Thursday, December 18, 2008
Be seeing you
Where am I?
In the village.
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling. We want information.
You won't get it.
By hook or by crook, we will.
Who are you?
The new Number 2.
Who is Number 1?
You are Number 6.
I am not a number, I am a free man!
Just finished watching the final (17th) episode of The Prisoner. And yes, stop reading if you don't want the big reveal spoiled. I hadn't seen the series since I was a kid, but Rover has always been an idelible image in my mind. Number 6 wants only his freedom - and when he eventually recovers it, the door to his London apartment opens on its own, just as it had in The Village. Unfortunately, what has happened before, will happen again... and again... history repeats itself, and spins 'round and 'round like the wheel of progress - or the symbol of the Village, the penny-farthing. This defeatist cyclical message is also present in Pink Floyd's The Wall. The Wall (of the prison?) is torn down, only to be rebuilt and brought down again ad infinitum. It is progress that series creator and star (and sometimes writer/director) Patrick McGoohan believes is moving too quickly - and that mankind, as a result, is doomed.
The identity of his captor, Number 1, is revealed in the series finale "Fall Out" (in 52 frames or so) to be Number 6, himself - an interesting argument that we are all prisoners to ourselves. Great series - a desert island-- or should I say Village-- DVD set if ever there was one.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Charity art auction
I was more than happy to participate in tonight's auction - it was a great opportunity to challenge myself, learn something new, and in the spirit of the giving season, the proceeds are going to the Children's Miracle Network. Below is my submission, the starship Enterprise NCC-1701 which I modeled in Maya. I created two cameras for a custom stereoscopic image which is viewable through anaglyphic glasses - the kind that bully in "Back to the Future" wore. Unfortunately, the print version is inferior to this - I suspect because this is RGB as opposed to CMYK. I'm going to test this theory - as well as adjust the convergence to give the saucer section more clarity and prominence. This being my first attempt at anything stereoscopic, I'm pleased. But grab a pair of 3D glasses and judge for yourself!
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Car Paint
The 1958 Corvette I'll be modeling (hopefully soon) will be predominantly yellow (there's chrome, too, but that's a whole other challenge.) Below is a test to create photorealistic car paint. A few things of note: The sphere uses a Blinn shader and a Sampler Info utility (specfically, its Facing Ratio attribute) and a ramp (its color connected to the Blinn's specularity, and its alpha connected to the Blinn's reflectivity.) This is image based lighting - not with an HDRI as it should be, but with a single raw 2K image of the moon. This sequence was rendered in Mental Ray with Raytracing/Final Gather. As this is just a test, I didn't feel the need to go to all the trouble of creating an HDRI. While this is by no means a stellar result, it is a promising one; I'm considering lighting my car this way. Of course, there are so many ways to skin a cat and I guess 9 tries to get it right. You heard me, cat... Better run.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
PaintFX trees and headlights test
This is a test of the PaintFX trees - they don't look photoreal, but for this nighttime sequence they may look real enough. I've got an area light overhead casting a blue light to mimic the moon. The headlights are two spot lights parented to a cube that will eventually be a Corvette. This is just a roughing out and getting a sense of how it will look. Eventually I'll be adding clouds, stars, a moon, a textured road, ground texture, rocks, (possibly some fog) etc.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
A work in progress...
Below is a quick test clip - I'm building an existing house (interior as well as exterior) in 3D and compositing the CG footage I render with actual Super8mm footage of the same house. The trick is to match the camera attributes such as focal length of the real world camera with which the original footage was shot in 1966 for some hopefully seamless transitions. This clip is entirely CG to which I added some noise/grain in post. Just a work-in-progress in the embryonic stage - obviously there are a lot more things to model and texture, but I'm pretty excited about how this is turning out so far.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Art Auction
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Quahog Zone
I'm submitting a "piece" (sorry for how pretentious that sounds) in a "Family Guy" art auction. The entry must be based on a specific television series and incorporate "Family Guy" characters. Hopefully, it is obvious that I've chosen "The Twilight Zone." My drawings below need some cleaning up before I can begin painting them onto transparencies. There's also a frame that I'm in the middle of assembling - a recreation of the door seen in the main titles of season three. Fingers crossed that the six episodes depicted below are recognizable; each is based on a specific shot. (Click on a photo to enlarge it.) I'll post pictures of the finished product upon completion.
Monday, July 21, 2008
WALL-E
Great, top-notch animation does not a good film make. It helps certainly, but Pixar's WALL-E suffers from lazy writing, perhaps lazier than the consumer-driven, obese space travelers (read Americans) the film pokes uninspired fun at. Also, the inclusion of a live action Fred Willard doing a thinly veiled George W. Bush seems a desperate production move to finish the film in time for a summer release - Mr. Willard probably shot all of his scenes in one day as opposed to the weeks (if not months) it would take to animate such a sequence. And the integration was jarring - it reminded me of a reverse version of the "Kidd Video" opening from Saturday mornings of the 1980s. As much as I dislike (and that's way too kind a word) #43, it came off heavy-handed and easy. Plus, Pixar had the opportunity to take shots at "W" in 3, if not 4, films before WALL-E, but I guess it wasn't safe then. Nothing worse than a late wink-wink.
The Dark Knight
I hope The Dude will abide if time constraints have forced me "into the whole brevity thing." Here's a short review: The Dark Knight is must-see. The most important part of a film is its ending. It's why films like The Graduate, Lost In Translation, and yes, even Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, stay with us long after the last frame reflects off the screen. The last 45 seconds of The Dark Knight are perfect and elevate what would otherwise be a good film to a great film. I'll be seeing it again!
Bored yet?
Haven't had a lot of time, so apologies to anyone who looks at this blog and is tired of small tweaks to these stars and planets, but alas, here's yet another. :) Oh, ignore the stars that appear in front of Earth - again, the problem is that Maya applies the glow effect after the render. To fix this, I'll just have to render it in passes and composite in After Effects - like a good professional should anyway. The thing to pay attention to here is the alteration to the camera move during the planet flyby. Still needs adjustment, but this is definitely more dynamic. Sadly, I just saw a clip from "Space Chimps" featuring a similar sequence, but hey, Star Trek really did it first anyway.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Test animation
Here is a rough draft of an opening sequence for a video I'm working on. A couple things of note: something weird happens with the Alpha channel when you render PaintFX stars in Maya. I think it's actually in the Post Render when a Glow is applied. As a result, it's not possible to composite anything - so the whole sequence was done "in camera" - certainly not the way I wanted to do it, but I just like the look of those stars so damn much. Another new thing I tried (new for me) is adding Motion Blur - that significantly reduced the jaggedness during the camera turns. I'm not completely happy with the look of Earth. No fluids here for the atmosphere, but I think I'll add that. I will be adding a lens flare in After Effects, but again, the botched Alpha channel will be a bit of a problem. Anyway, if you're bored, have a look:
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The last of the "Nine Old Men" dies
Anyone remotely interested in animation knows about the "nine old men." Among them were Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston whose book The Illusion of Life has been in my reference library for years. Fans of Pixar's Incredibles may remember a quick exchange between two old men, both voiced by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Sadly, Ollie Johnston passed away on Monday. This is from the Associated Press:
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Ollie Johnston, the last of the "Nine Old Men" who animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Fantasia," "Bambi" and other classic Walt Disney films, died Monday. He was 95.
Johnston died of natural causes at a long-term care facility in Sequim, Washington, Walt Disney Studios Vice President Howard Green said Tuesday.
"Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists, one of the real pioneers of our art, one of the major participants in the blossoming of animation into the art form we know today," Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt Disney and director emeritus of the Walt Disney Co., said in a statement.
Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his "Nine Old Men," borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the U.S. Supreme Court's members, who had angered the president by quashing many of his Depression-era New Deal programs.
Although most of Disney's men were in their 20s at the time, the name stuck with them for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. The pair, who met as art students at Stanford University in the 1930s, were hired by Disney for $17 a week at a time when he was expanding the studio to produce full-length feature films. Both worked on the first of those features, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
Johnston and Thomas and their families became neighbors in the Los Angeles suburb of Flintridge, and during their 45-minute drive to the Disney Studios each day, they would devise fresh ideas for work.
Johnston worked as an assistant animator on "Snow White" and became an animation supervisor on "Fantasia" and "Bambi" and animator on "Pinocchio."
He was especially proud of his work on "Bambi" and its classic scenes, including one depicting the heartbreaking death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That scene has brought tears to the eyes of generations of young and old viewers.
"The mother's death showed how convincing we could be at presenting really strong emotion," he remarked in 1999.
Johnston's other credits included "Cinderella," "Alice in Wonderland," "Peter Pan," "Lady and the Tramp," "Sleeping Beauty," "101 Dalmatians," "Mary Poppins," "The Jungle Book," "The Aristocats," "Robin Hood" and "The Rescuers."
"[People] know his work. They know his characters. They've seen him act without realizing it," film historian Leonard Maltin said. "He was one of the pillars, one of the key contributors to the golden age of Disney animation."
After Johnston and Thomas retired in 1978, they lectured at schools and film festivals in the United States and Europe. They also co-authored the books "Bambi: The Story and the Film," "Too Funny for Words," "The Disney Villains" and the epic "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life." They were the subjects of the 1995 documentary "Frank and Ollie," produced by Thomas' son Ted.
The pair's guide to animation is considered "the bible" among animators, said John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar animation studios and Johnston's longtime friend.
Oliver Martin Johnston Jr. was born October 31, 1912, in Palo Alto, California, where his father was a professor at Stanford. He once noted that he and Thomas "were bound to be thrown together" at the university, as they were two of only six students in its art department at the time. When not in class, they painted landscapes and sold them at a local speakeasy for meal money.
Johnston had planned on becoming a magazine illustrator but fell in love with animation.
"I wanted to paint pictures full of emotion that would make people want to read the stories," he once said. "But I found that [in animation] was something that was full of life and movement and action, and it showed all those feelings."
Johnston was honored with a Disney Legends Award in 1989, and in 2005, he was the first animator honored with the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony.
He was also a major train enthusiast. The backyard of his Flintridge home boasted a hand-built miniature railroad, and Johnston restored and ran a full-size antique locomotive at a former vacation home in Julian, California.
Johnston's wife of 63 years, Marie Worthey, died in 2005. Johnston is survived by sons Ken and Rick and daughters-in-law Carolyn Johnston and Teya Priest Johnston. The Walt Disney Studios is planning a life celebration for Johnston. Funeral services will be private.
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Ollie Johnston, the last of the "Nine Old Men" who animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Fantasia," "Bambi" and other classic Walt Disney films, died Monday. He was 95.
Johnston died of natural causes at a long-term care facility in Sequim, Washington, Walt Disney Studios Vice President Howard Green said Tuesday.
"Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists, one of the real pioneers of our art, one of the major participants in the blossoming of animation into the art form we know today," Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt Disney and director emeritus of the Walt Disney Co., said in a statement.
Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his "Nine Old Men," borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the U.S. Supreme Court's members, who had angered the president by quashing many of his Depression-era New Deal programs.
Although most of Disney's men were in their 20s at the time, the name stuck with them for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. The pair, who met as art students at Stanford University in the 1930s, were hired by Disney for $17 a week at a time when he was expanding the studio to produce full-length feature films. Both worked on the first of those features, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
Johnston and Thomas and their families became neighbors in the Los Angeles suburb of Flintridge, and during their 45-minute drive to the Disney Studios each day, they would devise fresh ideas for work.
Johnston worked as an assistant animator on "Snow White" and became an animation supervisor on "Fantasia" and "Bambi" and animator on "Pinocchio."
He was especially proud of his work on "Bambi" and its classic scenes, including one depicting the heartbreaking death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That scene has brought tears to the eyes of generations of young and old viewers.
"The mother's death showed how convincing we could be at presenting really strong emotion," he remarked in 1999.
Johnston's other credits included "Cinderella," "Alice in Wonderland," "Peter Pan," "Lady and the Tramp," "Sleeping Beauty," "101 Dalmatians," "Mary Poppins," "The Jungle Book," "The Aristocats," "Robin Hood" and "The Rescuers."
"[People] know his work. They know his characters. They've seen him act without realizing it," film historian Leonard Maltin said. "He was one of the pillars, one of the key contributors to the golden age of Disney animation."
After Johnston and Thomas retired in 1978, they lectured at schools and film festivals in the United States and Europe. They also co-authored the books "Bambi: The Story and the Film," "Too Funny for Words," "The Disney Villains" and the epic "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life." They were the subjects of the 1995 documentary "Frank and Ollie," produced by Thomas' son Ted.
The pair's guide to animation is considered "the bible" among animators, said John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar animation studios and Johnston's longtime friend.
Oliver Martin Johnston Jr. was born October 31, 1912, in Palo Alto, California, where his father was a professor at Stanford. He once noted that he and Thomas "were bound to be thrown together" at the university, as they were two of only six students in its art department at the time. When not in class, they painted landscapes and sold them at a local speakeasy for meal money.
Johnston had planned on becoming a magazine illustrator but fell in love with animation.
"I wanted to paint pictures full of emotion that would make people want to read the stories," he once said. "But I found that [in animation] was something that was full of life and movement and action, and it showed all those feelings."
Johnston was honored with a Disney Legends Award in 1989, and in 2005, he was the first animator honored with the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony.
He was also a major train enthusiast. The backyard of his Flintridge home boasted a hand-built miniature railroad, and Johnston restored and ran a full-size antique locomotive at a former vacation home in Julian, California.
Johnston's wife of 63 years, Marie Worthey, died in 2005. Johnston is survived by sons Ken and Rick and daughters-in-law Carolyn Johnston and Teya Priest Johnston. The Walt Disney Studios is planning a life celebration for Johnston. Funeral services will be private.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Ready-made clouds in Maya
Here are some ready-made clouds found in Maya's visor which I animated a camera through. They look better than the ones I made from scratch.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Light sabers
And here's something I made goofing around, but never finished. So don't adjust your speakers, there's no sound...
Stars
Here are some stars (very similar to the ones seen in my Enterprise project) I'm testing for a CG short I'm writing and producing. It's an idea I've had for years. I have this unrealistic goal of getting nominated for an animated short Oscar. Whether that happens or not, at least once it's produced I can be rid of these images that are swimming around inside my head - ha ha.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Pale Blue Dot - well, maybe not quite so pale
The Earth below is a little better, though not perfect. I made it, the moon and the stars in Maya while I created the clouds in After Effects. I also did a small bit of color correction in AE to desaturate the blues - although I think more attention to color is needed here. The Earth and moon are NURBS spheres with high tesselation to get a smooth edge. The Earth's atmosphere is made with fluids. And the sunlight of course comes from one directional light. Although this is only a still frame, the Earth modelled here is fairly large - with XYZ scale values just shy of 4700 - in case I animate any camera moves with hero objects such as a starship (I've given a name to my pain and it is parallax.) This was rendered using Maya's software. Mental Ray produced an undesirable grid pattern on the planet - I'm not sure why. Have a click for a closer look...
Monday, March 31, 2008
Earth
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
CG clouds
Here are some clouds I made in Maya using particles, a NURBS plane, and a lattice deformer...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)