A Christmas Carol was unveiled to the public at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.  There was lots of coverage and Disney also released images and a clip from the movie.  My initial observation is that all the reporters and critics that saw the actual Cannes footage have a very positive reaction.  People that see the small streaming clip at Latino Review, tend to have mixed reactions.  I’d say trust the people that actually saw the Cannes footage as they have had a better look at the movie.

Higher quality clip

Rotten Tomatoes

Comingsoon.net

Joblo

Featurette

I modeled a head today!  I rig faces all the time at work so I thought I’d try modeling one.  I could probably add a lot more wrinkles to give him more character but I’m tired…I may work on him more in the future.  Can anyone guess who my reference was?

I was able to make more progress on my personal project that I’m doing with my friend, Corey.  Here I’ve modeled and textured some clothes for my character as well as gave him some hair.  His eyebrow placement needs some tweeking and his hands aren’t textured yet but I think it’s a good start.  He could probably use a belt buckle too.  The clothing mostly uses just color, bump, and spec maps created in Photoshop.  The hair is using Maya’s fur system.

And here is a close up of the face after tweaked eyebrows and hair settings.  I think there is too much color variation in his hair.  He looks too much like he’s in a boy band.

This is a test of a sticky lips deformer I wrote. The first time the character opens his mouth, there is no sticky lip effect. The second time he opens his mouth, you can see the slight stickiness taper off on his lips which you can see in people when their lips are somewhat dry.

Just testing out some eye look functionality. This uses a few blendshapes and set driven key.

After being distracted with the likes of Deep Space, Fable 2, and Fallout 3, I finally started working on personal projects again. I remodeled my previous character’s head with extra topology to let me model in more detail in the blendshapes.  I also textured his head so he looks more human now with his eyebrows and lips.  Following the advice of one of my coworkers, I’m not modeling with any symmetry which I’ve noticed gives a lot better results that look more organic.  I plan to add a few levels of combination shapes, that is, blendshape targets that make combinations of other blendshape targets look correct.  It should add a nice level of complexity to the face and prevent it from looking too mechanical.

The past few weeks have gone by pretty quickly.  Work is still exciting and I learn new things every day.  I started getting into physics simulations and linear algebra programming.  You can do a lot of really cool things once you know a few basic concepts such as vector/matrix math, cross products, dot products, etc.  When you hear TD’s (Technical Directors for you non-industry people) should be good at math, they’re right.  Not all TD’s know or understand this material but they are still really talented.  But the ones that do understand it can go above and beyond creating really cool systems.  I’m finding it a lot easier these days to read a SIGGRAPH paper and actually understand it.

I had an interesting conversation today with some of my coworkers about sharing knowledge and source code.  If you’ve read my site before, you probably know that I like to share my knowledge with people and give away code and such for free. People helped me when I was learning and I like to return the favor to others. Someday, I would like to write up some pages on character rigging and coding with Maya but now that I work for a company, it can be a bit more complicated.  If I were to post code and certain techniques, I would now have to be careful that I’m not posting too much that could be deemed sensitive company information.  I realized this is why there are not really any in-depth production worthy character rigging resources out there. Most of the knowledge is learned on the job and most of it is specific to the company’s pipeline. As a result, a lot of this work and knowledge can be seen as belonging to the company.  So what can be shared or posted?  Unless we have specific permission, we could probably only share extremely dumbed down versions of tools or plug-ins. Maybe even break down material into the fundamental building blocks that the material is based on and not even talk about the specific tool at all.  With physics simulations, for example, I could probably only write about the basics such as vector math and verlet integration and then leave it up to the reader to build upon these principles to make complex systems. Now if I were to go out and find a SIGGRAPH paper and implement it and modify it on my own time and equipment, could I talk about that?  Maybe.  But it could be seen as knowledge relating to my work.  It’s a tricky area that I’m not too knowledgeable about.  Once I’m in the industry longer, I’ll probably have a better idea about this.

I just finished my first week at Imagemovers Digital. All I can say is I love it. Confucius was right when he said, “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I’ve looked forward to every day of work this past week. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t seen something amazing. I’m surrounded by some of the best in the industry and there’s so much I can learn. It was kind of intimidating being thrown into the midst of so many talented people. But it keeps me motivated and eager to learn more. It’s kind of weird thinking I’m going to spend the next couple years of my life working on a movie. But when I see my name roll up in the credits, it’ll all be worth it.