Nate Shaw Art

Boardwalk Empire 2

2012-01-29T12:37:00.000-08:00

I don't do fan art all that much though its a nice way to relax while drawing. For these drawings I just look at a couple of pictures of the character to remind me of how they look. Maybe I'll do a quick sketch or two but I don't want them to be drawings of actual frames from the show. However, I think it would be awesome to do reverse storyboards of an episode or two. Richard Harrow:

Boardwalk Empire 1

2012-01-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already started watching Boardwalk Empire I highly suggest that you do. I really love the deep characters, high quality vfx, period setting, and overall cinematography. I suppose I couldn't recommend it to everyone, its pretty intense.Jimmy Darmody:

Melissa

2012-01-10T16:25:00.000-08:00

My lovely girlfriend, Melissa, came to visit me in LA. It was a good way to start the year.

Pond Dude Animatic

2011-12-04T14:17:00.001-08:00

woooo-eee I'm all full of updates today! I have started my SESI mentor shot with David Davies from Sony last week. I pitched my story boards and have the ok to move forward with it so I did a quick animatic:

Some concept art for the dude's face:

Figure Drawing

2011-12-04T11:43:00.001-08:00

Figure drawings from the Santa Monica YWCA figure drawing session:

Sunset

2011-12-03T16:57:00.001-08:00

A little something for someone ;)

Environment

2011-12-02T21:40:00.001-08:00

This is for my baby dragon bros:

DogBode and the Adventure of The Missing Slice

2011-11-23T21:16:00.001-08:00

Dragon Texture

2011-11-21T21:33:00.001-08:00

Its been a while since I posted about the baby dragon project I started back in June. I finished the model and the texture a couple of months ago but the carver on a cliff project took precedence as I rushed to finish it for the pixar td residency deadline. Thats past and sent out and that project is nearing completion. As a part of my time at Side Effects I will be getting a mentor to help me through a quick effects shot in Houdini. I will be meeting my mentor on wednesday, he'll be from SPI so I'm pretty excited. I am planning on using the baby dragon project as my mentor shot. I have several ways of scaling it in order to keep it within scope of a ten week project.This is a viewport render of the texture I painted in Mudbox. Looking at it now I am not very happy with it. I was working with some serious hardware limitations on my box. I am hoping that I'll be able to sculpt and re-paint in 3D coat at SESI.

Figure Drawing

2011-11-12T14:08:00.001-08:00

Nick and I went over to the Santa Monica figure drawing at the YWCA. Its been a while since I've gone to figure drawing and it was good to get back into it. I just need a bigger sketchbook that I can still fit in my bag.

turtles on a cliff test render

2011-11-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

Its always a sprint to the finish line...

So Many Projects!!!

2011-10-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

I have somehow got myself involved in too many personal projects. I just keep getting excited about something new and beginning it. I have the Baby Dragon short animation, the Rowers of the Night dream comic, the 24 hour comic I began last week (and didn't quite finish... more about that later I suppose) and now I am full swing into a quick cloth and look development test animation. I have decided to focus on one project at a time until completion. First up is the cloth test. Its a short animation with very little story. I am going for round two on the Pixar simulation TD residency and wanted something to add to the reel since the last time they looked at it. Basically the short is a character in a hooded cloak trudging up a snowy hill. Right now its a 3 shot sequence. I have always been interested in incorporating painterly looks to animation and thought this was a perfect opportunity. This weekend I worked on two of the background paintings for the short. They are near completion but I am always open to critiques if you have them...

URBN Center Photomanipulation

2011-09-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

About a year ago I did this photomanip for the dean of Drexel's College of Arts and Media Sciences. The couple are the Westphals, donors to the school. They wanted a fun picture that showcased their latest donation to the school to put in a rich person's yearbook (as far as I could follow anyway). I was lucky enough to have some friends (Simon, Nicole D, Sonia, and Dan Bode) pose for photographs for me.

Dream Journal: Rowers of the Night 2

2011-09-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

These two are the remaining characters of the Rowers dream journal:

Dream Journal: Rowers of the Night

2011-09-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a crazy dream involving all of the "House of Nick." (Nicklepuff?) I was thinking about doing a quick sketch like I've done for the last couple but this dream stuck with me a lot more than the last couple. I have tentative plans to expand this one into a full fledged production... a comic, an animation, or both. Preliminary sketches for for of the characters:

Dream Journal 4

2011-09-25T19:37:00.001-07:00

I've been sitting on these lines for a while now.

Dream Journal 3

2011-09-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

Another dream journal I painted up for a wedding present for my friends Amin and Megan.

The Iron Feather: Infinite Canvas Comic

2011-09-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

Back in June I finished up the comic I had been working on for roughly six months. The idea was to create a comic that couldn't be translated to print and to present a story that pushed the boundaries storytelling. When I was developing the story for the project, my committee member Matt Kaufhold, a scriptwriter told me that my story needed a beginning, middle, and end. This advice got me thinking, what if I didn't have the three basic parts of a story? I made a comic that was structured as circles (thus defying normal page logic) There is no page, just an unlimited canvas. Obviously I was heavily influenced by Scott McCloud's writings on the future of comics. This unlimited space allowed the story to take on a format that moves a story in ways we are not used to. For example, the comic is technically linear but you can enter into the comic at any point. At several points the story branches in two directions, not in the way a choose your own adventure novel branches, the story actually continues both paths (regardless the path the reader chooses), the reader can choose which character he or she would like to follow. Since the essential story is circular, the reader will eventually come back to that point in the story and can choose the other direction to get a wider understanding of the story.

To drive the comic I used a flash based presentation software called Prezi. To use it you click on a piece of art and the screen will zoom and rotate to focus on what you selected. This software was what made the comic possible but, at the same time, makes the comic difficult to read. You have to have a lot of patience to work with Prezi on this scale. I pushed the app to its limits. I invite you to read the comic and feel free to comment on it. Does it make sense? What do you get out of it?

The project was the product of my Master's thesis at Drexel University. If you are so inclined, you can read my thesis document on Drexel library's website.

Dream Journal 2

2011-09-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a dream that the general populace was being menaced by giant spiders. It wasn't all that scary of a dream but I remember we had to be very careful when opening up doors. I worked on this sketch during my lunch break in between rendering battleships.

Dream Journal 1

2011-09-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

My good friend and long time college roommate, Chris Hendricks was married last weekend. I decided I wanted to give them something a little more personal so I decided I would make them a water color painting. Having some trouble coming up with an idea, I laid down to take a nap and had some vivid dreams. This rather crazy dream sequence ended in something like this:

Everglades Buttons

2011-08-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

I designed some buttons a month or two ago for Everglades National Park's website. They are Here.

Scooters

2011-08-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

Scooters are hilarious. I love the idea of them. When I used to ride bikes a lot (like wear spandex and and shave my legs a lot) I would go on rides with 5-10 other dudes wearing spandex. It was a blast, we would ride all in a line and draft off each other and go really really fast. Once we even caught a rather large fellow riding his scooter. The scooter was struggling a bit under the load. My bike ego was blowing up, it was great.

Another time I was riding with some of my bikey friends and this scooter pulls up next to us. The vehicle was carrying two dudes. The driver was completely ignoring us (but still making the decision to ride next to us?) His bro riding on the back, on the other hand was having the time of his life. The guy seriously looked like an extra in Mad Max, a minion of some type. He was looking at us and cackling with his his outrageously dentally impaired grin, all the while fist pumping as hard as he could. Once the duo got in pace with us, back-dude made a (no doubt) clever comment containing a double entendre that totally touché'd our sense of joie de vie. After heckling to his hearts content the duo sped out of my life... and into legend. (of my mind)

side note... Blogger always gives you examples of "labels for this post" and one of them is scooters. yessssssss

Things That I Want

2011-08-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

As you may have gathered from a previous post (or, more likely, you know me) I have moved to LA. Currently homeless (but not floorless) and jobless I have had a lot of time to do things like work on personal projects, post on my blog, and check job forums at least 36 times an hour.

For some reason being jobless makes me think of things that I want to do when I have money. For example I really want to build my own computer, learn how to surf, and paint some paintings. Right now, at the top of my list of things I want is teleportation. What would I do with this ability, you may find yourself asking the computer at which you are looking at this blog post? I would teleport myself to the top of a beautiful mountain range far from any human habitation, a place that I could sit by myself and observe nature in all its grandiose-ness and grandeur-ness. I would teleport myself there with a toilet and go #2. It would be the best.

Actually, that would be my second order of business. The first would be to teleport to my girlfriend and give her a big ol' kiss. Who, judging by my artist rendition, stands around looking annoyed all the time holding papers.

But seriously, Things I Want: 1. Teleportation.

Baby Dragon Concept Art

2011-08-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

Always back up your files... My Western Digital external hard drive failed two days ago. I lost most of my projects for the past year including what I had been working on for this baby dragon project. I was working on a concept painting that was almost finished but the .psd was wiped with the drive. I was posting wips on conceptart.org so I have a small version of the last work in progress.

EDIT: Some notes from bob on the model that I will be incorporating in the model redesign: i think it would make more sense and be more appealing if the eyes were more toward the front of the head me: and bigger bob: eyes are usually spaced out like that on prey, because they need to see if things are coming from a wide viewpredators usually have eyes frontward me: ah good point bob: and coincidentally, things look more appealing when eyes are more toward the front

Santa Monica

2011-08-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have arrived. The cliff and the coast.

Mullets

2011-08-04T12:21:00.001-07:00

Its happened before, it'll happen again...

Color Concept: Baby Dragon

2011-07-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

I wanted to put down some ideas for what the baby dragon would look like:

Baby Dragon

2011-07-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

After my phone project went well enough I've been wanting to start another compositing project. Instead of a simple cg integration test, I wanted to do a a character animation piece. The idea is that someone has found a baby dragon and brought him home in a shoebox and left him in their room. The baby dragon figures out how to get out of the box and causes a bit of mischief. My inspiration is the millions of cat videos on the internet of some kitten doing something adorable. My concept art for the baby dragon:

Initial storyboards:

Windowsill

2011-07-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

You can use Christmas ornaments for taking HDRIs! I read about someone using one instead of a mirror ball and had wanted to give it a whirl.

And I made this animation:

Dome Master Renders

2011-07-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

I uploaded the dome master renders from the Dragon Dome project. Visually it doesn't make a lot of sense, you have to imagine that this is being projected onto a dome. The edges are between 6 and seven feet all around and the middle is straight up.

For more info on this project, check out my earlier post.

Dragon Turntable

2011-06-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

A turntable of the dragon I modeled, sculpted, and textured for the dome project. Click on the picture to see it!!

Dragon Dome

2011-06-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

Judging by my post frequency lately, it looks like I haven't been doing anything lately. Its not true, I swear!

One of the projects I just finished up on was "Dragon Dome." DD was a project for my "Imersive World Building" class at Drexel, one of my very last classes there. The class needs a bit of an introduction to fully understand the project. The idea behind the class is to make an animation for a planetarium. If you've ever been to a science museum, they usually have some sort of astronomy show where they project some stars on a dome. The bulk of these types of shows and others like them show the main action as happening in front of the audience who is probably seated. Things come from behind to appear in front. The problem with the majority of the work is that it does not fully utilize the full screen area, an entire hemisphere.

My goal going into the class was to create something visually stunning that the audience would have to stand in the center of the auditorium to fully appreciate. Things would happen all around the audience who might, at times, have to turn their entire body to catch something happening.

I decided I wanted to feature dragons flying around, making the audience feel like they are dwarfed by giant flying reptiles.

There are some concerns and challenges that are different from the usual flat screen challenges. First of all, the only off screen is below the horizon. Really, the camera needed to be treated not as a camera or picture frame (like most productions) it needed to be thought of a space that the audience inhabits. This means that there couldn't be a floor in our environment, the camera couldn't move, depth of field doesn't make sense, and sizing things was a challenge.

Another interesting challenge was lighting. I am used to lighting things for a single camera. The lights needed to make sense but also illuminate everything, quite challenging in a 360 degree field of view. We found if it was lit too brightly, the light would bounce around the dome and wash everything out.

For the final animation, I teamed up with two of my classmates, Greg Ruane and Dan Bodenstein. The animation started with the two dragons flying right above the audience from the front to the back of the planetarium with two more dragons circling high above. For about 40 seconds dragons weave through tall mountain peaks that dwarf the audience. The animation ends with on hero dragon landing on a rock directly in front of the audience and letting out a huge roar. Audio was completed in an extremely short amount of time by John Avarese, (who, you will remember, completed audio for Big Catch). Unfortunately there is no possible way for me to upload the animation for others to see as, I am assuming, no one that reads this blog has access to a planetarium. Hopefully, it won't be lost to time, at least one more class of Drexel grad students will get to see it, even if I never do again.

For the project, I modeled, sculpted, and textured the dragon. (see previous posts) I textured the mountains and modeled the hero mountain. For the sky, I used nuke to create a star field. I created a noise and tweaked it into tiny, different sized specs and glowed the heck out of them and then overlayed a colorful milky way-esque texture. It turned out looking pretty good even if the planetarium guy caught my fake star field the moment he saw it. For the hero dragon, I did a cloth sim for the wings using Maya's nCloth.

Dan was the smoke and render TD for the project, in addition to making procedural mountaintops. Rendering this thing was a whole job in itself. We had to take 5 camera's (top, front, back, left, and right) and stitch them together into something that looks like a squished dome. From there they needed to be cut up to the 8 projectors to be projected onto the dome. Dan also figured out a way of getting depth information for the camera that would allow for distance falloff effects, something that was apparently a struggle for the entire dome industry (according to our professor). Dan was hilariously pissed when he found out it was a thesis worthy project, months too late for him to do anything about it.

Greg rigged the dragon and animated him. mmmmm motion paths.

This is a "glommed" image that would get projected onto the dome. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in its current state (on a 2d plane, your monitor).

What you see in the middle of the image would be directly above the audience and what is on the edges would be just above eye level (what you would see if you looked straight ahead.

Some technical specs:
Software Used:
Maya
ZBrush
Renderman for Maya
Photoshop
Houdini
Nuke
Sky Skan

sketchezzz

2011-05-30T22:03:00.001-07:00

Lighting

2011-05-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I gave a lighting lecture to my class. The idea was to take a simple scene and light it three different ways. I almost always use spotlights exclusively in Maya. This is mainly due to the controls they have but also because I have been rendering primarily with Renderman and depth map shadows for the past year and a half. There are certainly instances where one might want to use other lights but for these demos I used all spotlights. The renders are a bit on the low quality side because you don't want to wait too long for the scene to render when doing a live demo. These are all rendered in Mental Ray for Maya.

The first scene is lit with one spotlight with an image mapped to the color to simulate the shapes you get from the glass of a light bulb and the flashlight.

The second is lit to look like a studio light setup.

And the third is supposed to be lit from a window. Again I mapped an image to the spotlight.

Dragon Dome

2011-04-25T17:22:00.001-07:00

I had a bit of time to work on the sculpt and texture of the dragon. I was going to use Mari for the texture but my tablet wouldn't work properly in the painting view. :( So back to ZBrush's ridiculous interface.

Also, because these are triple boot machines with Mac keyboards that refuse to screencap using every button combination known to man, it took me about as long to take that picture as it did to paint the dragon. ("Snip" ftw)

Dragon Dome

2011-04-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

Dragons on Domezzz!!!

My WIP model for Dome project. This bad boy (once I finish modeling and sculpting him, teeth, extra horns, claws, etc.) will be all set to be all big and fly around a planetarium.

Big Catch

2011-03-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

So nearly six months from the start of production, my Advanced CG/Crowd Simulation animation for Drexel is done. Actual production only happened between late September through very early January. The past couple of months have just been waiting on the audio. If you have seen my reel you've already seen like a third of the animation. So in this case done means I am not going to work on it any more. Its actually really hard for me to watch. Very nearly every scene has issues I wish I could have addressed. Ultimately though, its time to move on. I learned quite a bit throughout the production of this piece.

I have been making animations in Maya for about a year now and I've pretty much stuck to that software (with help from Nuke for some basic compositing). This animation I decided to take on two new major software packages. I had to use Massive (for crowd simulation) to fulfill the requirements of my Crowds class. I also jumped into Houdini for the smoke simulations. I owe a lot to Dan Bodenstein for getting me started with that. I wouldn't have finished the smoke without his help. To get started in learning Houdini, I used a lot of Peter Quint's videos on Vimeo.

The audio and score was made by John Avarese. John teaches a lot of audio classes in the Film Department here at Drexel. He does really good work, including feature work. I was really excited to have him on the project. Definitely check him out: John Avarese.

Anywho, give my animation a look and let me know what you think!

(Click on the picture and watch it in HD)

Compositing

2011-03-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

A fun side effect of being a new CG and VFX student is coming to the realization that NOTHING ON TV OR IN MOVIES IS REAL. I used to share an opinion with many people that digital vfx were making movies less good. I guess I was thinking of the Phantom Menace or something. Little did I know that very little on tv is not digitally altered in some way. Think you can always spot digital vfx? Watch this: Ugly Betty VFX Breakdown Now its not perfect but if someone hadn't mentioned that this was all digitally recreated then I probably would never have known. Another great vfx breakdown, this time for Black Swan

So that is compositing. I just finished my first (and last, I guess) class in the subject. The class was entitled: Matte Painting. Unfortunately there was no actual matte painting going on in the class, not really. It was really an advanced compositing class. This term the professor added an extra element to the project. We had to do the project in stereo. (thats 3D for the general public, you know, like the movies where you wear the glasses, for example Step Up 3D).

We had to shoot our own footage for the project. Having never touched a video or film camera before this was quite a challenge for me. On top of that was the stereo requirement, so I had to shoot the footage out of two cameras at once. I really screwed up the footage part, which caused major problems down the line that never really got resolved. Basically the stereo portion of the project is unwatchable. (even if you happen to have a 3d monitor, projector, or tv. or more likely but still probably not, have anaglyph glasses sitting next to your computer like me)

I learned a lot in the process so the project wasn't a failure. You can watch the mono version of the project on vimeo. Click the image to be sent to the video page:

I'm going to do a quick breakdown of the plate eventually.

Drexel

2011-03-21T14:22:00.001-07:00

This March marked my second to last quarter here at Drexel. I'll be graduating in mid June with my master's degree in Digital Media. When I applied to Drexel waaay back in 2009, I was in the Everglades spraying plants by day and working on various art projects by night. At the time I was getting interested in creating art on the computer a la digital painting. Could there be art that is only digital and has no physical correlation.

Also I was interested in how digital media and the internet could affect how we looked at art. To me, an art gallery is a weird way of looking at art. For some installation art it is the only way. Place has a huge effect on how we view artwork. If we were to go into Starbucks and get a drink and on the wall there happened to be an original Van Gogh, something one may go to a museum to see, I would say that most people would walk right past. When I go to a gallery or a group of galleries, I end up getting over saturated with art and not really seeing anything. Or I am not comfortable in the gallery so it distracts from the overall viewing experience. Sometimes it seems that the whole gallery system is set up to arbitrarily award value to work. I think art is best viewed when it is something you seek out. And what about work that can't or shouldn't be viewed in a gallery. So much digital art is better viewed on the internet.

These were some of the things I was thinking about when I was applying to Drexel's certificate program. I was hoping to learn more about web design and vector art, ironically the only kind of classes I never got to take. I remember finishing up my Drexel application and moving on to an application to PAFA, I was reapplying to a program that I had got into two years previous. On the application PAFA, it asked how you fit into contemporary art. After thinking about this for a long time, I realized I didn't fit very well at all. Most of the things that inspired me at that point were animators, illustrators, directors and writers. Not very many traditional visual artists. I never completed that application (the second time). Even though I only came to Drexel to get a certificate for web stuff, I have really enjoyed the past year and a half working with computer graphics and animation and I am looking forward to wherever that takes me!

More Rake Viz Dev

2011-03-04T22:35:00.000-08:00

I took the day to finish off a couple of more pieces for my visual development portfolio. Check it out over at nateshawart.com. The character is from the Decemberist's album, The Hazards of Love. It is one of my favorite albums; a concept album, it tells the story of Margaret and a faun that she falls in love with. The faun's mother is jealous and does what she can to stop their trysts. At some point the rake comes in and kidnaps Margaret. The rake is an evil dude, his song is about his past. He gets married has kids but his wife dies in childbirth. Left with 3 or 4 children he goes about killing each one. After the deed is done he feels no remorse and goes about his evil deeds. I like drawing villains and I really like the Decemberists so I thought I'd give the character design a go. Once I finished the line up below, I wanted to do some action drawings. I quickly realised (I guess I hadn't thought about it too much before?) that this dude only does really bad stuff. I had to pick scenes of him doing bad stuff but infanticide might have crossed the line into questionable content for a portfolio.

Anywho, I had a good time drawing this guy, maybe I'll continue with the series once I have a bit more free time. (June?)

The Rake Viz Dev

2011-02-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

I'm getting my portfolio ready to apply to some visual development internships and I wanted to strengthen my portfolio a little before sending out my apps. My 2d portfolio needs to be more focused. I've been working on some character concept sheets to fill it out. This character my take on a character from the Decemberists album, The Hazards of Love.

I like the dude in the green vest the best so I'm going to do another sheet based around him.

Naked People

2011-02-19T18:41:00.001-08:00

Finally made it back over to the Philadelphia Sketch Club; its been about a month now. Its always really nice to draw from a model. I get a little frustrated because I always seem to draw the same drawing every time I go. Its a different model obviously but feels very similar to every other drawing I do there. Its my own fault, I bring the same materials: pencil and small sketchbook. I also approach it the same way: all of the figure taking full advantage of the paper without running off the sides. I've been doing a lot of looking around at other artists portfolios to get some insight into applying to 2d jobs. It makes for very disheartening experience. It seems like everyone and their blind grandmother can draw or paint better than me. While I value my time at William and Mary, other than feeling really solid in my foundations, it didn't do anything to prepare me for any type of commercial artwork. Fine arts..., sigh. Honestly it was my own fault. Anywho, my drawings:

I know it looks a lot like my other drawings but I tried to use less lines that are more considered. I like the results but it looks nothing like the girl.

Mental Ray

2011-02-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

Last spring I did some work with trying new rendering techniques (new to me anyway). You may remember my windmill tests. I am going to be using some renders for my thesis so I went back into mental ray contour rendering workflow and did another test render of some models. Instead of using lights for shadows I used ambient occlusion in mental ray. The great thing about this type of rendering is that its blazingly fast. This full HD render was probably under a minute on my box.

Animations!

2011-02-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

I uploaded two more animations to my vimeo site this week. The first is "Arrival." This was my animaiton 2 midterm project at Drexel. I worked with Jake Nichols and Kev Gross on it. The responsibility breakdown is on the vimeo site. It was nice to work with a group. We each could really focus on our individual tasks and do the things we liked to do. I had experimented a little with compositing for Moth but for this project I got to really have fun with it. Also thanks to my sister, Nyssa for some ideas when I was designing the texturing of the dragon.

Arrival on Vimeo

The second animation is the throat project I worked on with Jake and my animation 1 prof Dave Mauriello. It was a segment for a longer documentary about a throat doctor.

Throat on Vimeo

My Reel

2011-01-29T11:37:00.001-08:00

I finished up putting together my reel: Here on Vimeo!

It is a collection of shots from a handful of animations that I've worked on over the past year at Drexel. Right now its more of a generalist reel, when I get to actually applying for jobs I'll probably edit it to slant it to a more focused skill set. For now, though, its everything. Also, I decided not to include music. In general, when employers are looking at reels they turn it off. When I watch reels I always turn off the music. I know that it would add interest to the piece (as a separate piece unto itself) but there are all sorts of problems with adding music that I didn't want to get into. I figure here is a good spot to recognize the other people that contributed to some of the work shown. Evan Boucher did the character animation for the first two Carver clips and Jake Nichols and Kev Gross worked on "Arrival" with me.

Naked People

2011-01-24T20:53:00.000-08:00

Finally had the time to go to the figure drawing sessions over at the Philadelphia Sketch Club.

Sink Renders

2011-01-17T21:27:00.000-08:00

Modeled for the speed modeling challenge over at cgsociety:

Birdie

2011-01-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

Quick color study for the bird in my thesis comic:

Matte Painting Previs

2011-01-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

A robot in the woods!!!

Comic Concept Art

2011-01-11T14:51:00.000-08:00

Some concept art for my thesis comic:

Updated Pandora Rough Cut

2010-11-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

All shots have been finished to a degree. I didn't get a chance to make too many changes to the rendered shots I had last week. Instead, I went ahead and finished most of the animation. All that is left, aside from rerendering the entire animation fixing all of the problems, is to get in some run cycles for the smoke monsters chasing the little dudes. Additionally I have to render out all of the smoke. You can see on the shot of the close up of the hero opening the box that the smoke doesn't match up to the geometry. I suspect it is a difference in the way that cameras are handled between Maya and Houdini. Some of the middle shots won't make too much sense the way they are now. I know. I wanted to get the Maya renders out as soon as I could so that I could see them in motion and see what I need to fix.

The only nagging worry I have is that I still have not found a way to comp the shadow monsters coming out of the columns. Chris pointed me to "Deep Camera Maps" in Houdini but it took over an hour to render one frame... and there isn't much support on the topic in the Houdini community. I haven't had much time to devote to it but obviously I'll get to it in the coming week.

YouTube Link to a larger version of the above.

Updated Previs

2010-11-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

I updated the previs with rendered shots that I animated this weekend. Watching it right now I realized that I left out a shot of the previs. There is a reaction shot after the shadow monsters emerge from their smoke columns. Also I haven't updated the camera on the opening shot or the shadow monster crowd reveal, the one non rendered one after the columns hit. I am working on that shot now.

The second shot is probably too long. I showed it to some people and there seemed to be some agreement, and I agree, that I didn't really need that last shot. I could have the "No Fishing" sign reveal on the shot preceding it but facing the camera and towards the water.

If you have any crits I'd be more than happy to hear them. I'll be AMDO over the course of next week. I'm trying to have all the major animation done before Thanksgiving. Hopefully giving me two weeks for rendering and comp.

No Shaders

2010-11-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

My Massive sim imported into the opening scene and rendered:

Obviously they don't have a shader but I'm not sure why... I have a shader from slim that should be rendering but Maya can't find it for some reason.

Camera Update and Timing

2010-11-08T11:00:00.000-08:00

I went back into a shot that I will be animating this coming week. In order to get all of the smoke effects rolling I need to animate all of the shadow monsters. I want to get all of my camera work nailed down as soon as possible, especially for the effects shots so I went back into the full reveal of the shadow monsters and updated the camera move and timed it out better than what was in the older previs.

This is the overhead shot that immediately follows the above shot. This will be where a Massive sim comes in. I wanted to time this out so I get get some obj sequences into massive to do the "panic" sim.

This puts me at two primary Massive shots. The first is the opening shot of the town where they will be walking around and idling. The second is the above shot. There may be other opportunities for more, for example the moving shot of the columns coming down, they'd be running away. Shots like that secondary though because there would only be one or two of the Massive agents in view of the camera.

Old Previs

Smoke Column Viewport Render

2010-11-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

A viewport render from my smoke sim. The shot opens with Fisher opening up the box (he hasn't been animated yet) and the smoke columns shoot out and land. The Shadow monsters haven't been simmed out for this shot yet and they won't be visible until the smoke hits the ground.

Massive is going fairly well. I am pretty comfortable with my opening town sim when the townspeople are just milling about. Other than the one agent that decided to stop, turn directly towards the camera, and wave for about 30 seconds, the agents behave as expected. The "panic" mode part of the sim isn't perfect yet. They tend to ignore the painted boundaries and run right into the water or through buildings.

URL for the video if it doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRqjYoY3SY

Massive Trouble

2010-11-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

By Sunday I had finished the bulk of my animations and then on Monday I wanted to get them into Massive. When I switched from shadow monsters to townspeople for the Massive sim I tested out the townsperson rig in Massive with a quick animation. He seemed to hop along fine. When I imported my run into Massive it looked ok at first glance. The animation played properly but was jumping back t the origin. No problem, I thought,just need to set it up to loop. So I got the animation trimmed down and blended so it looked smooth. But when I took the camera off of "follow" mode I quickly realized that something was terribly wrong. He would run forward through the loop but when he reached the end of the loop e would get pulled back. Its important to note that he would get pulled back but not to the origin. As it turns out his axis moves slowly along in the z direction while the character moves quickly. So when he reaches the end of his loop he gets yanked back to the axis, which has only moved a little.

I spent a great deal of (frustrating) time yesterday trying everything that I could think of to fix this but nothing seemed to work. What drives me crazy is that the hop test worked properly with no issues but the animation that I spent two days on won't work.

In other news, here is a render of a couple of shadow monsters.

*EDIT: OK, they work now. Apparently I was just doing it wrong.

Massive Cycles

2010-10-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

Now that I've officially switched the crowd from the shadow monsters to townspeople I had a whole new set of animations to get ready for Massive. This is a playblast of the carver rig going through the following cycles: standing still to run, run, run to walk, walk, walk to stop, 5 or 6 idles, and standing still to walk. Additionally I have turns for both walking and running, and a walk to run. This completes the basic motions for the towns people crowd. I will add more as needed.

For the remainder of the week, I'll be working on getting smoke sims set up and getting my completed animations into massive.

Shadow Monster R&D and Test Renders

2010-10-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

In Massive class last Wednesday, Chris mentioned that exporting deforming geometry in fbxs was going to be a problem. I needed it because I was going to be rendering the shadow monster crowd sim in Houdini after doing the volume simulation on it. As a fix he recommended breaking apart every limb and section on the shadow monsters and then parenting each individual to the rig. After doing this, animating a stand up sequence, and then running a volume sim on it I decided that the smoke covers up most of the noticeable seams on the joints and this will be a workable solution. I went ahead and animated a run and a walk with the broken limb rig.

The animation isn't perfect on the characters but it should be sufficient for the shots that I need. There are a total of four shots with shadow monsters in it. The first is the shot where they materialize out of the smoke columns, the second is where they assemble, cheer and then begin their run, the next is the birds eye view of the monsters causing mayhem in the town and the final shot is where one shadow monster chases a townsperson across the scene. Only two of the shots are crowd sims. I decided that it would be easier to hand animate the shadow monsters materializing from the columns. Since the frames will have to be reversed, trying to fit Massive into the effect will be far more trouble than it is worth. I'll be able to place the massive agents to match up with the hand animated characters using Chris's Houdini script. I've got points in Houdini with the normals facing in the right direction in preparation for placing them in Massive.

I am getting pretty happy with the smoke effects. The shader needs to be tweaked a bit. Right now there is a tiny bit too much fine noise. Maybe animating the offset of it will help to make it look a little more believable.

Higher quality versions of those are here and here.

I've modeled three more skull variations bring me to a total of 10 and probably the number of shadow monsters in my crowd. The two curved horned human variation will be the Hero shadow monster.

Dirtied up Fisher's vest a little.

Rendered a sequence from the first camera to test the water's wave speed. The water looks like it is moving a bit slow with the amplitude as high as it is. I'll need to refine this a bit more. Additionally there is some flickering in the water on the right side of the clip that I'll have to look into.

A note about the farm. I rendered this sequence on the farm and I was getting 1 to 3 minute renders. However, when one of the render machines got to a certain point (frame 40 or so) it just gave up. It didn't stop rendering but my render times shot up to 10 to 20 minutes and eventually 4 to 5 hours for no reason at all. The those frames are no different than any of the other ones. I suspect if I was to kill the job and then restart it the remaining 2 frames would take two minutes to render instead of six hours.

Smoke Trail Test

2010-10-19T14:49:00.000-07:00

Houdini viewport render of the smoke trail effect for when the shadow monsters come out of the box. In terms of shape and look this is getting fairly close to what I am looking for. I'm thinking I'll need to enlarge the end of the smoke column as it reaches the ground to accommodate the shadow monsters rising from the ground. Depending on the renders it may need to be denser as well. I still need to Up Res it and shade it properly.

Cork Bobber

2010-10-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

Procedural cork in slim with an image map for the red line. Thanks to Dan for helping me to implement the clamp function for the displacement.

Skull Variation

2010-10-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

The crowd shots will have at least 6 different heads. I made one base skull and then modeled interchangeable horn/antlers that fits into the skull. Perhaps not always anatomically correct according to the skull but it should do for a crowd.

Fisher Texture Update

2010-10-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd update this real quick... thinking about dirtying his vest a little.

Texture Tests

2010-10-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

Two quick renders of the environment with some textures and basic lighting. The render settings are pretty low for them and the textures are only at about 60 - 70% complete. I will use matte paintings for the more distant backgrounds in the compositing stage at the end of the project. I'd like to get some haze and some particles floating about the air to give the scene some atmosphere and of course volume rays if I have time.

A render of the fisherman with a slightly updated texture map from the Carver. I might add more fur in different parts of the body like the arms and chest. Obviously the pipe and hat have yet to be surfaced and I am planning on modeling him some makeshift glasses.

New Skull

2010-10-12T08:35:00.001-07:00

I modeled this last week but just now remembered to post it here. I'm planning on doing two or three more skulls to add variation to the shadow army. I'll probably get in a deer skull, a bull skull, and maybe a cat skull. I'm making these shadow parts interchangeable to be fed into Massive to vary up the armor.

Shadow Monster Rigging

2010-10-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

The bones have been placed and I am currently working on skinning him. Maya 2011 has new skin weighting tools so I decided to switch to 2011 for just that part. I've already tested out exporting the weight map and bringing it back into Maya 2010 and I feel comfortable that this is the best way to complete the skinned rig. Luckily the skinning doesn't have to be perfect as the character will be flat shaded and blurry/smokey.

Pandora Preproduction: Scene Modeling

2010-10-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

The scene is at roughly 85 to 95% complete. This is a rough estimate because the rest of the modeling will be dependent on how the renders look once there are textures and animation in the scene. The rest of the set modeling will be done on an as needed basis when I get to the animation and rendering stages.

Pandora Preproduction: Refined Previs

2010-10-06T20:39:00.000-07:00

Taking into account many of the critiques I got over the last week I refined the story a bit. The previs is still fairly rough but is sufficient to show the shots in sequence.

I received a lot of good advice over the week but ultimately I decided to keep the actions simple. My weakest part is my character animation so I decided to minimize that aspect without ruining the story. The biggest change was keeping the character on the initial part of the dock after he releases the shadow army instead of returning to the end of the dock and continuing to fish. Instead he watches as another villager runs by in fear from a shadow monster. This is what prompts him to kick the box off the dock. The end closes with the fisherman looking at the "no fishing" sign that was just revealed by the shockwave of a big explosion.

I had received some good feedback about modifying the story so that the fisherman was unaware the whole time of what he unwittingly unleashed upon the world. However, upon reflection on how long I would need to complete the character animation I soon realized that it was not within the scope of this term.

PREVIS

Model Update

2010-10-05T08:52:00.001-07:00

A work in progress of the village. Only the front three buildings will be fully modeled. The rest of the village will be matte paintings.

The shadow monster without any of his skulls or armor. The character will be rigged and his props will be randomly applied through massive for the crowd shots.

One of the heads for the shadow monsters. There will be two or three more of these to be assigned to the crowd.

The dock where the animation begins and ends.

Advanced CG: Mischevious Sprites

2010-10-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

Homework assignment for Advanced CG. It was a short animation exploring visual perception and illusion. Basic idea from Molly Bang's Picture This.

Animation

Pandora Preproduction: Story Change

2010-10-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

I wasn't very happy with my previous story idea. I didn't like the lead in and didn't know how to resolve it. I would have had to model and rig two different characters and that seemed an impossible task by myself. Therefore I changed my "wrapper" story and kept the Pandora's box core.

The hero is a slightly dull town yokel who is fishing at the start of the animation. He is starting to nod off when he gets something on his line. After a bit of a struggle he gets pulls a small evil looking box out of the water. He opens it and black smoke spills out in tendrils. Everywhere the tendrils land a shadow monster appears. Once assembled, the shadowy figures rally and go about the town, breaking things, setting buildings on fire and generally causing great mayhem. There will be a birds eye view of the town incorporating a massive simulation of the shadow monsters running through the streets and breaking things. Fire will sprout up on the buildings in the far shots. The hero is stunned by what he has caused and subtly kicks the box into the water and returns to his pier to fish wincing every time he hears an explosion or crashing sounds. The final shot is the hero sitting down in the position that he started in except in the background the town is on fire. Once he sits down a piece of debris falls from a "fishing" sign that he had been sitting next to the whole time only to reveal that the sign had said "NO fishing."

Story Boards:

PREVIS

The advantage of the new story, aside from an improved story, is that I will be repurposing the Carver rig and model. I will remove his glasses give him a hat and some other props and modify the texture but the weight painting will remain the same.

I am happy with this story and have no plans to significantly change it.

Pandora Preproduction

2010-09-26T12:48:00.001-07:00

I like to use mythology for inspiration when I begin thinking of a story. It gives me an idea and story elements to build from. For my combined Advanced CG and Massive project, I decided to go with the story of Pandora’s box. According to the myth, Pandora is given a jar and then told not to open it. The jar contained all the evils of the world and when she opened it they all escaped and all that was left in the jar was hope. I am adapting that basic story to fit my own needs by changing Pandora into a male anamorphic chipmunk creature and a jar into an ornate box. I have no thematic reason for changing the character from the original story beyond that I will be able to make a cuter more sympathetic chipmunk in less time than I would be able to make a human woman.

Hero Character:

Evils:

The “evils of the world” will be represented by shadowy figures wearing various skeletal armor. When the box is opened, tendrils of smoke will burst out of the opening. Each of these tendrils will form a column that when they touch down to the ground one of the Evils will emerge. The actual body of the Evils will be geometry rendered out with a constant black shader applied. In Nuke I will blur and use various noise or 2d smoke effects for an alpha of the character pass. Ideally the bodies would be volumes but the simulation time and storage would be unreasonable for the scope of the project. On top of the bodies of the Evils will be various parts of armor or skeletal objects including skulls for heads. These objects will not be blurred or shadowy. I will use Massive for the crowd shot of the Evils closing in on the Hero and to randomize the skeletal parts that they wear. There will be one main Evil that I will hand animate. For the smoke tendrils/columns I will use Houdini volumes emitted by particles following a curve. For reference I found almost the exact effect I am looking for in the Harry Potter trailer. 1:50 at this LINK.

In all there would be 4 distinct effects.
1. Smoke billowing from the box.
2. Tendrils following a curve.
3. Smoke on the impact of the tendrils.
4. The Evils dissolving into particles.

Storyboards:

PREVIS

Problems:

Scale is the main problem with this project. Each individual element is not difficult but there is a lot to handle. There are 4 main effects. I have done simple volumes tests in Houdini and I think the tendrils and smoke will be fairly simple to set up. The dissolving people should also be easy. The difficulty will lie in integrating these elements with the characters in massive and getting them to render properly. The second problem is character animation and creation. My storyboards and previs feature the Carver from an earlier project of mine not the character I described. I do not think that the Carver fits the story, he is an older character, not one that would be searching around ruins. If I decide to go with a new character that could potentially add a lot of time to production. The solution I have to that problem is to enlist outside help for the rigging of both characters. Modeling and texturing is added work but both are jobs that I do quickly, efficiently, and with pleasure. If I can not find someone to rig the characters I will switch back to the Carver and the story will take the hit. Overall scale is the last problem, I am not sure I can finish the entire piece by the end of the 11 weeks. Once I have a better idea about how I will handle the aforementioned problems I may decide to cut it down to a trailer type of animation. Right now I feel the story and character need more development at the beginning of the animation to get the viewers to care about the character.

Random Links

2010-09-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

I don't usually do this but these are links that I recently liked. This is mostly so I can get back to them at some point...

Via Dave Lally: http://imc1.piccsy.com/13357-ba33a2-500-407.jpg

Dan by way of Evan?: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1369

and some really good music videos that I was first turned on to by Tom.

http://vimeo.com/14140965
http://vimeo.com/14141012
http://vimeo.com/14141046

http://vimeo.com/14141046

Organic Modeling

2010-09-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

Centaur:

Centaur from NATE on Vimeo.

Week 11 Final

2010-09-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

I had two areas of interest for my New Media project this term, visual development and direction. My goals for the first part were to create a short animation with a cohesive and considered visual style that is appealing. The second focus was more of an implied goal. I wanted to bring together the talent of several people to create an animation that is bigger than I alone could have made and express my ideas clearly so that other artists could execute my vision. Along the way though I learned additional skills and techniques that I used to overcome the obstacles that I encountered.

Up until a year ago I was sure I was going to be going back to school for my MFA in painting. Since then, however, my plans have changed but my artistic leanings have not. I approach all of my projects in a similar way that I would approach a painting. Of primary importance is the visual quality of the piece. How can I convey a narrative (whether it is explicit or implicit) through the image? Instead of using motion, dialogue, and other forms communication I like to focus on the what is drawn on the screen. I like to spend my time developing an intricate visual style using color, light, and form to tell a story as much as the animators convey a character's emotion. I set out to create an animation that told a short story about a wood carver that carves a creature that comes alive. A twist of the Pygmalion and Galatea story. I wanted the visual style to be reminiscent of an older painterly style. To accomplish this this I brought in several references. First and most obviously I used several painted backgrounds for different scenes. After rendering a scene I would take it into Photoshop and paint what I did not model. The best example of this is when the carver bursts through the door. Behind him is a painting I completed in Photoshop.

For the final shot I brought the background image into Photoshop and added details to the scene including grass and trees. To be able to do this I relied on a fixed camera.

The only shot that did not use a fixed camera was the second outdoor shot and the most complex and time intensive shot. Instead of painting directly on the background plate, it would have been nearly impossible with the tracking of the camera, I rendered painted backdrops behind the geometry of the scene.

I had hoped that the technique of using fixed cameras and painted backdrops would make production easier and faster. I am not convinced that this was the case though. For example, the shot I mentioned earlier of the Carver bursting through the door might have taken longer than necessary. The painting took several hours to get the way I wanted. Since I already had the geometry modeled and textured, it may not have taken me long to light and render from that angle and composit it into the background. Ultimately what I thought would save time did the opposite. For future projects I may want to completely paint every backdrop. Rather than doing double work by modeling, lighting, texturing, and rendering a scene and then doing a painting as well, I could have chosen one.

Another reference to a painting style was the use of light. In all of my animations I like to use light as a character. The light helps to tell the story much like Carravaggio used light to tell stories through his paintings. I used a light to denote "magical" events. This attention to light slowed production quite a bit though, every scene had its own individual and sometimes complex light setup.

The final way that I incorporated other types of art into my animation was through the use of paintings as source material. When I was struggling with the lighting of the outdoor shots I turned to a painting to get the idea for the quality of light.

The second aspect of the project was "direction". I wanted to create a project that was bigger than what I alone could do in a term and to be able to clearly communicate what I wanted for each shot. Since I have very little character animation experience and mine was a character piece I wanted to have character animators. Additionally, to be able to put as much time as I wanted into the look of the animation (and still have an animation as opposed to stills) I could not animate the entire animation. I developed a process for working with the animators. The first step was to create a full length previs that they could watch to get a sense of how and when things happen. Then I wrote several sentences along with approximate frame ranges to supplement the previs and get more specific about what I wanted from each shot. Next the animator would block out the shot and send it to me for approval. After I OKed that they would animate most of the big movements to get a sense of how the shot would progress. Here is where I found I gave the most suggestions for the shot. Then I would allow for one more round of changes and after the third pass I would ok everything except for the occasional small tweaks. I had to find the balance between getting the shot to look like what I had envisioned and considering the time the animator was giving me for free and the time I had left for the project. Looking back, I would have done a slightly more detailed previs with a couple of key poses for every shot. What I liked about the process was that it forced me to put into words the ideas in my head. Very often when I animate or draw or paint I have the freedom to do whatever I want without justifying it. Quite often the work is underdeveloped, I don't think about and reason through the artwork as much as I could to create a better piece.

The extra hands were very beneficial but I was reliant on their schedules and availability and ultimately they could not finish all of the shots. The first three shots in the attached not counting the paintings in the beginning my animators did the first three shots and the last four. I animated the three in the middle.

For the one main effect, Dan contributed his time to create a particle sim for the project. I had originally wanted to do the effect myself but I quickly realized at the beginning of the term that I would not have time to complete the effect with the little effects experience I have. Dan and I worked well together and our working process was a little less formal than that of the animators. Typically we would just discus what I was looking for and I would try to compare it to an effect I'd seen before. Dan would then do a sim and I would change my mind completely and he would resim again. In the end the effect came out better than I expected and I am really pleased with the outcome of the shot.

Aside from all of the conceptual material I learned, I overcame quite a few technical hurdles in the process of making the animation. This term was the first time I had made a fully skinned rig with facial features. My previous rigging experience was with robots that didn't need weighted skins or facial rigs. Though my rigging knowledge definitely increased greatly through the course of the project, it wasn't without struggle. I completed the the most technical aspect of the rigging process, the facial rig, during the time everyone was at SIGGRAPH. This meant I had no one to ask questions of when I ran into trouble. I really wanted to make a functional rig. If I was the only one animating I could have been more forgiving when creating the rig. I really didn't want to pass off a bad rig to other people. This attention to detail led to one of the biggest time sucks in the project. I spent at least two and a half weeks devoted to the rig with the occasional tweaks as the animators began animating and finding flaws in the rig.

Another technical challenge I took on during the course of the animation was shader writing in SLIM. For the ground planes in the set it was unrealistic to use painted texture maps for an area of that size. I had some experience with shader writing in Renderman Shading Language and of course using the hypershade in Maya to create procedural shaders. However RSL would have been too tricky to get something working in the amount of time that I had and the hypershade did not allow the flexibility that I needed. I have a friend that works at Pixar and I had seen samples of some shaders he had written in SLIM and I was impressed. I devoted several days towards working out the nuances of SLIM but in the end I was able to come out with some really nice shaders. I wrote both of the ground shaders in SLIM and the horse shaders was a keyable shader I wrote in SLIM. While I probably could have gotten similar results in a faster amount of time I believe that the knowledge I picked up in SLIM will benefit me later. I plan to use SLIM to create more of my shaders in the future.

Procedural shader written in SLIM for the ground.

Animated shader written in SLIM for the carving.

The biggest technical hurdle I came up against was in the rendering stage. As I began rendering I found out that as is usually the case my renders were not quick. It is the price I always pay for highly detailed scenes. It didn't help that I was raytracing for quite a few of the shots. The first coupled of rendered sequences weren't too bad, around 4 or 5 minutes a frame. I hit a roadblock though when I had a scene that was taking 15 minutes a frame for a 600 frame sequence. It was particularly troubling because I wasn't even raytracing in the scene. We had render farm issues as well. When we tried to cancel jobs on the farm it would cancel the parent process but not the child process on each render box. This led to the farm filling up with dead jobs. What made this more troublesome was that Renderman for Maya uses one license per 4 threads. Many of the farm boxes were 16 threaded computers. If 4 farm computers crashed that ate up 16 out of 40 licenses in one go. My frames in particular seemed prone to crashing. After a trying to render on the the farm a couple of times and crashing out too much I made the decision to only render locally. Went through the process of writing out RIBs and trying to render directly from PRman but there seemed to be an issue with the way Maya wrote out the point cloud information that created broken paths and would error out the render. These type of troubles led me to spending a significant amount of time optimizing my renders. I spent hours tweaking settings until the shot rendered in the lowest possible time. I was able to bring some of my ray traced scenes from 10 to 15 minutes down to 3 or 4 minutes. The 600 frame scene ended up having a typo in one of the settings that caused the render time to sky-rocket and there to be splitting along the edge of the buckets of each frame. Once I fixed that render time decreased greatly.

The amount of time spent troubleshooting rendering combined with the animators doing less work than I had hoped, being absent for a week and an overly ambitious project meant that I did not finish every shot by the end of the quarter. By around week 7 I realized that I would probably not fully finish the animation so I promised the opening three shots and the final four. This was the first time I've ever attempted a term long animation and I've definitely learned a sense of scale. For the sake of completion I will finish the animation over my two week break before next term. I will animate the last couple of shots and re-render to fix the issues in the currently finished frames. (flickering shadows, dropped passes, etc.) However, considering the quality of the shots I completed I am satisfied that I achieved my core goals for the project. I created a rich visual style that I was able to carry through to an animation and I successfully communicated my ideas to other artists to carry out my vision.

animation

ack!

2010-09-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

No Licenses!

Week 10

2010-08-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

A rendered sequence! Flickering shadows and over hot spec hits on the glasses aside I am happy with it and in the process of re-rendering. That leaves only 13 more shots to go... Rendering has been an issue with render times being very high or unfarmable but we'll see...

Previs 5

2010-08-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

I missed a week of work due to being out of town. This past week I worked on texturing, lighting, and shader development in addition to some compositing tests. I rendered out an interior shot and comped it together with an occlusion pass. Its a little dark (easily fixed in Nuke) and not all of the textures are done.

After I finish all of the textures and lighting setups I will begin matte paintings to fill out the scene.

I had some trouble with the exterior shot. I couldn't decide the look I wanted. I wanted it to be light outside so that it would make sense for light to be coming in from the windows in the exterior scene but dark enough that the unicorn effect will contrast well against the darker background. I began with a darker light setup but I hated it so I started looking around the internet for reference. Eventually I decided dusk is the time of day that I want the lighting to convey. I found this painting that captures a mood and color palette that I really liked.

A render from my lighting after referencing the painting. I'd like to fill out the foreground exterior with leaves but that may fall away to more important priorities. The exterior shot will rely much more heavily on the matte paintings and I will be working on nuke projection techniques this week.

Dan had a chance to develop the effect and render out a test. My feedback to him was less smoky, more particles and more definition of the form. This shot is repeated in the previs for this week once with a render of the effect and another with animation blocked out.

Animation has started with two animators graciously pitching in their time. Ultimately, animation will be the aspect that I let go if it comes down to deciding on what gets finished by the end of the term. My goal is to have at least two shots fully realized with matte paintings and all by the end of the term and I am fairly confident I will hit that mark. Of course I am shooting for completing the entire piece and I am going to give it my best.

The Previs

Previs 4

2010-08-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

An updated previs is here. Surfacing on the main character is about half done. I still need to make some shader and texture adjustments as well as finish off the fur. This will probably be the last previs before final animation starts to happen. (hopefully)

Concept Art and Story Changes

2010-07-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

I spent most of the past week refining the body rig and working on the face rig.
i spent way more hours than I expected to finish up the rigging so I didn't have enough time to finish a pre-vis. I did however paint up a quick concept piece for the scene in which the carver holds up the carving.

Additionally, I did some thinking about the story and have decided on some changes. Rather than walk away to look at a book, the carver will get a wooden case from the shelf that contains a collection of carvings of mythical creatures with one open slot. He'll reach down to put the new carving into the case and then realize it is gone and the story will continue as planned. There will be an additional ending scene where after retrieving the carving the character will place it into the open slot in the case, thus finishing his collection. Also, instead of carving the piece he may be painting it when the animation starts.

Pre-vis 3

2010-07-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

A third version of the previs for the animation is up. The timing is much closer to what it will be in the final and the final model with a preliminary rig has taken the place of the robot place holder.

I will also include the storyboards that I completed previously.

Jervo Week Homework 2

2010-07-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

All of my menus that will be used for the dvd. "Play All" and "Artwork" will not need menus as they will launch right into their content from the main menu.

2010-07-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

Previs 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr_pNqaUva8

Digital Figure Sculpture

2010-07-10T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last quarter I took an independent study in digital figure sculpting. I sat in on a figure drawing class twice a week and drew from a model. Outside of class I worked with Maya and zBrush to create a human male digital model. It worked out great because I got experience in organic modelling and had the opportunity to draw from a life, one of my favorite things in the world. I started with a base mesh in Maya using a figure drawing book as reference. Once I had a simple base mesh I imported it into zBrush where I sculpted the detail. Later using zBrush's "tranpose tool" I molded the figure into a version of a classical sculpture of Zeus. Thanks to Jake Nichols for the model of the column. It was created for our midterm animation (which will be done soon, hopefully) and I just went in to the project files and snagged it for this project. My professor wanted me to put the figure into a background but I was never able to render the figure so the windmill made an appearance as a backdrop composited in Photoshop. All in all it was a good experience to try something new and have fun.

I'll post the drawings I did in the class later on.

T-Pose Turntable

Posed Turntable

DVD Menu Mock-Up

2010-07-06T20:33:00.000-07:00

Animatic

2010-07-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

I changed my project timeline a bit for this week. Rather than taking up more time on new storyboards I decided to jump right into an animatic. Building the proxy geometry helped me to visualise the shots and figure out exactly what I need for each one. I used a model and rig from an earlier project as a stand-in. I intend to have a sequence of establishing shots that bookend the animation that I did not include in the animatic.

Animatic

Next week I will focus on refining this animatic and modeling the set and character.

DVD Menus

2010-06-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

For DVD class we have to find 3 DVD menus that we think are well done and answer the following questions.

* What is it about this DVD interface that you like so much?
* What makes this DVD different from the others?
* What is one item about this DVD that you would like to see better?

This is my homework submission.

1. Sweeney Todd - I like that the menus are integrated user interfaces with graphics made specially for them. There is no looping clip in the background. I hate it when there is dialogue in the menu. The transitions are quick. The framing of clips that serve as backdrops for the menus is nice.

The transitions are very quick, a nice change over many dvds with 30 second clips between each menu.

The language background could be a little more interesting.

2. Waltz with Bashir - The main title screen is cool with the looping shots from the movie. Again, its nice there isn't any dialogue.

Fast transitions.

The backgrounds of all of the other menu selections other than the main menu could have been more interesting. They could have involved more animation there.

3. Monty Python and the Holy Grail - The looping animation behind the main menu is pretty long and it takes a really really long time to see the entire thing. "The Hard of Hearing."

Taking the opportunity to tell jokes in the dvd menu that isn't in the actual movie.

The transition animations are a little too long. If they would have been shortened a second or two. it would have been fine.

Pre-Production

2010-06-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

For this Summer's New Media project I'll be once again focusing on look development in computer animated graphics. Instead of experimenting with several looks as I did last quarter I'll be focusing on a single look for a short animation. The short will be a character driven animation with a bit of story. What I will be primarily focusing on is seamlessly integrating 2d backdrops with 3d animated scenes. For this I will be using locked off camera angles so that I can use painted scenes with the 3d elements. Additionally, if the story calls for it, I will use 3d projection techniques in Nuke to create parallax effects with the 2d painted backdrops.

Inspiration for this piece has come from a variety of places. A short animation created by students two years ago demonstrates a way of mixing 2d and 3d animation for a very attractive piece. In it they used painted backdrops and a cel shader similar to the one I used last term as my third look to get a painterly feel that is reminiscent of an older Disney or Miyazaki animation.

These Gobelins shorts are an inspiration as well for their detailed painterly look.

A short animation based on a children's book by Shaun Tan. Hints at a little bit of the painterly approach.

A music video of a Gorillaz song. Animation by Passion Pictures of Australia. Some nice matte paints for the backgrounds and one shot with the character inside the windmill as pieces are falling are especially notable.

Past projects I have worked on that I am building upon are a dynamics test and Flight, an animation from last quarter.

Bottle Toss was a quick dynamics test I completed at the end of last quarter. I didn't want to construct and render an entire outdoor scene so I kept the camera still and painted over the unrendered parts and added detail to others. Here are the layers that were composited together and the final piece. There are some issues with the perspective and I unfortunately didn't get to do a shadow pass which would have integrated the pieces a little better.

Animated Sequence

A rough cut of my animation final for last term. There are obvious rendering and animation issues with this piece as well but what I wanted to point out was the painterly effect I was trying to convey with the textures and background. While I am planning on polishing this piece I had hoped it would have more painted backdrops as well. Something I am incorporating into this quarter's short animation.

Flight rough cut

The story for this summer's animation is in the rough previs stage. I have the beginnings of storyboards and this t-pose for a main character. The old turtle creature is a wood carver and the animation opens with him sitting at his workbench carving a miniature unicorn or some other mythical creature. He finishes and turns away from his work. There is a sound and he turns back to his work and the statue is gone. Sounds keep drawing his attention around the workshop as if he is not alone. He finally corners the noise behind some objects (maybe a curtain) When he uncovers the source of the noise it turns out that it is the carving as a full size creature of light. As he looks at it in awe he reaches out to touch it. As his fingers make contact with the glowing essence of the creature it dissolves back into the miniature wood carved toy.

Project Timeline

Week 2 - Story outline and preparatory research presentation.
Week 3 - Full storyboards and begin character modeling.
Week 4 - Set designs, begin set modeling and effects R&D.
Week 5 - Finish Modeling, projection, and effects R&D.
Week 6 - Texturing and Lighting, camera previz.
Week 7 - Animation and effects.
Week 8 - Animation, effects, and rendering.
Week 9 - Rendering, matte painting, and compositing.
Week 10 - Compositing and re-renders.

It is important to note that my focus in this class is look development, art direction, and directing. I may combine new media projects with Dan for the main visual effect and potentially have an animator for the bulk of the character animation.

Summer Begins!

2010-06-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Now that the Spring term has ended I finally got some time to relax a bit. (finally moved into my apartment that I technically moved into weeks ago) Last week I got to completely get away from computers and spend a couple of days in northern PA at a farm owned by one of my friend's family. I had time to do some drawings. The first one is of Jessie (farm hostess and birthday girl) and the second is Dan Bode.

Look Development in CG

2010-06-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

For this quarter’s new media project I focused on look development and style in 3D graphics. The class gave me an opportunity to explore look development in computer graphics and experiment with processes I don’t usually get to use. The end result of the project was a scene modeled and textured in Maya with one animated shot and two still images. In the first step of the project, I outlined three contrasting styles based on reference images of paintings and renderings created by other artists. Next I set up the constants for the projects. These were the elements of the project that would remain the same between looks. The constants included all of the modeling and camera angles. The constants provided a way to evaluate each image as a set and provided a clear link between the images.

Look 1

The goal of the first look was to base the image on 18th century Dutch landscape paintings like those painted by Rembrandt. The imagery, while not photorealistic, was a stylized version of reality. I used a limited palette and pushed the colors into an orange and blue range very similar to the way a painter would. Technically the process was a fairly traditional way of rendering. I used texture maps with painted photo textures and procedural shaders. To emphasize the painterly reference I used painted backgrounds.

Reference Images

A Rembrandt painting.

Images from CGSociety.org - artist named in the lower part of the image

Renders

Maya renders with no background or compositing effects.

Below is a render with no background that I took into photoshop and painted over it. This served as a target to shoot for in the compositing stage.

Renders with compositing

Animated Sequence

Look 2

The second look referenced ink wash drawings and etchings. For this set of images I wanted to stylistically distance it from the first set as much as possible but still be faithful to the model. I wanted to achieve hard lines in the outline and interior objects with an ink washed brushed on effect for the shadow shapes. I spent a great deal of time researching an outline shader but was never able to write my own. The simplest method to get a line drawn effect in Maya without using paintFX is Mental Ray’s contour shader. For the shadows, I wanted broad brush strokes to follow the contours of the surface of the model. The brush strokes were a texture map applied to a surface shader that was not affected by light. The next pass was a shadow pass that was a hard lined black and white rendering. I used the shadow pass as an alpha channel for the brush strokes. They would only appear where there was a shadow shape. Using Nuke, I composited together the shadow shapes with the outline render on top of a static image of a canvas. The final result was a drawing moving on a still canvas.

A Rembrandt etching used as reference

Contour Render

Brushed Render

Shadow Render

Composited Renders

Animated Sequence

Look 3

For the final look I wanted to make something that was in between the last two looks. I chose a cell shaded look because it was colorful like my first rendering but was flat like the second look as opposed to volumetric. Additionally cell rendering has a long history in animation that is often overlooked as a rendering style that I was interested in studying. The process of setting up the rendering process was very similar to the previous look. I started with an outline pass. Next I rendered out a texture pass with a surface shader. The surface shader received light equally and consisted of simplified color image maps in cell shaded style. Another way of doing the color could have been to apply ramp shaders but I preferred image maps because of the greater control and specificity I could achieve. Finally for the shadows I used the same shader as I did for the last look but this time I used it as semi-transparent bluish tinted shadows rather than a mask. The final result was a successful cell shaded image.

Reference Images

The render process was very similar to the one above, in fact i reused some of the renders so I will not show the process images a second time. The only difference was the color layer:

Final Renders

Animated Sequence

This project was successful in giving me an insight into creating two specific non-photorealistic rendering styles. I feel very comfortable with Mental Ray’s contour shader and the project has given me ideas for future styles that I want to work on. An unintended and unexpected result was greater understanding of compositing fundamentals and working in Nuke. Being forced to solve alpha problems for the second look taught me about how images should be layered when compositing. Out of the three styles, my preference in animation is still the first. As a painter as well as a cg artist I am drawn to the stylized realism that I achieved in the first style but I am still interested in experimenting with new looks and styles.

more robot

2010-06-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

If only I had one more week for this project until the crit on Thursday... :( so much to do not enough time.

quick still from the robot final

Robots!

2010-05-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

The first test render from my robot animation...

bird wip

2010-05-20T10:56:00.001-07:00

A bird robot in the process of being textured.

Compositing

2010-05-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

Compostiting exercise for animation 2. The snow and arrows are cg. Shot a door or two down from my apartment in West Philly.

Snow and Arrows from NATE on Vimeo.

robot

2010-05-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

Preliminary model for my Animation 2 final.

Windmill Till

2010-05-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

Maya + Photoshop =

Now to do this in 3d...

Windmill Test

2010-05-02T01:53:00.000-07:00

Preview

2010-04-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

A preview frame from my midterm animation!

Throat

2010-04-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

A render of an unfinished project I am working on with another student for a throat doctor. It will be used in a surgical animation of a throat operation. For this project I will be doing the surfacing and lighting.

Renders!

2010-04-17T19:54:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty quiet this month but I have been busy! This first is a clip from a short animation test in dynamics. the actual animation wasn't anything special but I tried some new techniques in matte painting for this project that I was pretty excited about. I even taught a short demo at the school's SIGGRAPH club on how to create a background painting for later compositing in Nuke. When I get some time (yeah right) I want to write up a quick tutorial on what I did. Its pretty simple but could help someone out in the future.

This next image is a render test for my next big animation project. Its a group project with two of my classmates, Jake Nichols and Kev Gross. For this render, I did all the texture painting and lighting and Kev and Jake did the modeling.

Wolfboy prototype

2010-03-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

Prototype for the wolfboy project that I will one day finish.... sometime.