SeithCG

Taking a little break from the movie. I launched Sandbox2 again and was caught all over by the magnificent cryEngine2. That and I tried the Exodus Pine Trees pack for Crysis (you can see them in the background); they truly did an excellent job! I just tweaked the shaders to get something a little bit more realistic looking, but they’re a pleasure to watch.

And so I thought I’m going to make some trees! The birch is a very peculiar (and recognizable) tree, so I got some source material from the web and went to work. The difficult part is that I had to add support for colored vertices in the Maya exporter; that’s indispensable if you want your leaves to blow in the wind in a convincing way. I think I’ll probably write a tutorial at some point on how to make a tree for Crysis in Maya.

Today I thought “I’m going to try that Mudbox program I heard so much about”. I had very briefly (~10 minutes) tried Zbrush before, but was turned away by the weird “proprietary” interface.

So I just exported a low-rez mesh I modeled in Maya, imported it in Mudbox as an .obj file and quickly started “sculpting” away using my Wacom tablet. And I have to say I was amazed by the ease of use and the level of control offered by the program. Now realism is not really my cup of tea, but this was a great refresher on anatomy. Don’t know if I’ll ever get around to finishing it though…

Anyway, I hadn’t sculpted anything since I was about 15 years old, and it was weird to find again the feeling of manipulating clay through a digital pencil and a flat screen. But hey, I’m a believer now! Kudos to the Skymatter guys, or I should say Autodesk, since they’ve been bought by the owners of Maya. Which incidentally was another great plus for me: the navigation in Mudbox is the same as in Maya! Zero learning curve! Yay! 😛

Since I didn’t post any movie-related news for quite a while, I just wanted to say I’m working right now on the rigging of the characters. Then I’ll move on to surfacing. I know I’m repeating myself but it’s a huge amount of work!

I won’t be posting many pictures, since I want to keep a lot of things under wrap still. It’s a bit silly not to be able to show the better parts of one’s own work, but I believe the impact of the discovery will be greater that way.

So I’m just posting an older picture which is one of those quick-and-dirty tests you do so many times during the course of a production. In this case I was just testing the rig when I “took the picture”. But that’ll have to do for now… 😀

I just released something I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks; it’s called MayaCGF and it’s a Maya tool to import models from the game Crysis into Maya. It also lets you export your models into the game of course! You can find all the instructions here.

While importing some game models for testing purpose, I’ve been shocked by the amount of details put into the human faces. I mean those could almost be used for feature with just a smooth level added. Congrats to the Crytek artists!

Oh and I almost forgot; it looks like “Seith’s Little Island” was published on a German magazine’s DVD called “PC ACTION” during the month of March. I don’t know the details, but still, that’s nice!

I released a new poseLib version with a couple of minor fixes. As usual you can find it here. I also updated the shotCam rig with both a new shotCam.ma file and the matching shotCamLister script which you can find here. Another addition to the Crysis tools I put up is crysisCleanupObj which fixes the problems inherent to exporting a brush as an .obj file from Sandbox2. It’s available on the MEL scripts page.

As a side note, I see my little Crysis map has been downloaded more then a thousand and six hundred times on Crymod (and I don’t dare to look how many times on this site). That’s just ridiculous.

Oh and I’m 99% done with the first pass of the 3D layout on my movie. Yay!

Here we go, I just added a very short tutorial detailing the steps I follow to export a Maya static model (meaning no rig yet) into Crysis. Let me know if I can clarify anything…

Update: The steps are a bit different now (new file) and I added a pdf version here.

Update 2: I worked on the MEL scripts and they do work a bit better. Now I can export my knight model with one click!

Of course there’s still lots of problems, things I don’t understand and such… And no animation yet. Still waiting for the SDK to get some badly needed information…

I gave a lecture to a group of Japanese students last week, from Osaka and Nagoya if I’m not mistaken (thanks to a top-notch translator of course). I talked mostly about animation, showing clips from my work on 2D and 3D movies. It happened at Studio Arts, and it was nice!

Also, I just added a little movie showing the progression of a scene through the animation process on the movie “Flushed-Away”.