TheTell-TaleHeart.com Blog

(Used as technical notes for my own troubleshooting and others running into the same problem) (scene #170.05, testing LowFlyingCamera, Object strokeDeadWillow1Freaky2_TTH20093))

The issue: When the paint effects are drawn, they look fine from one frame to next with a still camera, but when a moving camera goes by the texture/shading, slides up the tree.

Environment and Assumptions:

• Maya 2009 64Bit
• Rendering in Maya Software
• Production Level Rendering and Anti-Aliasing

Steps and Results:

• Removed shadows - is this a shadow effect (didn’t solve problem)
• Removed texture applied (didn’t solve problem)
• Made Shading> Color 1 and Tube Shading>Color2 same color  (didn’t solve problem)
• Conver t to polygons - While this may work and is not a viable workaround for me, it is good to know (problem does not exist on polys)
• Turned Translucence from 0.2 to 0 (didn’t solve problem)
• Set Twist>ForwardTwist=off (didn’t solve problem)
• Twist =.446 –> 0 (didn’t solve problem)
• Twist Rate =0.289 –> 0 (didn’t solve problem)
• Twist Rand =0.421 –> 0.078 (didn’t solve problem)
• Tip Fade = 0.100 –> 0 (didn’t solve problem)
• Shading>Transparency 1= 0  –> about 10% (didn’t solve problem)
• Tube Shading> Tube Transparency 2= 0  –> abuot 20% (didn’t solve problem)
• Tube Shading>Tip Fade=0.1 –> 0 (didn’t solve problem)
• Map Opacity=0 –> 1 (didn’t solve problem)
• Map Method=Full View   –> Tube2D (with additional new settings) (SOLVED IT!) A little Blur Mult and Smear is needed as well.

Apparently the full view texture mapping was causing the shader/texture to slide as the camera moved. The full view texturing is used to map the texture to the paint effect from the view of the camera, as paint effects don’t have UV’s to elegantly attach a texture. So, when the camera moves, the texture is re-sized to fit again. 2d and 3d map methods work well for my fly through animation.

Meet Dupin. He is the lead police officer in East Richmond, 1842. He likes reading, parties, and investigating reported screams at 4am in the morning…from Edgar’s house.

Work in progress.

The interesting thing about computer graphics (CG) is that the fantastic often pose less technical and artistic challenge than many of the more common and less notible items we see each day. For instance, if you saw a CG alien bug would you recognize if it moved wrong or if it had too many wrinkles just above its pinchers…probably not. But if you saw, a CG human whose eye lids blinked too slow or at the exact same time…everyone would notice it or at least sense that something felt too mechanical or fake. It is because we have seen people blink hundreds of thousands or millions of times. We have seen it so many times that if we don’t consciously recognize a problem, our subconscious will….for that reason, it often takes a significantly more time and effort to create something that might be less significant.

What a dramatic introduction to my posting on creating skin…don’t you think. Below are the first round of steps for creating skin.

(continue reading…)

In 2005/06 the trailer had over a dozen public screenings (foreign and domestic). As the full version is completed, I will be bring the movie back to film festival and TV showings, as well as, the larger Halloween and additional Poe specialized film festivals. However, it will not be available in its entirety on the internet (e.g. iFilms and others)

Below is a partial list of the previous showings of The Tell-Tale Heart trailer:

• Halloween Horror Picture Show (Tampa, FL) - film festival
• H.P. Love Craft Film Festival ( Portland OR) - film festival
• Rhode Island International Horror Film Fest (Riverside, RI) - film festival
• “A Night With Poe” (Superior, WI) - film festival
• Cackalacky Film Festival ( Charlotte, NC ) - film festival
• Santa Cruz Film Festival (Santa Cruz, CA) - film festival
• Enigma Films - (Tampa, FL) - film festival
• Halloween Film Fest - (London, UK) - film festival
  
• Silicon Valley Siggraph Club (San Jose, CA) - CG trade club
• San Francisco Siggraph Club (Berkeley, CA) - CG trade club
• Thrillville at Parkway Theater (Berkeley, CA) - dinner and a movie Theater
• Weekly Reader (home page) - web
• The DailyReel (Top 10 page) - web
  
• iFIlm (animation home page) - web
• Cinema Insomnia - TV
  

Mudbox allows me to create and refine the organic items in the short such as the character heads, bodies, trees, etc.  A fabulous software, that does require some know how despite its user friendly interface. I am useing Mudbox 2009 Service pack 2 64bit on Vista 64.

- Importing texture layers. I created a base head in Maya to start working from in mudbox. In that process, I created strarting color, bump, and spec textures. Note that bump maps and other grey scale textures need to be 8 bit. So, if you are pulling it from Photoshop, make your texture grey scale before exporting for use in Mudbox.

Using Maya 2009 and Photoshop CS4, I am creating a base face texture for all the characters in the story. Here are my notes:

GENERAL NOTES:
- It is a little unstable: , At one point, Maya no longer recognized the PSD file. Spent hours trying different approaches (tossing special layers, removing extra sub-groups, etc). Eventually, I had to recreate, however, copying the layers from the old PSD to a newly created Maya PSD network proved challenging as Maya would reject half of the layers. A few hours later I rebuild the face texture to where I left off.
- To see how Maya will read the folder, flatten the layers: For the most part, Maya seems to flatten the layers inside each group top down. Once or twice I thought Maya was messing something up as Maya created texture did not match what I was seeing in Photoshop…until I went layer by layer flattening the layers…and then I saw the same thing as Maya.

AVOID:
- Transparent Photoshop layers which have a layer mask. I have noticed some odd interpretations. However, this can be side stepped by placing a white layer underneath, flatten the two layers into one, set the resulting layer as multiply…then you can use a layer mask.