jen Project Pipeline - A journey within a journey

Hello! Sorry i havent posted in a while, things have been pretty busy as of my last blog post. But! Updates! Between then and now, i started a new job in Vancouver as a Senior Rigger and so far it has been a blast!

Anyways to start, with the content of this blog post… a little backstory. I wrote a story for an animated short film im working on in my free time. It has been a long process and theres still lots to do, our team is very small so i have to do a lot of work and develop a lot of stuff to get this short to completion. Hopefully when this project is done, it can begin my journey as a director. (One can hope) Ive had experience running projects in the past, mainly in the areas of organization, pipeline stuff, task management and overall running the a project from start to finish, so im bringing that knowledge for this personal project.

While we started working on this project and the pre production began, i started thinking ahead, since im mostly used to that thinking, i was trying to anticipate any problems we could face during production, one of those problems is the management of assets across the artists. There are many tools out there that can make this easier, like Artella, or Shotgun or any other project management software/asset management. Because one option was, to transfer the info between us via Dropbox or g drive or things like that, but its too much hassle. So i began to think, what if i make like, something like Artella but, by myself? Since Python is pretty much compatible with a LOT of stuff. I started doing my research.

I stumbled upon FTP servers, and what do you know, theres a whole python module for FTP servers. So I mixed that with some python and some Maya commands and i started to develop what i named… jenProjectPipeline. A tool that, in the course of this project, will facilitate the use of assets, props, characters, rigs, textures and animations of the whole short film. This tool is still in development of course, i believe i have done a lot of work on it in the past few months, so i think ive made good progress and ive made some successful test runs.

Here im gonna start breaking down my logistics with the UI, maybe in future blog posts i can go a bit in detail on parts of the code.

Here, we can see what i have so far in the UI, we can see the different sections in tabs for modeling, rigging and animation. So now ill explain how it works.

Here in the section labeled as number 1 in red, is a text list of all the files/items in the server that are under assets. As you can imagine, each type of model, rig an animation tab has the same server list layout in the UI. The purpose of this section is so that the user can see the list of all the available assets(in this case) that are currently in the FTP server. It also tells them what is the latest file currently in the FTP as well, for example in this image. We can see that the Tree asset is still in its first version, versus the Cliff asset is already in its third version. But with that list alone, we cannot handle those files to be worked on. Therefore, below the list, theres a progress bar with a download button. What this does is, when you select the asset you want to work on, you can hit the download to pull that file from the FTP server and store it locally on your computer. Once its fully downloaded, it will appear in the UI as a usable/editable asset.

That takes us to the area labeled number 2 in blue. That area is an icon text button layout that will display all the files you currently have locally with an icon representing them visually. It will also tell you what version you currently have locally. That way, if you are a version behind, you can download from the FTP and get the latest, but still storing the previous versions if you want to roll back. Having those assets locally in the right side opens us up to other options in the UI, marked below as number 3 in green.

These buttons below will allow us to manage what we want to do with the asset we selected in the number 2 area where the local files are stored. Starting with the green buttons, we can do a normal save, its just like a CTRL + S. Then we have Save Version, which is just that, version saving for your working backups. And with the publish button, what this does is that, it saves the official file, as a published file or published asset, and stores it locally, making the UI update on the right, but also, it triggers a python FTP code to upload that published asset back to the FTP server so that other users may see it and download it as well. This is going to be huge and very handy when handling the model deliveries, like, they can just tell me, i finished this character and i published it, and now i know i can just open this tool, download said character and start working on it. Since all of my small team is working remotely, this is going to be crucial to maintain a good synchronization during production.

The orange buttons, Open is just opening the selected file, Open Version is if you want to open any backup versions you saved with the Save Version button and the Open publish version is the same thing, but with the published files.

And finally in blue, we got the referencing, pretty straightforward, Reference its just that, it takes the latest asset selected and does a reference. Update Reference checks your scene for the asset selected in area number 2, and checks if its already referenced and it prompts you if you want to update that selected asset to the latest, or if you want to choose to what remap that asset. And finally, Reference publish version is if you want to bring a new reference that you can look for from the publish files.

I feel it pretty straight forward, im really excited how its working and how it has turned out, in the tests ive made, one of the team members actually uploaded that Cliff asset and i successfully downloaded it on my pc via the tool.

This is a pretty cool start for this tool and i bet its going to be very helpful in this project. Im going to continue developing it, and i will do my best to keep this blog update with the development of the tool and i will talk more in depth about certain areas of the tool as well. Maybe i will also do tech blogs talking about the rigging progress for the main character as well, well see!

Thanks for reading!

Revisiting Manny - The Re-joruney?

So I came back from Siggraph a couple of months ago and dove straight into an intense crunch time where I work, so I havent had much time to work on some of my stuff but now I seem to have a bit of more time on my hands.

While I went to Siggraph I had the opportunity to talk to some amazing people from the industry, got a lot of feedback for my reel and Manny and all that.

Now that I am back home, I can tackle those feedbacks and fix some stuff that, when told about made sense to me, and I still want to improve and make my stuff better.

One of the things from the feedback was the facial rig, and it was also something I was experimenting with before leaving to Vancouver.

Heres my current setup for the facial rig… It is functional, it works, but I believe I can push it further to get more appeal, more range of motion and overall better performance not just for the animators, but for the aesthetics of the character per se.

This is my current joint setup, and again, it works but i would like to add more life to it, so I’m basically going to erase his face rig and rebuild it from the ground up.

So in this setup I mainly focused on curve based ribbon setups. Using the point on curve info node to connect my skin joints to a curve, then driving that curve with other joins so i can have a nice falloff in the facial motion. I used this setup for basically the entire thing, mouth, eyes, eyebrows. In the eyebrows i was mostly experimenting with that curve using ik handles for each joint, basically, the joints are in a sufficient distance so that, when you move the controls and the ik starts to behave and move the joints, they move along the surface of his forehead/skull, giving the illusion of when you move your eyebrows and your skin slides on your forehead and slides on the top part of your eye sockets. It is a very cool effect i managed to accomplish with this setup, but im thinking i can achieve the same thing without all the weight of the whole facal rig.

So this is my new plan… roughly. So the blue balls are going to be roughly my skin joints and the red ones are going to be my driver joints that are going to drive the facial setup. My approach this time is to position the joints where aesthetically and design wise makes sense instead on just placing them raw on certain vertices or edges in the polyflow of the character. I have done some several trials of this approach at work with good success so far. SOOOOOO i am going to test that approach with my buddy Manny over here. I also want to do better skinning on his facial rig, i want to make it look UNFFF sooooo gooooood. Tho my challenge right now is that, the mouth is a bit too pre posed for my liking but…. I’ll roll with it to see what happens! I’ll keep posting progress of this adventure of fixing Manny’s facial rig!

PS: Im doing a fundraiser to raise money for tools and equipment for those aspiring young artists that want to get into the animation industry here in Puerto Rico. If you want to learn more, theres a button below that will take you to the gofundme campaign.

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