Here trying a different approach for making little nasty creatures, this time using the FEM system of houdini for Soft Bodies.

The approach is basically to use the restP attribute which controls the "default" position of the solid object, so that the mesh will try to keep it's initial shape, but that value could be animated and updated inside the sim using a sop solver. That restP attribute can be defined by vertex so that it can be transformed using the pivot of the tetrahedrons, so a "local transform" per each tetrahedron could be achieved, in this case contracting or expanding.
Then the rest is up to the FEM sim.

HIP file of one Slug with some comments inside:
joleanes.com/uploads/3/0/6/8/30680865/slug_001.hip

A few videos i used for reference:
youtube.com/watch?v=nUbETibPwBo
vimeo.com/81994340

Now coming back with another fun experiment, this time procedural centipedes, i have to confess these ones are a little hard to watch, i feel a bit uncomfortable.

Similarly with the sentinels, i had to use some trails and make a curve out of them to deform the centipedes, but this time the trails are not made with the trajectory of particles, because i needed to make the body collide with the other centipedes, so this time a similar setup of the tentacles was used, several pieces joined together with some hard constraints, then the head will have a random movement and the other pieces will try to follow the piece above the chain.
​
Then i take a distance value to feed the motion of the legs, those are controlled with an ik that uses a clamped sin equation for vertical movement and a sort of "zig zag" equation for horizontal movement.
And finally i use the path deform to deform the centipedes with the curves from the rbd simulation.

Then again doing some tech experiments for fun with the sentinels but this time in houdini.

First Step: doing the tentacles animations using some sin equations. and attaching them all to the sentinel head.

Second Step: doing some particle animations following a curve using the pop curve force operator, then some trails were created.

Third step: the trails were used to control the deformation several sentinels, one for each trail, i used again the path deform that i did in vex.

​
There is still some collisions between the sentinels that have to be done, maybe the next time.

Now the next step of the experiments, put some collisions!. I got some cool advice from Hernan Llano to setup the constraints https://vimeo.com/hernanllano

Check the previous video showing the procedural animation:
https://vimeo.com/248069396

the next step was setting up the RBD sim, creating some hard and spring constraints, and then i made a sop solver with vex to inherit the movements of the animation.

No stretch behaviour for now, maybe later.

Good exercise for practicing encapsulation!, with that i mean a concept used a lot in object oriented programming, really good way to keep the scene neat, clean and organized:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulation_(computer_programming)

​Now here remembering some old nice tech exercises but now with the powerful Houdini.

3-Step Tentacle with full procedural movement and geometry.

First step, the tentacle movement made with only points, a vex wrangler was used for that using some neat sin equations.

Second step, the geometry of the tentacle was made using segments that can be copied several times, then they are merged and the thickness is changed along the axis with a ramp.

Third and final step, the vex path deform (vimeo.com/247656989) was used to deform the tentacle geo along the tentacle curve that was created using the points of the first step.

Hip File to Download:
tentacle_001.hip

If you want to know more about how i design tools, i am using a similar process used in "System Development Life Cycle" which is the process used for software development, at the end of the day doing stuff in Houdini is the same as programming, but with nodes and scripting.

So before i even open Houdini i write a document with the requirements and design of the tool. Then after that i make the implementation in Houdini. I have found that is the fastest and most organized way to develop tools because you are not wondering around in the middle of the process in Houdini to know what to do next, because everything is already planned from the beginning. If something big need to be changed in the middle of the implementation or afterwards it's better to go back to the design document and make the change there.

Here is the Requirements & Design document for the tentacle tool:
tentacle_requirements_design.pdf

Here a wikipedia link with some info about "System Development Life Cycle":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle

Check this tool that i have been working on as Lead Developer:

SmartRefs is a new advanced external reference plugin for Autodesk 3ds max. With this tool you can Reference external files but having the ability to modify and animate the objects from that reference, in a similar way of the references of Autodesk Maya, but even more advanced.

SmartRefs is more flexible and robust than the classic XRef tool, even with the improvements made in 3ds max 2016. This tool is designed for artists and teams of any size, to allow them to have a better pipeline where big scenes could be splitted in several smaller scenes working as a whole in a seamless environment.

In a nutshell, SmartRefs makes 3ds max production ready.

Visit SmartRefs website to know more:

http://www.smartrefs.com

So as you may notice i haven't been able to update these plugins in the website for a while, i have been having a lot of work lately with other projects and couldn't keep working giving support and updates of these free tools. So i decided instead to make the source code available for the public for those of you who want to play around with it or to make a build for the newer versions of 3ds Max.

You can download the code following these links in the "Source Code" section:

IKFKSolver
Animatable Pivot

The version 1.0.6 of the Animatable Pivot is now available. Some issues related to copying keyframes were happening in 3ds max 2015, they were fixed in this new version.

It can be downloaded here:

Animatable Pivot

The version 1.1.5 of the IKFK Solver is now available. A bug related to opening the Link Info Tab of the Hierarchy panel has been fixed.

The new version can be downloaded here:

IKFKSolver

These tools are now available for these 3ds max versions, several things have been fixed and improved, specially an issue working with both tools in the same rig, now they work seamlessly.

You can download them here:

IKFK Solver
Animatable Pivot

Improved (IKFK Solver):


- When “Show all Nodes Keys” option is on shared keys are shown in black, the list of all controllers are not shown anymore in the track view.

- Colors of display lines are red in fk or blue in ik.

- Always display Lines option was added.

-Match switch options for fk/ik, target/swivel were added.


Fixes (IKFK Solver):


- Solver doesn't break anymore with negative or odd position and scale values in the FK Nodes.

- Issues don't happen anymore with a rig that uses ikfk solver in conjunction with animatable pivot.

- Cloning nodes now works properly.

- Double transformation don't happen anymore when ik and fk are selected and moved at the same time.

- Match now works well when IKFKBlend is between 0 and 100.

- IK goal now have proper naming when the solver is created.

- fk to ik match when target moves and the ik is offset now works properly.

Hi!,

Our short film Trickster is now online on Vimeo, check it out in the following link:

https://vimeo.com/88051948

Trickster is a small Live-action short film based on the Matrix movie, it's a fan-made film to see how far we can go with our skills in Film making and Visual effects.

The project was born in 2013 when Antonio, a friend of mine, suggested to make a video with a Sentinel 3D model that i made some time ago for fun. I was hooked since the beginning with the idea, i wrote a small synopsis and then a 3 page script, the project started to grow more than i expected. At the beginning we only thought of making a small visual effects integration video and then we ended up with a 3 minute live action short film.

This project was made in Colombia, and it was shot near Bogotá using a GH3 Camera and some Rokinon Lenses. 

Here you can visit a blog where we posted some work in progress: 

http://thetricksterproject.blogspot.com/

This is my demoreel as 3d generalist.
It’s a compilation of several projects that i’ve worked in the past years.
It includes works on 3d modeling, animation, texturing, rendering, composition, rigging, procedural animation and maxscript.
Thanks for watching.

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

IKFK Solver
Animatable Pivot

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.

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:

IKFK Solver
Animatable Pivot

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.

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  .

Download it from here.

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 :’(…

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.

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.

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!.

Hi there, the first plugin has been added to the script-plugin section. I have been working some time on it a long time ago, but now i have been able to compile the release version, and also i have made a tutorial to show how it works. I hope that you can find it useful for some kind of animations that could be dificult to do with standard methods, and for some special rig behaviours.

Here you can find the controller: Animatable Pivot.

And here you can watch the tutorial: Using Animatable Pivot Constraint. (tutorial coming back soon)

See you then.

Ok, finally the website is online after a year and a half of paying the hosting without using it, but well…. here we go.

First of all let me introduce myself, I am Felix Joleanes, i am mainly a technical artist but the love that i have to computer graphics have led me to explore deeply different areas like 3D modelling and 3D animation. I studied system engineering (almost equivalent to BS in computer science) which gave me the ability to improve my technical knowledge in the 3D field.

The purpose of this website is focused on sharing the technical knowledge that i have got in all this years of autonomus learning, and the experience working in video games and advertising. So, from today you”ll find here several tutorials, articles, videos and tools that i hope you can find useful (if you work in the 3D field of course). Most of them will be focused to technical artist but i expect to be publishing some of modelling and animation as well.

By now there are only two tutorials that are already online in other websites, but i hope to be publishing more tutorials soon. Meanwhile i invite you to take a look at the gallery section, see you then.