October 2008

Flash UIs for XSI

We were recently work­ing on a feather sys­tem for an owl char­ac­ter and we were bump­ing into all sorts of prob­lems. We are still bump­ing into those prob­lems and the issue isn’t solved yet but that is the sub­ject of another post.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is an arti­cle we came about while we were search­ing the net for sim­i­lar solu­tions. It was a blog post done by Jo Plaete con­cern­ing a feather sys­tem he had cre­ated that had a very unique inter­face. We all know how dull some of XSI’s prop­erty pages and UIs can be and I was very impressed by the Flash inter­face he was using for his feather cre­ation script.
I con­tacted Jo Plaete for more info and it just turned out that he was work­ing on an arti­cle to explain the steps he had taken for the devel­op­ment and use of a Flash user inter­face in XSI.

Hairy Wolf

Hair 3d wolf

This is the first model that was worked on in our hairy ani­mals pro­duc­tion tests. The char­ac­ter was mod­eled in XSI and ZBrush by Reza Ramezani.

The hair was also worked by Reza Ramezani using XSI hair. Tex­tur­ing was done using ZBrush and Photoshop.

You can see some more snap­shots and ren­ders in the gal­leries sec­tions. The ren­der is done in XSI 6.5 using Men­tal Ray and takes a LOT of time.

Hairy Gorilla

Hairy Gorilla concept

This char­ac­ter was also cre­ated by Reza Ramezani who did the mod­el­ing, hair and tex­tures using Hamed Kamali’s con­cept designs. The mod­el­ing was done in XSI and ZBrush, tex­tur­ing was also done in ZBrush

Gorilla in a T stance

We are cur­rently work­ing on the shad­ing in order to fine-tune some small issues and in the near future we will pos­si­ble start rig­ging and ani­mat­ing this lovely gorilla, so stay tuned.

Hairy Furry Animals

We are cur­rently plan­ning the pro­duc­tion of our next short movie called “Kadoo” (Kadoo Ghel­gheleh Zan) which is a chil­drens story based on Per­sian folk­lore. This film will con­tain a lot of hairy ani­mals, forests and veg­e­ta­tion and we are cur­rently doing some tests to avoid any issues when pro­duc­tion starts.

These are some char­ac­ter con­cepts cre­ated by Hamed Kamali which turned out exactly the way we wanted them to and some­how even exceeded our expec­ta­tions. Hamed really out­did him­self on these con­cepts and we were really excited with the results.

New XSI training from 3DQuakers

Char­bel Koueik and his site 3DQuakers have finally released some new train­ing titles for XSI. The first one is called Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor Train­ing, Vol 1 and it is mostly a script­ing tuto­r­ial focus­ing on using Expres­sions, Scripted Oper­a­tors and even Plu­gin devel­op­ment. Another very impor­tant topic is the com­pre­hen­sion and use of vec­tors which I think is a must to under­stand for any­one striv­ing to become a tech­ni­cal director.