Soliloquy of the Stars Sprint 6

So this past week was busy mostly because there were a whole bunch of last minute problems to resole, and every resolution to one problem led to causing another. So the first thing we did this week was to use a transparent material to mask out the part of the Black Hole character.   

You can't see this part, so why render it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The goal was to easily and painlessly mask out some geometry that was clipping due to differences in the number of vertices in the body versus the dress. Because the body had more polygons, it could curve more smoothly than the dress, and the body poked through in a few places.

 

Sadly, it did not end up being a fast and painless way to fix the problem, because it seems that changing the materials in the model messed up the chaos cloth, even though we were careful not to modify the vertex count.

 

I also enabled dual-quaternion skinning on our characters this week. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought this would be more difficult, but it turns our the plugin that makes it possible was pre-installed by default. What a relief!

Below you can see the artifact we were trying to fix, and the result of applying DQS to the problem. For our particular animation, there was a lot of this candy-wrapper artifact from the motion capture data. Using DQS improved the results a lot. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this point, we discovered that the star's skinning weights had somehow been corrupted when updating the model, so I had to fix it. Because I had access to the animation, I was able to skin the character as she moved and get much better results than I would have gotten if I had tried to guess how she would twist and bend. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soliloquy of the Stars Sprint 5

 We had another round of mesh updates this week.

The star got some new geometry for his head, and the Black Hole got new polygons for her dress.

 

 

Here she is. The dress has new topology, and we got rid of the halo.

In order to bring in the new head geometry, I just deleted everything else in the file and imported the head. That way, I didn't need to worry about breaking anything I had already done.

Here's the new head topology!

Everything works just fine!

The big week is here and I have another round of mesh updates to do. It isn't glamorous but it is important. Sadly the mesh updates came with some surprises in our cloth physics... I made sure to stay with Gabe and help troubleshoot things last night. It was mostly no use. Unreal's chaos cloth is not very friendly to mesh updates, because it stores things in vertex indices and those indices change when the geometry updates. Not much I could do about that... but I helped Gabe with Perforce and showed him how to revert things if there is a problem he cannot overcome.

Soliloquy of the Stars Sprint 4

 This week I was asked to focus on updating the skinning for the characters.
Here they are!

Really the test for how well my skinning performs is to see the characters move.

 

The big task for this sprint was just getting things to look right in motion builder for our animators. It took a few iterations, but it is done and shouldn't require anything except perhaps some small tweaking in the future.