Intro to Maya - More Screencasts

Four weeks into the course and there are literally hours of Maya training on YouTube now.
Here's a few of the tutorials:







Thanks for visiting,
Stuart

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

Cu-Al-FeCrNi_Au

The second in the series: Cu-Al-FeCrNi_Au

Medium: ForeverSpin 2.0 tops with J. Herbin Emerald of Chivor 1670 Anniversary Ink on Acid-Free Sketch Paper

Element 29

Here's just a bit of fun. Some might call it fine art. I call it Element 29.

Medium: Copper ForeverSpin 2.0 with Noodler's Ink Black on Acid-free Sketch Paper

Wireframe Contour Rendering with Maya 2016 and mental ray

Rendering a contour image in mental ray for Maya has been a nice way to show wireframes on an object. In Maya 2016 the usual method has become somewhat hidden, so I thought I would post a brief update on how to do that.

1) Create a black surface shader and apply it to your geometry
2) In the hypershade, access the shading group (e.g. surfaceShader1SG) and open the mental ray tab in the Attribute Editor (or Hypershade property editor!)
3) Under Contours, check Enable Contour Rendering and adjust the other options as you like
4) In the render settings, make sure mental ray is selected, and go to the Configuration tab
5) Check "Show Advanced Settings" and find the Contours section at the bottom
6) Check "Enable Contour Rendering" and increase the Over-Sample to something like 3
7) Under the "Draw By Property Difference" section, check "Around all poly faces"

Not quite done... you might see a Warning: Contour Rendering is not supported with Unified sampling

8) Go to the Quality tab and check "Show Advanced Settings"
9) Expand the Legacy Options section at the bottom and choose Sampling Mode: Legacy Sampling Mode

Hit render! *phew*

Note that if you are rendering beauty passes or other things, you probably want to use the original Unified Sampling and just create layer overrides for the contour settings. Also make sure that you have unchecked both "Around all poly faces" and "Enable Contour Rendering" for these non-contour passes/layers/renders, because I have had the filter settings be set to Box (1, 1) in the background without my knowledge due to "incompatibility with contour rendering". Just something to be cautious about; not sure if they may have fixed that in this version.

Thanks for reading,
Stuart

Strange Teapot

I've been learning how to use Pixar's Renderman for shading, lighting, and rendering. I was trying to get a handle on setting up different shading networks, so I decided to go a bit crazy while I figured out how to use various nodes. This was the rather unfortunate result.

I used the Official RenderMan Swatch (aka the renderman teapot) to  play around with. I learned how to work with displacement, bump, blend, and facing ratio nodes, various noise textures, and the layered shader.

Thanks for visiting!
Stuart

Science Photography EdX Course - Week 5

Though this is the penultimate week in the online course I've been taking, I believe this is the final assignment. Choosing one (or more) of the images we captured during the course, we were to create an educational figure from it. This was up my alley, so to speak, and I broke out the leader-lines and orientation images. I'm fairly happy with how this turned out. I think the leader-lines are a bit thicker than necessary, and though I like that everything is neatly aligned, I don't think the text sticking out to the left works as well. 

It's also not a complete educational figure, since it only shows some of the mechanisms in the watch, but these were the images I had available, and I'm not quite ready to completely deconstruct the pocket watch.

I've really had an excellent time with this course and been exposed to many ideas that will serve me well not only in my photography, but also in the computer graphics I'll be doing in the future. And I've been inspired to do more macro photography, so if you're at all interested in that, perhaps keep an eye on this space and we'll see what turns up.

Thanks for reading!
Stuart

Science Photography EdX Course - Week 4

This week's assignment had two components relating to mobile phone cameras and video.

The first part asked the students to spend a day taking photos around the house or at work with one's smartphone. I'm not too enthused with my phone's camera, but it was an interesting assignment to think about where photographic subjects might be. It was easy to grab a quick snap of an interesting texture, the way light fell on a mundane object, or how this item looked at a different angle. I'll consider using my phone as a brainstorming tool, then perhaps go in with my better camera and explore the subject further.
Here are the two images I thought were most interesting:

The second part of the assignment was to explore video and to create a short (< 1 min) recording of a process. Since I've been having fun with my macro lens, I decided to use the video functionality on my Canon T2i to capture the "process". I think the video should speak for itself.



And the obligatory setup snap. Yes, that's a plastic horse (pegasys [sic]) with a flashlight taped to it.

Thank you for reading and watching!
Stuart

Maya Course - 10 videos so far

So far I've uploaded 10 videos from the Maya course I taught this spring. If you're interested in learning a variety of Maya topics, I highly recommend subscribing as I upload the remainder of the course. A few selected vids:

A shorter segment on animating cameras in Maya


A fun overview of how driven keys can be helpful in rigging


And an introduction to the MEL scripting language


Later,
Stuart

Science Photography EdX Course - Week 3

Week 3 of the science photography course has come and gone, and the assignment this time was about different lights and light positioning.

I started out with some limited daylight from the front. There is a bit of a gleam, but fairly uninteresting in terms of light.

Then I added another light, in the above image it is bouncing off an umbrella from the front right. Still pretty similar to the daylight only, just mainly some color differences. Below you can see the setup I was using for these initial photos.

Then I tried the bare light (without the umbrella bounce) and I think this is much more interesting. The watch interior has more of a gleam to it.

This series really demonstrates how drastic an effect simply changing the light position can have. I hope I have the descriptions correct; it was a bit hard to remember exactly where the bulb was in each. Check if my analysis makes sense.

It was very interesting how a low light (the bulb was just an inch or two from the watch and my lens) casts the etching/engraving in sharp contrast and gives a graininess to the flat surfaces.

Whereas a higher light makes things appear more glossy with lots of specular highlights.

This final one might be my favorite from the shoot, in terms of composition and lighting.

Later,
Stuart