MODERATION

Or else all that candy you just inhaled?

Yea...you'll be feeling that alllll night.


On a side note: Ginger root does help :)

Pumpkin Madness!!

So this was the first pumpkin I ever carved EVER! And it was real awesome! I can't wait for next year to do more!

This was based on an image of okami...just tweaked it a bit because it was kinda highly detailed. :( I'll do better next time, I promise.

An update on the lighted kitchen coming soon!

Happy Hallow's Eve everyone!

PS: I apologize for the cruel low quality pictures. I took them on my phone coz my digicam is sick. :( It needs new battery.

More Pumpkins for All

Ha ha, I made a pumpkin as well, Matt!

Not sure how to link the original file though! Will I have to upload it to a remote host..?

Gotta run to class - help!

Pumpkins for all! Now Working! okay seriously now.

EDIT!!!!

No Need! I FIXED IT WOOO!!!!

thanks

Woo!

haha, okay I kind threw this together really fast from a cylinder, so sorry for the quality. Here is a pumpkin model you can use for the pumkin thing for class:



Quick render test:


Files:

pumpkin

stem

here you go :)

EDIT:

I've done some shader testing and realized you need to have two solid halves for back scattering (such as with a candle) to work. so here are the two halves made solid and hollow (you'll understand when you see them. oh and use the stem from above. I'm also leaving the link to the original pumkin so that you can play around with that as well.

DOWNLOAD BOTH:

Pumpkin top

Pumpkin Bottom


To Download: click the link and then select "Free" then type in the generated letters (to prove you are indeed a human) and the download should then pop up automatically.

Slow Motion Reference

Hey, guys! Just thought I'd share. Discovery Channel has a great show for animators out there called, "Time Warp." There are quite a few clips available on YouTube - check them out:

Bee Wings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khx-VkVSIOQ

Milking a Rattlesnake (some cool liquid effects):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm73uqOAMQw&NR=1

Water Balloon to the Face:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90VyvOhPmA0&feature=related

Tesla Coil:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jgqJr7gFlI&feature=related

Popping a Zit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f-IgP7EYzU&feature=related

Enjoy!

Halloween

Here a challenge for the blog, not a required assignment but should be fun to do for halloween: render a pumpkin lit by a candle from inside.
Maybe someone can post a pumpkin model to carve!

First Post

Yay, first post!















Um, trying to get a mystery feel goin on here.
This is just a point light of a very saturated orange...don't worry, its not going to be like this for the final one. Although I do like it. :)




Someone's been caught! Going to put a more harsh shadow for him (papertowelbadboy).
Don't know if I'm going to keep the windows black..



Can anyone explain to me how this could happen? We were doing the proxy settings thing today in class and this is what I saw when I rendered my frame. Help!

More to come. Update on colored kitchen with adjustments SHOULD be up here soon. (should..)

Something you should see

When I saw this I had to post



What you are looking at is not a film, its a mixture of photomapping and CG. Its brilliant, who needs shaders or lighting, when you can composite beautiful photos together on 3D models:

Blender, what is it good for?

Absolutely everything! (sorry it hit so I had to type it :P)

so as most of you know I do my modeling and UVing in a program called Blender.

Blender is an opensource animation package, that has some of the most powerful tools for the money. From fluid and cloth simulation to complex rigging solutions to even a full video compositor (something maya JUST put into its pakage and even so its no where near blender's), blender can do pretty much anything. It also includes a node based material system as well as a completely openGL interface (meaning you can customize it in anyway you wish).

I'm a very big supporter of blender as well as opensource software. I don't believe price should be the limitation that artists face.

Blender being completely free is just an all around great program to have on your computer, and being extremely small you can load it onto your thumbdrive and take it with you when you go :)

www.blender.org is their site and explains everything in fine detail.

some videos showing what blender can do:









as well as a slew of other vids on the main page.

OH and big buck bunny and elephants dream? they're both open source movies and have the all the files used to make them (Sound textures models scene files etc) available for download and use in your own project :)

Sending a postcard home:

I thought, since I made my own blog that I would post my progress there. So here is a link to it for anyone interested in looking at what I'm up to.

Ismetric

I'm also thinking about developing painting tutorials, so any of you folks who do digital painting may like what you see. Because obviously I'm an expert...right...

There'll be stuff at least. Whatever I can find....

...So there. Now you can know where I'm at. You been told.


See ya. :)

For Inspiration:

I just thought it would be useful to see these. Gobelins, for the most part. Yes, yes they are traditional 2-d animations, but heck, they're better than a lot of the 3-d nonsense out there.

The link for Youtube

The list of the animations:

Monstera Deliciosa - beautiful and clever.

Le lac gele - cool

Fenrir - Fantastic!! -my favorite, style-wise

Dodudindon- Hilariously good-my favorite concept/story

Jelly Sunday - did I watch this yet?...


There are a few animations I recall now that incorporate both, which is cool and I believe you could do later on (or now....maybe) in 3-d.

Apres La Pluie- "After the Rain"

La Main des Maitres- .......actually, this one is mostly 3-D in 2-D's clothing with some stills (which honestly don't convince me, but they work).



There's more out there. Look on the Gobelins site from time to time. Also, Supinfocom and youtube in general are great places to check.

When I can focus better, I'll be sure to keep you all posted (haha pun).

Textures anyone?

Once again I'm doing the charitable thing, even though like no one goes on here from class (for shame) Im submitting to you guys the bump and eye texture. the bump because you guys can use the color brush in photoshop and colorize it for a skin texture (I'm basically giving you guys a starting point) and the eye texture cause well who couldn't use a good eye texture right?

Bump:
(which had to be compressed significantly for upload, it originally was 48mb)


eye:


Enjoy! :)

HAFF 09

Yesterday I was notified that my animation Seeing Red has been selected for the Holland Animation Film Festival 2009 Web competition. This contest was entered via YouTube:

The winner of the webcompetition will be revealed in the end of October. Also, the film will be screened at the Opening Ceremony of the festival on 4th of November 2009.

More uncanny animation

This is the one we watched in class:

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.

turntable round two.

The second version. it looks more like skin. also changed the geometry and gave him bump on the body.

Hatter Turn Table

Just a test to see how the skin shader works out in motion. Need to adjust it a little bit. but overall I'm happy with it. The hands need some attention from me, but right now I'm doing a simple rig. The model is actually pretty low res, and because of the beauty of subdivision, I'm allowed to up the detail without loosing my control. the entire head and body are on one UV map. Its easier to detail that way, and normal maps are created smoother. I have a base idea of what he will say, I'm not posting that yet, cause its very rough.

Image still of turn table:

Online communities you should join!

If anyone is serious about CG there a few communities you might want to affiliate yourself with.
the big one is http://forums.cgsociety.org. This is basically CG Mecca. Forum attendees include animators and lighting techs from Pixar, Rockstar, and ILM. Its also a host to a lot of great advice from artists in the field.

Another is http://www.conceptart.org/ This is a little more specialized but it also has an area where jobs are posted regularly for appliance.

I'm also going to put http://www.3dtotal.com/ on here as well its a very good source of information on the industry in general.

Game of Tag

Did I mention I would like everybody to tag (a.k.a. label) your post with your name and some other useful tags / labels? I did last year... Using the "Show all" feature helps with consistency.

Some UV Mapping Info

This website helped me get a slightly better idea of the potential of Maya's UV tools. It seems to be using a different version of Maya, but a little poking around our version led me to similar functions. Of particular use was the note on Mapping Strategies: http://www.jawa9000.com/Technical/UVs/UVs.htm

Also, the "Automatically move UVs for better texture space distribution" button within the UV Texture Editor was a bit of a help - NOT to be relied upon completely, however! Computers are NOT as smart as humans yet, apparently.

In other news - test renders of my slug show the non-subdivided version, even though:
a) Smooth Mesh Preview is checked
b) Smooth Shade All is checked
c) I selected all the edges and clicked Normals>Soften Edges

Any advice?

I did something crazy!

Not really, but hey it caught your eye :)

More Progress:
(EDIT: Adjusted proportions on the body, due to requests on CGtalk.com)

I modeled the hatters body as one. Going to extract the head and apply blendshapes to it. Though I recently found out that even if the head is connected to the body the blendshapes need only be models of the head, as long as the verticies match they'll work!


Also here are some videos for that I found interesting.


Baginski - Fallen Art - Funny home videos are a click away


Watch Cycle in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Get it while it is hot

Want to know what you get when Salvador Dali creates an animation with Disney? Well, here it is:

I originally got it through a post on BoingBoing but it quickly disappeared. Maybe the FBI warning and the "1-800-no copies" had something to do with it. Let's see how long this one stays up!

New Hatter

After Looking at my model for a while I decided that I would redo him, to make him more hatter-like. I began tweaking the model at a low resolution in Zbrush as to not lose the detail on the higher end. I came up with this, which is I'm satisfied to say the finished look of the hatter. He's basically what has been in my head, I was just fighting the idea of the norm.

But what about all those blendshapes? Matt you fool! No not necessarily. You see in the blendshapes options I can assign a new target and then project target to blendshapes. In otherwords update all the blendshapes at once to the new mesh. I could also make this head a permanent blendshape and have all other shape fall off of it, but that in essence is that same thing as above.

so yay.