Week 09 - Initial Block Out - 'F' Stage

This week, I was responsible for preparing the block-out mesh for basic animation. Once I received the  is mesh, I used a default mocap skeleton as a base and placed the joints in the model by hand. During the process of placing the joints, I wrote some Python scripts in Maya to help me orient the joints and copy the transforms of the joints on the left to the joints on the right. Finally, I brought the model into Unreal engine and set up an IK retargeting system to place the character in the game using an adapted version of the default Quinn character's animation blueprint and transferred animations.

Here is the character skinning in Maya.

Here are some of the custom shelf tools I made.

"Select" is merely a hierarchy selection tool, because it is tedious to go into the menu each time. The Orient tool orients the joints and automatically detects end-joints and orients them correctly to their parents. The Symmety tool enforces symmetry on joints by copying the matrix from the left joint, finding the right joint, and scaling the left joint's matrix by -1 on the X axis in order to create mirrored transforms. The Mirror tool is the same, except it creates the joints, too, setting the parents correctly in symmetry. FInally, the Reload tool forces Maya to read my Python module again. It assists me in developing my tools in a standalone way that is portable and easy to update.

Here are the tools in action. It gives the user a text box input for the Left and Right ID's and a choice between X, Y, or Z axis for symmetry.

Some screenshots from my VSCodium project. On the left is code for the UI, and on the right is code that the UI tool calls to do the rigging tasks.

Here it is in Perforce at //CLASSES/Cohort22/Classes/Art/CommonArt/Semester_01/InteractiveExperience/TellTaleHeart/Source/Characters/Killer/killer.fbx

Here is the Killer blockout character in the game environment.

Week 7: Make it Stick

 

My first attempt - I didn't realize the printer was using regular paper this time.

Some photos of the screen during the print process.

Here is the layout in the Cricut Maker program.

Some photos of the process - this time with the right paper. Thanks for the extra paper, Mark!

Left one on Nitin's desk.

And one at the door to Cheryl's office. 

And one for Nick.

And the last one is mine!

Week 7 Crate Textures

 Doing a projection painting in Substance Painter to make up for my lack of sculpted shapes...

It looks like this.

Here is how it looks in Substance Painter. 

And here it is in Unreal.

Week 7 Animation State Machines

 

The character in the game engine.

The Guard's blueprint.

The guard's blueprint - the event graph.

Here is the IK skeleton. Unreal's automatic retargeting worked quite well.

The animation blueprint

And the game running in engine

p4 location: //CLASSES/Cohort22/Students/Joseph.Brandenburg/TechArt/josephbrandenburg_hw/TechArt_ASM_HW6 5.6/

Week 6 - Use of Composition

Here is the finished illustration. I wanted to have a circular composition for this one, with the eyes
radiating out of the image from the center. Although my illustration also fits Radial and Iconic composition types fairly well.

Several stages of the image:

Here is the final draft. (Below)

Here are a few screenshots from inside of Blender. This one is looking down from the ceiling!

And finally, a few render passes.

   The wireframe.

Shaded view.

The Depth pass.

Cryptomatte. I didn't actually use Cryptomatte because I thought the transparent image planes and volumes would mess it up. But it didn't!

Finally, the albedo (Diffuse color) pass. There was so much metallic and emissive material that most of the materials didn't have diffuse color. You can see the very little bit of work I did on the textures in this image... everywhere else it is kind of overwhelmed by the compositing. Oh well. I didn't spend much time on it!

I had a lot of fun with this one, but now it is very late. Here is the final image without compositing.

And the final draft again, below.

Module 2 Week 06 Simple Crate

 Sculpting in ZBrush went OK until.... help me?

I am already a third of the way through my life. I don't have time to do this in Maya. It took maybe 10 minutes to do in Blender.

I made the ID map with vertex colors. I would have liked to practice doing this in ZBrush. Alas, there is no time. It was easy enough to do in Blender. Interesting workflow. I wonder what the purpose is?

Baking the maps in Painter. It was faster than I expected. I like being able to bake a few different kinds of maps that are hard to bake in Blender. 

No beauty shot this week. I don't have any more time. Alas, what could have been.

Week 6 Game Animation

 Here is the group of models animating in the Unreal scene.

in order to get everything to work, I had to do everything a few times. What a pain. It turns out, having the root joint in the Archer character was messing everything up and I had to re-export and re-import everything and start over.

As a gif:

Some pics:

I had to get rid of the root joint o fix the IK retargeting. now the pelvis bone is the top of the hierarchy.

For whatever reason, these controllers are in the rig, even though I had them deselected when exporting selected from Maya?

Here is the retargeting working on the archer after I fixed the joint hierarchy by removing the root.

And here it is working the other way!

It is on Perforce at //CLASSES/Cohort22/Students/Joseph.Brandenburg/TechArt/josephBrandenburg_hw/HW6/Content/level/JosephBrandenburg_HW6.umap