SeithCG

I’ve just made a major update to poseLib (version 4.4.0). The biggest addition probably being the long awaited support for Macs (and OSX). A big thanks goes to Ludo for taking the time to thoroughly test it!

Also, I’ve decided to switch poseLib from a freeware model to a honor-based system (basically a donation principle). It means that people who use and like poseLib can make a donation to help the development and express their satisfaction with the tool. But I didn’t want to turn it into a plugin with DRM and thus force users to buy it. As I said, it’s “honor-based”; you do what you choose to…

Here is a screenshot of a Crysis mod I’m working on (when I have time, of course). Again, I have to say that the CryEngine 2 is very impressive indeed. It allows you to fine tune the shaders and the lighting to a degree of precision that is unprecedented in the domain of video-games. And since I’m using MayaCGF, I just have to click one button to send the model from Maya to Sandbox 2 (the Crysis editor). And if I update the model in Maya, I just click the refresh button in the editor and the updated model is instantly reloaded. I’m loving it!!

I’ve recently moved the first couple of shots through the whole pipeline, from animatic to “final” compositing stage. Of course, as on any movie, I’m sure I’ll tweak the shots before the production is over though, just to upgrade them to a higher level of quality. Anyway, it’s really rewarding! Yay! 😀

Oh, and a good friend of mine named Fabrice Joubert just finished his short movie called French Roast. Congrats to him and the crew! Try and catch it in festivals, it’s all good!

I’ve just started my wonderful adventures in render-land, and I’ve recently had to setup a (very small) render farm. After having experienced difficulties finding information online for doing so, I wrote a few simple tips about setting up a couple of machines for the purpose of network rendering with Mental Ray and Maya. This is fairly technical stuff, but who knows, maybe some of you will find that useful…

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… 😀