Archive for November 13th, 2008

Irradiance volumes

About 5 years ago, creating spherical harmonic values for irradiance volumes was painful. There were no tools, just a hodge-podge of code strung together with scripts.

Turtle from Illuminate Labs now makes it trivial.

You can bake everything from Ambient Occlusion to Radiosity Normal Maps to spherical harmonic coefficients with ease and full control (with Lua-based shaders). Amazing what art tools can do to increase productivity and quality.

BTW Turtle / Beast was used in Mirror’s Edge which looks like it was globally illluminated perfectly (see the cool sky mix with the warm sunlight).

Add comment November 13th, 2008

Multi-way / Bi-directional constraints in Maya 2008

I spent some time learning about bi-directional constraints in Maya via this and have re-compiled and re-packaged the plugin for Maya 2008 (the version I own and use).



Here it is - BiDirectional_Maya2008.zip

Constraints are typically unidirectional which means if you want to hand be the “controller” (i.e pivot) of an arm then the shoulder can’t be the “controller” of the hand without a complex rig. The animator won’t notice a difference, but the rigging process is long and involved with such requirements.

With bi-directional constraints, this dual control scheme is much easier to implement and more importantly - NATURAL!

Add comment November 13th, 2008

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