Shave and Haircut - Part 1 (Scale)

I am deep in the throws of a project requiring Shave and Haircut for Maya. I have been using this software on and off for the past year or so. Slowly and progressively learning how to manage time and get good results. I have posted many questions on the forums hoping to get a response, but there don't seem to be too many folks forging the threads for shave and haircut topics.

Anyway the first thing that I want to talk about is:

Geo Scale:
First things first, the scale of your object and the scale of your hair is very important. If the scale of your object changes, (for example your animal gets referenced into a scene and the animator scales him up) this will mess up how you originally intended the hair to look. So make sure your model's scale is fixed and that in no way in the future will his scale change before starting to work with Shave.

Hair Scale:
By scaling up and down or using mattes to scale your hair, this can affect the integrity of your clumping down the road. I have found that it is best to create your hair, and then use the scale brush tool (make the brush big, zoom out and scale all the hair down to the approximate length). I hear this is much better than attenuate because attenuation can cut your hairs too short and you'll be popping and fixing hairs rather than having control right off the bat (A great tip by Chris Chrisman). From there, I will minimally affect the hair using black and white maps until I have it right, or I will cut the hair, (this is an assumption but this seems to reinitialize the hair's scale to a default setting rather than globally affecting all of it attributes).

Eli Wins Portugal

One of my good friend's Eli Rarey just won the Portugal Film Festival. Word on the street he is opening a production company so he can create more films and win more awards. Watch out for Eli Rarey and his films!

More details later.

My old roomies are rock stars!!

There's no shame in acknowledging that the devil wants you on his team. Check out their write up in Denver's westwared. Second from the LEFT is my sister's fiance'!
List to their music HERE.

Contractopia

Check out our latest spot at Buck....Contractopia.
This was a really fun piece that we did about four weeks.

George Fuentes

As you can see George Fuentes is pretty awesome. I just met him the other day and got to watch him paint. He's fast! Check out his site here!

vcdave and okdork

Two blogs I've recently found very interesting: vcdave and okdork are two websites dedicated to ecommerce. I particularly found this jackpot tool really cool.

Also while on this tangent check out this traffic estimate site.

My Friend Scruggs Is Famous

Patrick Scruggs is viewed on motionographer again. He's awesome and deserves the recognition. Check out his work here.

Chris Lee's New Toy & Event

Check out the release of Chris Lee's new toy!

New Friend Ken

Ken and I became friends though intense conversations about television shows. He has some awesome work here. Also check out his mad remixing skills.

terrible

i am a terrible blogger. this whole business makes me feel bad because I usually only blog when I acomplish something and lately there haven't been many blogs at all which I suppose means I haven't been acomplishing much. I actually have been acomplishing a lot just haven't found my blogging groove. Happy May, may it be a good one.

We are interviewed by MyMentalRay

Check us out.
My Mental Ray is a community site for mental ray users run by a great 3D artist Julian Sarmiento. Julian was gracious enough to give us an interview!
Check out his site here.

Yay for us!

We are in Stash 31. Check it!

April no fool me day.

It's April 1st. and I haven't been fooled ha HA. Man this LA weather is nice. Today we walked to the tar pits...that joint is hurt up! then to the farmers market where I have a mint chocolate chip ice cream. I need to treat myself to icecream more often. I also watched the movie Rize, by David LaChapelle, that was great. If I had to choose between krumping and clowning I think I'd be a Krumper. Only because I can't deal with facial paint.
Anyway, happy April, spring is abound for those of you who aren't in sunny California...hang in there.

Flickr Tag Search Thingie

Check it!

HDR Photography

Tokyo Nightscape
Originally uploaded by /\ltus.

HDR Photography this technique is awesome. I would love to learn how this is done. Check out more of this guys work.

Buck Spring Reel

Buck's new spring reel...really goes.

Tower of Grantville takes top 3

Tower of Grantville takes top 3 at adcritic.

Tower of Grantville Stills

Here are some stills from the tower of Grantville created at Buck. Please view the quicktime here.

three months in

Ok, it's now March...already into the third month of this year. My life is busy and great, I've been working on a lot of projects and the quality of work on all fronts is continuously improving. I'm getting married in almost five months, this is amazing. Time is just blowing by with tremendous speed. All is well I will post some still of our latest piece soon.

Interview: Buck

Check out the interview I helped with with between MYMR and Buck here.