While I was looking for sounds to use for the animation, I came across this Arcade Ambience Project by Andy Hofle:

http://arcade.hofle.com

The project features four one-hour-long tracks that "simulate the audio ambience of a crowded arcade room during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s." I thought this was awesome and it would be perfect for the arcade scene, so I emailed Andy Hofle, and he has given us permission to use his sound for the animation.
Thanks Andy!

We still have not figured out sound for the soccer scene, but we will update this when we get there.

- David

Today was the last day of class and we still have some more work to do. We've been trying to render the animation in mental ray over the past several days, but ran into some serious rendering difficulties.

When we click the clacker, Maya says either "fatal memory error" or "out of memory".
When we batch render inside of Maya, the color layer gets to 0% - 5% and says that the render is completed, but the image file is broken.
When we right click the file outside of Maya and render through the windows explorer menu, it seems to render fine, but nothing is smoothed.

I think that the problem is that we don't have enough RAM to handle all of the textures. All of the Targa sequences for the arcade screens are 2.5 GB all together right now. When mental ray tries to load all of those plus all of the other textures into the RAM, it needs more memory than is available. Also, when I turn on texture preview inside of Maya's viewport, the program crashes.

Another student at UTD suggested that we convert all of the textures to .map (mental ray's default texture format). So we'll try that next. But Sarah went ahead and rendered half of the animation with the Maya Software renderer, since that seemed to be working, just to have something to show for the last day of class.


We're definitely going to try to finish the animation over the summer. There is still some keyframe animation and lighting that needs to be done, among other little things. I'm going to make a to do list everything that still needs to be done in another post. Sarah has an internship in LA over the summer, and Jorge and I will be moving back down to A&M in the next week or two for summer classes there. So we're going to take a break from the project for the next week or two, and then we're going to set a schedule and meet once or twice a week to work on the project so we can hopefully have it finished by the end of the summer.

- David

We tested some different ways to have the falling matrix rain effect on the Artificial Intellegence soccer players that Nick plays against.

For the motion capture session, we put five pieces of reflective tape on the soccer ball to act as markers and we were excited to find out that they actually showed up in Vicon iQ. Later we tried to make a VSK for the soccer ball, but we found out that iQ confused the five markers and swapped all of them with each other in every frame. So we figured that we could at least keep the markers in the exported C3D files and use them as a reference for exactly how the soccer ball should be key framed.

There is a plug-in for Maya called PeelMocapTools and it lets you import C3D files into Maya, but it's currently only supposed to be compatible with Maya 2008 and 2009. We have been using Maya 2010 for everything so far.

PeelMocapTools uses its own custom locator boxes to display the C3D markers in Maya. When I imported the C3D files into a Maya 2009 file, saved it, and opened it in Maya 2010, the custom locator boxes were not displayed, but translation key frames for each marker's group were still there.

So I created a sphere for each marker and copied over all of the key frames from each marker group to it's new corresponding sphere marker.
Now we can see the markers moving in Maya 2010.

The next step was to get the soccer ball animated in the same way that the markers were moving.
I found out that Maya actually has a built in ball rotation script. http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2009help/Commands/makeRoll.html

I just center the soccer ball at (0,0,0) and type this into the command line:

makeRoll soccerBall 0.0 false 0.75;

and it adds this expression to the Translate Y:

float $diameter = 0.75;
soccerBall.translateY = $diameter * 0.5 + 0;
float $tx = soccerBall.translateX;
float $tz = soccerBall.translateZ;
if( frame <= 1 ){
    float $rx = soccerBall.startRotX;
    float $ry = soccerBall.startRotY;
    float $rz = soccerBall.startRotZ;
    setAttr soccerBall.rx $rx;
    setAttr soccerBall.ry $ry;
    setAttr soccerBall.rz $rz;
   soccerBall.lastX = $tx;
   soccerBall.lastZ = $tz;
} else {
    float $lx = `getAttr "soccerBall.ltx"`;
    float $lz = `getAttr "soccerBall.ltz"`;
    float $x = $tx-$lx;
    float $z = $tz-$lz;
    float $d = sqrt($x * $x + $z*$z);
    if( $d > 0.00001 ){
        $x /= $d;
        $z /= $d;
        float $piD = 3.14 * $diameter;
        float $xrot = 360.0 * $d/$piD;
        float $yrot =  rad_to_deg( atan2( $x, $z ));
          rotate -ws -r 0 (-$yrot) 0 soccerBall;
          rotate -ws -r ($xrot) 0 0 soccerBall;
          rotate -ws -r 0 ($yrot) 0 soccerBall;
       soccerBall.lastX = $tx;
       soccerBall.lastZ = $tz;
    }
}

So that uses the ball's diameter parameter to move the ball up from (0, 0, 0) to be make the bottom of the ball touch the ground plane. Then you can interactively move the ball around in the X and Z axis and the ball will roll in the right direction however you move it. All that was left was to line the ball up with the markers at every point where the ball (markers) either changed direction or where Nick's foot touched the ball (markers), and put a key frame on the Translate X and Z

The only downside to the script is that because the expression is put on the Translate Y, you can't move the ball up or down. But you can bake the animation in and then move it up and down from there, so I'll do that for the first shot with the soccer ball where it flies up into the air, the shot where Nick shoots the ball into the goal, and also for the juggling on the credits.

- David

Here is a test for the AI texture. The UVs need to be reworked to fit the file. The texture was created in photoshop and lasts five seconds long, however I am thinking of making it last longer and make the lines falling bigger. Also the color can be adjusted if we want the falling icons to be burnt orange instead of green. 

Nicks Soccer shoes have been textured to look like adidas soccer shoes with two stripes instead of the typical three. The socks are in the process of being textured.

Round 1 of texturing the hair. The texture itself needs to be cleaned up a bit, but the color needs to be finalized first. This was done in Mudbox using the paint brush tool, and stamp tool.

Here is Nicks updated texture. The UV maps were rearranged to give more area to different sections. The texture has also been combined so that the specular, color and bump maps are all in one photoshop file.