AMA Unclassified: Some Stuff I've Done at Work

 I haven't been able to blog that much lately about creative 3D stuff because since I started work at AMA, I have been working on 'sensitive but unclassified' material.  Essentially, it's stuff that if I told you what I did, I'd have to kill you... or at least hit you with a wiffle bat.

Anyway, since most of my time at work is taken up with 3D, I haven't done that much at home.  However, there are a few things that I've worked on either as personal learning projects or developing something that might come in handy in the future.  A lot of what I now do would fall under the category of 'generalist' in the 3D world's terms.  That means I do a lot of 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, lighting, animating, rendering, and compositing... which is the whole kit and kaboodle, basically!  (I even do the music and sound effects now...)

One of my learning projects, I actually did this afternoon in After Effects.  My coworker told me about a great tutorial site called Video Copilot, which sells some great plugins for After Effects, but also has plenty of free lessons on how to do certain things in the program.  One of their tutorials inspired me to try something out to get some more practice in After Effects.  I never used it much before, except to composite my 3D frames together.  Anyway, this is what I came up with:

Now, you're probably wondering why I am proud about creating the above footage.  Well, let me first off explain that nothing of what you see in the video was actually captured as video footage.  I started off with two still images:

The Ares rocket on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral

A NASA T-38 chase plane

Pretty odd, huh?  I watched a tutorial where the guys at Video Copilot took a still image of a volcano and turned it into something that looks like it was video footage shot from a helicopter.  Essentially, it involves taking the still image and slowly distorting it from start to finish in the following fashion:

This gives the illusion of parallax and tricks your brain into thinking that the image is actually moving.  There is a lot of cleanup work, however.  For example, because the towers look goofy in the above twisted image, I had to separate them from the background and then clean up the area behind them so that it looks like nothing is there.  (I actually learned a lot about the tools in AE from this little exercise.)

After that, I added the small chase plane with a particle emitter coming out the back to give the sense of exhaust coming out.  I also added subtle things that help you think that it is real like the shaky camera movement, film grain, the spotty lens artifact, lens flares, and even some subtle chromatic aberration.  All in all, I spent some good time making it look pretty, which I probably wouldn't really get to do in a real production.  Most of all, I've learned how easy it is to fake things in 2D rather than creating them totally in 3D.

Another project I like showing off is the Earth-Moon rig I created using Modo:

My desktop background at work

I found some very nice, detailed texture maps on the internet and used them to create a 1/10,000th scale model of the Earth (Modo wouldn't handle the real scale).  The whole purpose of the rig is to be able to quickly adjust the controls so that you can get realistic lighting conditions and scale for whatever Earth-Moon image you might want to create.

There are controls that let you switch out the cloud texture, change the backdrop, change the season, change the time of day (and the dark side of the Earth will automatically light up... pretty cool stuff, if you ask me).  You can even scale up the moon and the sun if you want to go for some artistic license.  It has been a little side project of mine, but it has actually come in handy when someone came in and asked for a to-scale image of the Earth, the Moon and Mars for a presentation.  I just had to whip out that file and I was done within a half hour.

Bottom line: I'm really liking my work.

Letter to Santa - 2012

Dear Santa,

I'm sure, since you're the ultimate authority on naughty and niceness that your tech-elves have devised various data-mining algorithms to detect key phrases via the internet.  For example I'm sure that should I include the words coal, stocking, and reindeer manure in a blog page, I would automatically be put on the naughty watch list... well, hopefully that didn't put me on your watch list right now.  Anyway, since we're encouraged to be greenwashed environmentally conscious, like the previous years I decided just to post my Christmas letter to you this year on my blog in hopes that one of your vast cyber-elflings would stumble across it and pass the message along.

First things first, I have to tell you that when you stop by our chimney this year, you probably won't need to wear that fur coat of yours.  Honestly, it's going to be 80° outside this week, I think.  Maybe wear a breathable, yet modest, outfit and you'll be good.  You might want to bring a pancho, though, just in case we have rain on Christmas Eve.   The forecast doesn't seem to be calling for any, but I only trust it to within the next twelve hours.  Meteorology, in my eyes, falls in the same category as astrology and bone-reading.

Next I should point out that we actually do have a chimney this year.  For the past few years, every place I have lived has been sans-chimney, except for this year when we moved to a place that is hotter than the fires of hades during the summer.  I can't figure out what in the world someone would use a chimney for in Texas, except as maybe a launch tube for fireworks?  Anyway, when you come down our chimney, please try and shut the damper on your way in and out.  I've had enough standoffs with palmetto cockroaches in the past three months that I'd prefer not to invite any more of them in.

My little girl is looking forward to seeing what you bring her this year, although to be honest, I don't think she has a clue what is going on.  She seems to be confused that we're encouraging her to rip up paper only two days out of the year when the rest of the year she is forbidden from doing so.  Sorry that we didn't take her to see one of your helpers in the mall this year.  We really didn't want to pay $25 for a picture of her screaming.  If we wanted that, there are plenty of ways to achieve that within the comfort of our own home.

I don't know if you've got anything in your bag for me this year, but if you can manage a bit of employment stability this year, that would be great.  I was very fortunate to land a very fulfilling job at a NASA contractor doing what I love doing and receiving all the perks that make it worthwhile.  Honestly, I hope to be at it for a while, but with the looming fiscal cliff, I have a feeling of dread in my stomach.  (As a side note, for the longest time my attitude has been to let the government fail at all the problems that it has caused itself... but now that my paycheck in large is determined by the decisions of the federal government, I find myself whistling a different tune.  It's gut-wrenching at times.)  However, that's the only thing on my list, if you think you can make that happen.  After that, I'll worry about things myself.

In case you haven't heard, we have another little baby on the way in March, a boy.  If you have a little bit of R&R in your sack for the missus, I'm sure she'd love that.

I think you've spread out the Christmas gifts for us all year long this past year. It's been a relatively good year.  I got frustrated looking for jobs, but now that I'm settled in, I can't really complain.  The rent is paid, the car is running, and everyone is healthy.  For that, we are grateful.

Well, my daughter is whining downstairs, so I'd better go dig up some R&R from my own sack to give to my wife.  Have a merry Christmas, Santa, and don't use Apple Maps to get to our house.

-Brad Reynolds

Cucurbita Maxima 2012

This year I decided to do something a little closer to my personal interests and decided to carve a likeness of Neil Armstrong who passed away this year.  Admittedly, it's not my best carving to date, but to be honest, I had a rough day at work and just wanted to get it over with.

Armstrong is someone I personally admire for having the courage and curiosity to go farther away from home than most people will ever go in their lifetime.  Only a handful of men has ever walked on the moon and that is a pretty incredible accomplishment.  Having a job here at Johnson Space Center has really opened my eyes to how much is really discovered through space exploration.

Just to prove that I really did it.

Crickets... Crickets...

I promise I'm not dead.

I have sorely neglected this blog over the past few months, but for acceptable reasons:

• I started a new job at Analytical Mechanics Associates
• I moved myself and my family 2000 miles
• I have been very busy at work
• We just found out we're having a second baby in April
• When you're wife is pregnant, you need to do more as a husband so she doesn't get worn out

I have things I have been working on and I have been enjoying my job.  I get to see plenty of cool stuff here in Texas at Johnson Space Center, and I hope to be involved here a great deal more.

Hopefully more creative things will pop up here soon...

Visualization

I've decided that I want to try and do some more product visualization renderings, so I have been redesigning a past product idea that I had while I was a student.  I needed a guitar as a prop for the demonstration images, so yesterday I took about ten hours in Maya and Cinema 4D to model and texture up a replica Stratocaster.

And yes, the knobs go to 11.

Demo Reel – July 2012... in HD!

I finally upgraded to an HD demo reel.  You'll have to go to Vimeo to watch it, but it should be better quality than what I had before:

Redneck Rabbit: A Cartoony Project

For a while I have been meaning to do this just as a quick, fun project.

I've still got some technical things to figure out on him, and I have a lot more props to create, but this is a start.  I did the base concept in ZBrush, then retopologized it in TopoGun.  I'm going to try and use Cinema 4D for this, just for fun.

Dungeon Displacement and Occlusion

Learning the ins and outs of displacement in Maya has been an interesting challenge.  I have continued to do the sculpting of the individual pieces in ZBrush and exported the maps out as 32-bit TIFF files.  I then convert those over to OpenEXR files just for the sake of memory reduction (truthfully, since I have Maya converting and caching the files as MAP files before rendering, that step probably doesn't matter).  The normal maps are the same method, except I convert those to PNG.

I also added an orange ambient light to the scene to try and mimic what was happening with Final Gather turned on.  There wasn't much that turning it on added to the scene except for render time.

I also had to make individual occlusion shaders for each of the pieces of geometry, but that was fairly easy to set up since all of the displacement shaders I created before for the gray models can just be connected right up.

I was struggling with render times, which I can probably blame the approximation editor for.  I decided to try out turning on the "View Dependent" setting for my renderings, which helped out tremendously. With that setting turned on, Mental Ray determines how much to tesselate your model based on your current view.  It is determined in pixel samples of the final image, rather than actual geometry length.

Occlusion helps define the scene a bit more, but I think something is going a bit crazy with some of the displacement shaders.  Maybe it's the way ZBrush exported them or the way that Maya is reading them back in.

 Either way, I'm set to finish this one up soon enough.  I just have the floor and the ceiling to complete the sculpting on.  Those will be the most memory intensive to work on, just because of their sheer size and how much detail needs to be in them.  In total, I think the floor will have nine displacement maps alone.  I learned recently that ZBrush is still a 32-bit program, which really surprises me.  ZBrush on my computer is pretty snappy at handling millions of polygons, but I am surprised that Pixologic hasn't written it in 64-bit yet.  I can easily max out the dedicated memory for the program, so let's hope I can finish this project up soon.

Barbarian Hair Redo

I took some time this morning to redo the Fibermesh hair of the barbarian.  For some reason in the textured renderings, they look incredibly dark.  Shaders and materials is where I start to get really disappointed with ZBrush.  However, now that I know how to export displacement maps and such to get what I want, I will most likely bring my creations in the future into Maya to render them.

To me this is one of those renderings that feels like the textures and lighting are fighting against the modeling.  The gray model feels much more defined.

I most likely won't revisit this one because I have a lot more on my plate to work on, but this is a decent anatomy exercise.

Dungeons and Darkness and 32-Bit Displacement! Oh, my!

This week was both a battle and a huge learning experience for me.  I was unsure as to how I was going to accomplish the high resolution details in this scene.  At first, I decided to go with Mudbox for the high-resolution sculpting so I could do the color and bump maps at the same time.  However, I the performance of Mudbox on my system still leaves me wanting better results.  In addition, the camera controls in Mudbox are kind of screwy and I have had many times where I couldn't find my model to start sculpting.

So I hopped back into ZBrush to do the high resolution sculpting.  This was going to be an interesting challenge because I haven't had that much experience with getting things from ZBrush back to Maya.  Mainly it's been rendering from within ZBrush.  This also meant learning about 32-bit displacement maps and how to set them up properly within a scene.

There were lots of iron fixtures and pieces that I put in the chamber and I didn't really feel like I needed to put fine painted detail on them since they weren't going to be the central piece of the scene.  I decided instead to use a set of 3D procedural textures to get the look I was going for.  In this dark scene, I think it will work just fine.

To get the super fine details within the rock and bricks, I had to use a combination of normal maps and displacement maps.  A normal map is typically used for the bump map details on your model, basically as a way to fake tiny details jutting out from your surface.  A displacement map actually pushes or pulls your geometry in or out accordingly, depending on what data is in the image file.  I had a hard time figuring out how to render out 32-bit displacement maps from ZBrush, mainly because of the confusing way in which I was using the Multi-Map Exporter plug-in.  At first my displacement maps were very subtle, then I realized that I was using the wrong subdivision level in ZBrush to calculate the displacement map from. Once I got that straightened out, the rest was a piece of cake.

Mental Ray does render-time subdivision and displacement through a little feature called the approximation editor.  Essentially, when the computer goes to render, it analyzes the displacement map to find where the most "movement" will occur within the model.  It then takes the low-resolution geometry and subdivides it only where it really needs it.

Overall, I am pleased with the way this is turning out.  With just the lighting, normal maps, and displacement maps, things are really starting to stand out.  It will be a bugger to render, and I hope that Maya can handle it all.  This will make a nice addition to my reel.

For kicks I rendered out an image with Final Gather turned on.  You can see how the lighting won't be so dark the added bounce diffuse lighting.  There will be some tricky hurdles ahead like adding light fog and some Maya fluids for the torch flames, but I hope I can get it all worked out.  So far, the learning experience has been very valuable.