83 replies to this topic

[Chunkified]

Thought I'd make a thread to post up work with a more TD/Technical focus as there isn't really one on the forum...



MTV - 10 for 11

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9856/mtvmovsnapshot000820101.jpg width="400"> http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2484/mtvmovsnapshot000220101.jpg width="400">

Creative and Post Production by Mainframe (http://www.mainframe.co.uk)
Kit: Maya, Vray, Nuke, After Effects

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For this project I had to create a set of tools and a rig that would allow different sized and speakers to be placed randomly across a surface or attached to wires/hairs coming from a surface, have dynamics and allow them to be controlled either by a color map/ramp or by aiming towards another object. Using Python I created a set of tools in Maya to allow this to be possible. These included: distribution of the speakers and implementation of a centred hexagonal and octagonal algorithm for distribution (http://en.wikipedia....exagonal_number), rigging them for animation, organisation of the scene in a clean heirachy, detection and deletion of overlapping speakers.
Below are a few screenshots of the finished tool and some of the code towards it (click to enlarge):

Finished tool:
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/6278/mtvtools.jpg width="800">

Code snippets:
Algorithmic distribution
http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/9721/algo2.jpg width="300">

Collision Detection and cleanup
http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/9990/coll2u.jpg width="300">

Edited by Chunkified, 20 December 2010 - 12:30 AM.

[Chunkified]

Welsh Rugby Union promos

http://www.chunkified.com/images/golley08.jpg width="300"> http://www.chunkified.com/images/golley06.jpg width="300"> http://www.chunkified.com/images/golley07.jpg width="300">

Movie: http://www.mainframe...vies.php?id=125 (it takes a while to load ... )

Creative and Post Production by Mainframe (http://www.mainframe.co.uk)
Kit: Maya, Houdini, Vray, After Effects

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For this project I was tasked with making a tool that would allow the shards to be placed on a character, groomed and have some dynamic movement. (Basically... had to make a custom hair system)
After an initial protoype in Houdini, I moved to Maya and wrote a with a follicle based system in Python which allowed the shards to be grown on a surface and react to dynamic fields.
Due to the large volume of shards required in the scene (around 60,000), a number of other tools were also created to allow artists to work with the characters and setup in viewport, allow for rendertime generation of shards. For shots where collisions had to take place I also wrote a tool also in Python, which created an nParticle setup based on the shards positions and orientation, wrote this data out to a custom binary file format, then read the data back into Maya when an artist or I was ready to render.

http://www.chunkified.com/images/golley04.jpg width="300"> http://www.chunkified.com/images/golley05.jpg width="300">

Edited by Chunkified, 20 December 2010 - 03:07 PM.

[Steve]

Very good looking stuff Nile. I don't even pretend to know half of the stuff you do
Sent you an email the other day. Did you get it?

[Chunkified]

Thanks mate!
Yea got it... was away for the weekend!
Will put together something for you tomorrow (Got the day off wahhhhoooooo)

[s_purs]

Didn't bother looking at the links as I wouldn't understand it I'm sure, but your quick description and images look great. Good work mate! Didn't get to check it out when you linked me to it yesterday, sorry x

[abandonstage]

Awesome stuff, I always like to read what your up to though yeah I don't really understand most of it haha. Where did you learn half this stuff lol

[Deethree]

Beautiful tools, never has a finer man come from the motherland

[yaw3d]

Thats really cool

[Callum Welsh]

Really cool stuff. Need to learn Python some point since I'm using Nuke and Maya now. How well does Python integrate between the two programs, any major differences in how the code has to be integrated in or is it nice and easy?

[Chunkified]

Thanks all

Really cool stuff. Need to learn Python some point since I'm using Nuke and Maya now. How well does Python integrate between the two programs, any major differences in how the code has to be integrated in or is it nice and easy?

Deffo take some time to learn it...Was really easy to pick up Maya Python after learn Nuke's! No major differences at all.
Between Maya and Nuke the Python syntax doesn't change there's just different functions/modules to do stuff which are all documented really well in the Help files

Edited by Chunkified, 20 December 2010 - 11:33 AM.

[Callum Welsh]

Cool thanks for that.

[Miguel]

Amazing stuff, you're the TD poster boy for UH!

[Aldarion]

Neat !

[plasmax]

print "stunning work"

Can we see any of the custom hair tool? It sounds crazy... especially the conversion to nParticles for collisions. I guess MTV aren't allowing Mainframe to display the speakers ident... I'd like to see the movement on that.

I have so many questions but I'll keep it down to one for now:

Why prototype in Houdini if you're going to code in Maya? Is there any difference in python between Houdini and Maya?

[Chunkified]

Thanks plasmax!

I'm not at work at the moment so here are the only screenshots I have:

Custom hairs in viewport


Custom hairs with the shards added


The tool broken down into problems/sections basically...

Takes a mesh and attaches a follicle and a curve to the follicle... In this instance the mesh was a character which had mocap animation applied to it from a shoot we did at Pinewood.
Attributes from a UI are transferred to the curve which allow for randomisation and definition of size, orientation, dynamic weight.


Artist or I works with the animation and sets it up.
Either at rendertime or in the viewport a script is run which deletes or hides all curves and substitutes the shards into the system.

The nParticle conversions was actually the easiest/quickest part to figure out...
The Maya Python documentation was a great help with this.
I'd select the shards and run a script which would get the order i selected each shard, the position and the name of each shard...
Write this to disk and save the position into memory.
Then create an empty/default nParticle system based off this which could then be used to do anything, collisions etc...
Reading the data back in was a bit harder...
At rendertime another script would get the position and rotation data for the nParticles, the particle id in relation to the shard selection order from disk then move each shard accordingly.
Results are below:



As for the prototype in Houdini. When we first had the pitch I had a day to get a test of something which would take a lot longer in Maya to be done, so did it in Houdini.
Our pipeline at work is Maya based and since i'm the only one using Houdini, it doesn't make it practical to use for large parts of a project

Edited by Chunkified, 20 December 2010 - 04:27 PM.