Head Studies

Mendelssohn, Holofernes, and Judith
Rendered in Vray

Click for high-res

lcShaderTools_BETA

I’ve been asked about the shadow baking script I was working on.  It made it to the beta form you see here, but I’ve mostly abandoned this project.  The DirectX11 features previewed recently for Maya 2013 address many of my issues, so I’m waiting for that to release new shaders.

This tool is BETA, and I’ll offer NO SUPPORT – the workflow is very rigid, there are bugs.  Extract the ‘lct’ folder to your scripts directory (overwrite as necessary), check the README for run command.

Downloads


USAGE:

1. Click ‘Make CGFX’ and assign this shader as necessary – only the shader created using the tool can interact with it – no other shaders will work with this tool.
2. Click ‘Make or Link Lights’ – this creates a directional light and 3 point lights that are automatically linked to the shaders – you adjust light properties through the light node itself – for point lights the intensity value = attenuation and may have to be set very high depending on your scene scale.
3. For shadow baking, select ONE mesh and click ‘Setup UV’s’ – this creates a secondary UV set for all mesh’s that share the same shader.
4. Mental Ray must be turned ON and available.
5. To bake shadows - select ONE object and click one of the Bake buttons – this bakes shadows for any mesh’s that share the same shader – you do not need to specify a bake path unless you want to.
   

Siggraph 2012

I had the good fortune of being sent by Turbine to Siggraph last week, it was a blast.  The course Practical Physically-Based Shading in Film and Game Production was particularly compelling.  The course notes are very nicely detailed and the section by Brent Burley from Disney was especially interesting.

p3d.in test

My friend showed me this website – p3d.in – they let you upload 3d models for embeding into websites.  Its been done before but this implementation is simple, needs no plugins and seems very fast

A test with a wip mesh – 200k tri’s, about 8MB – may take a moment or two to load.

WIP–Judith Sketch

Here it is.  For now I’ll move onto something new

WIP–Judith

working form this portion of Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Cristofano Allori

WIP - Felix Mendelssohn 2

Time to move on.

WIP - Felix Mendelssohn

work in progress – trying to get used to sculpting in Mudbox

working from this image:
(any one remember CGTalk’s 100 Heads post?)

lcRetopoBasic–Another Update

Downloads

Some small changes based on requests

• Removing a mesh from the High Res List will reset its display overrides such as x-ray and hidden
• Added code to better handle Undo queue functionality when doing a shrink-wrap or relax
• Adjusting the mesh layering effect with the slider will do so for all mesh’s in the list not just the selected one
• Adding a new mesh to the High Res List will pop it to the currently active mesh layering distance
• I disable Viewport 2.0’s vertex animation caching when the script is run – this fixes the problem of the mesh layering effect not updating when the viewport is rotated.  Caching will NOT be automatically re-enabled.

lcRetopoBasic–UPDATE

Downloads

Still BETA, but I’ve squashed some bugs and added some helpful features

• Should deal with object names better, and namespaces from importing obj’s
• Should no longer hang on occasion when relaxing or shrink wrapping
• You can work in any selection mode, object, face, edge, vertex and use the Relax and Shrink-Wrap tools
• Will keep your selection mode so you can continue editing components
• Highlights the Object List red to remind you that you have no high-res selected

Still to do:
    Viewport 2.0 should(?) offer some speed boosts, especially when working with large high-res objects, but the method for layering the high and low res geo doesn’t work properly in VP2.0.  I need to come up with an updated method