With only 9 days left before the world premiere (and a little less to wrap the movie!!), Wellington is getting ready to host the event and to please the fans. Airport, cinemas, buildings and shoppings have all received a little touch of Middle Earth, and the result is quite... big!
I'll make it to the festival for the first time this year, coming from New Zealand especially for the occasion!
See you there!
Annecy 2012
For once we can show off with some cool crew gear! :)
Long time no see but I’m still alive!
The last 8 months have been pretty busy at work but with the wrap of The Adventures of Tintin I can finally put a term to my hibernation. I’ve spent most of this time creating a rig for a bird and developing a generic and modular workflow to build rigs and any kind of asset in an object-oriented, nodal based and consistent way, pretty exciting!
With a 5-years background as a XSI user, the transition to Maya when I arrived at Weta was quite straightforward but not really pleasant. I eventually ended up seeing the advantage of having access to the Hypergraph and being able to build my rig/deformer graphs in there, but still... on top of having to deal with poorly designed tools (what a nightmare to paint skinClusters in Maya!) and an API that looks like a mess where you have to write all the basic functions yourself if you’re planning to use it, my main frustration comes from not having access to an ICE-like graph to create my own deformers. I really miss this quick and intuitive process... accessing mesh data, dealing with minimalist building blocks, plugging nodes around and immediately see what happens, visualizing any node output to debug and see what’s going on, etc...
Once you get used to this workflow, it becomes hard to do without it. It would feel like driving a car with the handbrake on. ICE is simply invaluable when in example you’re on a tough prod and need a deformer but don’t have the time to prototype and develop a C++ node for that. Furthermore that node might be a bit too specific to your problem and might not be worth developing if you can’t reuse it later on, or might take too long to extract and implement a more generic concept out of it.
Fortunately this frustration is now coming to an end!
Andrea Interguglielmi just released a new procedural application in alpha version: Coral [en]. The goal is to provide the users with a nodal-based interface where you have all the very basic building blocks and can create complex graphs out of it to then package them in a single node if needed. You can create your own nodes, you can create your own attribute types, … you can do pretty much what you want basically.
You’ve got it, it’s quite similar in the idea of ICE and it’s a pretty good thing! The main advantage of Coral is that it’s a standalone that can be plugged into different packages so you can now do one rig or one deformer and use it in Maya, XSI or whatsoever. How neat is that?
An integration for Maya is actually already built-in and seems to work seamlessly according to this video [en]. I haven’t tried the Maya integration yet but I managed to build a simple and stupid deformer, which is really encouraging.
As this is an alpha, it’s missing quite some features and nodes to make it usable as it is in a production context, but once again nothing stops you from creating your own nodes and own attribute types and customize it the way you want.
The application is actually open source and works on Windows, Linux and Mac. For now the only binaries provided are for Mac but you can download and compile the code for your OS - I tested it on Linux at work and it runs fine.
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