Set Driven Key

Tosca

2012-10-11T10:43:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to announce the beginning of my collaboration with Pacific Symphony on their February 2013 production of Tosca, directed by Eric Einhorn. I will be creating a series of video backdrops for the show. We have some really cool ideas in the works, and I'm excited to get started!

Finished!

2012-03-29T22:11:00.000-04:00

I'm proud to finally present my finished short film. Enjoy!

Another Render

2011-12-19T14:08:00.001-05:00

Audio is coming along nicely. The whole thing is getting very close to finished. Here's another rendered image:

New Layout

2011-12-08T11:36:00.001-05:00

As you can see, I'm experimenting with a new layout for Set Driven Key. I've also enabled a mobile version of the site to make it easier to read on smartphones and tablets.

More to come soon!

Elephants - First Look

2011-11-23T23:33:00.000-05:00

Here's a first look at the elephants. I decided to experiment with an illustrated story-book rendering style. The bulk of the work is finished, and I'm in the process of adding some finishing touches and fixing some bugs here and there. My brother has started working on the audio. With any luck, I'll have a finished short by the new year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Back to the Elephants

2011-10-02T21:01:00.000-04:00

This summer was really busy with cinematics projects. I had the opportunity to do some pretty elaborate rigid body simulation work. I learned a lot, and the final scenes look great. I'm really psyched.

I'm planning on turning my attention back to the elephants for the next couple weeks. Hopefully I'll have some progress to share soon.

Mount Olympus

2011-06-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

I've been working on some theatrical backdrops over the past few weeks. Here's a sneak peak:

Elephants

2011-03-15T12:02:00.000-04:00

I recently started working on a new animated short about elephants. Here's the main character, all rigged up and ready to go:

Go Board

2011-01-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

Robots Building Robots

2011-01-12T14:35:00.002-05:00

Football Helmet

2011-01-06T13:30:00.004-05:00

A recent afternoon project. Created in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray:

New Gallery Updates

2010-12-02T18:33:00.001-05:00

I've made some changes and additions to the image gallery section of my portfolio site:

http://www.pdipierro.com/gallery/gallery.html

Digital Backdrops for the Sacramento Opera

2010-11-14T17:30:00.004-05:00

I recently had the pleasure of working on a project for the Sacramento Opera, creating a series of digital matte paintings that will be projected behind the performers at next weekend's production of ORLANDO.

You can read all about it here:

Sacramento Opera Moving to Vivid World of Computer-Animated Backdrops

Many thanks to everyone at the Sacramento Opera, and thanks to the Sacramento Bee for covering the story.

Tip of the Week: Test Resolution

2010-02-23T19:16:00.002-05:00

Sometimes when you're working on a scene, you don't need your test frames to be full res. For instance, the final output might be at 1080HD, but to speed things up while you're working on things like lighting and shading, you might only need to preview your renders at quarter res.

You could go into the render globals, do the math, and change the resolution - but it can be a pain to have to always be changing it back and forth. And there's also the risk of forgetting to change it back to full res before you submit a render and leave for the weekend.

Fortunately, there's a built in way of doing it. Just open up Render > Test Resolution, and you can tell Maya to render your previews at a different resolution. Renders that you send from the Render View or if you click "Render Current Frame" will use the test resolution. Batch renders will be unaffected.

It's quick, and it's foolproof.

Tip of the Week: Is Mental Ray Missing?

2010-02-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

What happened? Did it break? Did I accidentally uninstall it?

Perhaps you've asked yourself this before. You open up the render settings window and try to switch the renderer to Mental Ray only to find it missing from the drop down box. You see Maya hardware and software. Maybe even the vector renderer. But Mental Ray is nowhere to be found.

Is it a bug? Yes and no.

Maya gives you the option of turning different features on and off in the plug-in manager. (Window>Settings/Preferences>Plugin Manager). Mental Ray is one of the features included in the list.

You can turn it on and off manually, but for some reason, it occassionally turns itself off - usually after a crash. (This is a bug that has supposedly been fixed, but I've seen it in every version of Maya I've ever used).

While we're on the topic of missing plug-ins, there's quite a few other features that you can enable or disable in the plug-in menu (such as a variety of shaders and import/export for obj, fbx, and anim), so if something's missing, it's generally a good place to look.

On the other hand, if there is a plug-in that you don't really use or need, keep it disabled in the meantime and save yourself some RAM. For more on that, read this old post on Paint Effects and Dynamics.

2010 Oscar Nominations

2010-02-02T19:00:00.002-05:00

This year's Academy Award nominations were announced today. Here are the lists for Animation and VFX:

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
French Roast
Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
The Lady and the Reaper
Logorama
Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avatar
District 9
Star Trek

Animated films made appearances in other categories as well. The Princess and the Frog received a pair of nominations in the Best Original Song category, snd Fantastic Mr. Fox was nominated for Best Original Score. Up picked up nominations for Original Score, Sound Editing, Original Screenplay, and Best Motion Picture - only the second time an animated film has been recognized in that category. Beauty and the Beast was the first, in 1991.

Tip of the Week: Camera Bookmarks

2010-01-09T09:38:00.002-05:00

Camera Bookmarks are, in my opinion, an underused tool in Maya. They're a quick, automated way of saving camera locations and quickly toggling between them.

Go to View > Bookmarks > Edit Bookmarks to open up the Camera Bookmark Editor.

Here you can save and switch between bookmarks. There's also a button to automatically add your bookmarks to the shelf as custom buttons.

If you want to incorporate bookmarks into a MEL script, use the cameraView command. Type "help cameraView" into the script editor for info on the different flags that you can use.

Virtual Filmmaking

2009-12-16T20:25:00.000-05:00

Check out this article in Popular Mechanics about some of the animation techniques used on Avatar:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4339455.html

We've experimented with some similar virtual camera tricks at work. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of it over the next few years - along with more performance capture of course.

As for stereoscopic film, call me behind the times, but I still don't like it.

Tip of the Week: Hypershader Connections - Part 2

2009-12-08T19:10:00.002-05:00

Here's a quick follow-up to last week's tip:

Hovering the cursor over a connection arrow gives you detailed information about the connection - you'll see the output attribute from one node and the input attribute from the other.

But you can also tell, at a glance, what type of connections are in place.

Hypershader connections are color coded according to data type. Green arrows indicate connections for triple-valued attributes such as color, specular color, or any other rgb/xyz channel. Dark blue arrows indicate single-valued attributes such as diffuse. Light blue indicates a double-valued attribute such as repeatUV. If you're working with merged connections, a bold yellow arrow indicates that there are multiple connections between two nodes.

37th Annual Annie Award Nominations

2009-12-02T19:14:00.000-05:00

The nominee list is in for the 37th annual Annie Awards, to be held Saturday, February 6th, 2010 in LA.

The Best Animated Feature Category consists of:

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs — Sony Pictures Animation
Coraline — Laika
Fantastic Mr. Fox — 20th Century Fox
The Princess and the Frog — Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Secret of Kells — Cartoon Saloon
Up — Pixar Animation Studios

You can view the nominees in all 28 categories here.

Tip of the Week: Viewing Hypershader Connections

2009-12-01T18:37:00.002-05:00

Ever since Maya 2009, the default view in the Hypershader merges all input and and output connections between two nodes into a single arrow.

Sometimes this is helpful - it eliminates some of the clutter when you have a complicated shading network. But sometimes it's nice to be able to see at a glance how many connections there are, or to be able to select and delete connections individually.

Luckily, you can switch back and forth between the two.

In the Hypershader window, go to Options > Merge Connections to toggle between views.

New Pixar Short

2009-11-24T13:12:00.005-05:00

I love it when the big studios experiment with different styles.

Though to be fair, this isn't really a new style for Pixar to be working with - it's just not typically a style that they release their films in.

If you've ever seen any of Pixar's pre-vis animatic work, you'll know what I'm talking about. (They frequently include segments as DVD extras. There was a ton of footage at the MoMa exhibit in NYC a few years ago, and snippets pop up online every so often). Half the time, I think that their animatics are more polished and more entertaining than some of the other studios' finished products. When you look at the time and money that they put in to story, character, and style development during the pre-vis stage, it's no wonder that their finished films so consistently deliver.

In any case, I'm not sure what the origin is behind this new short, George and AJ. Perhaps this style was the plan all along. But it almost looks like they might have been developing a fully rendered 3D piece and decided that the animatic was strong enough to release on it's own. The VO sounds like proxy in places, which would further support the theory. Check it out:

Granted, the average independent studio or solo animator can't afford to put together something this elaborate for all the work that they do. But I think it's important to put as much time and effort into pre-production as you have room for. It's better to spend a couple weeks putting together a board-o-matic upfront than to devote a year of your life, slaving away in 3D, before realized that your original idea didn't work so well to begin with. Storyboards and animatics can tell you what's working and what isn't before you dive into the more time consuming 3D process.

I say this from experience. A few years ago, I started tinkering around with a new idea for a short. I actually got as far as spending a month or two modeling and rigging some characters. But before I got too far along, I finally started to realize that the story just wasn't working in the animatic phase, and I decided to pursue other projects. Looking back, I'm glad that I did.

And who knows? Your animatic might take you off in a direction you didn't expect, and you could wind up with a finished product in a whole new creative style.

Tip of the Week: Command Line Mental Ray

2009-11-14T13:57:00.000-05:00

Rendering outside of the Maya GUI (either by right clicking or using .bat files) provides all kinds benefits over normal batch rendering. (If you're unfamiliar with the process, you can read my tutorial on rendering with bat files). However, you can run into some obstacles when using Mental Ray.

Normally, if you right click on a Maya file and click render, the render will adhere to all of the render global settings in your file - start frame, end frame, image name, etc. However, one thing that it ignores is which renderer to use.

You can set your scene up and set all the mental ray settings, but when you try to render it outside the Maya GUI, it will always start rendering with the software renderer by default.

In order to make it render with Mental Ray, you have to specifically force it. Right clicking and clicking render won't work. You have to either open up the command line or create a .bat file.

For instance:

render myscene.mb

Will render in software by default, no matter what the settings in the file are. Instead, type:

render -r mr myscene.mb

For those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of rendering, I hope that you'll check out my tutorial or explore the Maya documentation, because it's a really useful production tool. If you're already familiar with using .bat files, and you've had trouble getting Mental Ray renders to work, I hope that this tip has been useful.

Big Year for Animation

2009-11-11T19:15:00.001-05:00

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that 20 films have been submitted for consideration for this year's Animated Feature Film category:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
Astro Boy
Battle for Terra
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Coraline
Disney's A Christmas Carol
The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Mary and Max
The Missing Lynx
Monsters vs. Aliens
9
Planet 51
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure
A Town Called Panic
Up

The rules for the category state that in a year in which 16 or more films qualify, there will be 5 official nominees (as opposed to the usual 3 nominees). Now, not all 20 films have qualified yet, but with so many up for consideration, the odds are better than usual that we'll hit the magic number.

This bodes well for animators. The more animation being produced, the more jobs there will be for everyone involved in the process. Furthermore, Oscar exposure can give a huge boost to lesser known films. How many more people in the US saw Waltz with Bashir after it had been nominated in the foreign film category?

You can read the full press release from the Academy here: Animated Features

Projection Mapping

2009-11-10T18:51:00.006-05:00

Check out this fascinating article on the facial animation process in Where the Wild things Are:

http://www.awn.com/articles/article/getting-wild-about-facial-animation/page/1%2C1

Outside-the-box thinking with some amazing results.