Guillermo M Leal Llaguno has released version 1.00 of a stand alone, post processing program called Glare.

The program’s loaded with options for specular blooms, rays, and other effects. From its demo video it looks like Glare offers all the fine tuning you could ask for: you can view and adjust which highlight levels should get the effect and view those selections and their effects either alone, or overlaid on the source image(s).

Using a stand alone application like this means that the effects can be tweaked and changed at any time after rendering – nice! – and because the program will work on image sequences you can add blooms to whole animations without having to re-render a thing.

I’m thinking about renderings here, but I guess it might not be obvious that this works equally well with video footage.

The final bits of the demo video show some of the possibilities for compositing Glare’s edited frames with the original frames of an animation.

At US $50 it looks like a great tool to add to the toolbox.

(Via Max Underground)

Technorati Tags: computer animation, 3d, computer graphics, rendering, specular bloom, post processing, compositing, glare, Guillermo M Leal Llaguno

In spite of what I said yesterday about how much I hate skinning characters to their skeletons, every now and then I do get to smile. My latest trick is to skin the characters not only to bones, but to splines that are (sometimes) also skinned to some of the same bones.

So when Harry’s chest and waist were getting pulled back and forth between warring bones I extracted some splines from his model, skinned those splines to parts of his skeleton, and added the splines to the bones that control Harry himself.

Then I adjusted the influence of those splines to even out the skinning and lock down the chest and waist lines – which are structural parts of his clothing, among other things.

This is a lot like what I’ve lately been doing with faces. The 3DS Max UI does a lousy job of displaying the splines’ envelopes, but since I can see the results on the model that’s not a huge problem.

The biggest downside seems to be that if you intend to edit the splines, as I’m doing in my faces, it’s not a great technique for animation because it’s hard to keyframe the shapes of the splines*. I guess you could create morph targets for the splines, which is a thought, but I so rarely do animation that I’m not worrying about that for now.

One reason this might be nice for animation, though, is that you can use the splines to simulate the way surfaces like skin or cloth slide over the more rigid surfaces they cover. That’s sort of what’s happening here already.

*Oh, there might be a way, but I don’t seem to be clever enough to work it out.

Technorati Tags: computer animation, 3d, thrilling tales of the downright unusual, character skinning, splines

My friend Glenn Price just showed me something he’s working on, and that reminded me of Andy Murdock’s Lots of Robots. I hadn’t watched it in awhile, and before I knew it, well, that’s what I did. Now you should too.

Andy’s been pretty busy recently with his work for the National Geographic Channel but I hope he gets back to this one day.

Sadly it looks like you can’t buy the DVDs at the moment. You can’t have mine.

Technorati Tags: computer animation, 3d, robot, andy murdock, lots of robots, cool

Okay, I got that out of my system. I finished up Tallie’s brown hair, which will end up on somebody’s head someday, but then I wheeled her back into the shop.

As I textured her I started with the fabrics, which led to the complexion, which led to the hair; and when I’d reached the end of that road she wasn’t quite who I thought she’d be when I started. Sometimes that’s good – characters often know themselves better than we know them – but this time, I think, I’d just put the cart before the horse.

So here’s much more the Tallie I thought I was making when I started her. I had an interesting time with her skin tones – it’s so easy for pale skin materials to end up looking dead – but eventually I came up with something that I like (again!) using very much the same techniques as the earlier version. The paler areas have a surprising amount of blue in them, to suggest that translucency you need in skin that’s not undead. So today… this is what I like .

One other thing I know about Tallie is that she’s quite fond of hats. Happily this hair will adapt to headgear a lot better than the other.

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, tallie

Here’s an update on Tallie, that new character I’ll be using in the Clockwork Book stories. I had some adventures with her hair, which I now sort of like – it’s sculpted with Mudbox, which is something I haven’t done with hair before. I just about always do some retouching on my characters’ hair, so my goal was to come up with something that’d nearly work.

Which might be a larger lifetime goal than I realized when I started to type that sentence.

Anyway, one of the things I like best about Tallie is the way I constructed her skin material. It’s based on two copies of a SymbiontMax material ("Human"). The first skin material’s pale, while the second one’s freckled.

I’m masking between those materials using vertex colors. You can see Tallie’s vertex colors in the lower left image.

All the heavy lifting for the vertex colors was done by baking in the lighting from an overhead light source. (In Max, that’s done with the Assign Vertex Colors Utility.) I positioned a directional light so that it cast light where sunlight would. That way Tallie’s more tanned, freckled skin tones show up just where more tanned, freckled skin tones really happen. I touched up the vertex colors around her throat and on her hands, but other than that it’s a pretty simple simulation of the way her skin would really be affected by the Sun. Neat!

Then a painted material gets masked on to affect her lips and eyebrows. But apart from those details her skin’s completely procedural.

Now, I regret to say, I have to skin her to a skeleton. That’s the part of character work that I always dread. But first… the lawn! I dread yardwork slightly less than character skinning.

Update:

This comment interested me enough that instead of skinning the character (which I know sounds awful; that’s just what it’s called) I’ve been modifying her ridiculously complex hair material to see what kind of brunette Tallie would make. I find that I also sort of like this version, and maybe more than I sort of like the original one.

I also established that the best example of a brunette (brunet?) in Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves is wearing aviator’s headgear, so you never actually see his hair.

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, clockwork book, 3d character, vertex colors, materials, hair, mudbox