Neo & Prime

My animation short that i never finished.

HP & BootCamp Hints

Window Vista issues on older HP and Compaq computer. Upgrading XP to Vista presents audio driver problems with limited solution. Especially when audio driver is intergraded with no additional installer. Newer HP desktop with Vista prevent ealier operation systems to be install. Kernal error during boot. Overall HP computers are not worth buying. Oh yeah, parallel desktop sucks, conflicts with bootcamp.

Leopard Boot Camp runs a solid Vista, except for audio driver during first install. I notice a lot of people having this problem when install Vista using Boot Camp. Audio works but not detected and there is a red led inside the headphone jack. Im using a MacBook, so this might be a solution for people with the same problem. All vista Driver should be in the Retail OSX Leopard CD. Everything will install and work, but once window runs an update, you would have to reinstall the Windows driver from the Leopard CD because it seems to remove the sigmatel driver required to run the audio device. After the second install or repair, it should permanently remove the High Definition Audio device, and it should work and the Sigma Tel Hight Definition Audio CODEC should appear. You can check it in the Device manager.

Next project

Time to get back to work. Will be starting on some game models and figuring some modding. Ill be posting the progress.

Up and Running

Completed building the computer, and booted up fine, with a few minor errors that was easily resolved. Hopefully i can start getting back into maya later this week. I had talied up the cost and i had saved alot on building my own rather than stock or custom from a private company. The same specs would have costed me over three grand from computer shops. The trick was promotions, rebates,Nextag and also recycling. Originaly i had wanted to buy a dell but what i had realized was that i was being overcharged for components. Also a big advantage with a custom computer is each part has its own warenty with a minimum of one year to more expensive parts lasting for three years. This would be something you would have to pay extra if you bought a stock system. Overall it was a good risk and i had learn alot through trial and error, which was at a minimum. I can honestly say that i wont be buying anymore computers, when i can build one for half the cost.

Currently running window xp 64, This OS lacks alot of support. ALot of the freeware doesnt run on this system, some virus and spyware works but not all. Wireless connection have to wait until driver loads up. Explorer doesnt function correctly. System display is limited to customize, or alot of desktop tool doesnt work. Wacom driver locks up the system. Advantage, everything is faster.

Hello

Finally completed enough of my animation to present in Chucks class, it came out okay, not as good as John Lee, so much stuff that i can fix but i guess i have to put that away for now, gotta focus on my portfolio. Tomorrow is the last day of school for me, very excited to finally finish. Just wanted to wish everyone the best, and hope to meet you guys in the future. My friends and acquaintances, good luck:) excluding John Lee.

Snoop

This is my final for Dana's class, decided to start and finish it during the break. I was going to do flava flav but i dobt most of the students know who he is so I decided to do Snoop Dogg. SAY NO TO DRUGS, hehe.

Sample environment

A clip from my animation. Drafts. Accidently delete some clips so this is some earlier stuff. Sorry for the quality, the file is too large.

Neo&Prime

A scene from my animation

Check this out

My friend Vibol produced some awesome music, check him out, Vibol Tell us what you think.

Procedure

I just finished this procedure for my creature tentacle. Its under the comment.

Paint

Hay Chio, i had worked on this with you.

What!!!

Just finishing up the horse before i give him his armors:) Just recently completed the teeth during chucks class and finally able to render it:) Suggestions are welcome.

Look what I found

i had done this two years ago, guess who? DRAGON BALL ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Models

About completed with this horse model, second try. I have been working on this allday today. I will be adding details and tweaking him to make him look aggressive, hopefully i can post the result later tonite. Have to finish as much as possible today because im bouncing between projects. Look at his smile :) actually hes going tobe opening his mouth, so i had left it like that, because i haven created his teeth. Advice and suggestions are welcome, because im not sure what a horse really look like.


Less like a mule and more like a horse, hehe:) I need a fresh eye

Character

Just had finished the character prop design for Dana's class. He really helped me alot to improve this character. It turned out much better after his advice. Also Javier's suggestions and example helped alot as well.

Solution

I had encountered the same problem that Chris had encountered earlier this week. I really had no solution until now. I had the same problem with my blend shape. Here is what I know.
Modifying the mesh after skinning will create a tweak node and also a transform set to store the changes. You can delete nondeformer history then find the nodes and delete them in your chain. Then you can create your blend shapes. If you don’t remove it, the tweak node will be on top of your input hierarchy and will override the blends that are stored underneath it, and no you cannot rearrange the tweak node in your input.
If you had already created your blends and added them to your target mesh, what you should do is “do not use membership tool” because it will mess with the weight in your blend shapes. Even though you paint over your blend shapes weight, the member ship will override it, so you’re screwed unless you reassign your membership to the target.
Editing blend weights. You are not able to select which sets of blends you can paint weights on through the paint blend weight tool. To access different blend sets go to the cluster weight tool. Under attribute, select Filter all. Then right on top of that select the attribute, blend Shape, the one you what to edit.

So difficult

I really messed up on Neos Rig. I was just skinning and had figured out that i had messed up the joint orientation during rigging. Had spend most of the day trying to fix it but no result. Giving up was not a choice and had to rerig it. So now finally finished it and everything seems correct this time around, I dont have to scratch my head tha hard this time. This is basically my 5th try rigging this character from scratch so extremely frustrated. But failure is a learning experience, thats what i learned today.

Neo&Prime

I have no choice but to start setting up some camera shots to turn in on tuesday. Although i have the rigs completed, I have not skinned. Im not going to take the chances of skinning the rig now and end up reskinning it again because i havent decided on the hair system im going to use. If its dynamics or modeled.

PrimeRig

I was hoping for it to get easier, but i guess not, It got alot more difficult rigging Prime, took me a while to figure out the feet IK. Lesson to be learned, the rotation of the IK is based on the joint local axis which really messed me up.

Suffer:(

I cant find the rigging package from class, so suffing with the rigs right now, but finally figured it out. Also learned somethine new.

Yeah! finally finish the first Rig except the eyese because i havent decided on making them yet. Hopefully tomorrow will be an easier day. Its nice to keep a log of my animation project, shows how much i suffered.

YEAH!

Finally Done setting up all the bones for all seven, now the CNTRLS, aaaaaaaaaahhh..

Rigging

have to finish all the rigging and skinning by next week. Dam, Four main rigs and three prop rig. I cant start texturing the environment until next week. Hopefully i can start with the blend shape while i do the animatic. But so far so good, I have completed putting bones for the three of four main characters already and now currently working on the fourth one. Hopefully I can finish all the bone tonite and start adding some controls.

Hint on rigging. Before you mirror the rig make sure you renamed all your joints and run the orient joint script and adjust them according. After mirroring do not run the orient script again, than what you do is select all the joints in component mode (mirrored joints" and rotate "Y" 180 so all the joint orient is reversed on the mirror joints. This will save alot of time rather than readjusting them one at a time.

Texturing

About finish texturing, this is the 16th day since i had finished the banana, fair progress. Have to start scaling and rigging soon, then i can start on the environment while i animate. I had to tone down the texture size alot because Maya isnt processing well with too many large files. I plant to spend only 20 days for texturing props and another 20 days for the environemnt. Hopefully i can finish all in time:( Somestuff are not coming the way i want it but right now i just have to move on.

Yeah

98% done with the UV finally i can start texturing soon

Neo & Prime update

Finished about 85% of the unwrapping, aaaaaaaaaaaaah, this seems to be taking forever. Just two more environment to go and im ready to start texturing except resolving some Maya bugs. Push, Push, Push. I should have proposed something simpler. I guess the pressure is getting to me. At least ive complete all the props and character unwrapping. Early this month was unproductive, i was on and off because of some graphic design stuff and playing too much video game. But almost over the slope, and hopefully it will be a smooth ride down.

Neo & Prime update

Have been pushing hard with the UV unwrap but lately been side tracked, or has been a while. Just have to unwrap neo, Prime and the and rest doesnt require much attention. Basically 40% into the unwrapping. Hopefully finish it all but early next month and save some time for texturing and rigging.

Team Ntricate Dasim style

Team Ntricate is going overhaul with version 2.
The Next step for team Ntricate:
Exploring a whole new style.

Click on image to see full size.

Business Card

Completed another business card and CI, havent had much time to work on my project:( but finally sended out for print:)

Business Logo:)

Recently complete two business logos.

Anyone need a massage, hit me up, its $100/hr. I mean Carmen, or if you need help finding a killer, you can contact Micaela.
PS, i still can print coupons.

Outside Neo

This is out side of the cave, I still have along way to go but once i finish this i can touch up the rest and start unwarpping and texturing.

Update

I Think I Cheated on Maya:(

Finally had a chance to play with XSI, seems almost like Lightwave but still trying to get use to the UI. Although the transition was kind of difficult at first from Maya, I finally got the hang of it. The quick key is going to take some time getting use to but I had the same problem jumping from 4D to Lightwave, and then to Maya. Although I haven’t created anything in XSI, I did find some features useful, that when applied in Maya is very effective. I guess that’s the benefit of working on different packages, each program has its strength that isn’t prominent in the others, but share similar function. Maya is still my number one program although XSI looks kool.

GOTTA CHECK THIS OUT

Final Fight

Hints

Recently i have been trying something different than my usual Maya stuff. Some things i had learned during messing around with Nurbs.

When stiching two surface to gether it creates a very small gap between the seams. To resolve this what you can do is select that two surface and go to align to clean up the seam. Plus you can turn up the sampling in the rendering settings, or go to Nurbs render overide to clean up the seams.

Sculpting on stiched nurb surface; Make sure that the nurb surface are stiched together. Then create a lattice around the intended surfaces to be sculpted. Now when you sculpt the surfaceit will not fall apart. but just dont undo.

Something i also find helful when modeling in nurbs. Create a general shape of your object with polygons, this will help you define your volume. Then you just can turn on snap to point and connect the dots, this will speed up your process.

Polygon modeling: Extrude
An easy way to start a polygon model is from the eye. What i usually do is first creat a sphere, rotate it 90 degree so it face forward. Duplicate the sphere and hide the copy in another layer. With the original, draw out the shape of an eye with the polygon split tool. Delete all the geometry except the eye you just traced out. Now what you can do is select the edges and extrude/translate them outward all at once with the manipulator, but make sure you history is on. BTW extrude with the blue arrow/box because that is the normal direction. Once you have done that a few time you now have the general shape of the eye. Keep it simple for now. Adjust it as you wish Now just bring the inner part of the new geometry created across the top of the nose and you can bring it downwars and form the general shape of the nose. All you need is basically three plane. The bottom, side and front of the nose. Now use the polygon split tool to create a hole and just bring all your excess geometry in there because no one is going to see it. After you completed the nose you can continue downward to complete the mouth, and then you can bring everything towards the ear. Trace out the general shape of the ear and just extrude it out. Suggestion, if you like sculpting this is what you can do. Create a plane and trace out the shape of the ear. Extrude it out to give it volume. After testilate is very high and use the sculpt tool to sculpt the general shape. After this rough sculpt of the ear in position to the ear on your character and turn snap points on and now extrude and snap from from the facial geomety. Now you have to extrude all the faces from the forehead to back of the neck. SImple but if you do it wrong the character head looks funky. What you can do is creat a sphere. Tesilate it to the right amount, and you can even sculpt it as you like. Now you can positiong right beind the face and turn on snap to point and extrude and snap. This will give you a more intended shape. Bring all the geometry down to the neck and then is where the head ends. Keep triangles for areas that has limited influence because when you render you would smooth it out and it will fix all the triangles and make them all quads. So dont worry about it, for sure your not going to turn it in all blocky unless its a game model and if it was a game model triangles wouldnt matter. You dont have to be too concious about that, because if you do you will be drawing lines all over the character that has no ending and also you will have an excessive amount of poly, just will be harder later on.

Another something different

Skull

Bone head. Something different:)

Chio's thoughts. Ever wonder?

...Why women can't put on mascara with their mouth closed?
...Why you don't ever see the headline "Psychic Wins Lottery"?
...Why "abbreviated" is such a long word?
...Why doctors call what they do "practice"?
...Why lemon juice is made with artificial flavor, while dishwashing liquid is made with real lemons?
...Why the man who invests all your money is called a "broker"?
...Why there isn't mouse-flavored cat food?
...Who tastes dog food when it has a "new & improved" flavor?
...Why they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?
...Why sheep don't shrink when it rains?
...Why they are called apartments when they are all stuck together?
...Why they call the airport "the terminal" if flying is so safe?

...Why chio ask these questions, when she say she's busy?

Answer:)

-When you tilt your head back its natural to open your mouth
-Psychics are to busy ruining peoples relationships.
-Abbreviated is a word, abbr is more what your looking for
-Doctors are actually train monkeys
-Too much lemon juice will make you vomit
-Yes, a broker will make you broke
-Exporting rats from India would be too expensive
-Dogs taste dog food, if its new then its improve
-They sterilize the needle because they don’t want the subject to die of complications.
-Wool on a sheep's back has a natural waterproofing or grease in the coat.
-self contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building
-Who said flying was safe?

-Thats her excuse to keep me up when i tell her that ill wait for her.

Week 3: Environment Props

I want the environment to be as natural as possible. To me the small stuff is what matters. I guess alot of these models you see wont be in the scene for more than 10 seconds, but those are the details im use to, I guess I have to break this habit because six months is not alot of time to complete this animation and that is my goal. Im currently at the end of my third week of modeling and have been lately slacking off. Gradually stepping back into gear and hopefully I can produce at a faster rate. I guess the project is becoming more difficult as I progress. As I plan for what’s ahead in the next phase, im just starting the current one. Right now I feel as if im on autopilot. Im not really thinking much on the process of model because it seems to be natural for me, but for my mind, im constantly thinking forward for what I may encounter later in the project such as: areas that I have to improvise or just when im working on something else and have to put this aside. Hopefully I can complete all of this soon because I really want to work on my actual demo real this coming Fall:) Ill be posting progress as i complete them:)

I will be posting the WIP Environmental as i progress.









I dont know what this is.

NEO&PRIME WIP

I had posted all these stuff at fullertoon forum for crits. I guess i will come back to this model in about three weeks to fix them up and unwrap.


Neo Update




On to the next character




Oh look a big stick:)








Neo & Prime is a short animation I plan to complete for animationB. I finally have time to work on this assignment. I will be posting the WIP as I progress.

Two version of Prime, Small and PrimeApe version


A little bit more progress










Second day on Prime and finally completed him, I think, I need a fresh eye. On to the next model.
More Props.

Guess what this is?

Dam! so much to model. Looking forward to rigging, booooooooo.

behind schedule:(

The end of week one. Week two 05/28/2007.
Objective of this week is to complete Neo and his gun. FInish the forth character. Finish additional props.



Another day of not being productive:( Trying to do at least something for the day. BTW, this isnt the Dazz model, its another model but based on similar idea.

Demonstrations and Developements

Recently John had completed a control point and orient mel script that really speeds up the rigging process. What this script will do is point, orient, create null group, and delete constrain history with a press of a button, zeroing-out the CNTRLs. He is also working on additional scripts to assist during rigging. His scripts are very helpful. You can check it out at his blog.

Im currently working on a background for my animation. I will be posting the progress along with the process.