navron

Hey guys! Long time no see I've been deployed for a couple months now. Internet's been pretty crappy, so no posting/uploading. Anyway, after about 4 months of agonizing, pulling my hair out stress trying to wrap my mind around 3d and Maya, I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. Remember the Applejack rig I was working on? Well, I'm about 50% done with the blendshapes, I finally figured out how to attach a dynamic nHair system to a character, and I'm currently working on styling AJs ACTUAL hair, including the ribbons, which will likely have to be nCloth in order to wrap around dynamic hair realistically. I still have to model a hat, but that won't be very hard once the model's complete. New plane>Extrude>Smooth>Parent>......>Profit. Here's a short animation test I rendered out with mentalRay to test the blendshapes I currently have, and the nHair system: Didn't get much love on derpibooru (50/50 loved it/hated it) due to it falling right smack in the uncanny valley, but hopefully with some more tweaking I can break it out on the far side of the valley right into the realistic character portion. My own thoughts? I'm surprised I even reached the uncanny valley after 4 months of 3d work, so I'm looking forward to the next 2 months when this rig should be fully complete. Unfortunately, I think plans for the Fallout Equestria trailer are out of the window, given how long it's taken just to model, texture, and rig a character from scratch. Hopefully I can round up a small team of people to assist in the modeling and texturing stages.

So I've gotten to the rigging portion of my AJ character: Going to bind the skin later today, add bendshapes for facial rigging, and then wrap it up with styling some dynamic hair for the head/tail, and wrapping it up with modeling a hat.

No arguments there. Maya is quite a sinister application. At face value it isn't bad, until you realize that even with tons of in-your-face features, most of the things done in Maya involve manually linking attributes, nodes, and creating a clean hierarchy of your entire scene layout.

Please excuse the thread necro. I figured it would be better to reply here rather than create a new topic. As an aspiring filmmaker and VFX artist, I've recently been learning Maya. I'm moderately proficient in After Effects, and (in-case anybody needs help with it) I have over 12 years of Photoshop experience. I'm currently active duty military, and I plan on getting myself proficient enough with Maya and After Effects over the next few years, and seeking a career in VFX once out of the military. Some of you may know me for music, or my few short ponies IRL videos under the youtube name "navybrony." Anyway, I'm currently working on my own 3d pony model, and sort of jumped the gun straight to rigging before double checking my model: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52284231/Silly%20Pony.mp4 Once the new model is all fixed up, I plan on fully rigging this character for animation, including a full set of blend shape controls (morph targets for all you 3dsMax guys), an integrated dynamic Maya hair system, and various other rigging techniques to make a true 3d character. A goal I've set for myself is to create a short 3-4min fake trailer for a Fallout Equestria movie over the next year, utilizing Maya for the modeling/animation, Terragen 2 for the environment/landscape, and After Effects for compositing and special effects. Thankfully I've got an upcoming deployment, so for 5 straight months I'll have 8-10 hours free each day to work on this project. Future plans include building a small render farm of 4 extra towers, which will bring my total render capability up to 6 computers, which should be more than enough to handle a 3-4min video. I feel true 3d animation is a relatively untouched area within the fandom, and (given the complexities) rightfully so. Hopefully this project will inspire others to tackle the challenge, and perhaps a couple years down the road, there will be enough people familiar with the tools to create something truly amazing.