The not so final word....

Just wanted to say HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!! to everyone. It's been a great semester. Hope to see more awesome 3-D from you all in the spring.

Finally...?

Yesterday morning the final images were presented (I'll create a gallery soon), marking the end of ARIL 360 for this fall. This blog will remain open however. It might be used for class again next fall, but in the meantime we may continue posting work and links to interesting animations and other stuff here. As long as it is related to rendering and (computer) animation

As for the image on the right: since most images were submitted just in the nick of time and I needed some time to download them all, I started off the final with showing one of the most interesting animations of 2008, which won an award of distinction at PrixArs Electronica (and more) this year: Kudan by Taku Kimura and Koichi Yamagishi. Not available on-line yet, AFAIK.

Sam's animation so far!

Well... I was excited that everything was going smoothly, but of course I've run into a little problem! Sally's feet are no longer attached to her body and all of the keyframes that were set for the feet have now disappeared! So, I am going to delete her from the scene, reload her, and see if the keyframes reappear! I will be in the lab all day today if anyone wants to join me!

Fun with Camera Lenses

After showing the animation Onde Sonore in class today, we had fun with the field of view settings of the Advanced Camera in Lightwave....

Pacific Data Images

Of all the great Non-Photorealistically Rendered (NPR) PDI animations, I only found one on YouTube: Gas Planet

I did find an interesting but lengthy presentation on 25 years at PDI. At 54 minutes into the presentation, a reel with clips of PDI shorts is shown, including a few shots from Brick-a-Brac and Fishing.

The image is a still from Gas Planet by Eric Darnell from 1992

Anna's FINAL PROJECT

Ok So here we go. For my final renders I'm thinking along the lines of these jpegs. Sorry for the extremely low quality, I had spent time rendering the scene but someone in class had accidentally pulled my jump drive out instead of their own, thus making me start practically at square one. >.<

Since I am also in the animation class, I'm planning to do some of the following shots as my renders.
1) The scene of the kitty in the hallway giving an evil glare to the fish.
2) kitty walking up to the fish bowl
3) kitty staring at the fish bowl
4) kitty jumping to the chair
5) kitty falling off chair
6) an initial shot of the room with eh fish swimming by himself.

Again as I have said before, disregard the lighting and very poor quality of the images. i have to sort everything out all over again. Any comments on how to improve these scenes in lighting, rendering, camera angles etc are greatly appreciated. See you all in class!

Couldn't help myself...

...and spent too much time playing with the node editor. Anybody wonder what next weeks lecture will be about?

Update: movie posted on my blog

Final Project

SUPER DUDE
I've been modeling Super Dude, the little superhero sidekick from the comic book I'm writing and illustrating for my Senior Project. The finished pieces for 3D class would have him taking off and flying in a cityscape setting like so:

...or something like that.

However, modeling has become quite a pain, and with bones and stuff still to look forward to in a short period of time, I might just end up reverting to an older model:

He's already got bones and stuff, so I might end up just sprucing him up a little and putting him where Super Dude would be. Like this:

Coraline

Since it has little to do with computer animation this is not something I will show in class, but here is yet another link I found on Drawn!: clips about the new stop motion feature Coraline by LAIKA animation studios. Keys: buttoneyes, stopmotion, moustachio, puppetlove, armpithair, sweaterxxs. After seeing the moustachio one I was a bit hesitant to put the armpithair key in, but luckily my fears were unfounded.

Meh....

What I'm working on now. Little animation for film class. Will post more later.

Lightwave on Facebook

Someone must have build quite a nodal network to generate this image which was created in Lightwave and posted on their Facebook pages

Rejected

In class I mentioned a cartoon, but couldn't really be explicit about what kind of bleeding the crowd was actually cheering on. But Don Hertzfeld's "Rejected" animation can be viewed on YouTube

Here are some more "traditional" (non CGI) animations you might want to check out: through the Drawn! blog I was recently pointed to some great animations I had enjoyed veiwing before, created by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer.

Animations of awesome.

So I checked out the Gobelins School site. Here are some of their other animations I've been looking at. Whether or not you've seen them before...

The Omen -Just fabulous.

Garuda - A boy sees the legendary bird and chases after it.

Wild Casting - Lion on the loose. Enough said.

Supertromp -Indian boy and an elephant that runs on gas.

La Ballade Sauvage -This one is sweet in a good way.

Keep Walking - This one is pretty smart.

Nano - Little mining creatures surprise you.


These students are AMAZING.

There are tons more from this site. Do yourselves a favor and look them over.

I'll post more stuff later when I see it. Oktapodi is great by the way. I died when I saw The Omen.

Voodoo...


Back to watching fun things.

More Kitchen

Here's another one.


Almost forgot! Here's the link for the sketch tutorial for anyone interested. I looked at what other people did with this tutorial and I was really impressed. The effects range from clay to speedpaint to colored pencil. Good stuff.

Textures

Textures from the American Museum of Natural History, in the rocks and minerals exhibit.

Procrastination Builds a Nation.

One road. One street

Pebbles and water catching on a rough walkway.



My ever-dying retaining wall.

I know I should have done this a while back. Here are some pictures I took during the rain a month ago. The clouds helped to even out the lighting. Okay, back to work.

Fun with Kitchens!

So I did some stuff with the kitchen. Of course I started playing with edges. I tried using the node editor for every surface. Trying to get inspiration for how to render my final project. I also used a tutorial to make a fancy floor (nothing fancy technically speaking).

The rendering took an unreasonable amount of time. The second above took about 2.5 hours.

O_o.

I think it was the amount of shaders I had. I'm not really sure. I need to figure a way around that. I'll see if I can do some less intensive renders for later, but alas, my midterm is draws ever closer....so why am I still here?

Give It An Edge.

I tried out a sketch tutorial I found online. It wasn't that difficult. Just using animated deformations to cause the edges to be squiggly. I really should be working on other projects...

Kitchen Colored Scene

So... I it seems that I am having trouble with the lighting in my kitchen scene. Actually my whole kitchen scene in general. Here are a few versions that I have found to be rather decent.

This first one is a brighter evening lit scene. a light pattern on the walls, with blue light from the window and orangey light from the hallway.

The second one is the same scene but I moved the lights around a tad. Its darker and colder than the previous scene.

The last one is lit the same as the first but the counter top has a marble-esque feeling to it, but to me it seems to distracting.

Any comments and critiques would be very helpful! See you guys all in class on Monday! ^.^

Textures

Textures from scanned fabric scraps.

Textures

Dinosaur skull from the American Museum of Natural History.

Inside of Antelope Canyon.

A large stick.