Morgan Loomis

Mad God on Kickstarter

Morgan Loomis — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:15:45 +0000

Phil Tippet is using Kickstarter to fund the completion of his Mad God stop-motion film. It’s well worth watching the pitch video to see some of the awesome sets, characters and animation that’s been created already. Nice to hear him talking about it with some of my favorite Tippetters as well. This is definitely getting my pledge.

Mad God on Kickstarter

Tool Icons?

Morgan Loomis — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:53:05 +0000

I’ve always wanted to make icons for all these tools, but in general I feel like that is a lower priority than actually finishing and releasing scripts, so I’ve finally admitted to myself that it’s going to take way longer than I like to design icons for everything. A couple people have mentioned to me that they like to make their own icons, so that got me thinking…

If you’ve made icons for any of these tools (or feel like making some), I’d love to steal them! So if you’d like to share, send me an email or link to your awesome icon in the comments. Or if you even have ideas for icons, that might help push me along. For the icons I like I’ll either incorporate them directly or adjust them slightly to work within a theme. Currently, my boring generic icon is what you see in the upper left corner there, but I might include that as an overlay for all the icons to help tie them together. Who knows! Anyway, not sure what kind of response I’ll get, but I’d appreciate any assistance.

Thanks!

Avengers Opens

Morgan Loomis — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:45:13 +0000

Avengers has obliterated the opening weekend record in the US after breaking many similar records overseas in the last two weeks (including in New Zealand). Congrats to all the artists who worked on this, and especially to the team at Weta who made it a fun project to be on. There’s a great article up at FXGuide that has a very thorough breakdown of all the work and vendors involved.

CG Monks

Morgan Loomis — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:24:13 +0000

Josh Burton, David Bokster, and Ryan Comingdeer have launched CG Monks, which has the awesome goal of (among other things) collecting Maya tools and distributing them in a consistant and cohesive package. I think this is a great idea, since it can sometimes be hard to know what tools are out there, or know where to find the ones you need, and then deal with installing them individually. So hopefully this will become an easy to use, well-rounded set of tools that extend and compliment our animation and rigging workflow in Maya.

There’s a page to sign up for beta testing if you want to test it out or make suggestions. There’s already plenty of staple scripts that you might recognize, including contributions from Hamish McKenzie (zooTools), Brendan Ross (supercrumbly), and Michael Comet.

New Tool: ml_deleteKey

Morgan Loomis — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:06:42 +0000

New on the tools page, ml_deleteKey is the counterpart to ml_setKey. Most people set keys with the “S” hotkey, and it’s always made sense to me to have a hotkey that deletes keys in a similar way. I use this tool assigned to the “D” key, which seems perfect as it stands for “Delete” and is located right next to “S.” The basic idea was to have a button that cuts the key on the current frame, without having to select anything in the graph editor or highlight the timeline. In addition to that simple functionality, it has similar options to ml_setKey, such as cutting keys that aren’t exactly on whole frames, deleting only what’s visible in the graph editor, or deleting all keys on a selected channel. All the options work together and are evaluated in the order that they’re listed in the tool. Running the tool with no options will cut all the animation on the selected nodes. Enjoy!

Ghost Dog Photos

Morgan Loomis — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:49:58 +0000

Last night I took Miles out and took some long exposure photos of him with a headlamp on his collar.

New Tool: ml_copyAnim

Morgan Loomis — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:44:09 +0000

Added one more tool! ml_copyAnim is a relatively simple script, it copies animation curves from one node to another. It also works on hierarchies, independent of namespace, so you can copy animation from one whole puppet to another in the scene. This is useful if you need a duplicate of a puppet, or if you need to update a puppet when swapping a reference isn’t an option. It also has the added feature of copying just part of the animation, so if you highlight a section of the timeline only animation in that range will be copied, and keys outside that range wont be overridden.

New Tool: Camera Depth Dragger (Plus Tool Update)

Morgan Loomis — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:28:44 +0000

I’ve added a new tool to the Tools Page: ml_cameraDepthDragger is another script that uses the dragger context, in this case to move an object directly toward or away from the viewing camera. This effectively changes the size of an object in frame without actually changing its scale. It’s helpful when you have an object where you want it in screen space, but it’s too close to camera and all you need is to move it further away (or vice versa). It’s pretty basic, in the future I’d like to have it adjust the rate that the values change based on the distance from camera and the lens length, so that it always behaves consistently.

I’ve also updated two tools:

ml_setKey has gotten a long-overdue update to use ml_utilities, make it work with middle-mouse dragging the timeline, and fixing some bugs with the insert option. Some its features have been eclipsed by the last few updates to Maya, but I still use it exclusively for setting keys.

ml_convertRotationOrder has had a significant update as well, the previous revision was really basic. The hardest part about switching rotation orders is actually knowing what to switch it to, so I added a suggestion button, which looks at a node and tries to figure out which rotation orders might improve its situation. Figuring out the best rotation order for an action is never going to be as easy as hitting a button, but hopefully this new recommendation system can help. Let me know what you think!

More Media!

Morgan Loomis — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:46:45 +0000

New Hobbit production diary!

New Avengers trailer! (Now with 100% more Weta!)

Updates

Morgan Loomis — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:47:38 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus lately, we had some guests visiting for a couple months and some projects to do around the house. I’ve also been seriously distracting myself with PyGame, as an exercise to learn more about game development, and also to have a bigger python project to work on outside of Maya. It’s been a lot of fun, if I stick with it maybe I’ll do some posts about it in the future. At work I’m finishing up on Avengers, it’s been a fun project with a great team and I can’t wait to see the final film.

Despite all that, I haven’t forgotten about Devo, I actually finally started modelling him a couple days ago. I’m using modelling as an opportunity to try and become familiar with Blender, which is something I’ve been interested in doing for a while. It’s a very intriguing tool to me. I also picked up Sculptris, after first hearing about it a few weeks ago, and it’s a great little free program for basic Z-Brush style sculpting. No sure how useful it will be for creating riggable assets yet, but it’s great for quick concepts, and it may help with detail or texturing down the line.

Hopefully some real updates coming soon!