Intro to Maya - Course Screencasts

This week I started teaching a Maya course, like the one I taught this past winter, except this is part one of the two. So here we're starting at the very beginning, opening Maya for the first time together.





After this class, the sessions will be much more biomedically focused. I generally start with some concepts, what I call "fiddling with primitives" and then move onto a step-by-step tutorial to create something. I won't post the videos here every week, so subscribe to my YouTube channel to see the latest as the come up each week.

Thanks for visiting,
Stuart

Molecular Visualization Principles #1-3

As a part of my research work, we are developing some principles, guidelines, or considerations for visualizing molecules in biological systems. It's hard to know exactly how to phrase and frame these, because they are not hard and fast rules; however, they may be helpful in creating more accurate depictions of biomolecules.

Each principle is presented as a short pair of animations. The Treatment A's do not adhere to the principle whereas the Treatment B's do. So far, I have created examples to demonstrate three of the principles, with more coming.

Principle 01 is "Leave some behind". It conveys the idea that typically not all molecules are consumed in a process. For example, there may be more subunits present in the environment than ultimately bind together in a biological complex. This example shows a virus capsid assembling. Note that many of the actual mechanics of capsid assembly (i.e. ideas that may constitute other principles) are ignored or simplified for the sake of clarity. One might declare some irony or hypocrisy here, however it is important that we build the framework for the principles individually before considering how they might be combined in real-world visualization cases.





Principle 02 is "Use Random Walks". It conveys the idea that molecules move randomly due to collisions in a crowded environment. For example, an Arp2/3 complex moves erratically before binding to an actin filament.





Principle 03 is "Add Non-binding Collisions". It conveys the idea that molecules might encounter each other with unproductive orientations and conformations multiple times before a successful binding event occurs. For example, Sos and Ras might collide a number of times before their orientations result in tight binding.



I'll be announcing an exciting new set of content very soon, so check back in a couple of days for that.

Later,
Stuart

Onion skinning

Another molecular simulation experiment:


On a related note, I've just upgraded to Vimeo Plus, so all my videos can now be viewed in HD while embedded, which means you don't have to click through to vimeo.com to get a nice quality version.

Later,
Stuart

Updated Demo Reel

I've just uploaded an updated and revised demo reel including some of the better shots from my master's project. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks again to PowersWithin for the fun music.

Later,
Stuart

Demo Reel 2013

I cut together a demo reel with some of the shots I've been working on this past semester. I asked Minyan (aka PowersWithin) if I could use her music for it and she agreed. Hope you enjoy it.

You can watch in HD over at vimeo.

Later,
Stuart

RtIN - Shot #3 video

Here's the animated version from my previous post. Hope you like it.

Later,

Stuart

Sedan 1940

This is a stop motion animation my younger brother did a couple years ago. It's pretty cool, so I convinced him to upload it to vimeo so other people can see it. Be sure to check it out and share it with anyone you think would like it.



That represents a lot of hours. I haven't done any stop motion that ambitious before.

My egg challenge is approaching a conclusion, so I'll post some WIP shots hopefully tomorrow.

Later,
Stuart

Gordon Turntable

I've just uploaded the turntable of Gordon Freeworm, viewable here: http://vimeo.com/24062004
I hope you enjoy all 18 seconds of it :)
Hope you're have a good (long for Canadians) weekend.
Later,
Stuart

Spring Planting with Farmer Joe

If you don't like reading, here's the link to the video (http://vimeo.com/22502558), but it's more gratifying to read right to the bottom and click the link down there!

My friend Daryl came over on Saturday, and as usual we got creative. After a short brainstorming session, we settled on a claymation short about a gardener planting some seeds. We quickly bashed out a storyboard and broke down the scenes into simple actions. Since we were working at 8 fps, each second of video would require 8 different pictures (oh the maths!). So, we acted out the scenes and estimated how many shots each action should require. With that finished...

... we got started on the modelling. We had decided to use real dirt and plant material for the environment, and we needed to use the clay for props and characters. With seven colors available, it was fun mixing to get what we wanted. (Quick, how do you make purple? Yes, red and purple. I mean blue.... and how about skin color? Correct again, red and yellow and white).

We needed some structure inside Farmer Joe to get him to articulate and maintain posture, so we used a skeleton of wire, which turned out to be far to flexible and weak, not to mention its aggravating tendency to disassociate itself from any contact with clay. It turned out to be a battle, and Farmer Joe was bolstered up in the garden with various toothpicks, paper clips, and the occasional "hold him in place and photoshop afterwards". As you can maybe see, we started by drawing out each of the characters and props to scale on the cardboard before modelling. As you can maybe also see, despite this careful planning, everything turned out 1.5x bigger, so that's alright.

We were a bit behind schedule by the time we got everything modelled, but we set up the camera on a Joby Gorillapod (product placement: Joby, please give me money) and got everything into position. I decided to shoot at a relatively wide aperature (f/4.5) so we didn't get too much in focus, seeing as the background needed to be somewhat amorphous and "passing as a real outdoorsy place"

Claymation always has its frustrations, and this was no different. Farmer Joe generally refused to sit upright and as the shoot progressed, his face got dirtier and dirtier, not to mention more hole-y around the crotch and legs (courtesy the aformentioned toothpicks et al.). But ultimately we got almost all the shots we needed (if you're very astute you can work out from the storyboard how the short was supposed to end) before the sun and Daryl both departed.

Then it was up to me to assemble everything together. I collected all the jpegs, ditched the unnecessaries (the bloopers, if you will), used some clone tool in photoshop to remove a few wires, and imported them as an image sequence into After Effects. I made compositions for each of the three shots, cut together the pieces, and exported in eye-popping 3D. I mean HD. One of those.

And for those that made it this far, here is the link to the final product: http://vimeo.com/22502558

Hope you enjoy it. Also, get out there in the real world to do some gardening!

Later,
Stuart

April Fools!

Some of you might have noticed a few of Google's excellent april fools tricks, not least of which was their nice 1911 youtube style. What I wasn't anticipating was how much it improved my crash control vid... give it a look-see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0mMHJCzdi0&vintage=1911

Haha... happy april fools everyone!

Demo Reel

I finally finished my demo reel!

Demo Reel on Vimeo

Let me know what you think :)

I'll put some Africa photos here as well soon.

Later,
Stuart

Bandit Ambush #6024

Well it's finished! Finally after many hours of messing with animation, render settings, and encoding presets (plus about 12-15 hours of actual rendering) I got a product I'm relatively pleased with.

http://vimeo.com/13793075

So.... check it out! And show it to your kid brother, who probably thinks that lego only comes in Star Wars and Harry Potter sets... c'mon kid...

And here's a frame (with signature, no extra charge):

No idea what's next. I'll have to either finish an existing project, work on some photography, do some tutorials, who knows? Oh yeah, and that community project is finally getting started (I think). Hope it doesn't end up dead in the water... no pun intended.

Whiplash!

Just uploaded my final animation to Vimeo.

Whiplash animation

Make sure to check it out in HD! Not that the extra pixels really add much, given the resolution of the geometry... but still. Hope you like it. Show it to your dog.

Later,
Stuart

Battle Without Honour or Humanity

I finally got permission (more or less) to post the animation that I worked on in the fall (with a few other people). More to the point, I finally got the animation. Had a really good time at the UVic Sunscreen Film Festival. Didn't win anything, but considering I didn't know about it two days before hand, I didn't have high expectations. I did vote for a film for the audience award that ended up winning Best Direction, Best Cinematography and the Audience Award (so I feel like I've got an eye for it now ;) ). Go to my channel (link on the right) for the 720p version! If you hear a very much lot about 720p and don't really know what it is (don't worry, lots of people don't), that just refers to the vertical resolution (basically 1280x720 pixels/frame), and p stands for progressive, which means it's not interlaced, and I'll leave that there.

Battle Without Honour or Humanity
Edit: I was going to embed it, but this blog layout is just so narrow that I have to shrink it by more than youtube's default smallest size.

Hope you like it, and if you do, hit the like button on youtube. For the animation, it's only fair to tell you that I animated about the last 15 seconds of the short. I did a lot of the room layout, modelling and texturing, and I did some rigging as well as a lot of organizational setup, clean-up and stuff.

Still plugging away on the dino texturing, so I'll post an update tomorrow hopefully.
Later,
Stuart

Embedded video version!

I figured out how to embed my youtube video in the blog, cool! Check it out again, maybe... :)



Later,
Stuart

I'll call that a wrap

Render's finished, posted on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0mMHJCzdi0

I'd appreciate it if I could get the number of views above 100,000... thanks.

For february I'm planning on focusing on learning premier, photoshop, after effects and some of those programs, so I don't know what I'll post, but I'll try to do something. I have an idea for a little project in maya I might do on the side when I'm tired of tutorials. In order to do it though, I'll probably have to watch more tutorials.

I finished "Around the World in 80 Days"... didn't quite like the ending, but overall it was fun to read. Next up I'm going to read "This is Your Brain on Music" which I've started a couple times, but I just need to spend the time on it, cause it's a really fascinating book from what I've read so far.

Later,
Stuart

yootoob!

Rough animation is on youtube now!

Crash Control rough animation

The render should be on youtube soon.
Hope you enjoy it in its raw form.

Edit: The final render is underway. Should finish and have it uploaded tomorrow night. Here's one frame of it.

Stuart

Pixelmation

So this is a little project Daryl and I did, unrelated to computer animation. I've been playing around with different types of animation, for fun, and this is one technique that's pretty atypical for animation. It's basically live-action stop-motion, and it's called pixelation, though I called it pixelmation, cause that makes more sense to me. You pose, take a shot, pose again, take another shot, pose again until you get the idea. These little animation projects usually end up less than half a minute long, and that's fine with me. Not looking for any feature-length stuff. I often get tired of a project if I work on it for weeks, so this length was great by me. Now I'm pretty much rambling again, so I'll post the video now and ramble some more while it uploads. Hope you enjoy it.

Ok, so apparently blogger's new editor that I just switched to doesn't support video uploading yet, so I had to save my text and switch back to the old editor and now it's processing the video. I'm going to be going back to learning Maya now, though there's a couple little projects I need to finish up in the near future. I really need to get all my stuff backed up off my old computer so when my new compy arrives I can have that available. I don't really have much that's critical on my computer. Most of the stuff I have that's not in the cloud is just stuff I've been using to learn things. Like my pod. And music. Well, I own all my CDs, so I just have to burn CDs of stuff I bought from iTunes. I've basically used up my computers to authorize with my iTunes account. I wish they'd thought about that a bit more... really unimpressed with that system. For example, I used up two of my available computers on the same computer, just cause I switched OSs a couple times. Ah well, there's ways around it I guess... legal ones, I mean. Or at least, I think it's legal.... anyway, the video's done processing, so I can stop typing.

Later,
Stuart

...and fire!

Here we go with some dynamics stuff:


It took me the longest time fiddling with the animation speed, the catapult basket shape, and the firing tangents to get the rock to actually hit the darn wall... I thought it would be easier to just move the wall into the path of the rock, but for some reason it was locked to its original position... and the path wasn't actually the same twice in a row when I changed some seemingly unrelated factor. Ah, frustration. But here we go in the end, a simple playblast of a rock knocking down a wall. Dynamics are pretty awesome, I have to admit. Imagine animating it all by hand... what a pain.
Well, next up is some path animation I think, so I'll hopefully get working on that soon.
Later,
Stuart

Load the catapults!

New milestone here... :)
Posting a playblast (not a real render, really just an animated screen grab of the camera movement etc. In this short film, our hero Delgo conquers great obstacles and loads a catapult.


I don't know if you can tell, but during the animation, after he **SPOILER** releases the rock **END OF SPOILER** his hands go weird and swivel around a couple times. I tried fixing it in the graph editor, but I have a feeling the problem goes back to the rigging, so not really sure how to completely fix it. I know my wrists can be picky at times. The whole thing still feels quite rough to me and I'd work on a lot of details, but I'd rather spend the perfectionizing on my own project, so I'll move on to rigid bodies... that is, dynamics. Let's smash some walls with this siege weapon!
Later,
Stuart