Raincoat Girl 2 by Neil Marshall.

There was a little delay between this post and the last, not because I was taking a long time with the animation, but while I was rendering it my computer got infected with a root kit.  The machine still won’t boot up without displaying a nice blue screen on bootup.  Always make sure that your XP is up to date because virus’ randomly finds security holes and install themselves while you’re watching tv elsewhere.  Luckily a couple days into my ordeal the UPS guy showed up with a new computer and now that everything is installed, its rendering the scene quite a bit faster then my older machine.

The new machine is an i7 Quad core hyperthreaded box, so I now see 8 buckets in Max instead of 2.  I’ve also got 6GB of RAM and I’m running 64Bit Vista so things are working quite nicely when rendering.  However, I did notice that the cloth simulator only uses one core.  I was disappointed that it didn’t speed that operation up too much.

Before the virus I had re-rigged the fingers.  The thumb issue was actually fairly easy to solve.  I removed the Finger0* bones from the skin, rotated them, and added them back into the skin modifier.

I was also having issues zooming in because the model started out as a model for a game with the units being 1 generic unit = 1 meter.  Thats VERY small for max.  I found that if I adjust the FOV instead of actually zooming in, that I could now paint the vertex weights without hitting my forehead against the monitor.

As I started animating it, I noticed a LOT of rendering errors from Mental Ray.  I thought it was my rendering settings because there are more then a few pages on the web dealing with dancing shadows due to final gathering.  It turns out that the rendering settings were not the issue. I was using a “SkyLight” light, instead of a “DayLight” light.  The Mental Ray Sub-Surface Scattering shader didn’t like the SkyLight at all.  In the switch to the DayLight I needed to change a few values in the shaders to get them to actually show up, but once I did everything rendered properly again.

Animating the character into the crouching stance revealed that the jacket was lacking in a couple areas.  I added a little bit to the neck and I split it between the legs so that it now spreads apart but stays buttoned up.  I currently hate the animation as it doesn’t look right, but it works for testing.

There is one issue that I’m not sure how to solve now.  After the crouch where the split in the jacket is, if I leave it to drape itself without the left hand there it will start battling itself because there are two separate pieces of fabric in close proximity.  Does anyone know how to make the cloth behave nicely in this case?  I would like it so that the left side of the jacket always prefers to be behind the right, but I’m not sure how I would go about doing so.

I managed to find some time to rig most of the character the other day.  It works fairly well but I didn’t have time to look at the fingers until today.  Where I unfortunately found an issue.  The thumb is about 90 degrees off, so I have to try removing it from the skin, rotating the bone, and somehow reattach it with the existing skin.  I’ve always had issues with this in the past and hopefully I can solve it this time.  Does anyone have any tips?

Another issue I seem to be having is with the bumpmap on the raincoat.  You can see it showing up almost completely black in the shoulder and pocket.  I’m not 100% sure what is causing it just yet, but I think it might be the grey background reflecting. Just one more thing I’ll have to look into.

Raincoat Girl by Neil Marshall.

I’ve decided I need something new for my demo reel so I started on a new model today.  I loaded up a very old model, created clothes for it, UV’d and textured everything.  Tomorrow I hope I’ll have time to rig it tomorrow and then I can start on an animation.  The bump maps aren’t the greatest but until I receive a working motherboard for my new computer, it will have to wait.  The skin lost a lot of definition when I switched to SSS and it will have to be tweaked quite a bit more before it’s ready for the final animation.

Bookmarks Slide View from Neil Marshall.

This is a video of a UI I helped create for the never released (out of Beta) AT&T web browser. It’s built in a version of Firefox which embedded the Ogre 3D engine. Our company created a simple API to interact with the 3D engine so that we could create scenes using JavaScript. I was asked to improve the usability of the bookmarks, while still utilizing our 3D technology and this is what I came up with. Previously we had a series of folders in a circle which you would scroll through and then the camera would drop down and display 8 bookmarks on the screen. From there you had next and back buttons to look at another 8 bookmarks. It worked, but it was a really clunky interface which required at least 4 clicks to get to your bookmarked site.

By laying out all of the bookmarks in a grid like fashion it made it easy to quickly scan every folder for the site you were looking for and it only took one click to load the bookmark.  We got around the “multiple clicks” issue by having extra information, like the properties button or title show up only when you hovered over the screenshot.  This worked really well to reduce the amount of UI which was constantly on the screen.

We also came up with a couple other handy features.  We limited where the user could scroll to to the bounding box of the bookmarks.  This reduced the chances of them getting lost in all the data.  If you did happen to get lost, you could use your mouse wheel to scroll out to get more of a birds eye view at any time.  One idea which we never had time to implement was to take a page out of RTS computer games and display a small map in the corner which the user could click on and it would move the screen.

The bounding box made it really easy to scroll along the top of the box, and effectively created 3 more zones which could also be scrolled easily. We used the left side of the bounding box as an oppertunity to display all of the users bookmarks a second time, but this time in alphabetical order. Then depending how the user typically finds a bookmark, they had two choices and both were available at the same time.

We had a couple goals which we never solved before the project was canceled and the company shut down. The biggest one was the ability to show sub folders. As it was we could only really show one level of folders. We wanted to try layering them in the Z-dimension, but ran out of time.

The other issue was management wanted to still show off the fact that we were using 3D.  The best we could come up with was to place the 2D grid on a sin wave or something to add depth to the Z dimension.  We tried using some shaders such as Depth of Field to blur anything in the background, but being a mostly horizontal view the effect was minimal. We just couldn’t come up with a cool looking effect which didn’t affect usability or initiate headaches.

Overall it was a fairly successful project and it would have been interesting to see it used in the wild. Perhaps the ideas used here will live on in some other projects.

Fighting Animations by Neil Marshall

I created these animations for a computer game being built by indy developers using the Garagegames Torque engine.  I’m not sure if the game will ever be finished, but I have worked on them quite a bit and figured I would show them off. 

The animations are only upper body animations as the bottom portion will be adjusted at a later time in game depending on if the user is running or just standing still.  You need to design animations this way in order to take into account all of the different possibilities of user input.  It’s also the same reason that the transitions have to return to a root pose before starting the next animation.  In the future I hope I can look into Natural Motion’s software (example) to eliminate that need, but for now, the technology I’m using doesn’t support it.  I’m also on the look out for free software which does something similar to Natural Motion’s.  Drop me a line if you know of such a package.