Joe Hultgren

I had someone ask if they could use my unicycle from my short film. Since I probly wont have too many more uses for it why not just release it to everyone. There is a pretty comprehensive readme included that should explain the complicated parts. and I would recommend reading the suggested usage section before animating with it. I 'm releasing this under a creative commons license.

Here is a new character I'm working on. Its fanart for Kerbal Space Program based off of Gene Kranz from the Apollo era mission control

I'm going use him to practice writing rigging scripts, now I just have to decide how I want those scripts to work.

So I'm going back to siggraph this year as a student volunteer again, and this time I have more stuff to show while I'm there.  Not only do I have my short film and the start of a TD reel, but a visualization I programed is going to be displayed outside of the Emerging Technologies and Art Gallery room. How cool is that!

So all the booths in that room have QR codes next to them that people can scan with their phones and I took that data and tried to figure out where people are moving to.  The screen shot is just using random data to run since the conference hasn't started yet but I imaging the real thing should look just like that but only more awesome because it will be at siggraph! 

Its written in Processing which I hadn't used before but was pretty easy and fun since its just a flavor of Java with more graphics going on.  I had fun doing it and it was a nice review since I got to use some programing concepts I haven't used since sophomore or junior year at ISU.

So I've graduated from VFS in Digital Character Animation and have a film to show for it.  Its kinda bittersweet to leave I'm glad to be done and all but I'm gonna miss my classmates and Vancouver. Also this means I have to go and find a job somewhere now, there's no going back to school a third time for me.

Up next is a quick trip down to LA and San Francisco  to see some friends and see if theres a city I would rather live in so I can focus my job search some.

I wrote this tool so I wouldn't have keep doing the same things over and over when making my blend shapes.
Its pretty easy to add new stuff just make a new subclass and make sure to implement 3 methods, then add a button to the right side for it. Its on my maya scripts bitbucket as blendshapetoolkit.py
The things the tool does are.

Shrinkwrap: 
The first part I wrote because I wanted my blendshapes to keep the cylindrical nature of the helmet.
It has the option to select only the verts that I want to affect

Arrange:
In order to keep things organized it moves the newly created shape to the next spot.

Materials:
Put a new material on the object with the option to only affect certain faces

Mirror:
For symmetrical meshes mirrors the shape node and moves it to  -x

Blendshape:
Adds the shape to the blendshape node of the target object

not shown in the video are the ability to rearrange the order and to save and load the list.

not quite getting the range i was hoping for.  I used a log scale to get the values to be reasonable in maya and it kinda killed the peaks, but we'll see how it works when I get the audio its going to be used on.

So I'm just gonna say this right now the finale of my film is pretty awesome, I mean it has a unicycle for pete's sake. Of course that means I would have to animate a unicycle. Screw that lets script it.

It's really not that hard once you get down to it. 
The first step for both direction and wheel rotation, get a vector of where you are now compared to where you just were. 

for wheel rotation take that vector and divide it by the radius of your wheel and you have the amount of rotation in radians, easy.

For direction use atan2 on the vector to get the rotation for the direction.  I also check to see if I'm moving backwards from where I was just and then offset the rotation so it doesn't just flip around.

one problem right now is to have auto/manual control I add the change in rotation for both the auto and manual controls to the the current rotation, which is going to cause problems for direction at least when I loop through the animation.

I'll need to add a hard manual mode where the rotations are directly linked to the manual controls.  Then I just have to start my animation in that mode so it resets every time it loops

I need a scroll in my film so I came up with this.
There were a lot of constraints and expressions for this so I used pymel scripts to do all that for me (code is on my bitbucket site under randomMelAndPymel.py)

how i works:
each of the curl controls has a locator that has the same y position as the control unless the control is on the far side of the other control

that locator drives set driven keys on its curl chain and bend deformer fix

if the bottom locator is above a bind joint (actually reference joints off to the right in the video) that joint is constrained to the bottom curl otherwise its constrained to the top

I was a little lazy with the orientations(lack of sleep due to last week of term) so I couldn't use a parent constraint and had to use separate point and orient constraints.

So I've been in Vancouver for about 5 weeks now going to VFS to study Digital Character Animation.  Its been fun getting to know the other students and working on my own film.  I got my apartment a block from school last week and I'm really enjoying being this close to campus.  10 minutes a day of commuting is so much better then an hour especially when class goes to 10pm

I've started trying to write some python scripts to do things in maya that can be a pain in the ass.  The coolest one is a script that makes towers based on a curve profile and stacking an object on top of itself over and  over.  I call it 'Towerfy' and its been really helpful for the set I'm making.  I'll probly do a post or video about it once I get it to a 1.0 stage, but its up on my bitbucket account right now.  

https://bitbucket.org/jhultgre/maya-scripts/

so stuff that has happened