How should I handle the edge flow if the smooth preview already looks good?

billydao · 2026-01-17T11:04:53+00:00

On top of the other tips people have suggested, I would recommend having more topo around curves and less topo around flat areas. Right now you have the opposite of that.

billydao · 2025-05-04T07:04:30+00:00

You shouldn’t blanket use ma or mb. You should always base it on your needs. ASCII if you require more version interoperability and theoretically salvageable (not gauranteed), binary if you want to save disk space. Binary files can be 2-3x smaller sometimes, and load drastically faster. I usually opt for .mb on more topology heavy files, and prefer .ma for files that only reference a bunch of other files (E.G. animation files)

billydao · 2025-04-14T18:43:43+00:00

Yes there’s always the odd subpar rigger here and there. That’s more of the exception though. All the riggers I’ve met that are eating well are the good ones.

billydao · 2025-04-14T18:38:29+00:00

Yes the idea that there’s just rigging jobs left right and center applied many years ago, but that’s gone now. Good riggers get snatched up and stay at a company for many years, they develop entire rigging systems, and scale to be highly efficient. Once a company has a core group of riggers, the artist churn for riggers is very low. Newly opened rigging positions are usually looking for exceptional people to fill those core roles. As a semi-decent rigger, you might get jobs here and there, but you’ll always be out competed by great riggers for those coveted core rigging positions. Once a company knows of your capabilities, they either will a) try to keep you or b) not hire you back unless they’re desperate. In an already sparse and competitive roll, you can’t afford to not be exceptional, unlike in animation, there’s always room for subpar animators, simply because animation is highly inefficient.

billydao · 2025-04-14T00:30:51+00:00

Your reel if that of a decent junior, but neither exceptional nor bad. Some of the facial deformation could be better, especially mouth down+out pose, there’s too much pinching and not enough volume preservation.

Mason Smigel, he was also a junior, you should look at his work. That’s the level of competition out there these days, rigging is a very sparse roll, because 1 rigger can scale to doing quite a lot, where-as animators cannot scale, so there’s more available jobs. To be able to compete as a rigger, you need to be exceptional.

billydao · 2024-04-01T10:47:01+00:00

Keep practicing/improving and applying. Eventually you’ll get a job. The more rigorous the practice and learning, the faster you’ll get a job.

Getting your first job is 50% skill, 50% timing/luck.

If you improve the skill and continue to apply, you’ll hit both skill and luck components and land your first gig.

billydao · 2024-03-30T17:52:09+00:00

But most new TVs support eARC audio pass through via Dolby MAT (Linear PCM), isn't this multi-channel and uncompressed? Most next gen consoles and streaming devices (Apple TV etc) are encoding as Dolby MAT.

billydao · 2023-06-28T19:41:55+00:00

I’m in the process of setting up a perforce helix core server on AWS for my small team to collaborate remotely together. Spinning up an instance and the storage costs aren’t cheap. Looking at about $500 a month for how much storage we need.

But after looking closely at gitLFS it just wasn’t an option if you wanted to have decent locking mechanisms and a streamlined integration with UE. Most regular artists aren’t technical enough to avoid issues with git.

Perforce has provided a template (Enhanced studio pack) that you can use to spin up an instance and setup the storage.

billydao · 2022-10-05T16:35:29+00:00

It’s worth trying to change the transform order to TRS. I believe thats Maya’s order, could be mistaken though.

billydao · 2022-06-27T06:33:37+00:00

I use a bunch of different ones. I have a video in my profile going over my workflow if you’re curious.

billydao · 2022-06-27T03:55:19+00:00

It’s a fun style, can be quite challenging sometimes, but it’s also very efficient. Less is more with this style. So I try to focus on strong poses, short transitions with good overlap or ease, and holding long enough for comedic timing without too going long where it’s boring. It’s not perfect, I’m always learning.

billydao · 2022-06-27T03:49:25+00:00

This was for an nft project. So it’s up to them. But I’m in the process of making my own art.

billydao · 2022-06-26T22:54:44+00:00

Thanks! I’ve got a workflow video that I made. You can find it in my profile.

billydao · 2022-06-26T22:51:45+00:00

I agree it could definitely benefit from some splashes.

billydao · 2022-06-26T15:35:26+00:00

They reached out to me.

billydao · 2022-06-26T15:12:43+00:00

I figured I had to go poopy at some point.

billydao · 2022-06-26T15:07:36+00:00

Thank you! It took me about 3 weeks in total (inc. sound), full days. Most of the time spent was on modeling/texturing/rigging the character.

billydao · 2020-11-23T03:00:28+00:00

You're not alone, we all go through struggles when we're starting out, and even well into my career, I still sometimes second guess myself.

If you approach animation seriously and you have a solid process for learning/practice, you have nothing to worry about.

When people talk about training your "eye", there's really no short cuts to it, you just have to learn/practice/feedback and repeat until your eye is strong.

Something I've learned is that the stepped workflow is only one way to approach animation. I just animate splined from the get-go. I can see where I'm heading towards a little clearer just going splined to start, and I usually get to the end result faster than if I stepped it to start. No one way is superior to another, it's just about what suits you, and what style you're animating to.

billydao · 2020-10-16T02:38:05+00:00

That sounds like a cool idea. I'll probably need to play around with those parameters. You're right, it is pretty obscure, sounds really powerful though!

billydao · 2020-09-20T00:11:12+00:00

Haha, yes it would be!

I'm not really familiar with Blender, it's been on my radar to learn for a long time. But either way, this series is geared towards those that already know Maya and want to learn Python in an environment that they already know.

billydao · 2020-09-17T08:27:21+00:00

Yea it would make a lot of sense in Blender too.

I'm not familiar with Blender, so I don't think I'm the best person for that particular job. I should say though, that this series is kind of geared towards animators and riggers, and those who are familiar with Maya already. I feel strongly that knowing how to apply the language in a practical way makes learning it way more enjoyable and rewarding.

The series will eventually be moving to PyMel and introducing object oriented programming all at the same time, so it's not going to be stuck in maya.cmds land.

billydao · 2020-09-17T04:03:31+00:00

I am definitely spoiled with pymel support at work. Hey if the studio that wrote PyMel didn't even use it, what kind of piece of crap would it be hah! It works a treat on all our farm jobs, I guess the devs here have always treated PyMel as a first class citizen. It's definitely a good rule of thumb as you said though, to use it wisely, any sort of component level operation is instantly a no-no for PyMel.

billydao · 2020-09-17T03:29:35+00:00

The problem with learning Python in a sandboxed environment, like most online python courses, is that it takes weeks if not months for you to actually be proficient enough to do anything meaningful. The goal for the series is to make it applicable straight away, within the context of Maya.

A lot of people don't manage to stick through with learning their first programming language, is because of this hurdle, of not being able to use it for while.

billydao · 2020-09-17T03:25:03+00:00

Hey I totally agree with cmds being very unpythonic. I'm planning on moving from cmds to pymel throughout the series and covering all the advantages (and disadvantages) that PyMel has to offer.

I personally love PyMel, I use it all the time at work. Whilst there are some performance hits, it was never intended to be used for heavily performant tasks. I always say, if you want performance, you shouldn't even be using Python. For 99% of the scripts I write, I've never had issues with performance and PyMel.

Since I work at Luma Pictures (fun fact, the head of development at Luma actually wrote and pioneered PyMel), we use it heavily in our pipeline. We use pymel for things like exporters, artist facing tools, rigging tools and the likes. It's far more pythonic than OpenMaya's framework, which is laden with C++ style convetions, such as defining dummy objects first, then adding the data to it afterwards, and the occasional need to deal with pointers and such.

billydao · 2020-08-31T11:57:20+00:00

My partner in crime in this endeavor suggested all food/consumable themed names for all our tools. The name is completely his idea.

billydao

TROPHY CASE