Archive

Archive for November, 2007

Quick technical update

November 22nd, 2007 1 comment

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! :)

Categories: misc, production, update Tags:

Crysis/Maya tutorial [Updated]

November 14th, 2007 1 comment

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… :(

 

 

Categories: crysis, misc, update Tags:

“Flushed-Away” animation process.

November 8th, 2007 1 comment

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”.

Categories: update Tags:

The Crysis editor is coooool! [Update: Download the map!]

November 2nd, 2007 11 comments

I don’t know if you heard of a game called “Crysis” (which should be on the shelves in about 2 weeks), but a demo was recently released, and I just started playing with the editor. It’s basically a program which allows you to build “levels” for the game. However by “level” I mean landscapes the size of Switzerland.

Anyway you can do almost anything you want in there, from adding blades of grass to raise mountains. And the lighting engine included is also mighty impressive. It features Sub-Surface-Scattering, depth of field, motion blur, oceans, realistic night and day cycles, and… all in real time of course. Lotsa fun! :)

Update: I added the download link at the bottom of the page.

Categories: crysis, misc, update Tags:

Another ruff layout sequence!

November 1st, 2007 No comments

Well last week was tough. I wasted almost 2 days trying to fix a nasty bug in Maya. Mind you, it’s the first time I meet something that bad (after many years using the program). Anyway, at some point I noticed every scene was opening with error messages. Which is a bad sign. So I did what any sane person would do in this case; I threw the computer out of the… er I mean I nuked the preferences folder and let Maya recreate default ones.

However it did not fix the problem at all. It seems one scene I was working on was “contaminated”, but to make a long story short, I managed to get back on track. As a plus, I now have a script that I just have to run to set my preferences back to the way I like. In case this happens again. *knocks on wood*

But most importantly I’m done with the last (chronologically) sequence of the movie! Now I just have the first sequence left to do. So I’m still on track I guess.

Talking about my short movie, let me answer here some commonly asked questions about it: I would say I’ve been (really) working on it for about 6 month. I hope that I can finish it within an additional year. The movie is supposed to run a bit less than 15 minutes. For now, I would like to keep the story under wraps. So let’s just say it involves a robot and a boy…

And, surprisingly enough, no farting and/or burping animals.

Categories: update Tags: