Official Apology To Pixologic ZBrush
I'm sorry ZBrush. Sorry I doubted your UI. Sorry for thinking your navigation was unbearable. Sorry for everything, really.
I love you, ZBrush.
From now on you're family.
Thank you, Pixologic. You got yourself a new customer and he couldn't be happier.
You never know until you try, right?
Remember how in this post I was looking for a sculptor?
Well, scratch that.
Turns out all I needed to unleash my inner sculptor was a suitable tool and gawd knows it wasn't ZBrush.
Which one was it, exactly? A-ha! Now that is a great idea for a post, isn't it? ;)
NVIDIA PhysX FleX now compatible with the majority of modern graphics cards
In case you missed the announcement, here's some truly great news:
"To better serve the game development community we now offer Direct3D 11/12 implementations of the Flex solver in addition to our existing CUDA solver. This allows Flex to run across vendors on all D3D11 class GPUs. Direct3D gives great performance across a wide range of devices and supports the full Flex feature set."
Yes! FleX is now not a CUDA-only physics library! NVIDIA devs have also utilized Async Compute to make it as efficient as possible with D3D.
Check out the GDC talk.
Hopefully we'll start seeing more FleX in the upcoming AAA-titles (or maybe even indie ones?.. Who knows!)
A quick note about distractions, conformity and motivation
It's true, that it has been a while since my last blog post.
The thing is, it's a hot ICO season. Being a huge geek myself I simply had to jump the bandwagon. Can't share the details at the moment, but as soon as the craze passes I will absolutely rotate back to the film.
Anyway... Back to the topic.
I'm also looking for a 3D sculptor. I'm not an artist and thus am seriously lacking in the character design department. If you're an aspiring modeler or a sculptor, drop me a line. Hopefully we'll end up working together on the short film. What I'm going after are stylized character designs like this one:
Sara by Ernesto Ruiz VelascoOr this:
Girl by Shuhei Akaha
This particular CGI character look is currently prevalent in the world of western animation and as opposed to pursuing the cherished and elusive unique and highly original character and world design (c), I would much rather adopt a known style that works and spend more time polishing the actual story and animation.
Many of the real artists would scoff at the very idea of conformity when it comes to original work, but going 100% original is insanely difficult in the age when you can find anything and everything at deviantart or tumblr.
You can either spend years developing and implementing a pioneer style into your works or choose a particular look you deem appropriate for your project, produce assets within its boundaries, put stuff together and end up with a finished multimedia project. Like a game, for example. This way a project may not be 100% inventive, but it will have a higher chance to one day become a finished product, rather than a collection of ideas and sketches.
And then there's also another factor at work here...
Motivation.
I don't know about you, but the longer I work on a composite personal creative project, the more difficult it gets. An animated CGI film is one of those. It's incredibly easy to get distracted and waste a ton of time on a single aspect of a complex project, get through, then look back to realize that there was an easier and more straightforward way and afterwards look ahead to see that the amount of work left to be done hasn't really changed much. That's when the inevitable happens and I start questioning whether I need this particular project at all. A dangerous rumination with a chance to bring a full stop to the project at hand.
So I would rather walk a known path and end up at the destination, than fight my way through a trackless forest and either get lost or simply abandon the journey because of loss of motivation.
So this is the time when I pause, take a deep breath and remind myself: "Hey! It's a personal project, remember? It's supposed to be fun. Don't fuck it up."
Perception Neuron Inertial Motion Capture vs Optical Mocap Systems and the First Production Motion Capture Session Experience
Well, the first motion capture session is over and I finally managed to find time to write a post about this exciting experience. The video of the process is still in progress and I will probably be able to post it after finalizing the 4-th and final redaction of the previz.
Or not, since it's getting more and more difficult to find time for logging. Go figure.
Hence today I'll mostly talk nonsense about the differences between optical and inertial motion capture systems and what pros and cons the latter can have in comparison with traditional optical systems like Optitrack. It's something I had to study before investing into the full inertial Neuron MoCap kit to make sure I'd get the most bang for buck when recording action sources for the film.
Optical tracking systems
Pretty sure you're familiar with those "classic" motion capture markers used by cameras and specialized software to track each marker's spacial data for transferring calculated translation onto 3D objects or skeletons. If not, here's an excellent article at Engadget to get you up to speed.
Looking good, Mr. Serkis!Among optical MoCap solutions OptiTrack is arguably one of the better known ones. Guys at OT aim at providing the most affordable optical MoCap cameras and gear. Here's the simplest set-up one would need to capture motion using an optical MoCap system:
Getting Ready for the First Production Mocap Session and Some Motion Capture Examples
I've been quite busy playing with the Perception Neuron 32-sensor Motion Capture kit recently. Long story short, it's an amazing affordable inertial full-body MoCap solution which can produce seriously impressive captures (some amateur examples below). By affordable I mean really affordable, since the only rival that comes to mind is the Xsens MVN suit which has a starting price of about $12,000. You can now clearly understand why I was so excited to receive my very own complete inertial MoCap suit for a fraction of the price of Xsens.
I received it about a week ago (not long after I reviewed the 6-neuron Lite kit) and still can't stop wondering how NOITOM team were able to achieve such level of performance with such democratic pricing.
The kit comes with everything you'll need to start capturing right away (apart from a 2-amp USB powerbank you will need to do captures over WiFi).
Everything is neatly packed and grouped by the body part. Cool thing is that this is a universal MoCap system. That is, you can only equip certain parts and connect them to the hub and capture, in case you don't need the data from all 32 neurons.
The magnificent neuronsI've also found out that the neurons' cases (not storage cases, actual sensors) are made of aluminum, so they are very sturdy which helps, since you need to pop them in and out every time you put on the suit and take it off respectively.
Does anyone else get the "Minority report" vibe?I believe the gloves are the highlight of the system:
Perception Neuron MoCap glovesBeing able to capture hands is really something! Imagine animating all those digits frame by frame! Granted, captured data is not production-ready off the bat, but it's stable enough you can get to cleaning right away and save tens, no, hundreds of hours on animation!
This saturday I will be doing my very first motion capture session. To satisfy your curiosity while I record and edit the MoCap session video, I quickly put together a couple of short clips I produced while testing the kit.
In the video:
- The very first attempts at capturing and re-targeting raw motion capture data (hence shaky) without any filtering whatsoever.
- Demonstration of how full-body capture with hands and fingers can help tell a story in real-time.
- Finished re-targeting rig and a nuanced finger capture. One-click filtering only.
- Just some random rendered scene.
Note: one of those will probably end up as a very short animation I will do before the main 8-minute film to practice every aspect of a feature production. Try to guess which one it is. =)
Well done, NOITOM, really, really well done... Thank you for making top-quality affordable MoCap available for the masses!
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more MoCap related posts.