Mudbox blend shapes and material finishes

More blend shapes and playing with different material finishes in Mudbox, to give me an idea of how this ice man figure will look when he's glossy and lit....
and of course transparent!

Photoshop concept art for storyboard

Mudbox blend shapes with simple reflective material

Mudbox eye blend shapes

More blend shapes in Mudbox

Mudbox blend shapes - eyebrows up

Mudbox blend shapes - eyebrows up!

Using sculpt layers, duplicated and then the mask brush.....

Critical Review - Allied

#Allied' Is a World War II Romantic Thriller, the art direction and costume design are brilliantly observed...

I expected this film, based on the trailer, to be a vintage action packed James Bond spy thriller..with a significant emphasis and tension regarding whether the Protagonist's wife was an ally opponent, or an ally. 

To a certain extent this was the case, but the true emphasis was on their relationship, rather than violent, slick combat.

I found the design to be the most compelling and convincing part of the movie, and felt that the final resolution  at the end, was seemingly hurried. A rather swift ending to an otherwise thorough script.

Rigging, FK, IK controllers - and how to create a nurbs curve in 30000 hours

Rigging today...

So I find the rigging process and creating the hierarchy fairly relaxing...

Creating a Nurbs Circle with 8 sections, and a Nurbs Cube....3 hours of tension !!!!!

For my own notes, so that next time it's not so laborious...

For the wrist controller cube...

Make coffee.

Put on Music.

Create Polygon Primitive Cube

Create an EP curve (curve tools)

Set cube to component mode 

Shift select EP curve

Snap to points (part of the magnetic toolbar icon)

Select cube, component mode, shift select new curve and snap vertices to the cube corner vertices.

Adjust, tweak and repeat (for about 30000 hours) until all cube edges have a curve (straight line!) attached to them. 

Delete cube in outliner

Select all curves (straight lines) and under curves drop down menu, select 'attach'.

Hopefully all the curves will now glue together and become one complete object...

And now back to the straightforward easy part of rigging....

Outliner below showing the Hip, Knee and Foot controllers

 Foot controllers with the IK handle

Hip, Spine and Arm controllers

Duplication of the Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist joints, with a rename to IK, FK and Bind...

and then repeated for the right side

Timelapse test; Atomos Ninja Assasin and the Panasonic 4K camera

Timelapse Test, using the Atomos Ninja Assassin and the Panasonic 4K...

This is 1 frame every 20 seconds and filming was for approx 4 hours.

More tests to come, alongwith research on how to become a 'sunset' chaser...

Camera Tracking Nuke X movie

Camera tracking in Nuke X composting sofware...

Final tracked image showing an imported 'plane' with checkerboard texture (as created in the workflow below).

     

Converting UHD 4K video to HD

Removing lens distortion, line analysis and drawing mode...drawing straight lines over any straight lines in the footage..

Analyse lines

Save

Input Read command and Camera Tracker...

Number of features 600

Feature separation 6

Select frame range eg. frames 50 - 300

Track

Once tracked, if there are any moving objects, such as people or cars, then remove those trackers manually.

Solve

Error value of below 1 is required.

The green markers are shown top left.

Any markers shown as red are rejected

Orange are to be solved.

The graph top right allows for the slider inputs to change the maximum error value. Tweak repeatedly until the error value is less than 1.

Hover mouse over view panel (top left) of the workspace and press 'TAB' to switch between 2D and 3D views

3D view showing Camera tracker cloud (white blob markers in 3D environment)

To import into Maya, in order to insert 3D objects that are embedded and move seamlessly within the scene, a scale and an origin need to be set; plus a selection of markers showing the ground plane need to be established.

To set origin in 2D viewer

Right click on a single marker on the ground

Select 'ground plane'

Select 'set origin'

To set scale:

Select one marker, SHIFT and click another

Right click

Select scene

Add

Scale distance (set scale dimension to the same as a known distance within the scene. In this case a paving slab of 40mm)

Magenta markers shown below in the 3D view, indicate the camera tracker markers that were selected on the ground plane.

Select markers on the ground

Right click

Ground plane

Set to selected

To test that the camera tracking, lens distortion correction etc are all working well, place a 'card' into the scene.

Select tracker

Create

Card

'TAB' key and Scanline Renderer node to toggle between 3D and 2D views

Card placed and rotated.

Apply texture if necessary with TAB key 'checkerboard'

Send Camera and locator to Maya

Select Scene 1 (shown as red circle in node graph below)

TAB key

Write geo 

Double click 'write_geo' node

File (black folder icon similar to file folders in attributes box in Maya)

Name file 'tracked_camera.fbx

In the options box (5 options, Geometries, Cameras, Lights, Axies, Point Clouds) just select cameras and point clouds.

Execute - select frame range

Open Maya
Set frame rate to 25 fps
Set project etc
File import 'tracked_camera.fbx
Can take a while as it imports a camera every frame, and each frame is key framed