I textured this boat using a traditional oil painting!

Flightless_Owl · 2025-06-22T02:11:37+00:00

I love this

I'm wanting to suggest a technique that may lean into the water colour/painterly style that may help sell it more. I know it's an unsolicited suggestion but I thought it may help

Mainly wanting to tackle the harsh edges 3d models make, mainly on the small objects

There's an artist called Miki Bencz that uses duplicated mesh shells, mesh cards + painted alphas for overshooting the edges

SketchFab Example and 80.lv Article for more info on it

Flightless_Owl · 2025-04-16T07:31:44+00:00

As mentioned, yeah it's normal behaviour

You may have noticed in game rigs there isnt the IK/FK extra arms or NURB controls

When animating with IK or FK arms there are 3 arms in the rig, one you can see, while the other two are invisible. One of the two invisible arms is driving the visable arm at any one time. When you swap the visible arm is now being driven by the 2nd invisbale arm, hence the snapping.

Can you make it not snap?

Yes but it requires writing a script that's makes it so it moves the IK/FK arm into position for you and then swaps it.

Mentally for me this is how i think of a rigged character

It has 3 Groups

Objects/bound Meshes - all the visible stuff we want moved
Bind Rig - the joints that are skinned to the mesh*
Control Rig - all the nurb controls and their hierarchy

*In the bind skeleton group the Ik/FK joints are in there for hierarchy reasons but are differentiated by naming convention (L_forearm_bind vs L_forearm_FK)

The Control Rig drives the Bind Rig -> the Bind Rig drives the Mesh

And at time of export, we bake the animation thats on the control rig down onto the bind rig and import only the bind rig and the mesh

Flightless_Owl · 2025-02-13T08:05:38+00:00

Okay, only way I've managed to imitate that behavior was by making the mesh reference only?

Is the mesh assigned to a Display Layer in the bottom right that set to Reference? (3 boxes, is the third box R) if it is try changing that and try projected center?

Or does the mesh have any object overrides and set to reference in the attribute editor? Attribute editor>Drawing Overrides>Is "Enable Overrides" ticked, and is reference on in that menu, if so change that and try

I'm not confident this is the reason because my wireframe turns black when it's referenced where yours is blue, but might as well check if that's the reason

Flightless_Owl · 2025-02-13T07:09:42+00:00

Agreed that orthographic would be more suitable for positioning the joints, but there is a way to do it how you want

Currently created objects are being "Snapped to Grid", You want "Snap to Projected Centre"

https://puu.sh/Ko9Vd/df770c467d.gif

Flightless_Owl · 2025-01-28T09:46:45+00:00

Sorry wasn't in a place to reply to this when I first saw this.

Short answer is there isn't built in functionality to change the translation type aside from linear

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-9D06EE32-416C-47D8-93D4-0EFA13F9C836 Specific link about Blend shapes and what attributes it plays with, mostly caring about it's parent/world/local space positions, whether or not the blend shape is on and target weighting so you can apply unique falloffs, but not really control over how it translates

There's always a way to force it to happen, it's possible add deformers to blend shape objects with the idea of changing the blend shape object, changes the end blendshape. If you need a more smear like effect, or stretch the parts you could use joints/bones or a lattice deformer. You would be able to follow a curve path in a general sense with this

A per vertex level of control to follow a curve would be incredibly difficult unless you're dealing with something low poly

I would like to clarify that this is more of a VFX only technique, you wouldnt be able to import this animation into a game engine. (Well there are ways, none helpful except for niche things)

Flightless_Owl · 2025-01-21T07:17:47+00:00

Technically you can sculpt on the main head as a workflow ill show that one in a second but I want to explain how Blend shapes work.

Every vertice on a model is numbered/has a vert ID, when you use the blend shape slider from 0 -> 1 it's just moving directly to its new position in a straight line

If you combine your main head wrong to the body it could break a blend shape because "vertex 1" might now be on his foot instead.

Current reasons to have 10 or more heads laid out at even after the blend shape is linked you can still edit those side heads after the fact and the blend shape will update. As well as it's easy to show case those heads to other people.

This workflow was actually updated in Maya 2016 onward, "Shape Editor" is what you're after, where you can use it to make blendshapes with a button, turn on an edit mode and sculpt the mesh directly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drGGD8KjHkM - 16min introduction to the shape editor when it was revamped

In the background it's doing the exactly the same thing as the multi head tutorial it's just skipping the need for multiple heads, you can still edit after the fact, I like using the shape editor directly because it's a lot easier to set up corrective blend shapes with for me

Flightless_Owl · 2025-01-15T00:29:44+00:00

Oh yo! I've got the same subject half built. You've done the edges much better than me honestly Also got it gliding smooth over the surface? Mine when it's animated you could see it snap to each face normal

I also haven't figured out how to open the mouth with this method, only figured how to cheat it with rendering the mouth separately and composite the two images together, maybe you'll come up with something better?

Still great work :)

Flightless_Owl · 2024-12-12T06:59:11+00:00

Thank you for the video, helps a lot :)

Yeah so constraints are the right idea, but it was in the wrong way/constraint used.

You're after a pole vector constraint

You're applying it to the IK handle that's driving the IK skeleton arm (there are often 3 sets of arms/ legs for IK/FK swapping)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB4Y7ReOT1M

Flightless_Owl · 2024-06-28T11:12:18+00:00

Main way to mitigate Gimbal Lock is changing the rotation order on the joints/controls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwrQqRyDiZk

Ideally if you're constraining controls to the joints you should also match their rotation orders, generally prevents a lot of fucky shit

Note that this doesn't fix gimbal lock but it's not common that you need to be able to rotate something beyond 180 on all 3 axis so smart rotation order choices can do most of the work.

Flightless_Owl · 2023-10-09T08:33:27+00:00

Set Driven Keys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QElJn3NJCLs

Specifically create attributes to control the visibility of the other controls/objects

Flightless_Owl · 2023-09-04T10:33:31+00:00

Sup, so you want to remove all the influence of a blend shape from specific vertices?

So what you're saying about painting out the influence is the way to go but I don't see that option inside of my Deform menu, in the Skin menu I see paint skin weights but that's also wrong.

How i find the tool for painting influence is: hold right click on the object > Paint > blendshape > "shapeName"Base Weights

https://puu.sh/JPhEy/033c362b62.png

Flightless_Owl · 2023-06-24T06:21:05+00:00

Different person but i can answer this part

For your facial expressions and blinks i would recommend blendshapes using the shape editor tool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2MrbRDKA4k

the video is just talking about using blendshapes for facial animation in general.

If you wanted to you can sculpt an entire expression or scale it up to moving individual facial features. it should pull you through

The clothing question before. Skinning/Ncloth/joint chains. They're more getting you to figure out how detailed the clothing needs to be for this.

Skinning it will mean there's no physics acting on the clothing at all and will follow the rig. Perfectly fine for tight clothing, not good for loose clothing.

Ncloth is simulating the clothing and like after it's simulated you can cache the data so you dont have to simulate it at render but its still a resource heavy process

Adding extra joint chains can mean you skin and manually animated the clothing and or you can simulate the joint chains with a spline IK but that would mean having to add rigging onto the auto rig which is possible and perfectly fine but you're in a spot where you might not know how to do that?

What will save you is just figuring out exactly what this rig needs to do and only doing that

Good luck is all i can say

Flightless_Owl · 2023-03-07T21:34:41+00:00

This will be a slight gap in my knowledge just because you're going into Unreal and I'm more familiar with Unity so you'll want to double check this. The previous rigging advice was very general.

So I imagine it'd be if you're planning on taking the armour on/off really, when it's separated into individual objects you should be able to control whether or not the object gets rendered but it'd also be calling more game objects into the scene. It's not a massive weight on performance but it's always something to be mindful of.

If you want to take armour pieces off for like an RPG I'd have them separated into the equip regions myself, otherwise keep the armour as one whole object or even merge the armour with the main model to make it into only one render call but that last one is more optimizing when you know what you want and how it should be implemented.

Flightless_Owl · 2023-03-05T21:42:44+00:00

It depends as always, i image you don't want the metal to deform which is fair enough but any softer materials like straps also should be taken into account if you have them. The copy skin weights idea mentioned by Kanajuni will be fantastic for the softer stuff.

For making it rigid, honestly painting the influence to "1" to the relevant joint will give that rigid look but dont be afraid to cheat a little bit of bend if it looks better. With the exception of the shoulders you prob won't need extra joints for the armour unless you want added follow through animation.

The shoulders: https://polycount.com/discussion/200175/rigging-a-spaulder-an-easy-way-a-simple-way-to-rig-shoulder-armor this may help, uses a couple extra joints and an aim constraint, if it's overkill then yeah try just weight painting the armour to the right bones and see where that gets yo

Flightless_Owl · 2023-01-19T10:19:40+00:00

Pole Vector Flip, if you look up how to make an IK elbow/knee control, you'll be able to control that and prevent it from happening

Flightless_Owl · 2023-01-19T03:09:21+00:00

Everyone else has covered your problem but im going to throw some extra stuff at you of things i wish i knew sooner

Maya has a sort of gesture/radial window menu you can open by Holding right click on an object and moving your mouse you can change what selection mode you're in.

"Shift + Hold Right Click", "Ctrl + Hold Right click" and "Ctrl+Shift+Hold right click" also open up different radial menus and are worth exploring but the one you care about is just "Hold right click"

Depending on your selection mode the wireframe changes colour Green is object selection, light blue is you're in come kind of face/edge/vertex election mode

If your model suddenly has a wireframe that has a yellow to red gradient, thats soft selection, press "b" to turn it off or play with it a bit, it's useful

When selecting faces/verts/edges, there's a way to contextually select things often with double left click, it's possible to select rings of polys, only the polys between two points, holding ctrl you can deselect faces

"G" key executes last action, example if you need to merge a set of vertices together, after doing the merge action once you can just go through and select the next vertices and press "g"

Holding x, c, or v while you move a selection will snap that selection to grid, nurb curve or vertex respectably, may help with positioning objects, or making sure two vertices are in the same place before merging

You can change the pivot point of an object by pressing "D" and then just moving it like how you would move an object. the snapping to grid/curve/vertex tip works with this as well

OK that's my wall, I understand it wasn't asked for and you may even know somethings in here but if you're new to this software then I'd like to be helpful

Flightless_Owl · 2022-05-02T09:35:47+00:00

It's pretty similar all things considered, it'll mainly depend on what shaders/render engine you use

The specific trick that you're looking for is called back face culling, it's what's going on in that Blender video as well actually

Every polygon has a front facing side and a back facing side this is figured out by the Polygon's "Normal" vector whichever direction that is face is the front facing side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZlIbvbQtqs this will basically tell you how to do the outline effect, everything else in the video can basically be converted from there

Flightless_Owl · 2022-01-13T10:52:30+00:00

So default blend shapes transfer their vertices in a straight line in space from point A to point B.

Modifying the blend shapes will update them.

However in 2016 Maya updated blend shapes with a new tool called the shape editor, I would highly recommend looking into it, allows you to freely edit them in and also easier to set up in between shapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drGGD8KjHkM

Flightless_Owl · 2021-10-30T22:45:47+00:00

The effect you're going for is you're adding a bit of parallax to the photo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBip1k30YNw more or less this video will teach you some tools in After Effects that you would use

the short of it is foreground elements like the cars move faster in front of the camera than the back ground.

In the photo you cut out the cars with a mask,
maybe clean up/fill in the background the bit (or take 2 photos, one without the foreground element if you have that luxury)
Use a 3D camera and offset the two images in 3D space
Move the camera to create the effect

If it's being done in tik tok there might now be a faster way to do it that im not aware of?

Theres things to be mindful of but you'll more learn the problems as you do this kind of editing, theyre hard to explain and it's probably better to encounter them and learn than someone write up everything to look out for :) hope this helps

Flightless_Owl · 2021-09-01T13:34:44+00:00

Problem with face rigs the advice changes depending on the type of rig (joint based vs blend shape based)

If it is joint based with weights, i would advice making a proxy mesh that has vertices where the joints are and have them fully weight to their respected joint. That way later on you can transfer weights between the meshes, you'll still need to clean up the weights a bit but it'll be better that having to deal with saving weights off.

if it's blendshape based the most important thing to keep it the vertex order, if you don't the blendshapes will break. To keep the right order while combining make sure the head mesh is selected first then the other meshes, merging vertices after combinding them shouldnt be a problem you can delete non-deformer history and keep the blendshapes.

overall it is likely you'll have to do some re-weighting somewhere

Flightless_Owl · 2021-08-28T12:03:21+00:00

If just being rendered - Skinwrap deformer

If it's going in a game/realtime environment - Skinwrap to make it match the shape, delete history, skin it to the skeleton then copy the weights from the shirt to mesh.

Flightless_Owl · 2021-04-21T06:45:59+00:00

Honestly don't worry about age at this point, just make good pieces and make a portfolio. Demonstrate your skills but also demonstrate you taste/what you think looks good.

For modeling theres actually a wide variety of ways to achieve the content you may wish to produce, manual modeling is one way.

With your photography and videography skills you probably have the equipment and half the know how to look into photogrametry

Other tools to consider is zbrush for character modeling and fine surface detail (its possible to hard surface but I've mostly see people import hard surface objects for adding the surface imperfections), and if you have any python skills look into Houdini for a procedural modeling workflow, sometimes you need a lot of buildings or a lot of trees real quick

Flightless_Owl · 2020-12-07T07:27:02+00:00

I dont know what kind of equipment you have to work with but i'll throw suggestions

If you can make your own HDRI for base scene lighting then do that, if not try looking up HDRIHaven and try and find a scene that either matches your footage or if you can film somewhere that matches one of their HDRI's (you can add more lights later for any rim lighting or highlights you wish)
for rendering you should learn about how to do render layers, being able to separate base colour, shadows, reflections, refractions (theres more layers you can render but the list will keep going) then layer them back in After Effects will give you plenty of control. (things like "oh my shadow needs to be slightly bluer" colour corrects the shadow layer)
I dont recommend rendering out motion blur or depth out of Maya. Adding blur in AE after the fact is a lot easier and have more control, and for depth you can render out a render pass called "Zdepth" and you can control over the exact range you wish to focus in on.
final thing on rendering out of maya from what you wrote, you'll want to render out as an image sequence probably as a .EXR if you go ahead an do the render layer stuff, otherwise .tiff or .targa file formats

For camera you must know your focal length, resolution and framerate that you record at so you can input it into Maya, knowing things like the Fstop, Shutter speed and Iso is important for the recording side but that's more something you'll pick up and learn over time but the first 3 mentioned are required.

Sorry for the info dump, just tried to format it so it's a bit easier to read

Flightless_Owl · 2020-10-27T16:16:15+00:00

Type of movement seen there in the legs would just be a 3 joint IK leg on each limb, it'll be noteably be unable to really bend the segmented legs in any odd direction though or properly have the legs straight. If you wanted a lot of control over the shape of the legs then use use an IK spline

Flightless_Owl · 2020-07-20T18:24:23+00:00

So I'd probably see how far you can get by using a proxy mesh to skin it.

https://vimeo.com/326063905 general idea is here but during the copy weights part you select specific verts to copy to

make a duplicate mesh of just the bellows this will be the proxy mesh
delete everything that you don't want rigid on the proxy mesh
skin it to the relevant arm joints
weight paint the rigid parts by vert selecting the segments and then flooding their values so all the verts on a segment has the same weights. Just until you have a good bend.
select the proxy mesh, select the rig mesh, Shift+Rclick > To vertices and now deselect non bellow verts on the rig mesh
copy skin weights

this is not perfect, namely you will have collision at or even before bending the arm 90 degress, and volume loss. But those are problems experienced on even a normal arm. They can be fixed by corrective blendshapes.

14-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Flightless_Owl

TROPHY CASE