joleanes.com - Felix Joleanes 3d Tech artist

IKFK Solver and Animatable pivot available for 3ds max 2012

Felix — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 19:34:38 +0000

These plugins are now available for 3ds max 2012 and can be downloaded from here:

http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/animatablePivot.php

Demo Reel

Felix — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:52:13 +0000

This is some of my work as 3d artist, i am currently looking for freelance or remote/off-site work.

this is the shot break down with some credits:
joleanes.com/varios/FelixJoleanesDemoReelShotBreakDown.pdf
Music by Nine Inch nails used under permission of creative commons license creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8095 .
Cellfactor characters, props and scenography are property of immersion games.
Pyro character by valve.

Thanks for watching .

UFO Sighting

Felix — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:32:38 +0000

I needed to post this, i was freaked out after recording this with my camera, i guess that aliens are chasing our cars technology .

vfx done in 3ds max, render in vray, textures in photoshop, track with pfTrack, and comp in after effects.

Procedural Animation Experiment #4, Sentinel

Felix — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:38:38 +0000

Making procedural stuff again around here, playing with some sin equations. Take a look at this new experiment:
(click Image)

IKFK Solver & Animatable Pivot, Rigging Video Tutorial

Felix — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:22:16 +0000

I have been talking about this tutorial for several months, and now finally i can publish it. this 29 minutes length video covers the implementation of the ikfk solver and the animatable pivot constraint in the rigging process of a character, with these new tools the creation of a character setup becomes a faster process, besides of all the several advantages that they provide. It shows how to create a rig with control objects, reverse foot with animatable pivot and it explains several features about the ikfk solver.

Link

It’s not wrestling, it’s Lucha Libre

Felix — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:56:40 +0000

The project that has been developed for the last year and a half in Immersion Games is almost finished, i have been working there as animator and technical artist, doing scripts and a lot of unreal kismet programing for cinematics. It was a fun project because all the research that has to be done to understand the culture behind the wrestling in mexico, and i found that it is more interesting that i thought, now i can see why all the people there enjoy the show and admire their wrestling stars.

The trailer of Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring is available to watch, check it out! (Click Image).

Curious

Felix — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:06:48 +0000

Nothing better to test a rigging tool than making an animation with it, so i have to go back to those old times as animator.
The Animation was made with a very basic setup using the ikfk solver, the pivot constraint was used to make a multiple pivot reverse foot and to offset the position of the center of mass, something that was pretty useful to make the character pivot around its ankle when he’s falling fordwards after stop walking.

Release Versions of IKFK Solver & Animatable Pivot

Felix — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:21:52 +0000

Well… after several weeks of beta testing, thousands of lines of code, and hundreds of cups of coffee, the release version of the free plugins ikfk solver and the animatable pivot constraint are now available. The latest version of the solver has several improvements, it’s stable and it can now work perfectly with the pivot constraint and any other kind of setups. Download them from here:

http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/animatablePivot.php

It has been the work of only one person here, but a lot of people have assisted me in the Quality Assurance part of the project. Maybe something have been missed in the vast amount of things that had to be considered to make these tools working perfect, if that happens and you find any bug or any improvement that these tools should have, don’t hessitate to email me at joleanes@gmail.com. In the next few days I’ll be publishing a video tutorial to implement these tools in your rigs, so you can make the most of it.

I have to give special thanks for their useful suport in QA to these people: Carolina Delgado, Alejandro Albarracin, Ian Arias, Paul Hormis, Toke Jepsen.

Rolling Chain

Felix — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:00:38 +0000

Other topic to the technical stuff: A thousand and one ways to rig a chain of bones!!!… naaahhhhh that’s too many, meanwhile it’s going to be only one.
I tried this aproach, it seems easy to use and also has the posibility to give a lot of control to the animator (Click Image).

IKFK Solver

Felix — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:58:41 +0000

Usually a rigger has the duty of solving several technicals problems and building a lot of diffirent kind of rigs, but sometimes it’s job can become too mechanical, like having to do something that is supossed to be automatically created by the tool. Since i started to learn rigging i saw the process of rigging an arm or leg like that: too mechanical, even a lot of tech artist preffer to create a script to make this rigging process automatic.

Well, in order to rig a leg you have to do this: create three hierarchies. The first is used to transform the leg in IK, the second in FK, and the last is used to blend between those two. Some sort of UI controls have to be created to control the switching and matching mechanism and other expressions has to be used in order to implement squash & stretch… that’s the most common technique using default rigging tools.

Now there is other alternative, it’s an IKFK solver, and it’s job is to automate all that process by just having only one hierarchy that can be transformed in both modes (IK and FK) depending on the needs of the animator.

It would be nice if you can give it a look. It is a beta version and it could have some bugs, i haven’t saw any by now, maybe i have to look deeper .

Check this video: http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolverVideo.php

And download it from here: http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php

Improving the site

Felix — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:14:02 +0000

Hi, the site has been a little quiet for a while, i have been under extreme pressures, so it has been dificult to me… you know… i have to put sun protection, wear my hat and drink my margarita here in the beach before the sunset .

but well… i have made a small improvement to the site, now the home page is a blog, so it has some of the adventages of being a blog, like RSS feed.

I Hope you had fun in this december… working or composing poems, and i wish you a happy new year… see you in 2010!

Procedural Animation Experiment #3, Mech

Felix — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:04:52 +0000

I received a suggestion in the threedy forums about my next Procedural Experiment and it sounded really cool so i gave it a try, This time the challenge was bigger and more interesting as well.

Procedural Bipedal Mech Walk:

Advertisement work

Felix — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:18:38 +0000

Here i am posting an advertisement animation that i work in some months ago, it was kind of crazy because of the anatomy of the characters and the look that was proposed, but it was a lot fun. They are bacteriums that looks like little harmless creatures because of the big cleaner power of the soap. If real bacteriums were like that, surely i would never wash my hands again :’(…

Procedural Animation Experiment #2, Snake

Felix — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:20:33 +0000

The Video in this article is not suitable for Ophidiophobic People, I am a snake lover so now i am trying to bring some of them to Life, I only hope that their fangs don’t grow up too much because i also have some lovely rats to take care of.

Take a look at how this charming creature is behaving inside 3ds max:

Real Time Physics Experiment #2

Felix — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:37:13 +0000

The next part of the Physic simulation experiments:

Procedural Animation Experiment #1, Spider

Felix — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:05:05 +0000

I have moved forward In my Long and dangerous Quest of making the Lazy animators life easier….

Here you can check some thoughts about this exercise:

Real Time Physics Experiment #1

Felix — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:13:38 +0000

I woke up the last monday ready to have a new day of working in the job. After taking the breakfast I was almost ready to go to take my bus, but it was pretty weird…. something was wrong there, there was nobody in the bus stop, that never happens, there is always a lot of people, then i remembered something… “Today is holyday”… oops, what should i do now, i didnt pepared any plan for today. Ok, having nothing to do … let’s do some exiting shakespeare reading at home XD… just kidding.

Instead i compiled some thoughts about real time physics in 3ds max that i want to share:

Bendy Limbs Video Tutorial

Felix — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:37:23 +0000

It’s been a long time since the last update, i’ve been a little busy working on some tools for procedural animation purposes, some controllers that will improve that aspect inside 3ds max, i’ll be showing some progress soon, but before that… i am publishing this tutorial that i made some weeks ago, it’s about how to set up bendy limbs in 3ds max, i hope that you find it useful , and i hope that you like my beautiful latin accent XD.

Cellfactor Intro

Felix — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:06:47 +0000

Well… this is a pierce of work done by just a few of hardworking monkeys in immersion (the place where i currently work). The cutscene was made to be shown in the trailers of the cellfactor videogame, But here i uploaded the whole movie. It was an interesting challenge in terms of doing all this stuff in the unreal engine 3 editor, finally after a process of trial an error i found an easy way of animating everything inside max and using some tricks to export the camera and the FOV animation to the engine.

Flippingless rigs, Euler, Matrix and Quat theory

Felix — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:21:34 +0000

A new tutorial has been added in the tutorials section. The flipping issue is a very popular topic in several forum discussions, and here i have compiled some ideas that i always wanted to share, Check it out!.