Quadrangulated

Something unusual, a Maxscript. A friend of mine needed a batch exporter for biped(bip to fbx). I decided to give MAXscript a try. Not sure what to think about it though, it was quite many unexpected errors to tackle, as opposed to python that was easier to learn.

Thanks to Dennis Roche (godennis[at]gmail[dot]com) . I used lots of his code to build this this.

edit: made a change where you choose a maxfile, which will also reload after each export. This ensures no errors adds up onto the rig, as well as you can set the timeline to 1 frame and ensure each export will not be longer than the biped animation.

A note, the script use the default fbx export settings from max. So in order to change the settings, all you need to do is to click export and change those settings to what suits you. Silly, but you get easy access to all settings you need, plus your presets and so forth.

Click here to download. Unzip in your script folder. And run the script from within Max. You find the script under “quadTools”. Just drag and drop to a toolbar.

Tags: batch, biped, exporter, fbx

Evening scripting exercise to keep my python knowledge alive at all.
This script took about an hour to create. It’s VERY simple! Less than 20 rows of code. All it does is change the override color of objects, based on selection and/or input string.

This is how it looks and behaves. Changes happens as you drag the slider.

So if you got some stuff that needs coloring, you can download the script here or go to my downloads.

Tags: coloring objects in Maya, overrideColor

Minor update for today. Got some good critits that his body seemed old. Think that has been improved a bit. The model is built with zspheres, so theres quite a few areas that I will fix later at retopo stage.

I revised the rendering (again). For now I went with a simple studio-like rendering. Experimented with linear space rendering. The sampling process is more optimal to the final output this way. Also better use of global illum methods when I have full control of the tonemapping for the HDR environment. No contrast adjustments made in PS, only added the soft glow.

Render took 6 mins in HD720. With 2 area lights and final gathering. My laptop is rather old so I am very pleased with the speed, it allows me to tweak easily.

Far from happy with the pose, once all texturing is done I plan on changing this one a bit, and do another more interesting action posed render as well.

Needed to replace that old shoe to my hammer-dude wore. Rather quick model… few hours to model, unwrap and texture.

A hand needs to deal with intense deformation like grabbing guns, swords etc. While zbrush gives you freedom to easily work with organic shapes, you still may want maintain the precision that you had from your 3d application.

Here are a few simple tricks in Zbrush that I found very useful to maintain a solid pipeline. You can see it as a sort of a tutorial regarding layers and morphs in zb, which are both very handy tools where you can be rather creative in your ways of using them.

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Tags: hand modeling, morph, zbrush

After re-textured the head from scratch 6 times I think it’s time to consider it done. I have been pushing my limits quite far for this project which is just fun, but there is so much else left to be done.

First time I am rendering with Irradiance Particles. Must be the only indirect illumination in Mental Ray that can be included in the lightmap compution of the skinshader without taking ages to render.

Also first time, and iteration of this character, where I used my texturing workflow that I described in a tutorial earlier. Still by far the best method I have used=)

Been trying out different workflows to render a mesh in Maya. Displacement mapping has actually been kind of broken lately. Both some issues in zbrush, but mostly the broken ccmesh in mental ray. Annoys me a lot that I used to know how to render an image with almost identical result in maya as in zbrush, now appears to be impossible.

While struggling I fell for the idea to export the “cage” from zbrush. By bringing the lowest level subdivision cage you can smooth it twice at render time. And only use a normalmap generated with zmapper from the subD level above the cage. Fastest method possible I think, and memory efficient too.

Couple good things with this method..

• Fast. Only smoothing (no displacement) at rendertime only takes like 2 seconds extra.
• Memory efficient. Opposed to displacement, you can easily remove subdivision levels without affecting more than the silhouette of the character as the details are stored in the normalmap.
• Effective. Zmapper is good, do doubt. Easy to tweak values like strength, sharpness etc. Regular bitmaps are effective for network render, you can easily change size, clone stamp, edit in all kinds of ways. Which is not as easy with *.map files.
• Easy to preview. Watch the “final” result with smooth preview and normalmaps in the viewport.

I am on Tutorial-mode it seems! That is what you get when I am trying to create art, getting stuck on the little details.

This time I’d like to share a texturing method I discovered recently. It is a bit different to what I used to. But I found it so very efficient, that I was suprised I had never come across this before.

Rather than projecting the texture (like in maya, zbrush etc) the idea was to reverse the process. Instead of altering the texture itself, I came up with the idea that it might be smarter to alter the uv coordinates…

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Tags: face texture projection tutorial, facial texturing tutorial, maya

Here’s a quick tutorial how to create a nice looking base texture, using Zbrush.

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Tags: base texture, tutorial, zapplink, zbrush