Tuuqayi

The Tools
As the first post in this production blog, I thought it might be useful to provide some information on the tools being used to make this film a reality. First off, the hardware. I'm using two computers for primary development. One is my trusty 1Ghz Titanium Powerbook G4. Although slow by today's standards, I've been a Mac user ever since I started using computers, so my primary computer will always be a mac. And honestly, it still handles all my 3D apps fine, just isn't very helpful come render time. And the second computer is the processing workhorse, an 1.81 GHz AMD Athlon 64 PC. Although I'm still not a big PC fan, this computer was made available to me, and it renders at about four times the speed of my laptop, so I'm not sure what I'd do without it. And now the sofware. The primary app for all development of the film is Autodesk Maya. I'm still running 6.5, so I guess that would still make it Alias\|Wavefront Maya, but regardless. I am (perhaps foolishly) still running 6.5 because I have everything so stable right now, that I'm just a little concerned that upgrading could tear it all apart. I've been using Maya for since '02, and I like to think of myself as somewhat of an expert by now (but you can always learn more...). There are also sevel peripheral pieces of software being used. First is e frontier's Poser, which admittedly has a pretty bad name among most 3D artists. But I was able to use it to make all the character models in the film aside from the crows. And it easily cut my modelling time in half. Although I will say the interface can be terriblely frustrating at times. Now getting models from Poser to Maya isn't a trivial task by any means. Building that pipeline took a fair amount of trial and error. The solution that finally yielded the best results for me was exporting the models as .obj files. And then in order to bring over skeleton weights, I used a program called Carrara, which natively opens Poser files, and exported .fbx files. Then it was just a matter of transfering weights from the imported fbx model to the imported obj model. Granted this isn't a particularly refined procedure, so there was a LOT of cleanup involved. And the animation rigs I built in maya were custom made, so the Poser weights usually just ended up being a starting point. Next is e-on Vue 6, which I am planning on using for most of the sets in the film. This will be my first experience with this piece of software, so I expect there will be something of a learning curve. Hopefully I can document that a bit on this blog. Last there is Photoshop for texture map manipulation and additional matte painting. And also Final Cut for editing and compositing. So that pretty much covers it. Getting everything to work together often feels like trying to get a room full of clocks to chime at the same time. But when it all does, the results are pretty gratifying.

By fruehdom on October 21, 2007 at 5:00pm EDT	Topic(s): maya poser finalcut photoshop vue

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