Breakdown:
Taijitu - BYU student short film 2016
- I was responsible for modeling the red robe of the older monk. This included both the simplified mesh used in simulation as well as the render mesh.
- I used simulation in the modeling process to get the arm drape to fall naturally. After wrapping the cloth around the arm, I used the result as the initial rest state for the mesh in order to reduce the amount of time required for pre-roll.
- Clothing simulation:
- Hug shot - Responsible for both characters' robes
- Medallion removal - Responsible for red robe
- Stumble up the stairs - Responsible for white robe
- Ascent up the stairs - Responsible for red robe
- Run through the tapestries - Responsible for white robe
- Medallion handoff - Responsible for red robe
- All simulation was done using Maya nCloth.
Character Pre-roll and Simulation Setup
- Responsible for scripting a tool that places the character in the pre-roll resting pose for cloth simulation. This tool iterated over the major controls of the older monk's rig and set keys in order to pose him correctly for the cloth to rest on.
- I also wrote an additional script which automates the process of setting up the simulation. This script first determines the true world space position of the character, then caches out the animation with the pre-roll and imports that cache in a separate file for greater efficiency. Once the new file is initialized with the animation cache and robe asset placed correctly in world space, the script then applies the robe dynamic property presets and initializes all required constraints between the robe and character.
Graphical Interfaces
- Responsible for creating custom tool shelves with intuitive graphical user interfaces to allow our production's artists to easily interface with the production pipeline. These shelf tools allow for checking out copies of production assets, publishing changes to files, rolling back to previous iterations of props and characters, etc. All graphical interfaces for these tools were programmed in python using PyQt4.
- The graphical components of the tool shelf scripts were abstracted from the software-specific functionality so that the same interfaces could be reused to perform similar functionality across different software packages.