FabLab Footering

Booked a few hours in the FabLab yesterday, had modeled up a little Spitfire in Maya and cut out the parts with the laser cutter, this was done in MDF but I'm going to refine the design more - particularly with reinforcing stabilisers in the wing struts and then recut it in basla wood or card and it should hopefully fly!

Stereo 3D Reasearch & SeaGulls amongst other things

I've been running a block of basic training in Zbrush & Maya with Troll Inc. As part of this I also created this SeaGull character and rig for an iOS game in development. To help with the animation process I implemented set driven key states for actions such as flapping, wing folding and walking.

 

Additionally I have begun devoting some research to stereoscopic 3D rendering in Maya and also the older technique of Anaglyphic 3D. Im interested in particular in potentially using this technique in a game or with a 3D building projection mapping.

 

Maya Stereoscopic Render Composited as Anaglyphic Test

April Update

This month I've been tied up tutoring Maya & Zbrush with Troll Inc. & Uproar Comics and wrapped up last week doing a promo animation for the EBN Conference which will be held in the city at the end of May; keynote speakers will include Apple co founder Steve Wozniak.

 

             In other news, Dead Hungry Diner the game I worked on at Blackmarket Games has now hit iOS for Ipad & Iphone! Congrats to the guys! Highlights of this month have included doing a 2 day concept design workshop with artists from WETA studios, doing a radio interview on the BBC Arts Extra show talking about my work and doing a 2 hour tech talk with 600 6 form students about working in digital arts as part of the National ICT Event held at Derry's Millenium Forum.

CultureTech In Residence & Walls 400

In addition to the cultureTECH project - the work I created for this has been used as part of the Walls400 conference celebrating the history of Derry's Walls. With the project I was required to generate and employ different types of 3D scan data of the walls and the work out a methodology for processing this for use by other creatives. After this I took this data into Derry's FabLAB to explore different techniques of digital fabrication.

Using the FabLab Facilities and the 3D assets from this project to fabricate a number of items.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Press
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.derryjournal.com/news/local/derry-s-walls-go-digital-1-4948848
http://www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/digital-scanning-of-largest-monument-for-400th-birthday-1-4953236
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/headlines/mapping-missing-pieces-of-londonderry-s-walls-1-4955462
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/see-derrys-walls-in-a-new-dimension-famous-landmark-being-mapped-in-3d-29167859.html
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CultureTECH In Residence Project

Haven't had a chance to update all month as I've been working on the CultureTECH in residence project where I have been tasked to work on a project mixing new technologies and elements of our cultural heritage. Exciting stuff!

 

Leaning Creative Learning Week 1

I've begun an MIT online course on learning creative learning - a course which aims to teach problem solving and learning skills through group activities, experimentation and play! As a for instance understanding and playing with a model gear/ differential can be used as a mental model to understand/visualise ratios as a mathematical concept.

For the first week the first exercise was to create a tower as high and structurally sound as possible in 18 mins using only dry spaghetti and marshmallows, I opted to doodle a little before hand to get a bearing of design implications, the lessons I was able to learn from this was to start from the top of the tower downwards so irrespective of how far id get the tower wouldnt be incomplete.

The spagetti was very fragile which demanded I take my time with the process. In a group scenario the fragility of the working material and the tendency for everyone to want to lead are complications in place to force people to rethink collaboration and  how to communicate better. 

HTML 3D model viewer

experimenting with the p3d 3d model viewer platform, has support for Specular & Normal map support too!

Shootin' the breeze

a few concepts I've knocked up for the Eddie Ifft Talkin' Shit Podcast

Rosie Red!

First day of 2 weeks Celaction2d animation training with DogEars tomorrow morning!

So Excited! :-)

Wee Sneak Peak! :D

A wee sneak peak of some the characters I've been working on this week in the studio. Motion capture, lip syncing, cloth simulation and craic all wrapped up together with a bow!

Retargeted mocap & custom animation with Ncloth simulation

Fluid Dynamics and Rigid Body simulation/Pdi

a piece I'm currently working on making use of rigid body simulation, fields and maya fluid dynamics to drive the explosion blast.

Anatomy Study #2

Anatomy Study #1

Spooked Out at the Mill!

My latest big project in collaboration with Mark Quinn and Delia Millán Martínez , a 3d building projection & firework display on to Mossley Mill in Newtonabbey went live on Halloween night,

 http://www.newtownabbey.gov.uk/news/displayarticle.asp?article=1544

Projection studio edit

I've done a little video breakdown of some of the vfx I created for the animated sequence

Live recording from Halloween Night

Cream Collective...

Just completed my first collaborative project with Mark Quinn under our own Brand the Cream Collective, straight onto our second project and now featuring the talented Delia Millán Martínez, full steam ahead!

A wee sneak peak of our next project, featuring physics simulation, swarm behaviour animation and integrating our own motion capture setup.

Animation Retargeting with HumanIK

 

        Got my head around the HumanIK setup in maya it is for the most part non destructive of existing custom rigs so long as joint local rotations are all tidy, the HumanIK  'ik' rig that is created as an intermediate between my own ik/fk rig and the source footage and is nice to work with on it's own right!

Maya vertex to Joint animation for UNITY/UDK pipeline

 

Was having issues trying to get vertex animation from Maya to UNITY so decided to share my process, although I was using this with Ncloth simultion this techniques has applications for blendshapes or any vertex animation in real times engines, MegaFiers and several Max scripts can achieve a similar result but joint animation is loads more low fi albeit resource heavy on a game engine. I'm working on an MEL script to automate this process

FABLAB introductory workshop!

Just had my first session at MIT's new FabLab in Derry, some really exciting equipment there, particularly interested in the 3d printer and the laser cutter! In the coming weeks I will definetly get to cut my teeth with some interesting work at the crafting workshop!

  

Rigging IRL :-)

 The past few weeks I've been working on a series of 3d characters for Uproar Comics Zombies! App

 

  
, as part of this I've been devoting some time to researching retargeting mocap animation to a rig. I've retargeted animation between duplicate rigs/rigs with similar nodes before but never between completely different rigs so it's definetly been an experience, currently experimenting with Motionbuilder & Inkinema in my pipeline to try and establish as simple a workflow as possible. Below is the test model/rig I created for the process.

Additionally the past week I started building this robotic arm kit, the mechanical/electronics side is almost complete, it's so far proved a fun experience, once complete there is a usb interface and control software for the servo controller as well instructions on writing your own code/interface. A few months ago I dabbled with OPENFRAMEWORKS and I'm looking forward to seeing how I can bridge the gap!