GDC: Facial Rigging Highlights this year

Facial rigging made giant leaps in games this past year to further come closer to film level quality. Some of the big stand outs that I saw at GDC and otherwise were from Crytek and from Bungie with their facial re-targeting systems. Ryse stood out a ton with their high fidelity and animation friendly rigs that gave 4D scan quality animation with easy customization.

Hit the jump for video and extra reference to how they these guys accomplished these high quality animations...

GTC: NVIDIA Titan X is stunning!

GTC followed GDC in a big way with new announcements coming from NVIDIA. Along with presenting their new Pascal chip set and giving an update of their Tegra K1, NVIDIA demoed their new Titan Z Graphics card. This card is simply stunning. The biggest part of the presentation for me was the real time visual effects that it can support. I cannot wait to get my hands dirty with these features in the near future because they are real game changers.

Hit the jump for videos of the Titan Z and the visuals that it can support...

GDC: Engines for all!

HUGE news coming from GDC was related to the public release of Unreal 4 and CryEngine for the public. Unreal 4 is now available to the public with full access to the C++ code base for 20 dollars and month. The in incredibly cheap compared to the million dollars that you used to have to pay in the past. Not to be outdone, Crytek released CryEngine in the same fashion for 10 dollars a month.

To keep this in perspective. Unreal and CryEngine have been cranking out some of the greatest looking games on the market and now all of that power can be yours to wield at a small fee. Also with Unreal, you can distribute your projects and unreal only asks for 5% or your earnings if you use their service. I'm especially excited because I can now dig into these engines more and check out what they do well for any potential project I wish to make.

GDC: Mixamo

At GDC, I was able to go to lots of talks. This one unexpectedly grabbed my attention in an awesome way! Mixamo is a service that allows you to create an enormous combination of male and female characters that you can model out, rig, and animate just about automatically so you can create tons of useful custom game characters in a short period of time.

The main services are FUSE for creating character models and the Mixamo site for animation and rigging services. There's even a Unity app that lets you browse and test animations before using them in your engine from the site on the fly.

Hit the jump for video tutorials on how to use FUSE and the Mixamo service...

GDC: Rigging Dojo

GDC is sadly over and I have to say that I had an incredible experience there. One of the great finds that I personally discovered is Rigging Dojo. This site isn't anything new but it's an incredible rigging resource for aspiring and experienced character TD's. For anyone out there interested in building up their rigging chops, I can't recommend this site enough. It is a great community and training program with great relevant information and great inspirational material for anyone building a powerful portfolio.

The free resources alone are phenomenal but if you pay for a subscription, you can get access to amazing classes and great coaching from the experts in the field. I highly recommend checking out the blog and resource page on the website here: http://www.riggingdojo.com/blog/

Visual Studio as a Maya Python IDE

I already love to use Visual Studio for C++ plugin development but when it came to python tool development, Visual Studio used to lack a lot of the features that I genuinely enjoyed in Eclipse. However, thanks to Jos Balcaen, there are amazing new plugins available with Visual Studio's Python tools that allow Visual Studio to have all of the fun perks that Eclipse has as a Maya Python IDE. These plugins are available for Visual Studio 12 or higher. I'm using 12 in this picture with Maya 2014. It works really great and the workflow to connect Visual Studio to Maya is nearly identical to Eclipse. This is a really great deal especially if you're a big Visual Studio nut and want to use Intellisense or Visual Assist to debug your python tools. This is especially sleek if you're primarily using Windows and of course if you can afford a license :D.

If you have Visual Studio 12 or higher, you can set it up as a Maya Python IDE using this link:
http://josbalcaen.com/maya-python-visual-studio-2012/

Currently, I'm doing an audit between Visual Studio, Eclipse, and PyCharm to see which IDE fits best for my needs. Right now it looks like if you only care about python development, just use PyCharm. It's a really excellent Python IDE in general, arguably better than the other two for Python development. If you want a full fledged multi-language IDE to develop Python and C++ tools for Maya or what not and you only use Windows, go with Visual Studio. If you need something FREE, open source, cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac), and multi-language and you're willing to put in a little bit of extra effort, go with Eclipse for sure.

Hope this information is useful. Let me know if there is any other IDE out there that can give these options a run for their money and I will research that as well!

Paint in Specular Maps on your models in Mudbox

This may not be anything particularly new going on but I know I've always been looking for a nice and effective way to paint and author specular maps without having to desaturate other textures and blow up their contrast in Photoshop. Autodesk just recently posted this tutorial on how to author specular maps in Mudbox using all of the awesome paint tools that used to be used for sculpting and painting color maps.

I'm sure Zbrush has a response to this somewhere but from my experience, I haven't seen anything that gives you this much control at the sculpting phase of asset creation.

Hit the jump to see the video tutorial...