a few bits and bobs to start the summer

I've been pretty bad about posting with any regularity. Been a bit busy with the family and a lot of the things I've been working on aren't terribly conducive to interesting blog posts, some MEL scripting and playing around in XSI, Nuke, etc. Hopefully I'll get more up to speed this summer.
A few random things . . .

1) added a couple new things to my reel. Again. Not a ton of new stuff, just some 3d tracking stuff and some bits of the Nick stuff (which never got used). Here's a quick hit of a couple of the many Nick pieces we did. (FYI, I modeled a bunch of it, rigged much of it, and animated all of the first bits and some of the last bits)


2) Rich and I did another quick Ilksville thing, "half-shell smile". Trying to keep chugging along with it. It's tough cuz we've both been busy. Got one more cooking as we speak.
larger version here
BTW, congrats to Rich on his installation at the Artomatic show! If you're in DC in the next month or so, go and check it out!

3)Here are a few of the doodles from Corel Painter that I've been playing with.

click for larger

4) I've also gone back to modeling a bit more of the Psychemy guy. As I've talked a bit in my animation class at NYU about modeling for animation (however briefly), maybe I'll post up some of the modeling process for the body and such.

5) After a big of a hassle with distributors, I've finally reorganized things to get The Needful Head DVD a proper home. It may take a few days to for things to get sorted with Amazon, but once it's all working, rest assured, I will pass along all the relevant links.

Been way too long - Ilksville update, doodles, etc

It's been a while since I've posted, mostly not my Fault. We moved (only 10 blocks, but the hassle is still pretty much the same). Been working a ton. Teaching twice a week. Daughter's first birthday. Ex-cet-er-a, Ex-cet-er-a.
But I'm back and I promise to never to be gone for so long. Until such time as I need to be.
Anyways, I'll post a couple of technical things later, but just a quick catch up.

• Been playing a bit in Sketchbook Pro. Really cool program. So simple. I know Photoshop can do all kinds of crazy things and you can make your own brushes and defrost your Xmas turkey and blah blah, but all I really want is something to doodle in that can reasonably simulate pencils, rollerball pens and some markers. I love that there is almost no interface and almost no options other than transparency. Great for quick little sketches, storyboarding doodles and the like. Wouldn't do a serious image in it, but great for jotting down ideas.


• On another app note, just finished a serious 3D tracking gig and got to say PFTrack is still my favorite 3D tracker. As if you care.

• Rich and I are back on Ilksville, after much delay. Spent a day or so adding some front and back cards, cleaning up the sound and reframing the older ones and another day making a new one, "one woman show". Believe it or not, this is STILL just audio we picked up while we were hanging out. No "acting". (you'll see what I mean when you hear it). Rich and I planning to start carrying around the audio recorder more often to build up our library of stuff. There's a couple more we can work with from what we have, but the well is running dry.

You can see the bigger versions of all the revamped clips here (temporarily).

• Would love to be able to post some stuff I've worked on the last year. Maybe soon. I'll just post a pic of one of the numerous Nickelodeon things I animated for a "rebrand" effort at Freestyle. Brian Drucker has bunches of images of it here. He designed it, so I'll let him show it off. My goodness, he has a lot of cool work on his site.

3D stock images

Been working with my Lovely, Talented, Smart and Lovely wife on a bunch of images to submit to a stock agency. Basically, just images based on globes. I can see why there aren't loads of 3D images in stock. They have to be rendered at around 6K (6,000 x 6,000 pixels). A lot of the ones we've been doing have depth of field, transparency and so forth, which takes FOREVER. About 3-5 hours per frame (I know that's not forever for some renders, but I'm doing 5 versions per image (US, S. Amer., Eur., Asia, Africa), each precomped on various colored backgrounds (15 images per concept). Some things don't work and some do (I rendered about 30 images at 4K, only to realize that wasn't high enough rez). I'm rendering them in little elements that Steph is then comping together. The upside is that with 30-40 pictures, we could probably get a couple hundred images through all the permutations. It just takes ages. Since I'm not a Render Ninja by any stretch, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack these hi-res images as best I can.
Here are a couple, smallish, of course.

Nil doodle - animated

Just playing around for a few minutes in Flash. Don't know how anyone ever used Flash or Photoshop without a Wacom pen/tablet (I did for years). Absolutely different programs when you can draw kind of properly.
Anyways, as I said, I was doodling in Flash and started playing with a character that Rich and I were discussing the other day, Nil. We were talking about his head shape and translating it to 3D and I just started drawing him (not nearly as well as Richard does). Anyhoo, the resulting test is below. It was fun to draw something again, even just for 20 minutes. BTW, it was 12 fps drawn on two layers (head, arms). Hopefully more about the real Nil project later.







click pic to play the .gif

Oh yeah, also wanted to mention that I've been reading Ken Perlin's blog and put a link on the right side (over there --->). I've worked briefly with Ken on a project and he's near about the smartest computer-y type guy out there. But he's also a really fun blog writer ("blogger", I guess) about a lot of different topics, most of which require no p.h.d. so I'm throwing it out there.

Sure I'll work on your movie. Where's my trailer?

Rich and I got some work animating a few sequences for a movie some friends are making!
The Brothers Barnes shot a documentary about Todd Snider, called "Peace Queer: The Movie" and had a few interstitial moments they wanted to fill. They called me about some animation. The schedule was basically 3 minutes in less than 2 weeks to make their deadline for the South by Southwest festival. Yikes. So after throwing up in my mouth a little bit, I said the only thing I think I could do would be something along the lines of Ilksville. I showed then what we had done and Viola! They liked the style and I whipped up some storyboards and now Rich and I are furiously making the characters, backgrounds and animating away. When it's all said and done, I'll post some stuff up. It's basically just some Ilksville-ish charicatures of the subjects of the movie that Rich drew up, with the same rigging and animation procedures and such as I've mentioned here before. The only new thing is that there are some cuts to tell the stories a bit better.

It's a lot of work (relatively) in a short amount of time, but it's fun. I love working with the Barnes. Worked with them on some jobs for IBM/Lenovo and always like their stuff. Good to be back working with them again. So never let anyone tell you blogging doesn't pay off!
I won't forget my roots when I become big and famous. I bet Rich will. . .

Needful Head DVD

Rich made this up the other day. I guess that means we're making the Special Edition DVD!
It will include the Director's Cut (which, since I am the director AND the producer, will be the exact same as any other version), loads of needless commentary, a Makin'-Of Featurette that is in the makin', a read-along version of the Book with a neat-o "linky thingy" that will let you play the scene from the movie that corresponds to the scene from the book (I need to work on the marketing pitch for that particular feature. . . ) and perhaps some other things that you might like. Or not. What do I care? We're not offering refunds.
So if you're interested in acquiring a few copies of the DVD, let me know. The minimum order is 32. Cuz my economy needz stimulatin. . .
BTW, the trailer is here.

Technical - Modeling Psychemy

Richard has a series of drawings that I love that are called, collectively, Psychemy. He's had some of these up in art galleries on both coasts and keeps adding new pics into the collection. It's basically a loose series of weird little mis-en-scenes or scenarios. We've talked a bit about working these into short little animations. They're really weird and fun and moody and full of character. Since Ilksville is so cheap and we're working on a slightly longer form piece with a big story(more later), I think any Psychemy stuff will be, instead, about style and execution, really hitting a mood and a look. So anyways I'm slowly getting started working on some pieces for these projects (I have two of these Psychemy shorts in mind right now, this is from one of them).

So anyways this fella is from one pic (I've cropped the rest of the image out so as not to give away any story).
I thought I would just quicky post about starting to model out this character. Any crits comments welcome . . .
Today . . . the head.
So. . . I just started modeling yesterday. I think the idea will be to go pretty realistic and tone it down from there if necessary. So I'll just show some shots of where I am and how I got there.

(click any pic for larger)


So basically, I start with a unit cube and move it 0.5 units in x til the edge lines up with the origin. Then I delete the origin-side face so I have a box with the open side facing the origin. I center the pivot on the origin and then use the poly proxy to duplicate the object and set up vis layers. (Back in the day, I used Connect Poly Shape to do this. It's built into Maya now). So basically I'm modeling the entire head on only one side and the poly proxy ends up duplicating the other side. I can smooth that or leave it rough modeled, hide or show any version of this. All these visibilities are useful depending on the stage. Here's after ten minutes or so of getting the rough shape. It's important to make sure you really pay attention to each vertex you add, moving it to enhance the shape.

Here's with a few more loops added. I'm basically just adding loops at this point and shaping the head each time. You can see for the eyes, I'm starting to add the shape of the loops. I'll have three major sets of edge loops: 2 eyes and the mouth. The nose kind of works off all three. BTW, I'm NOT a great modeler, but I try to make sense of it as I go, so bear with me if you know a better way (and be sure to tell me anything to improve my sh#t). I just added the eyes by cutting (chamfering?) the vertex where the eye will be.



Here's what I was talking ab0ut with the proxy stuff. I often model only on half the face, then periodically look and see what it looks like whole and smoothed. you can see the starts of the loops for the eyes and mouth. There are definitely some problems at this point. The laugh line isn't really right (look in the mirror, it goes up onto your nose) and the mouth loops are a bit wonky. Even on simplified or non-real characters I thinks it's pretty huge to have the topology at least close so the deformations when you animate work well. As I said I'm not a great modeler, but having an idea helps. So I'll usually stop at a point like this and rework some of that stuff, adding edges and deleting them til it works a bit better.

So here's where I've ended up at this point. I've added a few more loops around the eye and ended up turning the chin inwards, making it much "weaker". I've added some really rough ears, too.
At this point I only have half a head. I'll leave it that way til I'm really sure it's right. This character is pretty asymetric so I have a bit of a dilema. The two options are to just create a symetric model, which is much easier to work with and rig (especially if you have any heavy rigging stuff you want to dupe from side to side). Then I'd model the asymetry and use it as "permanent" blend shape later. Or I could just finalize the model and "hard model" in the asymetrical changes. I'll do that for now just for testing. (it took about 5 hours to get to this point.)

Here is the smoothed poly proxy. I'll just copy the scene and get rid of the stuff I don't need. BTW, I save a new version about every 10 minutes. I have about 15 versions of just the head. I've used the autosave version stuff and it's fine, but I don't always trust Maya, so I manually "save as".







I'm not going crazy with this, since I'm going to go back and tweak the ears and a few other things, but I just wanted to do a test to make sure the asymetry worked OK. It pretty much does. I'm back to low-poly merged version (acutally an older version, sorry) and I pretty much just used some soft mods (about 10) and pulled points. A couple of quick tweaks to line up some verts and this is what I got. Not quite there, but close enough for now. (some loops need some work, but I'll redo all this later)



Here's a smoother version. Obviously I'll have to make some changes. There's still way too much symetry and things a bit too "normal". I like to pull out renders (or screencaps) to look at stuff so I can judge things as from the third person perspective. I'll make notes and go back later and make things works better.







So aside from adding an inside of the mouth/teeth and "lumping" things up generally, here are some things I'll change when I get a chance to go back to the model. Having worked with Richard's illustrations before I know that I always have to go back and add in "quirkiness" later. The model might look fine (or might not), but it needs to match his mood, which is really unique and great, so I think it's worth the time to pull around a few pixels to get it right.

Hopefully, I'll have some time soon to go back and polish this up. I think the body should be pretty easy, so I should do that in a day or two also and post it when I'm done. I'm still trying to figure out whether to go nuts with the hair and clothes, or keep it easy. We'll see.

Ilksville - "fasting" testing

So here's another one I worked on for 5-6 hours yesterday and today. The sound is a bit low on this one for much of it (I may have to treat it to make it more clear) and it is, once again, about as long as I would want to go, but it's progressing. As always, this is audio of an actual conversation . . .


As I said previously, I'm not trying to make these any good from an animation POV, just sort of fun little things to watch. But one thing I'm finding interesting is that these require attention to a sort of secondary animation principle that I usually don't worry about too much. Because these are so static and there is so much reliance on the eyes and mouths, I find that it's really important to make sure that I'm at least doing a little to direct the viewer's eye to where it needs to be. I have to be really careful not to put extraneous motion away from the center of action. Subtle things seem to work OK to give some texture, but big movements will pull the eye all the way across the scene and make it harder to watch. Obviously, this isn't animation rocket science, but I though it was interesting that certain things become more clear when something is as simple as this. It's also a little more clear in the larger version (see link below) . . .

view the larger QT - here

Animation - The Needful Head Website/Trailer

Just for anyone that I haven't told yet, I made a site for "The Needful Head". It's not quite done (slouching my way to the finish line . . . ) but it Exists, and that's the important part.
I can't put the full film up there (it's still at fests around, just played in Taipei and in Germany in a couple of weeks and is scheduled to go onto iTunes soon), but there are pics and stuff there and some drawings from the book that Rich wrote and illustrated that aren't in the movie. The music is a bit annoying (Halli's music is wonderful, but unstoppable on the site at this point). I also slapped a trailer together, which is on the site. The link to the site is on the the right side, over there =====>>>
or www.TheNeedfulHead.com

Here's the trailer.

Technical - Making Ilksville

Yes, there will be technical stuff here. I'll try to give fair warning (like the word "technical" in the heading). But since I enjoy knowing how other people do stuff, I figured I may as well show I do stuff.
Here I'm gonna walk through the basics of how we put Ilksville together. Here's where we started . . .

Audio is recorded on a little device (a Zoom H2, it's awesome. records in surround sound if you want! It's cheap and small and works like a charm). Just stuff with our friends for now, but we'll branch out and record other people and things as we go. We take that "wild" sound and listen to it and clip out a few interesting little snippets. I run those through Soundtrack pro and 2 semi-tones up of pitch correction to each. I take these snippets and we figure out which to use and then pick a character for each person (if they don't already have one) from the many pages of characters Rich has done and start to set them up . (BTW, I think this is basically how South Park is animated . . .)

This is one of the dozen of so pages of chars Rich started with. The character for Rich is third from the left on the bottom row.




(click pics for larger)


Then Rich redrew the character so I could put it back together as individual pieces.
I used the original template to piece this back together in seperate layers in Photoshop. Then I rendered each piece out in its own Tif file.






The next step is to go into Maya (3D program) and create a flat plane for each body part. I map the textures onto the planes. Here's a quick example.
Each plane is positioned and the pivots, etc are adjusted so the parts move as they should when rotated. Basically, every thing will rotate in only one plane. If we wanted to create a new arm shape we would draw a new arm and map that onto the flat plane. We're trying to stay away from that for now. Just keep it super simple.

Then I add in controls for each body part and link them as I would any character (parenting, point, orient and parent constraints) I try to lock off anything that won't be used so I don't confuse myself when animating. The only parts that are slightly different are the mouth and eyes. That's because these have so many shapes.


For instance you can see here that the mouth has some new controls. I set up some enum controls on the mouth controller with each phoneme. This type of control works well because each shape will completely cancel the previous shape.
I tried to use the bare minimum of shapes, as you can see. I then used set driven keys to drive the visibilities of the various mouth shapes (easier to me than switching textures).
The eyes were similar.
Each mouth shape and eye shape was drawn seperately in photoshop then imported and mapped onto a plane. Again there's probly an easier way to do this, but I couldnt' be bothered . . .

BTW, I copy each rig from a previous character and reshape it for the next one. Then I reproject the UV's and change the texture maps, so I don't start from scratch on each one. . .

In terms of the backgrounds we're just using anything that seems to work. In this case I took a photo at the Museum of Natural History and tweaked it out. Sorry kid. Whoever you are.

The first pic is the orig. The second pic is the corrected one.

I use these in Maya to layout the scene, but don't render them. I only render the chars and props then comp it all in after effects, adding shadows, etc.

So here are the characters in the set. Everything is done from the front view, so there is no perspective at all. Everything is orthagonally flat.
Since the set won't be rendered with the chars, I don't need to complete all the doodads before I render. I can go back and add in signs or whatever later.
Then I just start moving things around. I do the mouths first. Then just do runs on the body. I'll do the torso, then the arms, etc. Sometimes I'll animate straight ahead for a little while too. This one ("purses") was really long. It took about one day. "swayze" only took about 2 hours. I'm trying to animate as LITTLE as possible and still have it be watchable. I'll have to adjust the level of animation once I do a few more and figure out what works best. Trying not to be fussy at all. Bush-league, I know, but time is precious and stress sucks. The red hashes at the bottom are all hand animated points, so you get an idea of how many things need to be touched even for this level of animation.The timeline covers about 1 minute. Even keeping it simple, it's a lot of animation to do in a day.
That's about it. As I said I render it out and comp it together with the final pic in after effects and mix the sound back in. Eventually I'll also be adding a quick title and end card to each one as well.

Ilksville - "Purses" testing

Here's the second one. This one is rougher and much longer. the render here is straight out of Maya, so there's less integration with the chars and the props, etc. But you get the Idea . . .



This is about as long we'd be wiling to go on any one clip. The point is to be fun and quick, not to belabor the process or the story. This one is of our friends Ana and Melissa. Again just a randomly captured snippet of dialogue. We've decided that for the time being, all props and environments will be photos, not drawings, though as I said, they're not quite properly integrated yet in this clip.
At some point we'll work out intros to the clips and package them up a bit. Just starting to talk about that now. Obviously, the whole idea of the thing is evolving a bit as we go. . .

View the larger QT - here

Ilksville - "Swayze" testing

Here's a small sample of what we're on about. This is the first test I did.



The basic idea is that these videos are just little excerpts from the lives of the residents of Ilksville. This one has me, Rich and our friend Melissa. The sound probably isn't quite loud enough, but this is just the first test. And the whole point is that this is "wild" sound. Just caught while the recorder was running. The animation is also crap, but the whole point is that we should be able to do an entire clip in about a day. I'm rigging the characters in Maya (a 3D program), which I'll explain in another post someday, but aside from that, we're trying to be Breezy about this whole thing and just accumulate interesting tidbits whenever we have the time.
View the large QT version - here

Ilksville - the beginning

Last year at a film festival with "The Needful Head", my main collaborator, Richard Bailey, showed me about a dozen pages of drawings he had recently done. They were just rows and rows of funny little people. He was calling them "Ilksville", but had no idea what to do with them. I loved the drawings and after months of fits and starts we've Decided on this concept:

• 1. Ilksville will be about the town/place called Ilksville(duh), the residents of which are the little people in the drawings.
• 2. the whole point is to be quick and loose with the project. Never to worry overmuch about what we're doing. We'll do that with other projects. This should be fun and "easy".
• 3. Rather than worry to much about a plot, we will just periodically record audio of us and our friends while we're hanging out, etc. We'll then take small snippets of that audio and quickly animate Richard's drawings to that clip.
• 4. Eventually the clips will be collected into a website or some other repository where people can browse through them. We'll wait a bit to see when this will happen.
• 5. The characters will be consistent throughout, so viewers can get to know them, as they would a real person. No acting or cherrypicking dialogue to create false impressions.

That's about it. We've started with a couple of tests, which I'll post later.