so what is art? Marc Quinn's answer

just came across this piece curious to know reactions. I was initially searching for facial expression to sculpt and extract shapes from, but I came across this instead:

its a sculpture made by the artists own blood!

Marc Quinn took 4.5 liters of blood and froze a mold of his own head out of it. The blood is taken from this own body over a period of five months. The work is then repeated every five years to establish a unique record of the artist aging

cool huh? wonder how that would scan in? :P

Scrunchy Face!!!

I found Osipa's second edition....okay I had to buy a new one, and frankly I never really read it:( after ripping it open I found a reversal of the first addition, starting with the target emotion and ripping the blendshapes from it! such a good book.

oh and this is cool right:





from this I will create 10 blendshapes! brilliant!

Jan Svankmajer - Dimensions of dialogue
by

Idk what this is, but I love it.

Matt's animation presentation: Updated

heres a link to my presentation, the other wouldn't pause :[

Here I have my animation presentation up for people to look at a head of time. I don't want to bore anyone one with tech stuff so I made it as general as possible.

and yes that is the music the short will use :)

The Valley of the Uncanny Apes

Looking at Matt's Hatter the subject of the uncanny valley came up during this weeks class. A friend of mine posted this link on Facebook. He especially liked the reference to the Polar express at the end.

Image from the linked article on Wired Science.

Ball Turn

I fixed the weird artifact in the turntable example I showed Monday, and made it turn slower. The problem was quite unexpected: it was the ray-traced shadow from the key light giving these blocky artifacts. All lights are using shadow maps. The ball is now subdivided. Maya subdivides UVs just fine, but not after you created the Proxy (the image is rendered using the Maya Software renderer).

Jack Saved!

I Retopo'ed Harry's Red panda thing, named jack, in Zbrush. I took the mesh that was giving him such a hard time with the normals and bascially (point by point) drew a kind of cage mesh around his original, this cage snaps to the highres model and out puts a model of the same shape (close as it can get), however I tweaked the geometry layout on the model seeing as I suspected being made of a single sphere was causing some of the normals. There is a problem area near the stomach, I wasn't exactly extremely careful :/. however any problems with the mesh I'm sure he can smooth out himself. I'm supplying the Ztool for you buddy, just load it into Zbrush, it has also a color texture painted on it, I believe this is what your original color scheme was? I hope so, if not just do what you need. Hope this helps.

ztool:
jack.ZTL

P.S. There are no UVs on this mesh. Simple way of doing this is a UV Transfer in MAya. Just import the new mesh as an Obj. and place is exactly on the original, should do that automatically. then in Polygons > Mesh > Transfer Attributes, select UV and click apply, it should work well I tried it. The UVs of the original mesh are tranfered onto the new mesh. It analyzes face placement in relation to the original so it just slips the new geometry into the shell UV of the original. Enjoy :)

This model will need some tweaking so be prepared.