Tech Art Trivia

Professional
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Based off this request:

[QUOTE=Vailias;3247]I had this thought the other day, that I think would be infinitely helpful to aspiring tech artists everywhere, and potentially others.

Since technical art, at its core, is creative problem solving, could those of you doing this on a daily basis list off some of the specific problems that you have solved (without breaching NDA’s of course), so that others might put themselves through the same thought process and see what solution they come up with.[/QUOTE]

Post some specific issues you’ve tackled, but to keep it interesting, don’t post solutions yet.:D:

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ooh, a treasure hunt :D:

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doh, i posted too early on the other thread… moving my reply here -

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thats a great question/request. however, i’m having trouble coming up with a good example for you.

i think the problem is that, as a supervisor, i’m on every project coming through, which could be anywhere from 3-6 projects at a time. i literally have a minimum of 4 maya’s open at once so i can jump around from problem to problem, or rig to rig. there’s a constant flow of needs, requests, and wish lists to attend to all the time, for everyone on my team.

so before i get to a list of examples, the #1 most common problem solving that we hit constantly is… “how can i make such-and-such better/faster?”

-how can i make this module/rig better?
-what can i do to make tool x better?
-how can i make the machine do this work for me?

sure, we do a lot of animator support for specific shots or problems that come up in production, but probably the majority of our high level thinking happens before production when we’re building or figuring out how to do something.

here’s a rough list over the past year or so of problems we’ve had to solve…

dog leg rig - our old dog leg sucked. make a new one that is simpler, faster, and better.

our rigs were slow - make them faster.

we needed to rig Po from kung fu panda for commercial/dvd work. he needed to match dreamworks’ quality (deformations, rendering) exactly - do it.

we needed to rig Marty from madagascar 2 for commercials. he’s a quadruped, but when he stands on his back legs and gestures with his arms, his front arms need to have a human-elbow-like bend in them, not a front 3 joint (dog leg) rig. when he’s in quad mode, his legs need to have a 2nd bend in them and transition smoothly to that.

we needed to rig melman from madagascar 2 for commercials - his neck had specific kinks in it, but then those kinks had to go away sometimes in animation. rig the neck to match DW’s rig.

same as melman’s neck, the tails in madagascar had specific kinks (coat hangar like) in them, but then needed the ability to go smooth. make an easy to use tail rig

we needed a detailed foot rig to animate/roto over live action to composite fx work on the live action plate. we ended up ditching the plates and just making the whole shot cg, so the foot had to be a very realistic foot rig.

we had to rig/skin 60 characters in 5 months, and then 40 characters in 5 months at higher (feature) quality - make a system that can enable you to output quality work at that speed.

we needed to rig instruments for the ‘entire world’ to be able to animate with, without having the rigs breakdown by people animating in singapore, south africa, canada, etc… (www.massanimation.com)

there’s plenty more in between all that… i’ll think about this one a bit more, cause that was kinda fun to think about the different stuff we’ve done lately :slight_smile:

-josh

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Josh: Thanks. Most of those are exactly the sort of, I guess “tech art challenges” I was looking for.

The first two are a bit fuzzy in the detail, so if I may ask some follow on questions:

Dog Leg Rig: What made the old one complex? Was it the control layout or the inner workings or both? Simple is different to different people. What kind of simple do your animators want? How many controls did the existing rig have to make it complex? (just looking to set an upper bound on where simple becomes complex… as lower is “make maya know what I’m thinking”)

Slow rigs: What made them slow? (seeing as you likely can’t post rigs here) Are they script and expression heavy where a node based approach would work better or just cumbersomely designed? Lots of custom attributes? Too many dependencies or influences from any given control?

Thanks for the input though, this is a great start.

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Dog Leg Rig: What made the old one complex? Was it the control layout or the inner workings or both? Simple is different to different people. What kind of simple do your animators want? How many controls did the existing rig have to make it complex? (just looking to set an upper bound on where simple becomes complex… as lower is “make maya know what I’m thinking”)

it was both slow to animate with, as well as overly complex for the animator to deal with - way too many controls that had to be animated for it to work properly. it was also hard to get a good (and specific art-directed) default bend in the rig, which caused more animator work. the new one had more control, with less controls. kinda of hard to describe without giving too much away, but the new one was a total redesign of the old in how it worked.

Slow rigs: What made them slow? (seeing as you likely can’t post rigs here) Are they script and expression heavy where a node based approach would work better or just cumbersomely designed? Lots of custom attributes? Too many dependencies or influences from any given control?

this is something that is a constant challenge. it’s super difficult to get a realtime rig with the quality that we deal with, so that is basically our end goal (which we haven’t hit yet). they are not expression heavy, but there is a LOT of stuff/nodes in them. if we were to graph the need of our rigs between ‘speed’ and ‘features/flexibility’, the graph would look like this -

speed -------------------------------------|------- features

we’re slowly trying to dial that position towards ‘speed’ without sacrificing rig features, because thats the part of the rigs that enables us to tackle almost anything. using dgTimer doesn’t really pinpoint our slowdowns to one specific thing, so its really just the mass amounts of ‘stuff’ in the rigs. so that means we’re always looking at ways of optimizing and making each rig module more efficient. certainly a never ending task :slight_smile:

oh, some more challenges that we hit recently -

rig optimus prime… quickly
rig plantlife/trees/flowers to grow (not just using paintfx…)

and from my previous game studio job, the biggest challenge there was working with a programmer trying to come up with a good system to customize your character (mmo style), and then executing that on the art side.
-how do you setup the pipeline of skinning 100’s of clothing items?
-how do you make multiple body types that can fit those clothing items?
-how do you keep track of all that?
-how do you export all of that, and then re-export when there is a rig/model change?
-how do you chop up the clothing geometry for maximum customize-ability?
-how can you make sure edges between chopped geo always keeps the same skin weights?
…etc.

-josh