This just in from the Troubleshooting Desk: 3ds Max 8 and 9 do not play well with Microsoft’s Direct3D 8 or 9 drivers as served by this author’s Nvidia GeForce card in XP, at least with ForceWare Release 169.21. Both versions of Max, while using Direct3D, exhibit periodic viewport refreshes that overwrite any other UI elements including windows, menus, and dialog boxes.

Switching from the Direct3D driver to OpenGL in Customize > Preferences > Viewport has solved my problems. Your mileage may vary.

Awesome stop-motion/live-action remake of the best scene in the best movie ever. The sound alone still gets my blood up, on par with the TIE fighter noise.

Adobe’s got a prototype of a 19-lens lens array which allows after-the-fact focus and depth-of-field modifications. The main impetus for the lens (apart from The Awesome) is the spectre of 20-megapixel cameras; current lenses can’t focus sharp enough to take advantage of so many pixels.

An infographic and detailed write-up is available at Popular Science.

(via Feed.)

Robert Hodgin has released a video accompaniment to “Lovely Head” by Goldfrapp in a style he calls “Solar,” made with Processing, “an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.”

Details on Solar.

(via Motionographer)

The Riddler Brick

Joe Maller updated his iTransmogrify! iPhone bookmarklet, which now converts many more types of Flash-based video embeds to clickable iPhone links.

So I’ve updated my own auto-iTransmogrify! script, suitable for embedding on your own site. Once embedded, when an iPhone visits your site, all convertable elements will automatically be converted for it, and any future updates to the script will be automatically propagated. Yes, it will be magical.

For even greater ecstasies of convenience, I’ve put the script in a .js file, downloadable here:

iTransmogrifyToo!.js

Include this script in your footer, or after your page’s </body> tag, by referencing it as below:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://zoomy.net/iTransmogrifyToo!.js"> </script>

You may either hotlink directly from my site by using this code verbatim, or use your own copy by uploading the .js file to your root web directory and replacing “zoomy.net” in the script reference with your own domain name.

So far this update doesn’t affect my own site, as all but three videos I’ve posted are on YouTube, and those three are in formats which aren’t yet supported. But we live in hope.

Valve has a geeky rundown of the design theory and rendering techniques in their recent game Team Fortress 2:

(High-res at Stage6)

The above video is an accompaniment to a white paper, “Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2″.

It’s clear from this paper that the successful visual design in this game is not the result of precocious or ineffable artistic ability. It’s all intentional and well-reasoned.

Of note is their attention to the silhouette. Not only was each character designed to have a distinct and immediately-recognizable silhouette, but the colors and shapes of their costumes were designed to reinforce that silhouette. The characters also enjoy perpetual rim lighting, to that same end.

Lego of mystery

I noticed that the YouTube movies I was embedding in my posts (as well as all embedded YouTube videos everywhere) showed up as “broken plugin” icons on my iPhone, even though the iPhone supports YouTube videos and can play them from links.

Last week Joe Maller released a bookmarklet for the iPhone called iTransmogrify! that fixes this problem in an ad-hoc band-aid sort of way. You download it to your computer, then sync it to your iPhone, and then when you find a broken embed you hit this bookmarklet and some JavaScript trickery replaces the embeds with follow-able links.

I didn’t want that extra step when testing my own site, so I made an automatic workaround.

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My high-school VR dreams are coming true. Thanks Nintendo, you’ve always been there for me.

Guess what I’ve been doing! No no no you’re all wrong!

I’ve been playing with the Mental Ray Misss_physical shader, combined with Daniel Rind’s Diffraction shader to introduce refraction blur and chromatic aberration. You should have been able to guess that.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with final gathering (the rendering technique, not the Highlander sequel) and black spots. The web-lore on these spots is that they are breakouts caused by bacteria. They are *not* caused by eating too much chocolate or greasy foods.

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A Flickr set.

A bit too Daffy

In the world of 3D animation, “rigging” is the process wherein virtual control mechanisms are connected to a model to enable its manipulation. There are a few general techniques which may be employed, but the methods of their execution vary between 3D packages and must be adjusted for individual models, design goals, and motion styles.

The large number of controls necessary for basic manipulations — compounded by inevitable structural problems, application glitches, and the difficulty of applied kinesthetics — makes rigging even a stiff-looking biped a tricky proposition. Making a 3D rig that can move like Daffy Duck is downright Quixotic at best.

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This article describes a way to use z-depth data to composite 3D layers.

Comp this, wise guy

When rendering a 3D scene, it’s often convenient to render separate elements on their own layers and composite them together. This method has two major advantages: 1) if you make a change to your scene, you can simply re-render the appropriate layer rather than the whole scene; 2) you can make adjustments to specific layers in the comp rather than re-rendering.

However, when comping together 3D projects, it’s not enough to put the elements in the right place on the screen. There’s a third dimension, or “D” as we call it in the industry: depth. Objects in your scene may move in front of objects they once were behind, or may be intertwined in some way. In these cases, simple layer-arrangement in the comp won’t do the trick.

Maya 6 and the After Effects 6.5 Production Bundle both have the rudimentary capacity to handle files with z-depth channels, which store information about how far from the camera objects are. Here’s one way to use RLA files and AE’s “3D Channel Extract” plugin to comp most intersecting layers without any special shaders or passes.

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In the giant logjam of data that has been the internet for the last 10 years, something finally just gave.
Try the Photosynth demo.

Shake those structures

I’ve played nearly all the parts in the giant space opera that is 3D animation. Lots of it is lots of fun, and some of it is genuinely rewarding. But by far the most difficult, arcane, and thankless part of the process is the rigging of 3D characters in preparation for animation.

I did all the rigging for Space Bunnies myself. This included seven full character rigs, some with unusual structures and dynamics simulations. Some of these rigs worked as expected, but some fought me all the way to the comp, taking my attention from basic functionality, getting in the way of the animation, and even causing trouble at rendertime.

Now that I’ve stopped crying, I’m ready to talk about it.

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Not bad, just rigged that way

I started the Space Bunnies project in August of ‘05, planning on a three-month project. I worked out a storyboard and a rough animatic in a week in Flash, and followed up with detailed character and set designs. With those done, I had a pretty good idea of what certain aspects of the the final product would look like. However — I severely misunderestimated three dimensions which pentupled, or possibly septupled, the amount of actual labor involved. Not to blow the surprise or anything, but those three dimensions were BAD RIGS, TECHNICAL SNAGS, and COMP TIME.

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