ike's Tech Blog

Before landing in London, I had the chance to work for more than one year on Kandor Graphics’ next feature film as Rigging Supervisor. Set to be released in March 2013, small clips are starting to appear. Although I worked on the initial stages of the film I still feel very attached to the project and the crew. They are doing an outstanding work!

At The Mill New York I had the opportunity to build three different realistic creatures for several commercials for Emerson. Finally, only two of them were used: the wolf and the kangaroo; the polar bear will remain on the zoo!

For these commercials I worked closely with Sauce Vilas and Alexandre Allain. Both of them are animators, and they did a wonderful and beatiful work, and we had the chance to talk about how to improve our work while discovering the city together.

My time in London arrives to its end. In a week, I will travel back to Spain to have a 2/3 months break, meeting old friends and working on a couple of personal projects (I need a new reel!). Working at The Mill has been one of my best work experiences ever (and that includes travelling to the New York office for 3 weeks!).

So Luis, Jorge (x2), Pete, Andreas, Óscar, Jacob, Jose, Rafa, Alex (x3), Alberto, Rodri, Iván, Thibault, Dave, Rob, Wayne, Dan, Jordi, Max, Gemma, Karl, Dave, Rob, Carlos, Nathan, Sauce, Jeff, Sam, Jess, Amaan, François, Cat, Vince… -and others that for sure I am missing-, thank you for all these months!!! It’s been an awesome trip!!!

New project to show! This time is about pigs. We needed to give a bit of life to three real pig masks, and for that Dave, Luis, Andreas and me worked together on a rig that could make it possible. I wanted to try something new and built a system that allowed quick blocking for the shapes of the mouth (based on Paul Smith’s patch rig). In the end, it looked good enough to use that as a base. Then we worked building corrective shapes on top and additional controls to make it, where Dave, Luis and Andreas did the major part of it.

Another beatiful work from The Mill. I built the rig for the bison -yep, those running beasts that can be seen 1 second or so- and Sauce Vilas animated it.

When we want to convert one geometry into another we normally use Morpher, only if they have the same amount of vertices -and the same vertex order. Some time ago I found quite useful to have Edit Poly modifiers on top of that base geometry instead of using Morpher when modelling the different morph targets, mainly because it was easier to toggle them on/off to see the difference from the base object. I have been using this small script during these time, and I thought it could be useful for someone else.

So this is how it works: select one EDIT POLY object, then run the script (you can drag and drop it to a toolbar), then select the ‘target’ object. As I said, as if you were using Morpher

The folks at Mill NY have completed a series of commercials for OfficeMax. One of them features the elephant we did at London. Mattias did the modelling and I was in charge of building the whole rig in Maya. Luis provided some invaluable feedback and Iván‘s scripts where a great assistance for the trunk.

A small test with connecting my iPad to 3DSMAX using the magic of TouchOSC. I had to struggle with the setup a bit until I realized I had a few too many Virtual MIDI controllers installed on my laptop. TouchOSC sends MIDI messages that are read by Float Motion Capture controllers on the facial mask that drives the morphs (I’m skipping here a couple of steps but I wouldn’t mind sharing the complete process).

There’s almost no latency between the iPad controls and 3DSMAX. In fact, what you see in the video is the real speed on both sides, with no editing to fix the delay.

Some minutes ago, this teaser for the upcoming Rainbow 6 game was shown on VGA (Video Games Awards).

We at The Mill completed this only just one week ago. So congratulations to everyone involved (me included!) because they really pushed the limits to deliver this masterpiece in the given amount of time. We build around 15 realistic characters  using the studio rig and taking care of each character deformations, including muscles on the necks (courtesy of Tom Ferstl, who developed a tool to make our life easier for that task). It’s a pity that the final edit has not all the delivered footage, because Jorge did some insane details on the props for the Rainbows (which are not appearing on the video above).

… take advantage of other packages that you might already know. But in my humble opinion you should never approach it the way you worked with other programas. The philosophy that lays behind this new software might differ from the one you are used to.

A couple of years ago, when working in Kandor, César showed me this. And I’m pretty sure it’s one of the most useful advices which someone has ever told me. It’s quite frequent finding people who complains about certain behaviour of certain software (‘Maya can do that and Softimage cannot’, ‘Maya is a sh*t because its Outliner sucks’, etc.). All of us have done that, and even it might be kind of funny sometimes. But if you see beyond the rant it reflects the frustration of the user when approaching a new paradigm with not-so-fresh ideas.

After having to learn two different softwares, Maya and Softimage, in the last couple of years I can tell you that César’s advice was wise and useful. I was struggling with Softimage, trying it to work the same way 3DSMAX did. Even I started to remap all the keys to match 3DSMAX ones. Wrong! He told me I needed to think that perhaps these hotkeys were the ones which made more sense according to how the software was designed, and that I would make the most of the program if I approached it like if I knew nothing.

That way I did convert the frustration of having to learn a whole new program in enjoyment of finding new and exciting ways to work. César’s advice completely changed my mind. I hope it works for you as well!!!