Week 7

Week 6

I've spent sometime creating a drying puddle scene (the final resting place of the juvenile Bothriolepis). It was an interesting challenge. Wet sand tends to be darker and also very glossy and then it fades off. To achieve that effect I projected a horizontal color ramp across the terrain, and then parented it to the waterline. As the waterline descends, the rim of wet sand seems to follow. It's still a work in progress. It would be great to get some cracking mud on the upper levels of the terrain.



More work on tweaking the overhead view. Starting to layer in some foam effects to make the water surface look more believable.



Here's a look at the current state of the rig. Rather than using only joints, I am incorporating a slightly different tool to achieve this deformation, something called a blendshape. It's a workflow I've used before. I had originally done it as a test, but I think it might save me some time in the end. I think it'll be more of a hybrid rig in the end (some things being controlled by joints and others by blendshapes). I am going to run it by Dave to see what he thinks.

Week 5

I have started working on my poster.

Rough Animatic


Render Tests:

Week 4

I spend time working on my animatic (will be posted shortly) and my character rig.

Here are some shots of my WIP Ontogenic character rig. Ontogenic joints are in red, normal character animation joins are in green. Most of these joints haven't been mirrored to the left side yet. I'm still in the process of naming and cleaning up the joint hierarchy. 

The tail has a sine-wave deformer to simulate the undulation of a tail. 

A bend deformer allows the tail to curve up and down. 

A second bend deformer allows the tail to curve laterally.

Here I am trying to make sense of the range of motion for Bothriolepis' pectoral appendage. Translating it into Maya will be a challenge. 

Here is a fossil of Bothriolepis from the Escuminac Formation in Canada. Dr. Daeschler brought these guys into our Vertebrate Paleontology class for the lecture on placoderms. 

Phyllolepis: Another weird placoderm from the Red Hill Site in Pennsylvania. 

Nice 3D model of Turrisaspis.

Week 3

Here is my current progress on the Bothriolepis model.



Here is test video of a particle effect I would like to incorporate into the animation. Getting Maya to render transparent sprites is proving to be a challenge.

This is a chart describing the sort of shader I will be setting up for my ontogenic character. Vray has a blend material that accepts several separate materials and overlaps them. I'll have two separate textures for the adult and juvenile form, which will fade into one another under the control of the growth slider.

I figured out the positional specular highlight shader. I placed a conditional node between the samplerInfo node and the Vray material. The samplerInfo node sends the Y position of each rendered pixel to the conditional node. If the Y position is greater than 0: the specular amount of the Vray material is set to 5. If the Y position is 0 or below: the specular amount is set to 0.

Here is render test. Notice the faked Caustic lighting on the sand. Also notice the environmental fog that causes objects in the distance to assume the color of the water.

Week 2

Here is my progress on the Bothriolepis base model

Here's a render test of (faked) caustic lighting

Here are some renders of an attempted position-dependent specular shader.

Winter 2014 - Week 1 - Review

This week I returned to work on my thesis project. There are several administrative-type things going on behind the scenes (drafting requests for my expert panel, formatting my manuscript (thank you stefan), searching through spreadsheets of measurements, brushing up on allometric formulas, etc.).

I have been brushing up on how scientists study and quantify morphological change with the help of the book On Size and Life (1983). The most useful technique for assessing change is with an allometric formula. One chooses two measurable parts of an organism (x, y). These two measurements are then plots against one another. The following formula is used:

 y = bx^a

The exponent a reveals the type of growth occurring. If a=1, then one is observing isometric growth, two measurements changing at the same rate. If a < 1, then one is observing negative allometric growth (slower growth) and a > 1 is positive allometric growth (faster growth). 

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Related but unrelated to the thesis project, I have put together an animation demo reel. It highlights some of the characters I have animated over the last few years. 

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I have spent sometime working in Maya and Vray to simulate an underwater environment. Adding an environmental fog helps a great deal. Getting the surface to look convincingly reflective is still a struggle.

I've begun to model my character. Bothriolepis is encased in series of armor plates. Here I've been trying to add enough topology to allow these normally immobile plates to deform during 'development'. 

Source:

MacMahon, Thomas A., and John Tyler Bonner. On size and life. Scientific American Books, 1983.