a 3D animation website

I’ve created a new website with my training videos on 3D animation.  I use Autodesk Maya, arguably the most popular commercially-available 3D modeling, animation, and rendering application.

There are thirty or so videos on the site and they cover all phases of the animation process, including modeling, lighting, materials and textures, dynamics, cloth, cameras, skeletons, deformers, and light effects.

I tend to focus on polygon and NURBS (curved line) modeling, but there is a small amount of attention paid to subdivision modeling, as well.

I am in the process of actively adding new videos to the site.

Please visit http://3DBuzz.co and take a look at them.

Each video is focused on a specific topic, area about 10 to 25 minutes in length, and are meant for beginners. The videos are also posted on my vimeo account.

Introductory videos on 3D animation with Maya, part 2

I teach 3D animation at the University of Colorado in Boulder (in the computer science department).

I got a good response from the previous posting where I listed the first five Vimeo videos I have created on how to use Autodesk Maya to create animated projects, so I have added 7 more. They are short, meant for beginners, and each is focused on a specific topic. They are meant to more or less be watched in order.

They are on:

Creating a simple cactus model with NURBS modeling.

Using the Outliner window to create dependencies between objects in a scene.

Using the Graph Editor to re-use scale, translate, and rotate animation.

Using basic polygon tools: edges, beveling, and surfaces, and creating a mailbox.

Creating a simple breadbox by using the sweeps of NURBS surfaces.

Materials, procedural textures, and bump mapping: making a varnished table.

Creating a sidewalk and a roadway using materials and bump-maps.

All of the videos are on my Vimeo account.

Introductory videos on 3D animation with Maya

The entire set of videos can be found in my Vimeo account.

A lesson in product dependencies: why a great product can be the wrong solution

3D Animation Videos.

I teach information systems and 3D animation at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For my animation classes, I like to record my in-class lectures to that later, when students are trying to remember how to do something with an infinitely complex application like Autodesk Maya, they can look at the demonstrations on the videos. I use Camtasia (they have both a Mac and a Windows application) to create desktop/voice recordings and have found it to be a great product.

Finding a tool to quickly build a simple website.

The problem I ran into had to do with posting these videos for students to download. The site I built and where I used to host videos (http://3dbybuzz.com) turned out to be a pain to maintain because of the large number of videos I post on it. The videos are also very long. So I decided that I would make a fresh set of much shorter videos and have them hosted on a paid Vimeo account. All that works fine.

Extending an application with plugins.

Now, the Mac-based web design application I had been using is called Sandvox and it is a very elegant, intuitive tool. I think it’s the best in its class in terms of ease of use. But it’s a little short on functionality. So, I followed the advice from the Sandvox site to check out plugins made my another (completely unrelated) software vendor. I bought five of their plugins and they worked great. I used them on 3dbybuzz.com. So, I naturally went back there to see if they had Vimeo plugins.

A problem with service for the plugins.

Which they do. But their site seemed to malfunction. I could log in to my account, but not access anything I had paid for. The site would not let me post a service request. I couldn’t find an email address or phone number on their site. (Remember, this is NOT the Sandvox folks; this is a separate company that supplies plugins.) I managed to dig up an email address for the vendor by poking around the Web. I sent a message asking to help. I tracked down one of the lead guys in the company on Facebook and left a polite request, saying their plugins are great but their site is broken.

I never heard back. Period.

Finding a different tool to build a good website.

So, I have switched to RapidWeaver, which has a very large community of plugin suppliers. It’s also a very powerful app. I also bought three plugins. One for a RapidWeaver extension that provides a new kind of webpage, called Stacks, to the RapidWeaver application and two from another plugin vendor that give Vimeo capabilities to Stacks pages. They work great. I find that the combination of the Stacks webpage and the wide variety of plugins it can support to be a very clever way of extending RapidWeaver.  First, you install Stacks, which allows Rapidweaver users to add a Stacks page to a website and then you choose plugins to provide capabilities to Stacks pages.

It’s really too bad…

I’m a teacher and a researcher, not a business person. But tying yourself to a plugin supplier that does not provide timely customer support seems like a bad business decision to me. But, honestly, Sandvox and the five plugins I did buy from that vendor are all extremely good pieces of software, in terms of their functionality and their usability and the appearance of the resulting webpages.

More on audio editing: audio formats

Note: I have trouble uploading images to the IT Knowledge Exchange blog server.  To see this blog posting with its included image go to: sound editing.

Editing Sound.

We’re in a series of postings relating to editing sound.

Previously.

See the previous postings on  cleaning audio, selecting an audio editor, and a couple of basic audio editing principles.  We have also looked at the interface to a popular audio editor, Amadeus Pro, and at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. We looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.  Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors, and then at the difference between audio editors and digital audio workstations.

Sound formats.

Today, we look at a few popular audio formats and compare them.

Uncompressed.

If you want your sound to be as close as possible to the original sound captured in the real world, wav and aiff are two very popular choices. The problem is that these uncompressed sound formats can lead to very large files.

But wav and aiff are important for capturing sound in a “lossless” way, meaning that the digital media contains all the information that is captured by the recording equipment. They serve as very good archival formats for permanent recordings that might later be edited and used in a variety of other formats.

By the way, wav, which is short for Waveform Audio Format, is a Microsoft standard. And aiff stands for Audio Interchange File Format and it was developed by Apple.

Compressed.

Perhaps the most popular compressed sound format is mp3. It is used heavily on the Internet. It is a proprietary format owned by the Motion Picture Experts Group, and its full name is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is highly compressed in that an audio recording in wav format might be reduced by 80 or 90% when converted to mp3.

This sort of transformation is called “lossy”, in that information is removed during the conversion process. But what is removed is for the most part not missed by the human ear. The idea is to remove frequencies not heard by people and to remove soft sounds that are drowned out by other, louder sounds.

The end result is good enough for high quality music.

A competitor of mp3 is wma, which stands for Windows Media Audio, and is also proprietary. And yes, Apple promotes mp3.

More later…

More on sound editing: DAWs vs. wave editors

Editing Sound.

We’re in a series of postings relating to editing sound.

Previously.

See the previous postings on  cleaning audio, selecting an audio editor, and a couple of basic audio editing principles.  We have also looked at the interface to a popular audio editor, Amadeus Pro, and at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. We looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.  Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors.

Today, we look at a common question.

What is the difference between a DAW and a wave editor?

The products we have looked at so far are generally called audio editors or wave editors. These include Amadeus, Wavelab, Peak, Sound Forge, and Sound Studio.  See the links above.

Highly multitrack.

A Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) is generally a far more complicated program.  A wave (or audio) editor usually can only handle one or two tracks of recordings, while a DAW might support ten or twenty or more tracks.

Non-destructive editing.

Wave editors are used (usually) to perform what is called destructive editing.

This is a term that is used with regard to a wide variety of media applications, and quite frankly, “non-destructive” editing tends to sound better to the average person.  Apple Aperture is a photo editor and manager that supports non-destructive editing, in that you can apply powerful effects to an image without risk of destroying the original image.

DAWs support non-destructive editing because the goal of a DAW is to support the sophisticated mixing of pre-existing sound tracks, as well as the application of special effects to sound tracks.  But a wave editor is used to make raw recordings and edit them into the sorts of useful tracks that might be imported into a DAW.

Special effects, software instruments, and MIDI.

We’ll look at these things in the next in this series of blog postings relating to audio editing.

But to wrap things up, here is a screenshot of a very popular DAW, Cubase, the same folks who make the WaveLab wave editor we have previously discussed:

VST and AU plugins: Making audio editors more powerful

More on audio editing: cleaning in the free Amadeus editor

Recently, we have been looked at the process of editing and cleaning sound.  See the previous three postings: cleaning and editing(1) and editing(2).  Then, we looked at a very popular Mac wave editor, Amadeus Pro.   Most recently, we looked at basic sound editing in Amadeus.

Today, we look at a free audio editor, Audacity.  In particular, it has a great noise removal effect.

Cleaning sound in Audacity – a voice track.

First, we create a track and use the red button to record a few seconds of silence, and then a voice.

The denoise effect in Audible.

Now, we swipe the “silence” part of the track, which is really a bunch of background and mic noise.  Then, we select the noise removal effect.

Then we tell the effect plugin to “Get Noise Profile”.

Then, we go back to the track and swipe all of it.  Then, pull down the effect again and choose “OK”.

Now, look at how the effect has removed the noise from the entire track, including the part with the voice recording on it.

The result is a chunk of audio that sounds very professional.

More soon.

More on audio editing

Recently, we have been looking at the process of editing and cleaning sound.  See the previous three postings: cleaning and editing(1) and editing(2).

Then we looked at the interface to a very popular Mac wave editor, Amadeus Pro in a recent posting.

Today, we continue with Amadeus.  Below are series of screen captures, taking us through the process of making two tracks, removing the beginning of one track, then grabbing a piece of the second track, and then gluing the two together into a single seamless track:

1. Record with the red button:

2. Add a second track using the Track drop-down from the top menu and record again.3. Swipe the beginning of the first track, which contains only noise.4. Cut that piece out.5. Here is the result. 6. Swipe a piece from the second track and do a copy.
7. Paste it at the end of the major audio section of the first wave.  Then, cut out the end of the first track.More on audio editing soon.

Editing sound: a look at the Amadeus wave editor