

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:23:00 +0000

We wrapped up the project that has consumed the last 2 months of my life and delivered to the client. If you happen to be at E3 next week you may catch it. This was an amazing project and one I plan on writing at length about as soon as I can.

For now, I'm catching up on a myriad of emails and relaxing for a few days. Today I get to hang some blinds for my wife and make some bird houses with neighbors. Nice change of pace.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen this film yet you really should. I love everything about it.

Morphy May be around....

noreply@blogger.com (Josh Burton) — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:29:00 +0000

Morphy Tip of the Month: Take a look at some of the lip sync choices some of the stronger pieces have used (especially the example below). Seen a lot of animations that are pretty much just open/close and wide/narrow. Remember, wide can be smiling wide or terse/angry wide or a myriad of other options. Play with showing more teeth for some characterizations as well. Some folks talk showing more lower teeth, some upper. Play with it and keep up the great work!

Awwww...baby Morphy. nice job Shawn!

It's just a flesh wound Morcy! Great work Jed.

Fantastic mod, Tim and great animation too:)

Here's a good example of nice mouth shapes for lip sync.

And from this months 11 Second Club a few selections:

In other news....

The gig is going along great but working some crazy hours. Ran across a wild Maya bug though. Some scenes would only playblast at 24fps regardless of settings. Spent a good couple hours banging my head against Maya before looking up the hot fixes and finding I wasn't up to date and that was a known issue. So, if you're using Maya 2011 on a project, I'd recommend getting hotfix 3:)

Can't wait to see this project up and done. The team is doing fantastic work and I plan on bragging on each and every one of them as soon as I can talk about it.

Cheers.