Not-So-Happy Accidents: Renders From my Maya "tmp" Archive

The following are a handful of animation blunders - not exactly those golden "happy accidents" we look out for - from the past year's school projects. It's amazing what kind of forgotten mutants you'll find haunting your "tmp" folder in the Maya images directory. For each image, I've tried to give something of an explanation for how those results came to be so that you don't find yourself in the same bewildering situation.





This bizarre apparition was part of a group project last semester. We were in a jam because we needed to pose this creature for a still frame but we didn't have time to do any rigging. So, using soft select on the model's geometry, I successfully fudged a decent pose, but not without learning of the bizarre horrors that arise from jacking up the soft select threshold and attempting a slight rotation.

So I'm animating on a short film directed by a TAMU VIZ grad student; we were ready to transfer the data from the proxy models' control nodes to the final (kind of) models. At least that the theory behind it. The new control nodes went a little crazy, body parts ended up flung all over the place and my character ended up looking FAAABULOOOUUUUUSSSSS in his red scarf.

It's nothing a few adjustments can't fix. In all seriousness, our riggers have done a wonderful job.

This is a test render from a shot where a character undergoes a hideous Mr. Hyde - type transformation. I had fun messing with the ever - versatile Eleven Rig and ended up with some truly terrifying results.

Corrupted links to shader files are to blame for this guy's rabid look.

 Oh yay, everyone loves blackface. Freakin Mental Ray.

A couple of keys got switched around and my char got a little pissed. "I'm going to my trailer!"

This one actually was kind of a happy accident. I was experimenting with a lattice deformer on this hallway environment and the results were pretty disturbing. Not very practical because of how twisted together everything became down the hall but it made for an alright set piece.

I always thought layout was a little creepy - black and white environments with creepy faceless proxy models just standing there.

I accidentally deleted something important while poking around this rig's node hierarchy and my char's face melted off. Enjoy the nightmares.