steam tree

Ok sorry for not updating for a while. Client work, crazy schedule, yadda yadda yadda...

Ive been working on my technique and I think I nailed it. Attached is a WIP of a tree. There will be many more of where this came from. If anyone is interested in helping make more of these please help! I will be training friends how to make trees like this next week. The more trees the better! When this animation gets played on the big screen, you can brag to all of your friends and say "I made that tree!"

Download the quicktime here: bonzai_looph264.mov - 574kb

Industry crit

industry crit: pdf 220 KB

Thesis Time

I spent the majority of my winter break getting myself together and organized for this upcoming thesis project. I built a home studio for recording and visual effects. It will come in handy when all of the computers are taken up at the CADA lab.

Now that I built this bunker in which I will be spending the next three months in, It is time to go through all of my previs work and plow ahead with this steam engine project. "Push the pedal to the metal efficiently" - thats my motto that will get me through the year.

Stay tuned!

Style Frame

 

Here is a style frame for my thesis. Rendered with Mental Ray and refined in Photoshop.

The making of this styleframe required many passes. I intend on implementing this workflow for my animation. Enjoy!

2 great scripts

Im prepping up for the big INDUSTRY critique. fine tuning my animatic, getting my style frame solid, and picking out a nice color scheme. By next friday I should have a nice packaged post with pictures and video with all of my preproduction work.

I met with Hosenfeld and he gave me some good suggestions to enhance my work.
One being stylize the spirals. Instead of making them so uniform, have them compact where they start and stretch out where they end.

I also just got back from my meeting with Myles Tanaka, he said that I'm heading in the right direction. I should be fine with what I have. I think i will push my animatic a bit more for clarity sake. He recomended that I make the fish that eats the world HUGE.

on another note, I found two really great scripts on high end 3d.

Julian Tylney Taylor's - curveField - this handy plugin allows me to use a curve as a field for particles. In the end I get flowing particles along a curve.

Mihai Militaru's - Extract Curve From Edges 0.1.0- basically allows me to extract a nurbs curve from a polygonal object. this script is a lifesaver- I no longer need to switch back and forth between maya and max to do this.

Many thanks for your hard work. It will help me a great deal.

panel review

So last Friday was the first panel review of my project. I thought it went pretty smoothly. I didnt get much feedback, so I guess I am moving in the right direction... or am I?

"The World is a Steam Engine" - particles spiral along the surface of a moving steam engine train and its passing landscape.

The bottom line is that I just want to make something look really cool. "The World is a Steam Engine" has no story, no drama, just really really sick visual effects. In the end it should make people smile and feel good inside for no particular reason.

Pretty soon I will post everything that I have in one concise blog post. For now I am just writing what is on my mind. Thanks for reading.

finished my thesis

My Sister had her 22nd Bday party. There were lots of Tootsie Rolls, (nobody likes them) so I decided to turn them into clay. Then I thought of making a stop motion animation.

So me and my friend Youngsun got to work. It only took us about 30 minutes to do it. Im so glad I got my thesis done~

I bought myself a locomotive

for $65 i bought myself a steam engine on turbosquid. Its amazing what you can get for your money these days right?

Although I felt like a sellout, I feel it will be better for me in the long run. $65 saved me probably 3 weeks worth of work. At this point TIME is at stake.

I can now focus on my spiraling technique and camera angles rather than trying to reinvent the wheels of a train. - a valuable lesson learned from the Dreamworks video conference with Marty Havran.

Although I have the technique all sorted out in my head, its not completely there yet. I am a bit discouraged with my results, but I know that once I get the technicals down I will feel a whole lot lighter.

here is what i have so far:

I also found this inspiring piece done by framestore:

it works!

The UV Technique worked like a charm! Now I wonder if I can emit particles from the white dots...

I also have to come up with a nice repeatable procedural map that will look sweet.

Another spiraling solution

So I talked to Adam tonight about getting the particles to flow around a path. He suggested that I do everything in nurbs and use a per-particle attribute that flows along the u and v coordinates.

Honestly I hate nurbs... I know they arent that bad to work with, its just I dont feel comfortable with them. Frustrated, I kept thinking of more solutions...

Then it hit me! UV's!

With a spiraling polygon, I can layout the UV's so that line up in a perfectly vertical strip. Kind of like a film strip.
By animating a procedural texture map of dots in the vertical direction along the vertical UV's, the effect will be dots flowing along a spiraling surface.

I will do a test tonight! Thanks Adam Burr!