Tormented pre-release webatrical trailer

Link to the trailer on Vimeo

We’re two weeks (or so) away from the opening night, so we decided to raise the expectations by creating a new webatrical trailer.

Unlike the previous (teaser) trailer, this one shows you a little more about the film, the story and everything else. So far, people have liked what we’ve done here, and hopefully they will also like the complete film.

Remember, if you live in El Salvador, this short film (and a handful more) will open in nearly two weeks.

(This post is also available on the Tormented Production Blog)

Ze Moonwalker est mort

As many should know, he’s dead. Although I really liked some of his songs I’ve never been a big fan. However, like it or not (and this goes to all Michael haters out there), he will never be forgotten (as long as his present and future fans exist, obviously).

Michael Jackson is Legend.

Why I’m so obsessed about my pen

Hello again. Long time no post, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been up to something (or some things…)

Renderosity just posted my latest article. This time I review the Wacom Intuos 4 tablet. I have to say it’s an amazing product and a must-have upgrade. You can check out the review here.

And in case you missed it, last week I shared some views on the Adobe CS4 3D workflow using Photoshop, After Effects and Flash.

Make sure you check out the Publications page, as I update it often.

New company reel

As you know, I work with some guys here in my country doing animation and stuff like that. This is the latest demo reel

The rant of “teh” day

The cool thing about blogs is that you can pretty much post whatever you want (as long as you comply with the provider’s TOS). You can talk about whatever you want, complain about anything, or pretty much share whatever you feel like sharing.

You may or may not know I took part of a film workshop. The final presentation was supposed to be this month, and right now we’re almost finished (we’re missing editing and sound mixing).

The thing is that today I found out the presentation has been put off till August. So we’ve all done all we can to finish on time, rushed our work, and make any sacrifice just to see our film on the screen, and now this?

The reason I was given is that the movie theater said they wouldn’t let the workshop utilize one of the rooms till August. If you ask me, that only shows poor planning from the guys running the workshop, as the projection room is something that had to be arranged months ago, not 2 weeks away from the closing date. The workshop began on November, and we’re on May. Do the math and tell me if that wasn’t enough time to arrange that.

Well, I was talking to one of the animators today, and he told me he’d heard something. There’s “this guy” who’s far from finished (he’s missing a plethora of ‘stuff’ for his film, be it animated or filmed, I’m not telling). The reason he gave was that one of the workshop advisors made him lose 2 months of work, and that he demanded more time to finish.

Mind me, but those advisors know about screenwriting and directing, but not about the “hands-on” experience of your film (be it animated or filmed). I went through the same advisors, but the difference is that we would work on our assets while we’d be working on the script and storyboarding. Also, a lot of the guys who had filmed projects are already finished. So there’s no excuse that a guy has yet to start his project after 7 months.

So that excuse about the advisor doesn’t hold much water. I mean, someone helping you with your screenplay, or storyboard or stuff like that has nothing to do with your inability to rig a character properly, your lack of modeling speed (or skill for that matter), your inability to get your stuff together and go film your shots, or even turn on the freaking camera.

I hate incompetent people. You always do your best on every project you work on, just to see someone screw everything up because that person doesn’t have a clue.

There, that’s my rant of the day.

Mariana’s expression-driven wrinkles

(this was also posted on the Tormented production blog)

There’s been a lot of talk on this blog about the facial wrinkles, and how they are triggered when the character hits certain expressions (mostly Mariana). I figured this would be a good time to show you those wrinkles in action on a finished shot.

The film opens on May 15th here in my country (unless something weird and unexpected happens). Keep your eyes open, as we will be posting more news.

Human shading tests.

(originally posted on January 18th 2006… and yeah, Jessica Alba is HOT)

One of the things I am working on right now is rendering semi-realistic human characters. I don’t think it will be possible for me to reach full photorealism but I shall try to get as close as I can. The first image is just a lighting and shading reference that I’ve been using for this.

  My first test was to render a realistic character on a generic light setup (no direct sunlight or any kind of outdoor lighting). The result of that first study is what you see below.

(no image)

For that skin I used 8 different layers ranging from ambient lighting and ambient occlussion to sub-sufrace scattering. This could be used for some “photo shooting” simulation with the model posing for the camera.

The second test was to render a character under direct sunlight. As seen on the first image. Direct lighting conditions yield a stronger terminator and higher “key-to-fill” ratios. I tried to simulate this the best that I could using layered lightings. The final result is the one below.

(no image)

Someone gave me the suggestion to use a real plate to check whether or not the lighting was working. Although it doesn’t look 100% photorealistic it looks very cool

Stage 2 will include hair rendering. I will then try to marry it all together for digital characters for either animation or print. We’ll see how it goes. I will post some tech stuff about this some other time.

See you soon.

HDRI+IBL=cool

(originally posted on January 23rd 2006)

Continuing with my lighting experiments for my skin shading, I’ve been experimenting with Image Based Lighting using HDRIs. One can easily use a Final Gather setup to get the “lighting” but the result is only as good. That’s why I decided to mess around with the ibl node instead.

The image above shows the ibl sphere surrounding the “scene”. According to what I read, there is a problem with most HDRIs and their gamma values, so one has to use this “gamma correction” node in Maya to make the IBL lit the image correctly. For this particular scene, I used a gamma setting of 8 on the three channels. The higher the value the lower the lighting values. The default value of 1 always renders a completely washed out image!

The final image shows a render test using the default “crappy shadow and anti-alias” values. I can even decide wether to render a completely diffuse or specular image directly on the node. Layering renders anybody?

Expression-driven wrinkles

(originally posted on Valentine’s 2006… nothing better than spending all day in front of the computer coming up with animation techniques)

Hello again, everybody.

I’ve been working a little more on my female character. The rigging is technically finished but I still have to add some little details to make the character behave in a more organic way.

A guy at the forums showed me a sample video from the book “Stop Staring”, I think, where you would see wrinkles appear on the character’s face when he/she performs an expression. The technique could be done with either bumps or displacements, but I decided to use bumps for faster rendering.

What I did was to combine all the different bump maps to a layeredTexture node in Maya, and then I connected that as a bump map to my character’s face material. The network can be seen on the next image.

(no image)

I then used Expressions to connect the bump maps Alpha output to the corresponding facial expression, so when the expression hits a value of 1, the Alpha value will also be 1. Combining the facial expressions will result on combined wrinkles onto the face. Click to watch the sample video.

Any downsides using bumps instead of displacements? As you know, displacements generate actual surface tessellation and deformation, while bumps don’t. This means that, though wrinkles will show when using bump maps, they won’t be seen on profile shots since bumps don’t deform the geometry.

USUL

(originally posted on March 28th 2006… comparing USUL and my upcoming film TORMENTED you can see there’s a hell of a difference between them)

It’s been a while but I am here again

You may or may not know that I was working on a short film a while ago. Well, I began working on it again a few weeks ago. There is this kind of “animation competition” in my country and I figured I would join using that film.

I’ve been rushing to get the job done because I have less than a month to finish the whole thing. Luckily all the pipeline had been worked out already so I just continued where I had left. The rendering and POST is nearly done. I hope I will have the sound editing by next week. In the meantime let me show you these two renders.

You know, I would have gone for a more impressive look, but I built the pipeline more than a year and a half ago, so I had to keep the same visual style. However I will work on a new film in the near future, using the latest techniques that I have developed