Windmill test

I made this animation a while ago at Drexel as I was experimenting with different looks for cg animation. I found this when i was backing up some old data and thought it might make a cool gif.

The Seed

Comics are typically thought of as a print medium. For years they have been formatted to fit nicely on the page of the funnies in your daily newspaper or your latest superhero comic book. They come in 3 to 8 panels or they are fit into a rectangle roughly 1:1.5. This is fine, especially if you are trying to keep these comics on a bookshelf or fit them in between crossword puzzles in the Sunday newspaper.

I think that print comics are totally rad, I buy them all the time. I also think that digital comics that look like print comics are totally sweet as well. I think many of the best comics began as or are still internet self published comics. The scope of subject matter and styles is staggering. Many comics that would never have made it past a comic publisher’s trashcan have gone on to become huge successes. The internet’s effect on comics has been the best thing to happen to the medium since printing. Almost as exciting as digital distribution is digital formatting of comics. If the comic will never exist beyond digital form it can be any shape and size. It can even do things that print comics will never be able to do and take shapes completely impractical for a print comic. I wrote a pretty long paper on this subject and Scott McCloud tells it better than me anyway. You can read my master’s thesis about it here and Scott McCloud has a website about the topic as well.

The Seed is my latest experiment in digital formatting in comics. There are two ways to view The Seed.

Method 1: Html 5 interface. This method is recommended to those on a desktop or laptop. The coding for the interface was done by Christian Hahn. It takes about a minute to load on a super fast connection, about 2-3 minutes on Time Warner’s pretty average cable internet plan, probably make yourself a sandwich or something if you are on dial up.

Method 2: A static image. This is recommended for people with an ipad or mobile device that can turn off the auto-rotation. Also its pretty fast to load. Web help provided by Melissa Cell

There are plenty of really talented comic artists playing around with digital formatting in comics. Here is a list of some that I thought of off the top of my head.

Like all of Emily Carrolls comics.
Magical Game Time, by Zac Gorman (uses lots of sweet gifs)
I don't know if nawlz is a comic, game, or animation but I do know that its pretty cool.
hobo lobo
and lots more, leave em in the comments if you can think of them.

The Iron Feather: Infinite Canvas Comic

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.

Big Catch

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)

Summer Begins!

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

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

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!

The first test render from my robot animation...

bird wip

A bird robot in the process of being textured.

Compositing

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

Preliminary model for my Animation 2 final.

Windmill Till

Maya + Photoshop =




Now to do this in 3d...

Windmill Test

Preview

A preview frame from my midterm animation!

Throat

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!

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

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

Shader Writing

As promised in my previous post, here are some of my images from my shader writing final project. For those who aren't familiar with computer graphics, when something is modeled in 3d it initially just looks like a flat gray object. Only when the artist assigns the model a shader and then textures it and finally renders it will it look like what you see in the movies. Shaders are what give the object certain visible properties and govern how the renderer's lights affect the object. For example you can make a glass shader that allows light to reflect and refract through an object. Even the most basic properties of a surface must be defined through some kind of code.

How a shader is rendered depend on the renderer. The renderer is what calculates all of the algorithms to display the graphics and there are many different techniques for even more different renderers. There are ray tracers, path tracers and micropolygon renderes among others.

There was a time when everything from the geometry to the shader had to be written out in code. Now a days, however, its pretty simple to use a 3d package like Maya to create geometry and use its built in shaders. For my grad class though we learned how to code shaders in Pixar's Renderman. PRman is a well known renderer, most notably used in Toy Story (and all the subsequent Pixar films). My shaders are just not as good as the built in ones that come with Maya (think Blinn or Lambert). So the surface shader work was an academic exercise that I learned a lot from. However I think some of my displacement shaders are pretty decent and I may use in future work. Displacement shaders don't affect the color of an object, rather they actually displace geometry in a scene. Bricks and peeling paint in my example.

Moth

Its done. My final animation 1 project. Roughly a month and a half of late nights, frantic learning of new software and concepts and I am finished. Yay... just in time to start the new quarter tomorrow. Where my other animations were more exercises than productions, this was very different. This was more of a full on solo production with the intent to create a short animation with a narrative. Looking back on the project, I learned a great deal.

I have a breakdown of the software used on the Vimeo page. It doesn't mean all that much to most people. The idea for the animation started from my shader writing class. I'll post the final for that project after this post but I had to model a scene and then write all of my shaders in code (Renderman Shader Language). I chose an alleyway. Later when the final animation was assigned I decided to save production time and reuse some of the assets between classes. All I knew was that my animation 1 final was going to take place in a alley. After seeing some of my classmate's work in their Advanced Animation class, Franz, I wanted to give the trails SOP in Houdini a try. The original idea was to have lights fly around the alley. Basically I started with an idea for a visual and went from there. In the future I think I'll try to start with a story and work towards carrying it out in animation.

When I watch the animation now I think I could probably cut the entire flying light sequence out and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

I didn't create this in a vacuum though, and I have a lot of people to thank for critiques and general technique advice. Dave Lally, Dan Bode, Jessie Amadio, Evan Boucher, Nick, Tom, Christian, Dave Mauriello, Simon and all my other Drexel classmates.

Moth from NATE on Vimeo.

More Test Renders

Some more frames from my animation final. I render out these frames to check on lighting. When placing lights I can't see anything but flat shaded objects so creating a light set up requires a lot of placing objects and lights and tweaking settings then rendering to see what it looks like.