A small but useful update to my ghosting tool for Maya. Now it has a new ‘Replace’ mode which I find handy during the polish stage of a shot. Hope it comes in useful and as always, happy animating! Download the script here – http://www.graphite9.com/MayaDownloads.html
This video explores two contrasting workflows for animating a tail with appealing overlapping motion. I guess you could say one method is more technical and the other is more artistic. Both are valid of course, the end result is what counts most!
This video outlines the main steps in the animation process I used while animating my shot ‘More is more’, hope you enjoy it. I love to play the guitar so this was really fun to put together, a good excuse to play the cheeziest ’80s style riffs I could think of. It took two chorus effects on at the same time to get a tone this terrible 🙂
For those who find the technical details interesting, here’s some info on that side of it : Animation was done in Maya 2013.5, the original character rig was supplied by iAnimate, modded by a student there and further modded by me to give him his rock star persona.
For his textures I used ZBrush and Photoshop. The throne he’s sitting on started off as a regular chair model supplied by iAnimate and I altered it in ZBrush to make it more ‘rocktastic’ (I believe that’s the technical term here ;). The guitar was a model purchased from Turbosquid, originally modeled in Cinema 4D 11.5 I believe and I made some minor adjustments to it before converting the generator objects to polys so I could export it and rig the strings in Maya. His pick I modeled and textured in C4D (it has his name on it which is impossible to see in the animation, but hey, he knows it’s there 🙂
His hair is polygon based and to make it dynamic I used Mayas’ nCloth solver and a little rigging (blend shapes and constraints). I painted maps for the Input Mesh Attract attribute so that the ends were more floppy than the base of the hair.
The little table and glass in front of him were modeled in Cinema and the environment and statue in the background were rendered with the Physical render engine in C4D R14. The character was rendered out in layers (shown in the video) using Mental Ray. The final composite was done in After Effects CS5.5
Less is more? Not always..
A shot I started while studying at iAnimate and kept polishing afterwards in between client jobs. A lot of work but a lot of fun too as I felt very close to the subject (I’ve played guitar in bands for many years so it was easy to get into character!) . Many thanks to my mentor Angie Jones and all at iAnimate!
Software used Maya, C4D, ZBrush, Photoshop and After Effects. A ‘making-of’ video is on the way 🙂