Work on the gallery

~Glenn
I have been doing a little work on the gallery set. Just playing with materials and lighting. It's not nearly finished but these things take time. That said, I'm pretty happy with the mood of it.

Bedroom lighting test

A simple render on an untextured model. Just checking out the lighting I need for this shot.





~Glenn

Sliding skin.

This is how to create shape kleys (blend shpes/morph targets) in Blender using the shrinkwrap modifier and a vertex map to mask the effect.

Sliding skin is necessary for things like eyebrow raises where the skin has to slide across the skull bone.

~Glenn

Negative cloth solve.

It appears that while 2.5 allows negative frame numbers (thanks to aligorith), the cloth solve panel still only allows solves to begin from frame 1. Many studios rely on pre zero frames as a cloth pre-roll before the take starts. For clarity, action always begins on frame one. On a show containing hundreds if not thousands of shots, consistency is paramount.
I usually start around frame -50 for my solves. I had a shot where a character in a skirt began the shot sitting down. I animated her from t-pose at -100 to her seated position at frame 1 so the cloth skirt could solve into a nice arrangement for the start of the shot.

~Glenn

Pinning an object to a vertex

I needed to pin buttons onto a deforming shirt and as I didn't want to simply skin the buttons to the armature, I needed to constrain them somehow.

Michael W at blenderartists pointed me to this gem from the 2.4 Wiki...

You can parent an object to a single vertex or a group of vertices as well; that way the child/children will move when the parent mesh is deformed, like a mosquito on a pulsing artery. In Object mode, select the child/children and then the parent object. ⇆ Tab into Edit mode and on the parent object select either one vertex that defines a single point, or select three vertices that define an area (the three vertices do not have to form a complete face they can be any three vertices of the parent object), and then hit ctrl p

~Glenn

Kentaro

Here is a first pass test of my Wombat character kentaro. The fur has polished up great for a first pass, but he turns to mud id ambient occlusion is enabled. What I need is to figure out how to exclude the fur from Ambient occlusion. I really don't want to have to render him out as a separate pass. If anyone has any ideas as to how to do this, drop me a note.

~Glenn

Rain on glass test

Here is a youtube clip of a rain displacement map made for Adelaide Grey

I have also tried to throw the rain as a gobo onto the wall as well as tidy up a few render problems.


~Glenn