Morphy's Head is UV'd...

...And it's not at all visible at any point in this post. So you'll have to trust me on that one.



So, what are you lookin at here? Lemme tell ya:

• First 140 frames are just a simple cycle of poses
• After that, the same cycle continues till the end only now I've added facial customization control animation on top of it.
• Only the left side face controls are on there and connected to (unsplit) facial blendshapes while I'm polishing the poses)
• All three heads are exactly the same rig, only I've toggled some visibility to make things clear. The blue controls on the left are facial deformation controls that you can use to scale and move different parts of the face. The green and yellow controls are regular animation controls that you'd use when doing facial. The right side will be the same as the green ones, only mirrored and red.
• I may still add a few more controls as well for some more things I've been thinking about adding. Such as...
• Lip corner compress
• Eye squeeze
• Middle lip controls

Man, some of this stuff is taking a while to get working the way I want. Getting the jaw's movement to scale with the mouth shrinking was especially contentious.

What's next?

1. Eye rig - this is gonna be a bit tricky as well because I'm moving the eye around but I think I have a good plan of attack on that.
2. Polishing poses for the facial rig and then creating the left/right variants.
3. Tongue rig
4. Making deformation morphs - noses, lips, and other such things
5. .....finish the body rig at some point:)

Joint Based Deformation Controls and a final head...

FINALLY got happy enough with a head to call it final. Here's a semi polished range of motion with Face Machine only work on it. I'll have to do a good bit of sculpting and tweaking to get things where I need them but I'm happy with the base deformation at least....



The funky little anomolies in the range of motion are the breakdowns (upr/lwr lip variations).

Now to the good stuff. So I posted a test a few days back where I was looking at what morph only based deformation could do for facial variation. I know that can work but wanted to have better flexibility and control for the end user that would be funner than just grabbing sliders. So today I decided to experiment with a joint based inital facial deformation system that will get the user 85% there on the facial tweak which can then have some morph tweaks (new noses, etc) added or they can sculpt on it if they like. I've been LOVING the maya relax polys mode with the sculpting brush to get good geometry distribution.



At this point I'm thinking workflow will be for the user to do these tweaks at world center away from their animation and drive the tweaks to the facial rig that attached to the body rig but I'm not sold on that yet. Tomorrow should nothing crazy come up, I'll be working on on an initial pass at hooking up facial poses to controls to start testing things.

Can't leave well enough alone...

This is quick down and dirty test as proof of concept to see how the facial feature morphing will work with the actual pose blendshapes. Yes, the shapes need a lot of polish. The generics coming from Face Machine are doing some funky stuff under the lower lip and on the upper as well in the smile. For the most part I'm thinking it's gonna work great and I have plans as to how the user will be able to move the eyes, brow and mouth that I have yet to implement.



In the above, all are a referenced animated "rig" which I then turned on the whole face morph on the faces on the left and right.

So yeah, I messed the snot out of the head playing with planes of the face and what not. There's things I like about the new one and things I don't. The hope is that the customization will be able to get to a wide variety of looks. One issue is for the maximum flexibilty, the base has to be a bit more boring than I'd hoped. Pretty happy with how it's moving aside from the brow. Really prefer the the amount of movement I was getting in the first range of motion I posted last week.

Thanks to David Bokser on the feedback and the ideas for how to be able to do a blendshape rig vs a joint based one (which I had been leaning towards).

Other stuff I've been playing with:

• Iris/Pupil variation - played with bout a joint based system and morph based one. Ended up going with the morph based one to make scaling easier and for the customization stuff I was wanting to do.
• Attaching eyebrows/beards, etc  - Looking like just a wrap deformer is gonna work on this front
• Moving facial features - planning on using a heirarchy of "mover joints" with good natural fall off.
• Big facial morphs - like in the above vid - I made a "girlish" morph as well as a more "manly" one. I'm trying to think through if it would be better to have a couple of those or go wild and break it down to nose big/small, head variations, etc or if people would prefer just to have a hook up to do their own customizations. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

In other news, the bass were hitting the buzz bait like champs on Saturday. Not so much on Sunday.

Morphy Facial ROM v01

Trying to be better about keeping notes at the behest of Jason via Animator Friendly Rigging. Been using Google notebook so I have my notes wherever I am workin. If it's useful to anyone to see process or my idiocy, I'll be happy to post em:)


Here's the ones from today...

Completed

• First pass of poses in the face machine
• Finally happy with sculpt of head
• Another pass of 060_010_010 - hoping to be final

To fix on face machine setup:

• Look at Skull deformation geometry - brow is sliding past where it should
• Make some new attempts on smile crease placer to get better deformation
• Note - will have to manually create eye crease shape as TFM doesn't have controls to get to close to it

To fix on head model (v03):

• Lip corners need work  - reference Stop Staring chapter for better layout ideas
• Model mouth interior
• Shrink teeth size to match geometry shift made in Rom file

Questions/Ideas

• Model or scrounge some teeth (Perok, Henry?)
• Don't forget - grab hand and leg fixes from last body rig version
• Possibly make version of head with eyelids closed to see if better shapes are possible out of TFM
• Tracking teeth placement  - instead of including teeth in deformed geometry look into rivot type contraint to follow a couple of faces that are fully influence by the jaw. Could potentially create empty groups for folks to put whatever teeth geometry in for replacement.
• Should eyebrows be apart of deformation mesh....?

Also, here's the latest version of that last GC shot - put in a bit more polish over the past few days....part of me would like to go back and polish some of my early GC shots but I think I'll work on Morphy to get a character other that a Garden city one on my reel:)

Fresh from the Internets!

More amazing things falling out of animation land...

• First up, hailing from Canada - Shaz Lym's Mr fresh! And that's an awesome name Mr. Lym. Almost as cool as my Marine buddy of old - the one and only Cisco Schaff.
  
  
  
• Man the new Rapunzel Tangled trailer looks perty - check it!
  
• More from that amazing school in France....geez, these guys....
  

To the Face Machine!

He looks kinda like that old horror movie "pinhead" character with all the things stickin out his face...

So I've been resculpting the face umpteen thousand times over the past few days. I'm finally pretty close to what I want so I'm gonna throw it into Face Machine to see how it's deforming. It's a pretty sweet app for checking a head deformation. Half hour of setup and you can pretty much get any pose you want out of it. Something isn't working well? Well go back and fix the model, rerun the rig maker and you have an updated look at how things are blendshaping up. I'd think about using it for the actual facial rig but 1) it's a bit heavy and 2) users have to have special nodes installed.

At first glance, Face Machine is a bit pricey. However for the amount of time it saves me in creating my base set of facial blendshapes I find it well worth the price. I am however, not much a fan of the the cost for their upgrades to new versions of maya. If you're not doing anything more than making the existing plugin work in the new version of Maya just give it to your customers or charge a lot less. It's a bit annoying having to shift back to Maya 2008 to run it. Silo and Zbrush have much more aggreeable upgrade paths.

My most recent workflow on rigging faces the past few times has been:

1. Model head.
2. Put in face machine, setup  and create the face.
3. Make a referenced range of motion file on the face to see how things are looking.
4. If I don't like how things are deforming I 1) go back and tweak the model or 2) go to my setup file and move things around if I think it's a pivot issue.
5. Tweak out the blendshapes in Silo of Maya with some surface sculpting
6. Use the range of motion file to export my blendshape Obj's
7. Make my right/left blends in a new file 
8. Rig things up to my osipa style setup
9. Profit

It's been a pretty good workflow over the past few characters I've done. I've actually been really suprised as I was able to use it for Lobstery and Squirrely both and they're not very humanesque. 

Calling all Masters of Disguise!

Looking for some input for some potential Morpheus customization options. Here's what I came up with last night when I should have been going to bed (it shows).

Here's an image to use should you choose to participate in this exercise. Hair, nose, eye placement whatever is in play. Think as far outside the box as you like and I'll see if I can make it work.

Send your entries to me (you can find my email addy on the contact page, don't forget to remove the spaces) and please put your subject line as "Make Mine Morphy!"

If you don't submit an entry you waive your right to complain when Morpheus is released to the public:)


Back to learning how to create matching controls for FK/IK setups!

Finished up his hands and legs today. The screen grab on either do the complexity of Jason's methods no justice (much less the coolness) of it. Really love the hand ik usage in the rig for some complex poses.

I'm interested to see how he handles fk/ik snapping in the next part (4b).

Trying to decide if I should finish the body rig or move back to the face for a bit to give this stuff some time to gel or if it would be better to stay in the learning zone for a bit longer...there's still some of the stuff I'm just following along cause I have no idea what's going on.

On to the last part!

Morphy Update...

One arm and no legs! At least Tiko had two arms...:)

Just wrapped up part IIIb of Jason Schleifer's fantastic series. Man my head hurts from all the stuff he's been covering. It gonna take doing it multiple times to really have it sink in. However, Morphy is slowly moving towards animate-ability. 

The head still isn't final but much closer. Gonna finish up the body rig before finaling the head. at the very least I'm gonna have to remodel his lids and mouth for better edgeloops.

Some of the few things I learned I'd never tried before in maya:

• What shape nodes are and how replacing them can do neato things.
• "cntrl h" to hide stuff 
• "g" will repeat the last command
• Writing set driven keys with mel
• Jason has SO MANY great scripts that will find a permanent place on my personal rigging shelf

Yup, 6 years with the app and still a newb.

Say, if any modelers out there wanna help out. I'm gonna need some help creating hair styles, glasses, etc for customization.

Hope everyone had a great weekend. Had a nice relaxing Monday fishing, hanging with friends, grilling and making some homemade ice cream.

Here's a sweet short trailer I ran across this morning on the internets. Love the look.

On to the fingers!

Happy Memorial Day!

One of the neater things I think there is with the Norman rig is that folks have found ways of modifying it so that they all don't look the same. Some of the Animation Mentor students have begun doing the same and to me it makes a huge difference rather than just seeing the same character all the time. So one of the features I want to implement in project Morpheus is at least providing an initial leg up in that department for animators using it.



Here's a quick proof of concept attempt on a 80% complete body model. The idea is that people can vastly change their appearance by working out, eating more, eating less or whatever- it's still their same skeleton. I know that women and men have different skeletal proportions but hey this is animation and I can break rules if I want to. Right?

Still gotta decide where to do the head cut off from the body and if doing a single body mesh makes sense.

Initially Morphy will will have several body sizes to choose from for the animator depending on what they wanna do in their animation exercise. I plan on doing the same in terms of facial tweaks (noses, jaw lines, hair, etc) to provide.

I've been wondering about trying to see if some of the body stuff can be done via displacement maps and what not but as I don't have a lot of experience in that area it'll have to wait. The final Morphy will be fully UV'd should anyone care to go nuts on that front.

So, progress for the project on the week...

• Head - completely redesigned - 72.3% happy with it. Far enough along to start working on the body rig via my Animator Friendly Rigging master class progress
• Body - 80% done. Will probably end up shrinking the feet and adding more edgeloops for mophing detail.
• Hands - Modeled with a goal of being Milt Kahl-esque in proportion
• Body Morph tech - Reasonably confident it's gonna work

Hope everyone has a great memorial day weekend. Think we're just gonna hang out with some friends and get caught up.

Out.

Also, finally saw How to Train your Dragon last weekend and it was awesome. Got the art book this week. Likewise.

Morpheus Head Progress

More appealing?

So when I went back to the head I started last year and looked at it more it just felt a little too generic and somewhat similar to some of the other free rigs. With that in mind I started a redesign (as seen above). This isn't final and I think folks will think some of the modification toys I have in mind pretty neat when I finally get them done. Don't wanna spill the beans too early;)

Been collecting reference and what not as well from a myriad of choices. I've fallen in love with Milt Kahl's animated hands from Sword and the Stone and so I think I'm gonna go for something kinda like that.

I mean, look at this awesomeness....( image courtesy of google image search)

Hands are such a huge pet peeve of mine on character rigs. I hate not being able to get the shapes I want or when the fingers are too long and can't roll up well.

Back to it!

Announcing "Project Morpheus"

All characters shown copyrighted to their respective owners. But that "?" is all mine!

As I mentioned last post, I've been looking into doing another character rig. "Project Morpheus " is a temporary project name but for now it'll suffice. First thing I did was pull up some of my favorite rigs I've seen used to good effect so as to not recreate the wheel. Or at least not recreate the same silhouette. I was surprised how similar some of them were and decided to keep being different in mind as I started designing the character's body.

I'm in between gigs right now (waiting for answers on a couple of things) and trying to be productive in the downtime. Working on updating the reel,website and resume for another releasing of the doves hoping for an olive branch. Bokser wants me to do one more Garden City shot so I'll probably end up with one more there.

Been going through Jason Schleifer's fantastic rigging for animators series and learning loads I plan on implementing. He recently started releasing the DVD's himself at a substantial savings to what they had been on Autodesk's site.

Project Morpheus Goals:

• To create a flexible bipedal character for animation tests and even projects including modifiable body and facial proportions and features
• To develop more solid rigging muscles to add to my hireable toolset
• Write some rigging tools using python to learn the language and speed up workflow
• Using animator friendly principles from Jason Schleifer as well as ideas displayed in others rigs.
• Play with the idea of a free baseline rig and a more advanced option set rig setup that I might charge something for to help support character making (which I happen to enjoy)

Garden City Update....

Pretty close to final on my last shot of Garden City. It makes a lot more sense with the music but you're just gonna have to wait to see that in the final film. Also, there're 10f heads and tails on the shot.

Gonna start getting together a new reel here with a bunch of new work to send out and there are a few projects on the verge of happening that should keep me busy for a few months.

Anyone else in Texas see the absolutely amazing lighting storm last night? It was like a strobe-a-thon for an hour lighting up the landscape clear as day at 15fps or so (that's flashes per second). Wish I had a camera capable of taking that in.

Been trying to decide what path to take for the next professional development project

• Short film I've been ruminating on for a while
• Getting into digital sculpting in Zbrush
• Delve more into the rigging side of things
• Do another free rig (the human I started last year) since people seem to like Squirrely so much

...for now need to pick up some meat for dinner tonight:)

SO MANY great films coming out this year....

They just keep coming...Best of luck to the class of '10!

• Work by Michael Rianda
  
  
• Changes in Weather by Amelia Lorenz
  
  
• The Hardest Jigsaw by Eric Anderson
  

In the end there could be only one....

Blocking (maybe a bit further along then blocking) on my FINAL Garden City shot. Can't wait to start seeing some renders. The shot is directly before the house falling a part one from a couple of weeks ago.




And here's some more goodness from the internets...

• From one of my favorite flash animators....
  
  
  
• Beautifully different looking film
  
  
  
• Fantastic webinar courtesy of Animation Mentor with some great animators
  
• Animalific film of a few years back...
  

Couple of great shorts and an update (with Controls!)

Had a guy email me asking me to post a couple of animation with controls visible in the playblast. So here they are...


First off, here's a pretty close to final pass on the last (sequential shot) in my last Garden City sequence. Still not happy with a couple of things but waiting for notes from Bokser before hitting them up.


Secondly, here's the Squirrely animation which he'd specifically requested to see with controls.

Now for some really good stuff. It's getting to be the end of the year and that means lots of great student films. Best of luck class of 2010! Here's a few:

• "Helium" by Daniele Zannone
  
  
• "Crater Face" by Skyler Page
  
  
• "A Bear Film" by Kris Anka
  

No this isn't a student film, it's a studio reel, but holy cow is this some amazing stuff...

Keane and a blue moon...

Great series of vids. Hat tip to my pal Kyle for the find.

The moon was so bright last night it was eerily awesome at 4 am. We live in the middle of nowhere now so there were NO outside lights to spoil the beautiful blue illumination. It was casting these sweet blue shadows on my back patio and the big old moon was just glowing there like a great big light bulb in the night sky. Shoulda got the pastels out.

Why was I up at 4am? Allergies, my friends. Gotta love em.

Got some good thinking done as I lay there surrounded by tissue paper on the couch (decided to not subject my wife to my sniffles if I could help it) and have some new ideas on the next project side of things to workout. This is if Garden City ever finishes.

Progress makes...progress

Sorry, still no audio

Pretty close to final on a couple of shots here. The house will have lots more going on when Bokser get's done with some sim. We also need to break up the fence a bit more and add a few more things. Bokser made some pretty cool tools to help animate the house and move pivots during animation

Been busy on a wide variety of things from this sequence above to riding lawn mower research to still combating this poison ivy/oak of 4 weeks now.

Warning! 
Fixin to talk about God and faith here so if you wanna keep to the art skip the following....

Reading a lot as well. Rereading some of the emergent thinkers lately and listening to some of their podcasts. Specifically rereading "A Generous Orthodoxy" at present and don't find it very generous in it's characterizations of some sides. "Strawman" arguments get a little old. Attended a church that leaned that way for about a year. There are many good things I saw there and in the "movement" but I can't quite seem to fully make the jump philosophically. Still not sure how I feel about some of the ideas and what not. Actually that's a part of the problem with post modern theology - it's often hard to get to point of what some of the people are saying in the midst of the the perpetual "Yes and"'s. What that means is they'll set up a yes/no question and then proceed not to answer it. On many questions of the faith (protestant Christianity) I'm in the solid "I don't know" camp which is a long long way from where I once was in high school when of course I knew everything (if my thenself met my nowself and chatted about belief I might well call myself a heretic).

One of my main issues is that it feels like much of the emergent movement seems to be wrapped up in politics and I'm just not a fan of that on either side of the aisle. In as much as the "religous right" has swung to the ride side of the fences, the emergent branch seems to swing just as hard to the left. Frankly, if a preacher starts telling me who to vote for it's time to find the exit. Had some good conversations with some atheist/agnostic buddies when I was in LA and frankly I sympathize with a lot of what they had to say about their experiences with people of faith.

I pray I'm never one of "those experiences."

Another day, another Garden City Sequence...

Been workin on my last Garden City sequence and here's the blocking for it sans audio. As I mentioned a while ago, no more audio on the GC stuff so as to keep the story mysterious. I've moved onto the the linear/spline stage but wanted to post something to kick myself into making so progress. Did my first calf sorting with some friends last night near where we live. It was an interesting and fun experience. For the uninitiated, it involves a pair or peeps on horseback sorting a number of calves in order. Something like "nine ball" on horseback. Only they have to start at whatever number the judge tells you to. I need a lot of practice. The small joys of rural life:)

Hope everyone had a nice Easter...

First things first, I have the internets at maximum warp again! Well, not maximum, but quite sufficient.

The commercial I worked on last month at Psyop finally aired and someone who worked on it posted it so I reckon it's okay to link it.

My main shots were -

• s17 - fore and mid ground Octo guys, their Squid bubbles, and the arms.
• s23 - quick shot of the fox at the Octobot controls
• s24 - foreground fox, octobot and bubble sac, and the near-midground action of the bubble sac being hit by the turtles and eaten by the sub

I'll post the playblasts when I get the project page up as there's a bit more there. I had a blast on the project and really enjoyed the team and look forward to working with them again in the future.

Had some lemons of life lately which I'm workin on making into something sweeter...maybe lemonheads...I like those. The most recent of which was discovering Poison Oak in some other vines I was clearing off of some trees. Never had it before. Don't want it again. Don't want you to have it either. Avoid this at all cost....

However, I do have a sympathetic, supportive and beautiful wife who makes the bad days not so bad.

That and the prospect of a gator hunt on a neighbor's pond sounds like a life experience that suburbia just can't offer that the rural one can:)

Also, Bokser wants to finish Garden City this decade so I best get back to that...