O4D - thinking out loud

Code Monkey

31 October 2014 - Comments
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The shame of it; I failed to blog last week. Okay, I'm over it now. I have another confession, I started coding again. I know, it's bad. Or is it? Well, as it turns out, not really. It's actually helping me speed up my workflow a little here and there.

Maya, Python and Eclipse

So I setup an Eclipse-based Python development environment. Maya's APIs are obviously one of it's strong points, and what makes it so adaptable to studio pipelines. Being able to code against them does open up a world of possibilities.

This has already proven very useful, as I've written some code to render variations of materials, etc, when doing look dev which I can leave running in the background.

SynthEyes

MatchMover has struggled on some of my recent project footage. So I've been looking at SynthEyes. It immediately tracked the problematic footage on auto.

On the face of it, it seems the way to go.

Projects

I've switched tracks on my showreel project plan, whilst I get around some footage issues. In the meantime, I've decided to work on an ad-based concept. I made a start on the modelling and texturing this week, and hope to start the animation early next week.

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Experiments

I've also spent a little (very little) time exploring some options for generating dense grill models. I previously tried modeling straight polys, but kept crashing Maya due to the density of the meshes.

I made some progress using displacement mapping, although the UVs have to be incredibly clean on any edges for this to work.

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Chuffed

Oh, and I spent a little bit of time on some dynamics for the train project, that I hope to progress once I've overcome a few footage stabilization issues.

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Tags: Journal


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