Render & Light Effect Test

Rabbit: Render & Light Effect Test from Alessandra Waste on Vimeo.

Here's another look at my favorite sequence. Rendered it out all pretty with Final Gather and tried out a little glow effect in After Effects to make the cave floor breaking seem a little more Matrix-y, like it's something more tech-related. A friend had a good point, though, that with the glow that thin it could be misconstrued as a shoddy composite job. I'm going to mess around with it a little more. I think I have a few options:

1. Increase the amount of initial glow so there's no question that it's intentional.
2. Get rid of glow entirely and leave black transparent background as-is
3. Duplicate layer in AfterEffects, hide that layer's original composite, and mask around the area where the glow would line the edges of the rabbit while leaving it around the edges of the floor. The environment's geometry is glowing and breaking at this point, not the rabbit, so he shouldn't glow.

Hmm. Back to work, back to work!

My bunny broke Maya

Rabbit fall test 2 from Alessandra Waste on Vimeo.

Sorry I've only updated once in the last week. Been busy busy busy, as is to be expected.

Here's the sequence I've been working on the last two days. Most of one, however, was spent trying to figure out how to break the floor. First I tried to run a shatter effect, then have a gravity field just pull the pieces down. It went terribly for numerous reasons. I ended up just breaking up the pieces by hand and keying each individually. The look is a little different, but I've grown to like it. Before I was trying for a natural-looking crumble (and failing miserably). This looks more like the program itself is breaking, which fits in with the theme of the piece, so... great!

no sleep for computers

Yesterday I set two computers to render some sequences overnight. When I came in this morning, one was done and one wasn't. I cancelled the unfinished batch and set it up on another computer where it's been going all day so far. I had to redo the whole sequence anyway because the UVs on the ground were messed up for some unknown reason, so I would have had to redo it anyway. Hopefully it'll be done by the time I come in tomorrow...!

Above is the sequence that actually finished rendering. I used mental ray & Preview: Final Gather because it makes the sand and stones look really nice; I just couldn't get it quite right otherwise, also the trees looked off and this softens them a little bit.

When I render individual frames from Maya, the sky appears blue as it does in the program with physical sun and sky. When I batch render, however, it interprets the sky as transparency. At first this irked me, but then I realized I could composite in one of the Joshua Tree sky panoramas that I wanted to use in the first place but looked stretched, pixelated, or a little too Uncanny Valley when I placed it in Maya as an image plane or environment sphere. I think it looks better this way, actually! Unexpected silver lining!

hopping along

Today is all about animation, much like tomorrow and the next few weeks. Here's a screen grab of all the windows that I juggle while getting this little dude to jump around. He's running off toward the rocks. I'll pop out a playblast at the end of the day since, as we discovered last night, rendering takes so long.

save the environments

I kept tweaking the sets today. Here's a render with mental ray and a physical sun and sky.

 

 

I tried a few versions first with Image Based Lighting but something just looked... off...

The difference between the photorealistic HDRI behind the almost-sort-of-real-looking rocks was a little too jarring for me. I also tried one with a fixed image plane, but that had the same problem. This was a really pretty landscape I wish had worked:

rabbit in the rocks

jeepers creepers

Where's you get those peepers?

 

problems fixed and snake painted

I had some problems with the rabbit rig yesterday that carried over into today. But I fixed it this morning! Weird things were happening with the combination of the rig, blend shapes, and other cluster deformers. Ended up being a combination of the hip pole vectors going insane (as they do) and one of the clusters on the spline spine whacking out. The pole vectors were straightforward enough to fix once I figured out that they were to blame, but I still don't know what went wrong with the highest spine cluster. I just had to detach the skin, delete history, and reattach it. So now one spine cluster is a little lower than the others, but it still functions the same way and doesn't effect the rig in any noticeable way. After that, the new blend shape I made (for the millionth time) from a newly duplicated skin mesh worked fine.

After giving up yesterday, though, I instead spent time painting the snake and it looks FABULOUS. I think there will be two snake puppets: one for slithering/sidewinding and one for posing and more nuanced movements. The slithering snake uses two nonlinear sine deformers and was surprisingly simple with beautiful results. Right now I'm working on the posing snake. It has a joint skeleton and a retractable mouthpiece with some killer fangs that swing out when the jaw opens.

 I'll put up some pictures at the end of the day.

Edit: Look! A picture!
The colors look a little off, but that's just from the default render settings...

ssssnakes

I thought it would be worth noting in case someone was antsy. NO, THIS IS NOT HOW MY STORY ENDS!:

 

My rabbit does escape the snake, but we don't really know where he's going instead.

 

Side note, this site is absolutely indispensable when it comes to identifying potential snake or lizard problems in California. We've had our fair share of rattlesnake encounters all up and down the state, though currently my mother is waging war against some particularly territorial western fence lizards in Sonoma. www.californiaherps.com

Here's a really good example of a sidewinding rattlesnake in Arizona. I really like how muscular this snake is. Even though it's moving slowly, you can still see how strong it is.


Decided to go for broke and fully model and rig up the snake. There will be two puppets: one for sidewinding and slithering quickly; one for more articulated poses, strikes, and subtle movements.

Here's a playblast of some quick and exaggerated sidewinding in place. I'm REALLY happy with how this turned out. He still needs his teeth, facial detail, and eyeballs, but I think he still looks pretty menacing anyway! It loops, not sure how to make the player do that automatically...

What a day

Rainy walk over to the lab only to rediscover that there's an all-student meeting this afternoon about planning our graduate degree show and it's over in one of the other buildings. Ugh. Not much time to work over here today so I'm going to block out some of the backgrounds and environmental stuff. Here are some shots from yesterday. I was trying out a pose that the rabbit will end up in pretty often to make sure I had the skin weights alright, especially that his underside didn't fold into itself.

Day off & UVs

I took a little break yesterday and didn't come in to the lab. My eyes and brain were fried from solving Monday's problems and I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and deal with unwrapping UVs. Instead, I stayed at home, read some of the research materials for the written component of this project, and saw a movie. Let's call it researching camera moves and angles...

Anyway, this morning I unwrapped and messed around with the rabbit UVs. Think they're all right, I'll throw some color on it this weekend. The checkerboard doesn't seem too stretched out. We'll see.

Did some fine-tuning with the skin weights. Getting there...

Painting weights:

Testing some checkerboard:

UVs:

spline conundrum -> binding skin

We had some technical difficulties this morning with the spline spine that started a little domino-effect down the hierarchy of controllers and manipulators. I didn't get around to actually binding the skin and starting to paint weights until this afternoon. Here are a few fun poses. Shaping up well!

Bunched up:


Stretched out:


Run away!

rig-a-rig-a-rabbit

To the tune of Ring Around the Rosie:

Rig a random rabbit;
make naming joints a habit;
if you didn't orient,
they all fall down!


(alternate ending: if you didn't orient... well, you're f*#%d!)




Legs are fine. Arms are fine (fingers to be dealt with later, need be). Tail is fine. Neck is... hopefully fine. Spine is ANNOYING. He's too bendy for his own good. I'm just not super comfortable with spline IK, but it should be alright as long as I deal with the clusters correctly...

I think I'm just going to give the ears a few controllers. Don't want to mess with more splines and clusters, so it'll just be rotating the joints. Eh, should be fine. I wasn't totally sure what to do with the neck, since it's nearly as flexible as the back and needs to be able to puff out when crouched down/bunched up, but also stretch forward and out when running quickly. I added an RPsolver IK as you would ordinarily use in any old character from the neck to the head joint, but I left one more joint between those two so it's more flexible and has a little reactive bend in it. It's all under the head controller circle. Seems OK so far. We'll see...

lagomorphic cleft palate surgery x 3

This morning was rough. I modelled the mouth and ears and tweaked the head a little bit overall. It's a little narrower. Domestic rabbits have wider heads, but desert cottontails are a bit "sportier", though not nearly as lanky as hares. When it came to the mouth I kept adding detail to one side with the knowledge that I would mirror the geometry as a final step. This went fantastically, until I realized that the points on the inside and underside of the lip were so close together that they puckered into one star vertex with a million edges. I ended up doing rabbit "cleft palate surgery" around three times. Finally, I just decided to forget about it, continue modelling, and move on to the ears. Ears then finished, I came back at the end to mirror it all one last time. In the interim I kind of forgot what the inner lip/mouth/nose geometry had originally looked like, so he looks a little now different than intended. It's like rhinoplasty that came out a little too subtle. Something has changed, I just don't know what. Oh well. Here's blockhead:


Here's a smoother version from the front:


And the whole blocky body. Still need to attach the neck. Ho-hum.

EDIT: Connected head to body. There's a seam just at the base of the skull that REALLY bugs me but once I texture him it probably won't show up. I think I've just stared at it for too long. I thought the wireframe from the side looked pretty:

Digital Digits & Blockhead the Bunny

First thing I did when I came in this morning was copy the whole body, delete the paws, and completely remodel them with actual fingers. MUCH better, I think. The back feet stayed the way they were as one solid piece. I'm ok with that.

He kind of looks cool, actually, down at the unsmoothed poly level. I like his new little blocky toes.

Blocked out (hah) his head. I'm not super confident in modelling eyes and eyelids, but after wresting with it for a little over an hour I think it's passable. I was super careful to avoid vertices with more than 4 edges. No weird pointy or puckered bits allowed! I want to sketch up some mouth ideas and specific shapes/poses before I model the nose/mouth muzzle area. All that's left, then, are some big ears and connecting the head and body.

Lucky Rabbit Feet

Spent yesterday in the lab starting to model the rabbit. In my head I saw him a little more stylized and angular, but these screengrabs show the smoothed version. We'll see how it progresses. He's still currently headless, but I'm really happy with the pelvis-to-leg geometry. Smooth, simple, and should deform really nicely. The front legs were a little messier, I'll probably tweak them a little more. It was strange modeling the rabbit because his range of motion is so extreme. He's very bouncy and can bunch up into a very compact ball, or stretch out quite long while running. The back needs to be very flexible and the back legs need to be able to fold up almost completely without weird geometry folding in the skin, but also stretch out behind him without being whittled away into skinny nothingness.



I love the back feet, but the front paws give me pause (haha). Part of me wants to remodel the front paws with actual little fingers. That might make for a nice detail in a few shots. I wouldn't animate each separately, but probably add a slider between open/splayed and closed/together. Wouldn't be too difficult...

I boarded a couple sequences over the weekend, too. Worked out a few things for the snake character regarding what is possible/impossible for it to do in the weird surreality of the tunnels.