Thesis Project: End of Semester Summary

I haven't posted much lately since the semester has ended, mainly because I'm trying to get used to having a third warm body in our home.  However, I wanted to post my semester's progress for my thesis class.  I still have some tweaking to do with Alex's hair, but I need to call him done soon.  For the Robot, I wound up desaturating the colors of the environment so it wasn't so intense.  For all intents and purposes, I am calling that model done.

I am doing a short character sculpt just for fun over the break, but at the beginning of January I will need to start working on the Kobol.  In just a few months, I'll be finished with this and on my way to graduating with my master's degree!

Dear Santa,

Dear Santa,

Once again I'm posting this online because I know you have some pretty good data mining algorithms on your servers up there at the North Pole to help you keep up your naughty and nice lists.  Thus, I figured this would be easier than mailing a physical letter.  Plus, the post office is doomed to closure, so I hear.  I would imagine that with the advent of Facebook and the amount of people who post drunk pictures of themselves (3 out of 4 Britons, for example), those lists get a little more off-balanced each year.

Anyway, how have things been this past year for you?  (Again, I always feel that there should be some sort of pleasantries before I launch into my list of demands yuletide requests.)  Have the polar ice caps melted yet?  Or is that global warming thing just a bunch of hooey?  There are plenty of lobbyists down here to try and convince us one way or another, but for the most part, I don't really listen to much of anyone in the media.  How is Mrs. Claus doing, by the way?  Wikipedia tells me that her name is actually YoYo Frost Claus, but honestly, I don't know how reputable that source actually is.  I don't want to speculate on the subject either, just in case your wife's name really is YoYo...  By the way, I don't know if she is a regular internet surfer, but there are some shocking allegations coming from the offspring of a  number of desperate housewives.   I am certain they aren't true, but you might want to warn her about the smear campaign against your good name.

Anyway, enough of my inane banter.  I actually wanted to let you know that the following is what I am respectfully requesting this Christmas season: nothing.

Yeah, you read that right.  I have no requests, wishes, demands, needs, or desires that require fulfillment this year.  You see, 2011 has been very fortunate to me, bestowing many a blessing upon me throughout it's existence.  I don't know if you've kept track of things, but the following are just a few of the great things I have experienced over the past year:

• Just two weeks into 2011, I was able to be sealed to my sweet wife Sarah for time and eternity in the Mount Timpanogos temple.  All of our parents and siblings were able to make it, which made it a very special time for us.
• In our new ward in Provo, we had the chance to serve as ward service missionaries to our brothers and sisters in the state hospital where we gained completely new and intimate insight into how far-reaching the power of the Atonement really is.
• A few months into our marriage, we discovered that we wouldn't be solitary newlyweds by the end of the year!
• Sarah finally finished BYU (although the school's bureaucracy has kept her from getting her diploma and officially graduating... maybe you could do something about that).
• When we moved from our tiny house in Provo, the amount of help that showed up to help us load were more than we could possibly use, and we wound up with a bit of a bottleneck in loading.
• My parents were kind enough to let us stay at their house for a little while during the summer while we were waiting for an apartment to open up in California.
• We got to spent a few days with half of Sarah's family up in Oregon.
• A little while later, we got to spend time with my entire family for a week at a lodge in Bear Lake,
• I passed my mid-point review for my thesis project, which opened the door to finishing my degree up in May.
• In August our wonderfully spacious and rent-controlled apartment opened up in Martinez, California.  The move across Nevada went seamlessly without any problems.  When we got to our place, once again, there were so many people that showed up to help us that we were totally unloaded in half an hour.
• I had the chance to get to work on my thesis with a really great guy who works at Lucasfilm.  He even invited me out to come have lunch with him at Skywalker Ranch, which is a place I've wanted to visit for a long time.
• We got to go spend general conference weekend with my brother Brian and his family up at a condo in Lake Tahoe.
• We had the great privilege of having Sarah's parents down to take care of us on Thanksgiving and spend some good time with us.
• And finally, our little bundle of joy, Leah Lourena Reynolds was born on December 3rd.  The birth went fine and, though our schedule has been wrecked, we're very happy that she is a healthy, content, and energetic baby.

So, as you can tell, life has been pretty good this year.  I mean, those are the big things that have just happened to me directly.  I haven't even scratched the surface about how many of my friends had kids or got married.  Or that Osama Bin Laden finally got his comeuppance.  Really, life has been great this year.  I have a great support network and all of my needs are constantly met.

In short, I don't want to be impolite, but if you want to skip my stocking this year, I'm totally fine with that.  I mean, feel free to still come in and eat the cookies and milk.  Heaven knows I don't need those calories in my system.  In fact, have all our holiday goodies that people bring over.  If you don't eat them, I will.  And, believe me, I don't need them!

I guess what I am saying is that if there is a limited amount of Christmas cheer that you're allowed to hand out, feel free to pass on me.  I've had the equivalent all year long and it's really quite nice.  I know there are those out there with empty bellies, sorrowful hearts, and tired eyes that need blessings more than I do.  Of course, if you've got someone on your mind, maybe I should be the one to go give them some Christmas cheer instead.  They might appreciate it more from a friend than a fat stranger in a red suit.  No offense.

Anyway, it's been quite the year and I've experienced all of the three big M's that are big life-changing events: Marriage, Maternity, and Moving... or are the three big M's "marriage," "maternity," and "mortgage?"  Hang on a second...

Marriage, maternity, moving... mortgage?  Movie monsters?  (Double word score!)

Whatever.  What I'm trying to say is that it's been a big year.  Supposedly next year the Mayan calendar is set to restart and that has a lot of people worrying that the world is ending.  However, I don't think that the word "restart" means the end of the world.  Just look at what Hollywood has been doing for the past ten years and you'll see that the world hasn't ended.  Maybe the world of good entertainment, but not the whole world.  (Besides, the first part of The Hobbit comes out next year!)

Anyway, this has gone on long enough.  I just wanted to wish you, your wife, and unionized elf labor force a Merry Christmas!  Please watch out for the Occupy Protesters.  I hear they might be headed your way to try and blame the housing market bubble burst on you.  If they do come that way, I hope the ice caps melt.

Keep it real, Santa!

-Brad Reynolds

P.S. Okay, maybe a flying, time-traveling DeLorean would be nice to have.

P.P.S. Or maybe my own personal robotic bodyguard.

P.P.P.S. Or maybe a Wampug.

Advanced Texturing and Lighting: Haunted House Finishing Touches

There is very little left to be done with this rendering, thankfully.  Right now I am just adjusting tiny things like the ambient occlusion and certain light levels.  Eventually, you can get "tweak fatigue" and just have to call the whole thing done.

Still the best creation to date...

Leah Lourena Reynolds, born December 3rd, 2011 at 4:59 PM at John Huir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, CA.  7 pounds, 3 ounces.  19 inches long.  Cries whenever cold.  Loves her mommy a lot.  Not quite sure what to think of daddy yet, but thinks he's getting better.

Thesis Project: Robot Shader Progress

This week, due to other activities, I wasn't able to get a whole lot done on this.  However, I did do some adjustments to the shaders and textures, trying to get a better bronze look out of the material.  I also have been playing around a bit with doing some post-processing like depth of field, lens flares, and glow.  More tinkering to come.

Thesis Project: Robot Shaders

This week I did a lot of work that will save me some headaches further down the road.  I finished up doing the initial texture painting of the Robot model just so every piece of geometry could have a texture map associated with it.  I had to deal with some corrupted Mudbox files, which is never fun, but eventually, I got something stable that would work for me.

After that, I had to figure out how to be able to link the 53 individual shaders so that they would be easy to tweak down the line.  I wound up at first creating a master shader with the basic overall settings.  After that, I created another shader that I called a "starter" shader.  I then linked certain values like sampling, glossiness, and others directly into the master shader.  For the starter shader, I also created three layered texture nodes and linked them to the diffuse color, reflected color, and reflectivity attributes.  I then linked the colors of those individual layered texture nodes back to the master shader

Basically, I was then set to copy the starter shader and the starter layered texture nodes, do some reconnecting, add the texture files, and that was it!  They were then connected to a master shader ready to adjust the color across all 53 shaders with ease.  In the end, if this works the way it should, I'll either love myself or curse myself if it doesn't work out.

Here are a few test renderings of the robot posed with full textures and shaders applied.  There is a lot of tweak work to do, but I am now set to finish this guy off.

Advanced Texturing and Lighting: More Tweaking

Now that I'm down to the last little bit of tweaking shaders and lights, things are starting to look the same. There isn't that much more to speak about in terms of how to set this up.

I did try adding a bokeh shader to the camera to simulate some depth of field.  However, without an HDRI light source and a narrow depth of field, it's sort of useless.  I'll probably take it out.  Some other time I will explain more about that and how the effect works, but for now, I have other things to work on.

The Sounds Inside My Head: A Musical Sketchbook

I fancy myself a bit of a musician.  I ever since I was young, I can say that I had an interest in music.  Maybe not talent, but interest.  Some of my fondest memories were of me getting to play around with the musical keyboards that my brothers owned.  Like most electronics of the late 80s and early 90s, these keyboards had pre-programmed music tracks that you could turn on and off in addition to hundreds of synthesized instruments.

However, I had very little knowledge of how to actually play music at a young age.  The rest of my brothers had the opportunity (forced, sometimes) to take organ lessons.  (My parents still have their old Wurlitzer sitting in their home and, while some of the keys don't work that well anymore, it still will play just fine.)  By the time I reached the age where I was to start learning the organ, Wayne, the teacher of the rest of my brothers, decided he'd had enough of teaching organ lessons.  There weren't any other organ teachers in the area, so my dear mother took it upon herself to try and teach me keyboard lessons herself.

Bless her heart.  I think we made it through two lessons before she gave up hope on me because I was more interested in dinking around on the keyboard than actually reading music and training my fingers to work opposite of one another.

Eventually her hopes would turn around as I learned the saxophone in junior high and happened to excel in my music classes.  During that time I also got my first guitar, a Yamaha acoustic, that for the first six months didn't really get played properly.  I was given an ultimatum by my mother that I would either take guitar lessons or she was giving it away.  Being the greedy child that I was, I opted for lessons.

And then I found my true musical love.

While I still feel I could pick up a saxophone and play it, I know it wouldn't be like picking up a guitar. I took guitar lessons for a number of years and eventually came to play it in our high school jazz band.  That is where my skill really started to develop, since I was being forced to change chords drastically on every beat.

As the years passed, I gained a lot of musical equipment and started to get interested in how to record songs.  My first attempts at recording (and at the songs) were laughable and involved routing the guitar into a tape recorder.  The quality was so bad that I even cringe now while writing this.

Eventually, I discovered digital recording, although I only knew how to record using a waveform editor.  That worked okay until I had to start synching up the tracks.  I got lucky sometimes, but others, I was clueless about how to fix.  Thankfully, technology got better and I got wiser... and I got one of the most helpful musical creation programs I have been exposed to: Garageband.

After playing the guitar for many years, I one day sat down at my parents' organ and began to play actual music.  Granted, it was pretty much only a few church hymns, but they sounded decent.  I remember my mother coming in to see me at the organ and asking where in the world I learned to play.  It was amusing to me to see that learning how to play the guitar actually helped me understand how to play a keyboarded instrument.  I could translate chords with my left hand and could do a decent job at picking out the melody with my right hand.  It's not perfect, but it works well enough to get the melody across.

Now, even though I enjoy a good jam session with friends, if I'm doing music, it's mainly for my stuff at home.  I now have a MIDI keyboard and USB guitar interface where I write out songs for my own personal enjoyment.  I'm not much one for lyrics, so most of what I do is sort of "musical sketches."  I thought I would share a few recent additions to my so-called musical sketchbook:

This is actually going to be the music track for my upcoming demo reel (hence the creative title).  I needed a track that was only two minutes long, and since I usually write my own music for these things, I had to come up with something.

This track actually evolved during a jam session with a good friend, Matt Banz.  Sometimes I just start playing and he comes up with a beat on the drums to fit the tune.  This was one of the ideas that came out this past summer.

I have more, but most of them are just sketches, or little musical doodles.  They're not fit for the blog.  Or human ears.

One of my hopes with doing a career change is that I can get back into music as a hobby.  As it was, I would go all day at work as an industrial designer, then come home and work on animation as my hobby.  I would like to go to work all day doing my hobby so I can come home and work on my hobby.  Some day, perhaps, when the stars align, that dream will come true.  Until then, I won't stop "sketching."

Thesis Project: Robot Textures

 This week I dealt with a few technical issues, so the amount of work that I actually got to do was sort of minimal.  I decided to finally download and install the student version of Maya 2012 for Mac, seeing that it is a 64-bit application.  The thing that has been killing me lately is that Mental Ray for Maya 2010, which is what I have been running previously, runs out of memory on me halfway through preview renders.  Doing a batch render every single time I want to test out rendering the robot wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

However, I found my own set of problems when trying to upgrade to Maya 2012.  For some reason that I couldn't ever really understand, the nodes in the Hypergraph and Hypershade had no labels on them.  I later found out that the text only appeared when you zoomed to an optimal level, but otherwise disappeared.  This sort of renders Maya inoperable for the most part, so I had to do some searching on the web to see if anyone else had this problem.  I found someone posted something about changing fonts in Maya 2011 for Mac to make it more legible, and that involved editing some of the core files of Maya.  However, they had created a script that automated the process, but it was only for 2011.  I downloaded it and did some editing to the script so that it would modify 2012.  When I ran it, it seemed to solve my no-name problem just fine!  Sometimes I know just enough to get myself into trouble.

After doing the upgrade to Autodesk's 2012 applications, I started doing the texture painting for the robot in Mudbox.  Mudbox is Autodesk's answer to ZBrush and it allows you to do sculpting as well as painting directly onto a mesh to create texture maps.  I mainly have been using it for texturing, as ZBrush has features that I like better for sculpting.  The one thing about Mudbox that makes it so versatile in texture painting is the fact that you have layers, just like in Photoshop, and can stack textures on top of one another.  Then you can export your whole scene back into Maya with all of the shaders automatically created for you.  It's pretty snappy, although there are still a few bugs to be worked out.

With the robot, the look I am going for is metal that isn't corroded, but isn't impervious to having material buildup on it.  These renderings are straight from Mudbox, so they don't give the best impression of what the shaders will really be doing, but they can give you an idea of the grime I painted on. 

The way I plan on going about with this will require some fancy shader programming, which hopefully will work for me.  I calculated that I will have at least 53 different shaders for my scene, some of which are very similar, but use different texture maps.  This will require creating a master shader and linking the individual shaders to this master shader.  I've done a few tests, and it's looking promising.  However, I hope I don't screw up my scene by doing this.  If it works, it will make tweaking the textures all that easier to do.  If it doesn't, then I've got a lot of work on my hands.

Advanced Texturing & Lighting: Haunted House Progress

This week I spent some time amping up the amount of fog within the room.  That required masking out some of the areas of ambient occlusion in Photoshop, but the effect seemed to come across.  I also played around a bit with global illumination, which is another way of simulating how light bounces from one surface to another.