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Rig encapsulation using Maya’s assets

Posted by Mat on Sep 3, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments

I’ve been playing around lately with Maya’s assets, and I think they’re pretty cool. Following the example provided in Maya’s documents, I wasn’t too happy with the result. I had to play around a bit before figuring out how I want to use them. Here are my thoughts on some points after playing around.

There are two levels of encapsulation when working with assets: black boxing and attribute locking. Black boxing basically just hides  any non-published nodes from the Outliner so the animators can’t go getting into trouble with the guts of the rig. The guts of the rig is the proverbial “big red button”: leave a note saying “DO NOT TOUCH”, and it only increases temptation. Attribute locking goes through the entire asset and locks any attributes that have not been published.

Final Destination 5

Posted by Mat on Aug 20, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments

A movie I recently worked on came out last weekend. That movie is Final Destination 5. I worked on it over at Prime Focus from February to the end of June.

Prime Focus was responsible for the epic bridge collapse sequence in the movie. A lot of hard work went into the sequence, and it featured a lot of gory deaths :)

I was responsible for the digital doubles on the bridge, both background and hero characters. I also wrote some tools for the project including a motion capture importer/mapper, and a tool to help match move easily make adjustments along the camera’s axis, while not changing how it appears to the camera, when stereoscope issues arose.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, consider checking it out. You pretty much know what you’re going to get from a Final Destination movie, but this installation is a lot of fun, not as predictable with how the deaths play out, and quite funny!

Intro to Maya Muscle

Posted by Mat on Aug 7, 2011 in Blog | 1 comment

I started using Maya Muscle this past week for a project I am doing at work. I’m enjoying it a lot so far. Muscle simulations have come a long way since I was last actively working with them.

I started out using the simple muscle system with the muscle spline deformer, but at the advice of the documentation I have started exploring the newer “Muscle Creator” system, successor to the “Muscle Builder”. I can see how this new system adds more flexibility and makes things even easier again for setting up and customizing muscles (as stated in the docs).