Dandelion design

without shadows

Just finished with modeling, texturing and "furring" my latest model of a dandelion.  This will contain the same colors and shapes as the other design - cyan, violate, white and orange as well as cubes, spheres and cones.

However, I am having some issues that I need to work out.  I like the shadows I get on the ground, but you can see there are some shadows that the fur picks up that looks bad.  I don't know how to separate that out.

"fur" with shadows

There's no way to "unlink" lights to fur like you can other objects and you're supposed to be able to separate that out in rendering under the fur and/or light attributes, but I don't see it (I think that's a new addition and I'm using Maya 2009...cause I'm poor).

It looks like I'm going to have to work this out in compositing.  Last time I did shadows separate I had a hard time working it out.  So, something new to learn.

Also, the rendering times are pretty extreme.  The last model had about 30 seconds of rendering time per frame (that was full HD).  These renders were just for 640x480 (less then 1/4 of HD) and fur without shadows took 1 minute 13 seconds and 2 minutes 40 with fur.  Separating them out in comp will fix that, but I still need to figure out how to make it all shorter.

cyan "petals" with violate "fur" - rejected idea

Another thing I was trying was using different colors on the fur then what is on the geometry.  It looks kind of interesting, but I don't think it looks quite right.

Well, there's still a long way to go.  I just have two models rigged and ready for animation.  By the end I'm a little worried about rendering times and more worried about having too much geometry for Maya to even run without crashing constantly.

On another note, I just have to add how frustrating it is that what I am doing is extremely complex and for "experimental cinema" it's quite advanced, but even at this stage in the animation and VFX world this is really low tech.  Not to mention how in the experimental cinema world they don't care too much for animation of this kind.

Garden test #2

So, I spent a whole bunch of time writing out a complex series of expressions.  For those who don't animate digitally that's basically kind of like programming - writing mathematical equations that set relationships between different things.
Basically what I wanted was to have the parts of the flowers grow to their full form, but I didn't want to animate each cube or sphere or anything.  So, I made a simple circle (that is invisible) so that when it's at 0 degrees all the objects are at the same place and I rotate the circle to 180 degrees all the cubes and etc are in their final place.

This took about three full days to write the expressions, but it took only an hour or so to animate.  You can see the picture here is basically what I had to write, but keep in mind this is only 1/4 of the entire thing.  I couldn't get it all in one image cause it's too long.

But it turned out really great looking in the animation.  Also, the nice thing is one series of expressions like this creates 12 flowers because changing color or shape doesn't require any different expression.  However I still have 7 more series of expressions to go through and that's just for the flowers.  I haven't even started planning out the bushes, trees and waterfalls.  I have a feeling that this is going to be an extremely heavy scene.  Having too many objects can cause my computer to chug along slowly cause I don't have the top of the line computers nor a render farm like huge studios do.

In any case, here it is.

Implosion of Light: The Garden (start)

Well, I still have one more song by Ale (aka Languis) to create some visuals to, but after a couple of these animations where the visuals were strongly synchronized to the music I decided that I wanted to go in a little different direction.

I'm not sure where it came from, but I started to have visions of a growing garden made of cubes, spheres and cones.  I'm in the process of designing and planning, but I made a quick and simple style of what I'm thinking.






The design, animation and everything is extremely simple, but this was just a test.  I was having trouble in the rigging process.  Basically I didn't want to have to animate each little cube on it's own and I wanted to have something else simple driving the cubes into growing.  That way when I actually animate it's quite simple even though it looks complex.  It's still time consuming, but if I was going to animate every single cube individually I probably would completely nix the idea.

I've sent an email to Ale to see what he thinks of letting me take the lead on this and I'm waiting to hear from him.  I'm sure he'll like it, but he's also a super busy guy.  I asked him if he wanted to do his own version of the first prototype piece (the one I animated to the music by Eric Satie) and he thought it was a great idea, but work and kids have gotten his hands full.  Still once he gets to it I think it'll be amazing!

I'll post designs soon!

Implosion of Light 1 & II

After I returned from Italy I met with Alejandro Cohen of Languis (the sonic component of Parallel) because I enjoyed working with his music and I wanted to continue the collaboration.  He loved the idea and quickly came up with three sonic pieces, which I slowly slowly animated to.

I am very grateful to him for his patience.  It showed around a few times at the Punto y Raya Film Festival in Madrid, Dublab's labrat Matinee here in LA and a couple other places.

You can see the first one below, but the second one just completed in March of this year and will be making the rounds to festivals.  If you would like to see it please ask for it!





UPDATE: Ale is going to post Implosion II on the Dublab blog. So, I might as well post it here too.

Implosion of Light 0

So, I've been working on this series for a couple years now.  I'm calling it "The Implosion of Light an Sound".  I thought of that title while I was on a minor shoomie trip a couple years ago and had a crazy vision of CG cube based pixelated images.

I had a residency in Florence Italy and was very moved by these mosaics there.  Particularly the one's in Revenna on the East Coast below Venice.  It contains some of the oldest and "most perfect" mosaics (according to some historians) and rightfully so.

I was particularly moved by the abstract ones and after some weeks of contemplation I decided that I wanted to take that idea and use my skills as an animator and a 3D artist to create a new type of mosaic.

At first I just wanted to make a simple animation using just cubes and animating to music (because I feel more free to be abstract, but audiences will accept it).  I knew I needed to start off with on my own cause it would be a little difficult to explain to someone without an actual example AND it was extremely important to get a "pipeline" (or workflow) working because it would be pretty intense and I wanted to make it as easy as possible.

I was also pretty passionate about making it, what I'm calling, a "Virtual Sculpture".  I started looking into holographic technology to see if I could create animated holograms.  At the moment that technology is not quite ready for complicated animation.  So, I decided to go with making phantograms.

A Phantogram is basically a hologram, but it can only be viewed from a specific angle.  It needs to be stereoscopic 3D (so usually wearing glasses) and it's a forced perspective image meaning you need to look at it at a 45 degree angle to see it in a proper form.  So, if you create a phantogram it appears that the image is popping out of the monitor, table or floor.

It took some time, but I finally organized a pipeline and then I spent the next two months or so animating and creating my "prototype".  And this is what I came up with.