Danny William's "fast retopo"

Danny Williams shares a bunch of tips , tricks, and techniques in this great overview of how to retopo your models in Maya. ( & some zbrush ) 

  After teaching a class ( in a local NY school) Danny noticed a lot of different ideas coming out about how to retopo and decided to create a tutorial  series to show on how he tackles the re topo task.

( and be sure to follow Point Pusher, and let him know any questions , comments, critiques ,  or other tips you want to share with him) 


Here is part 1 of 5 !  ( introduction) 

fast retopo in Maya: 01_Intro from pointpusher on Vimeo.

Part 2:



fast retopo in Maya: 02_decimation_import_export from pointpusher on Vimeo.

MtoA 513: using Cryptomatte with Arnold Maya & Nuke

In Arvid Shneider's latest youTube series he walks thru using Cryptomatte with Arnold and Nuke. 

Be sure to follow Arvid on Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1KDwEVBlxr4ew7xqLOhu9g
 and support him on his Patreon Site:
https://www.patreon.com/arvidschneider

Oates Studio.. Unity and alembic

I just stumbled across these videos of the making of digital humans for the series ADAM from Oates Studio. 

 The series was picked up and expanded by Neil Blomkamp and his team at Oates Studio. Oates has taken a large interest in real time  rendering and developing everything to work and play in Unity.  ( all three of the ADAM shorts have been completely rendered in unity) 

 As you will see, part of the interesting thing is that they are taking full moving captures of the humans facial movements at 30 to 40 fps. Rather than face dots and mocap to transfer to a jointed/blendshapped facial rig, and then importing that data as alembic straight into unity.   That combined with body mocap and some animation blending creates the final performances. 

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     It looks like the alembic importer for unity has been around for a couple years. but with the help of Oates Studio it has gotten a major upgrade with they combined efforts to create the ADAM series. 

  It makes me wonder how large these data sets can be, and still run real time in unity, as well as if they are working on ways to use the alembic cache to drive alternate characters. Something that is normally handled by facial rig transfer from mocap data .. ( like how weta creates the faces for "Apes" https://youtu.be/txoEDIdbUrg)

 This is a nice in depth article on the technological challenges solved by the ADAM team. 

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/12/04/adam-the-evolution-of-alembic-support-in-unity/

Maya 2015 Modeling Improvements ( part1)

Steve Roselle goes over some of the new modeling improvements in Maya 2015

Daryl Obert of Autodesk kicks off MAYA MONDAYS.

Big thanks to Daryl Obert of autodesk and his Maya Mondays with tips tricks how-tos and updates every monday, be sure to check out Daryl's blog on the area for his other informative postings.

I hope Daryl can keep this up.. sounds really good.  



http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/daryl/

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Monday January 27th ( the first official monday for Daryl)

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Monday February 3rd ( set driven keys) #2

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Monday Feb 10th   Depth Of Field #3

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Monday February : Render Layers , Render Passes , and Post. #4

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Monday March 3rd : Textures

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Monday March 10th

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Monday March 17th :  Artist Janet Echelman  Net Sculptures Maya plug-in

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Monday March  24th: BiFrost Attribute Tests from Igor Zanic

 http://www.igorfx.com/bifrost/

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Monday April 1st : BiFrost Shader

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Monday April 7th : inside the back of the  Autodesk NAB booth

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Monday April 14th : Maya 2015 now available!
http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-maya/free-trial

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Monday April 21st : Setting up an environment for VP 2.0 using recap etc

 

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Monday May 12th :  M and E webinar  "controlling complexity with xgen in Maya 2015"
 MAY 20th

http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/pc/index?
webinar sign up



and in case you missed it.. it will be available for review here:
http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=452932&id=17148448

and the youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_6ApchKwjN8RomN0cLQQT74i1a6sAzKi

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Monday May 19th :   XGEN index archive tool

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Monday June 2nd :   XGEN  tube groom for long hair

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Monday June 16th

 No video this week , but a shout out to the mental ray blog

 Lots of great info on this blog, take a look:-)

http://blog.mentalray.com/

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Monday June 30th : XGEN Stray Hair

( from Daryl)
The two expressions I used are
Frequency:  stray() ? 1 : 10
Magnitude:  stray() ? 1.5 : .1

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Monday July 14th : Maya IBL rendering

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Monday July 28th  : Ocean Shader

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Monday August 4th : Maya Subscription options

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/buy

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Monday August 18th: XGEN improvements in 2015 Ext 1

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Monday August 25th : XGEN  spline outputas curve

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Monday October 20th : EXT 1 color picker

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Monday October 27th : m2015 nParticle tip/workflow

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Monday Nov 3rd : Bifrost wet Sand Effect

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Monday Nov 10th Maya 2015 IBL bug workaround...
 http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/daryl/maya-monday---ibl-bug-workaround

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Monday Nov 17th Maya 2015 - Deformer order

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Monday Nov 25th nhair tips and tricks..

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Monday Dec 10th nhair tips and tricks 2

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Monday Dec 22nd Tips and Tricks with BlendShapes.

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MAY 23rd Users Group Meeting!

Mark your calendars!  

May 23rd 7:00 to 9:30  users group meeting 

Featuring Whats New in 2013 ! 
And Chris Devito & Danica Parry will be presenting  their award winning short 
"RAMUS"


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Lee Fraser of autodesk will be showing us a bunch of new and cool stuff in the latest release of Maya 2013!

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Chris Devito and Danica Parry recent graduates of SVA will present and talk about their award winning short

-  "RAMUS" -

 




Food and refreshments sponsored by Brad Porter of Great Eastern Technology

See you all there! click here to RSVP

Wednesday, May 23rd , 2012
7:00 PM - 9:30 pm
38W 21st Street, 9th Floor