I've been in this industry a long time. Not as long as some, but I've been using 3D software since 1998. While the technology has improved by leaps and bounds, one thing has remained the same, and perhaps regressed - the usability of the software that employs that technology.
Now, I know I'm going to get all kinds of people yelling and screaming at me "WHAT?? ZBrush is SOOO intuitive! Maya is so fast!! 3D Studio Max is the fastest modeler out there!", and a myriad of other "you're so stupid - you just don't get it" statements. I have one question for those people: How many consecutive hours of use did it take for you become "confortable" in a 3D package? By "comfortable", I don't mean that you could create a primitive, move a few verts, and tumble the view. I mean that you could actually produce work in that package, and not feel like you were blindfolded with one arm tied behind your back and hung upside down. That's what I thought.
Since I started using 3d software, I have used: Maya, Blender, Wings, Lightwave, 3DS Max, Animation:Master, XSI|Softimage, Daz3D, Silo, Mudbox, ZBrush, Sculptris, Nendo, Mirai, Messiah, Modo, Cinema 4D, Bodypaint, Marmoset, Unity3D, Strata 3D, proprietary toolsets, and a bunch of others that I can remember looking at or using and shuddering, but not remember their names. Some were better than others, but the majority, no matter how they marketed themselves, were just mind-boggling hard to use when it came down to it.
What makes software difficult? (In no particular order):
First, uniformity.
Second, vocabulary.
Third, GUI.
Fourth, tool implementation.
Fifth, complexity.
With computers growing ever faster and more powerful, it's time we take a look at why computer graphics has become so wildly popular, and yet so unfriendly. In the next few weeks, I'll be going through each point in detail. Please feel free to comment and to share your thoughts about this. Stay tuned...
Hey everyone. Man, it's been too long. Life just seems to get too busy. Anyways, my good friend Tony Jones from Avalanche Software has been making additions to Blender's rigging tools, and so I decided to show off some of them by doing a set of tutorials. The tutorials cover the following:
Adding the Rig Bones and the Control Armature
Adding the Constraints
Adding the Drivers and Custom Properties for the control object
Tony's done a great job with it and you can check out his site here where you can get all the information on his new build and you can even download it to play with it.
I'd love to hear what you guys think about the tutorials!
Yes, I finally came into the digital age by having my own website. It's a work in progress until I can actually get the time to make the site I REALLY want to make, but it'll work for now. So hopefully everyone can go check it out. Most of the content is what is on my blog, but in a much more organized manner.
Like I said before, I have been taking pictures for a long time, much to the chagrin of my wife and to the detriment of the multiple hard drives that I have used up. But I decided to do it a little more seriously, investing in new equipment and starting to do individual and family photography. All the information is available at my site.
I would definitely welcome any suggestions, since it's still a work in progress. Thanks!
So, one of my good friends, Tony Jones (a programmer/artist at Disney Interactive) started getting into Blender, adding some features to the rigging tools that help a lot with creating much less complex rigs. Here's what he has been up to. So I'm testing his new tools and learning to rig in Blender at the same time. It's a rough road, but Tony is making it a lot easier with these tools.
I rigged this leg up in about a 30-40 min period, learning included:
I've known about Blender and "tried" to use Blender for years. I have always been impressed at it's amazing capabilities given the free nature of the software. There's just something about people writing software because they truly love it vs. wanting to make a huge profit that intrigues me. In those years of attempting to use Blender, I have never been able to really grasp it. But with 2.5, and the Maya hotkey presets, it just opened up a whole new world that I think I just might want to try out again. Not because it's "Maya", but because there's one less program that I have to learn with different key combos. I was able to jump into Blender 2.5 Beta and start playing around immediately. That being said, modeling something from scratch (a face, body, etc.) is still proving to be a challenge, but it's one that I just might consider now that I don't have to fight the urge to use the Alt-LMB combo to tumble. I would suggest everyone give it a shot if you are into 3D. It's looking like a really cool tool that is finally coming of age.
As my wife can tell you, when we go on vacation, I develop a growth on my right hand that she likes to call a "ca-me-ra"". It seems to appear out of nowhere and it takes over my brain at times. I've really gotten into photography lately more for the artistry of it. I've invested in a few new lenses, and woah, do they make a difference. I'm still a total novice at this, but I love it. Here are a few pictures of my latest trip up Highway 101 through California and Oregon. There are many, many more to come....
So as I was typing the title for this post, I think I hit the backspace button about 20 times. Not a good day for typing.
Anyhoo, I found out the hard way that backing up 9 years of work is a good thing to do in more than one place. Two days ago, I was working on my laptop at work, and had my backup drive attached to it. All my music, pictures, previous work materials, downloaded training materials, etc, were on it. The dumb thing had a 1.5 foot USB cord, and as I turned in my chair with my laptop on my lap, the drive careened off the desk and hit the floor. Then it started what sounded like beeping at me. I soon found out that the "beeping" was more of a mechanical problem where the disc would spin up, but couldn't be read. So I did some calling to find out how much data recover costs...you don't even want to know. For a 200 GB drive (yeah, it's been my backup for a LONG time, I know), it was going to cost me between $800 and $2700 for the data retrieval. Why don't I just give them my newborn child and call it even? So now the drive is sitting on my desk, a cold, black, dead reminder to BACKUP YOUR FLIPPIN' WORK!!
We'll see how long I can go without accessing anything on it.
After 9 great years at Avalanche Software in Salt Lake City, I took the plunge, and made the jump to movies – something I have always wanted to do. In those 9 years I have worked with some of the most amazing artists and people around and have learned an immense amount from them. Like Adam Ford said, they are some of the greatest people I know and will continue to be great friends. I am thankful for the amazing knowledge that I gleaned from so many of them, and hopefully, I can do it justice.
But on to a new chapter of life.
Today, the dream became the reality. I was lucky enough to be considered and then hired by Pixar as a Technical Director. It’s quite frightening after working in the games industry for 9 years to walk into a place where you are now the rookie and you don’t know a thing about what you are about to do. But I feel like a huge sponge that is bone dry, and I can’t wait to be thrown into the pool. It’s going to be difficult, but I am so ready for this.
Well, I figured that since I couldn't find a tutorial on this, even though it's pretty simple, I would put one up, mainly for myself so that I can remember in 2 months when I try to do this again, but also so that if someone else is looking for a tutorial, they could find one. So here it is...
If I'm doing something wrong in this tutorial, or if there is a better way to do it, by all means, please let me know!
So for about a month now, I have been out of drawing supplies, and just too lazy to go get any…which is the reason for all of the digital drawings. Here’s another drawing that I could have used 2 more hours on. I think it turned out pretty good, but I’m feeling like if I go back to paper now, it’s going to be a whole new experience all over again…
Once again, I just can’t seem to get a likeness. I need to do a lot more portraiture and study measurements. I guess that’s my next task.
This is how I tend to do my digital drawing in Painter. It’s pretty much exactly like I would do with paper and charcoal, but I have UNDO!! Anyways, this drawing isn’t finished. I got to figure drawing late, so I was limited, and just like any lazy artist, I wait for the face, hair, and the hands until last. I guess that’s why they are almost never there. Anyways, here are the steps I go through:
1. First, I block out the forms and make sure my proportions are correct:
2. I create a second layer and keep “pick up underlying color” checked, then first wipe out the image using a blender brush, then lay down lines for form:
3. After that, I start another layer, and wipe the lines down so that they are not so harsh:
4. Once I have that done, I begin blocking in my light and shadow, and tightening up the edges a bit in places. I like to have some tight edges and some soft:
5. In my last step, I now go through each part, tightening the drawing, adding shadows, core shadows, highlights, etc. :
So like I said, I didn’t finish this drawing, but I think it is a good example of how I work digitally. Hopefully next time I’ll actually finish it.
Thanks for the suggestion from my colleague Sam Nielson -
For those of you who don't know him, Marcelo Vignali is an amazing artist working at Sony Animation Studios. In this interview, he gives so much good information about being an artist in the industry today, it's hard to summarize. It's a good hour long discussion, but it's amazing to hear his thoughts on being and becoming an artist in this industry. I would recommend everyone watch it.
I have been trying t0 figure out why so many 3D packages refuse to make tools that are easy and intuitive. Continued searching has just proven to me that most packages try to do the same things as the others, just in a different, but still overly difficult, way. So I moved one of my personal projects from Maya into Softimage. Making new morphs was a painful process in Maya, and I know that rigging is a lot better in XSI, so I thought I would give it a shot. So I started making shapes, and wanted to figure out a way to mirror them easily. So I went out on the net looking for some tutorials. The only ones I really found were using GATOR. Not a very easy thing to do. So I read about using weight maps to do the mirroring. Not very much info. so after testing and trying and reading and watching, I tried to put it all together and finally figured it out. This method may be widely known, but unfortunately, there's very little demonstration or documentation on it, so I thought I would do that so others don't have to go through what I did. Once you have the weight maps made, Softimage actually makes it really nice and easy to separate your symmetrical shapes. Here's a quick demo of how it works:
Here are a few digital sketches from our Friday figure drawing sessions. They were just studies, as I was trying to feel more comfortable with a stylus and tablet while sketching...
Biped Auto Rigger...Not finished yet. It's still missing a lot of stuff. It's just an IK spine with no facial rig, no stretchy limbs, etc. I'll have to keep going on it.
So I was looking around and I saw some guy who did all of his hair on his models with zspheres, so I thought I would try it too. Turns out it works REALLY well. This was just a test, so it's not a final sculpt. Just messing around, but really cool nonetheless. The head is a standard preset from Modo, but all of the hair is from ZSpheres.
I'm one of those artists who is rarely satisfied with the tools at my disposal. Even with the advent of ZBrush, Mudbox, Modo, etc., I still find myself wondering why the software designers created the workflow the way they did. Yes, anyone can get very comfortable in any package, but it usually takes years of practive and customization before that happens. It is rare that a piece of software is so straightforward right out of the box.
One of my biggest pet peves (sp?) is a software package that has features that seem to never end, and yet those features are so hard to get to and use, that it almost negates the fact that they are there in the first place. Years ago, I was hired at Avalanche Software in Salt Lake City (I still work for them, but we are now Disney Interactive Salt Lake). We were using a piece of software at the time called Hash's Animation:Master. I had never seen it before. I had been studying at BYU in the animation department, barely making it through creating characters out of NURBS primitives, and hated every second of it (Nurbs, that is). Now I understand that they have been made easier to work with in some packages, but still, back then, it was a total pain. You could not do what you wanted without it being a total paiin. When I began in Animation:Master, I found something different: that the feature set wasn't huge, and the paradigm was different (using b-splines vs. polys or Nurbs), but I found that authoring what I wanted to was an absolute breeze. Things like bones didn't have joint orients. Assigning a mesh to a skeleton was a manual, but an easy and simple process. Rigging was a joy compared to what I was used to. It had almost every tool that I needed to use, and it was EASY to understand and implement all of them. Different, but when easy is the different part, I willing o go for that. I loved it.
They had a dirty little secret: make tools easy to use and understand, and the artists is empowered. Such was the way that you could correct a mesh's deformation when it was animated. Who would have thought - just pose the character, sculpt the mesh, and have the character remember what it looked like at that point! Truly amazing. So simple, yet almost all software packages today that are so much more "robust" fail to realize that. They take pride in how "deep" their feature set is. What I see is painful authoring. Even though I CAN do it, I have to do it an inefficient and difficult way. the result is the same, but I have lost valuable time I could be spending on other things. I have much more important things to to than make corrective blend shapes, influence objects, etc. I want to animate. This is where Hash came in. If more packages would implement things like these two videos I made, artists would go nuts. The power that comes with correct authoring methods cannot be overstated.
The first video shows "Smart Skinning". Move an object, fix anything that needs to be fixed, and it remembers. The second shows how I create a facial animation slider, blending skeletal animation and a corrective shape in one step, and one simple to use interface. Now remember, the tools are pretty rudimentary, but the implementation is genius. No wonder I continue to compare Maya and Softimage to A:M. It was one of the most genius packages ever.
Here was a 13 minute sculpt I did in ZBrush. Man, I love sculpting in it, but I still can't STAND the interface. I did a lot of the sculpting with the DamStandard Brush, that you can download from Pixologic's Homeroom website. Here is the direct link. The brush was created by Damien Canderle, whose website is www.maddamart.com.
