Fourth video – Spring 2012: A first NURBS example with a glass material

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Buzz

This is the fourth in a series of brief videos on Autodesk Maya and how to use it to create animated projects.  In each video, we try to focus on a single concept, rather than on step by step “how-to’s”.  In this video, we look at the overall modeling philosophy of NURBS and the concept of moving curved lines through 3-space to create surfaces that can be connected up to create 3D surface models.  We also look at the Mental Ray glass material.  Here is the video on Vimeo.

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Important note on class videos from Fall 2011

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Buzz

To view the videos from last fall, do not go to the very beginning of this blog.  (I gave bad instructions in class, sorry.)  The blog is a lot older than that.  The first video from the fall is this one.  Then, look at the videos posted after this one to see the rest of the fall videos.

thanks, Buzz

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Third video – Spring 2012: The Basic Operations of Translation, Scaling, and Rotating

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Buzz

This is the third in a series of brief videos on Autodesk Maya and how to create animated projects with it. In this video we look an informal look at the basic mathematics of what goes on inside an animation engine like Maya as 3D objects are created and manipulated. We focus on straight line (polygon and subdivision) modeling, and on the basic operations of rotating, scaling, and translating.  The video is on Vimeo.

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Second video – Spring 2012: 3 Kinds of Modeling in Maya

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Buzz

The video is posted on Vimeo in HD.  It goes over the 3 sorts of modeling that are supported in Maya: polygon, subdivision, and curved line.  The video describes how they differ in the ways they are stored and rendered.

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posting on the class discussion page

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Buzz

Every student except for one is now signed up on the discussion page, http://www.3dconversation.net/.  You might want to try posting something to see if it works.  You should be able to do it by sending email to post+buzzking@coffeecup.com.

There is a limit of ten students who can be registered to post, and since there are eleven in the class, one person is not currently signed up.  I might be looking for a couple of volunteers to share a login…

See everyone at 4 today.

Buzz

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First video – Spring 2012: The Maya Interface

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Buzz

This is a brief overview of some of the more critical aspects of the Maya interface. The video is posted on Vimeo: Video 1.

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Spring 2012 Project & Course Format

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Buzz

1. There will be no required book for this course.  On http://3dbybuzz.com you can find a tab that lists a number of great how-to Maya books, if you want to buy useful (but generally expensive) books.

2. I would like the class sessions to be a combination of how-to lessons and one-on-one work sessions.  So, please if you do not already have Maya, go to http://students.autodesk.com/, create an account, and download and install a free version of Maya.  It would be best if you can put it on a notebook computer that you can bring to class.  This way, I can work with you in class.  The machines in the classroom run an older version of Maya, which in terms of functionality, is almost identical to the current version, but projects cannot be moved between the new version and the version on the classroom machines.

3. As the semester proceeds, remember that you can always send me your Maya scene (as a .mb file) to get help.  If I cannot immediately solve your problem I will do my best to research it.

4. Each student will build an animated short (very short) video for their class grade.  There will be no exams.

5. I would like to “sort of” or informally require attendance.  It’s a small class and we should be able to work together closely.  But if folks don’t come to class, this doesn’t work.  (Remember, though, I am always looking for advice on how to improve the class.)

6. We will hit the ground running.  In the intro class, I don’t expect students to start their projects for several weeks.  But in this class, I’d like people to start on their project immediately to avoid panicky, round-the-clock debugging and rendering sessions at the end of the semester, and to make it easier to build something challenging.  I’ll work with each of you to put bounds on your project, but please keep in mind that basic modeling skills are the most important thing to master first.  Clean, elegant models that can be effectively textured and rigged are critical.

7. As the semester proceeds, I would like to facilitate out of class conversations by using http://3dconversation.net.  I’m new to the tool, but I believe I can sign each of you up. We can probably use it to discuss common problems and techniques.

8. Given time, we will also look at other applications in this class, such as other 3D modelers, dynamics applications, renderers, etc.

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Advanced Animation, Spring 2012

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Buzz

1. This will be the blog for the Spring, 2012 Advanced Animation course.  All important messages concerning assignments and other issues will be posted here.  You might want to subscribe to the blog.

2. I will NOT use email to communicate with the class as a whole, but if you need to reach me, please send mail to buzzking@rocketship.com.  This address will be dedicated to this class and I will read it frequently.  Please note that my university email address, as it gets hit with hundreds of pieces of Spam a day, is NOT a good way to communicate with me. If the response is personal, I will email back.  If the entire class should get the response, I will use this blog.

3. Thanks for taking this class.  I am always open to suggestions, and so please keep me informed of what you think of the class and how it could be improved.

4. I will begin posting to this blog soon.

5. There are actually 3 sites that we will use for this class:

- this site, http://wordsbybuzz.com, which, if you look at the earlier postings has a complete set of videos from last Fall (the intro class).  I will be posting more videos on this blog this semester, but my intention is to make them shorter and more focused.

- http://3dbybuzz.com, which has videos of past semester of the intro and grad animation classes.

- http://www.3dconversation.net, which we will use to carry on conversations outside of class.

Thanks

Buzz

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More on audio editing: audio formats

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Buzz

This blog is dedicated to 3D animation.  Since sound is a critical aspect of crafting an animated video, we have been looking at audio editing.

Editing Sound.

In particular, we have been looking at the process of editing and cleaning sound.  See the previous postings on cleaning audio, selecting an editing application, and a couple of basic audio editing principles.  We looked at the interface to a very popular Mac wave editor, Amadeus Pro in a recent posting.  Then, we looked at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. And recently, we looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.

Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors, and then at the difference between audio editors and digital audio workstations.

Sound formats.

Today, we look at a few popular audio formats and compare them.

Uncompressed.

If you want your sound to be as close as possible to the original sound captured in the real world, wav and aiff are two very popular choices. The problem is that these uncompressed sound formats can lead to very large files.

But wav and aiff are important for capturing sound in a “lossless” way, meaning that the digital media contains all the information that is captured by the recording equipment. They serve as very good archival formats for permanent recordings that might later be edited and used in a variety of other formats.

By the way, wav, which is short for Waveform Audio Format, is a Microsoft standard. And aiff stands for Audio Interchange File Format and it was developed by Apple.

Compressed.

Perhaps the most popular compressed sound format is mp3. It is used heavily on the Internet. It is a proprietary format owned by the Motion Picture Experts Group, and its full name is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is highly compressed in that an audio recording in wav format might be reduced by 80 or 90% when converted to mp3.

This sort of transformation is called “lossy”, in that information is removed during the conversion process. But what is removed is for the most part not missed by the human ear. The idea is to remove frequencies not heard by people and to remove soft sounds that are drowned out by other, louder sounds.

The end result is good enough for high quality music.

A competitor of mp3 is wma, which stands for Windows Media Audio, and is also proprietary. And yes, Apple promotes mp3.

ogg.

Below is the export format dropdown menu from Amadeus Pro. Note that mp3, wma, wav, and aiff are all there. So is another very important format called ogg…

wpid-sound-2011-12-22-08-21.jpg

More later…

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More on audio editing: wave editors vs. DAWs

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Buzz

This blog is dedicated to 3D animation.  Since sound is a critical aspect of crafting an animated video, we have been looking at audio editing.

Editing Sound.

In particular, we have been looking at the process of editing and cleaning sound.  See the previous postings on cleaning audio, selecting an editing application, and a couple of basicaudio editing principles.  We looked at the interface to a very popular Mac wave editor, Amadeus Pro in a recent posting.  Then, we looked at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. And recently, we looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.

Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors.

Today, we look at a common question.

What is the difference between a DAW and a wave editor?

The products we have looked at so far are generally called audio editors or wave editors. These include Amadeus, Wavelab, Peak, Sound Forge, and Sound Studio.  See the links above.

Highly multitrack.

A Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) is generally a far more complicated program.  A wave (or audio) editor usually can only handle one or two tracks of recordings, while a DAW might support ten or twenty or more tracks.

Non-destructive editing.

Wave editors are used (usually) to perform what is called destructive editing.

This is a term that is used with regard to a wide variety of media applications, and quite frankly, “non-destructive” editing tends to sound better to the average person.  Apple Aperture is a photo editor and manager that supports non-destructive editing, in that you can apply powerful effects to an image without risk of destroying the original image.

DAWs support non-destructive editing because the goal of a DAW is to support the sophisticated mixing of pre-existing sound tracks, as well as the application of special effects to sound tracks.  But a wave editor is used to make raw recordings and edit them into the sorts of useful tracks that might be imported into a DAW.

Special effects, software instruments, and MIDI.

We’ll look at these things in the next in this series of blog postings relating to audio editing.

But to wrap things up, here is a screenshot of a very popular DAW, Cubase, the same folks who make the WaveLab wave editor we have previously discussed:

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