Blender Week 2

Live happened, so with a month delay, here is work from Blender Week 2. We did not get to a third week. I did finish a VR project I had been working on for years, but that is a different story.

Of course, all of you who follow me on Mastodon or Instagram have seen these videos already
 

I started the week epxloring the scuplting tools, which are pretty intuitive and work well. Not quite ZBrush, but that progranm has such an awkward interface that you need to regularly use it to be good at it. Like editing on and AVID system, which you could not even do without a custom keyboard with color coded keys - it has been a while since I actually used AVID so I do not know if this is still the case.

I uploaded the video in a square format to Youtube and that turned it into a short without asking. Bad YouTube.
 

On day two I took the one eyed character thing into Unreal. Took a lot of trial and error, and two days, but it walks. It does sink further into the ground after a few steps. That I had never user Unreal before did not help.
 

For day four I decided to do someting fun again. I took the sculted head from day one of this week, and pushed it through a pinboard. Not a real pin board, the pins are just cubes placed in a dense grid using Blender Geometery nodes. I was curious to see how many cubes it could handle. This was on a relatively new silicon Macbook Pro. Not disappointed.
 

For the last day I decided to play with dynamic simulation. Or day and a half, as it took a while to render. I basically did someting I used to assign my students: build a Rube Goldberg machine. I found the rigid body dynamics easy to use and pretty robust. I did not get it to interact with cloth or other soft body dynamics, and am not sure you can.

Then life happened and I did not return to Blender for the rest of the summeer.

xGen Experiment

Not really have had time to create new work recently. For my classes I have been experimenting with Maya's xGen. Today I made this to test duplication of animated geometry with it.
 

Almost at the last scene...

I am approaching the last scene of my animation whose working title has been in flux but seems to want to settle on "Scatter Brain Matter". It is going to be a tough one but I have to add a strong finish!

Here is an image that emerged as I was working of the Trumbull inspired sequence that will form the transition into the final sequence:

I may also have been slightly influenced by Dinosaur Train...

Is it just me or does it show a lion with a smiley face on top?

Strong Communication

Enjoyed drawing a bit on my night off. Created this in myPaint.

Hi HTML 5

I looked around and saw some promising HTML 5 stuff on the interwebs, so I had to try it myself

 

 

If staring at it is not enough, you can try playing "Catch The Line"

Not so Hot Rods

Could not help myself, messed with Maya and created this:

This is a test, and I have no idea where I am going with this and should really be working on ">Hello World" but one must digress to get somewhere, right?

For the geeks: Used Python within Maya to set up the scene by placing locators on the points of a grid and constraining others to the points on a copy of that grid, and then point constraining a copy of a cylinder to the one and aiming it at the other locator. I then manipulate and deform the grid with the constrained points the rods aim at, and your mother's brother's name is Robert.

Harmony

No idea how it works, seems to have been written entirely in Javascript. But the effect is amazing: Harmony - procedural drawing tool. I drew the image posted here on the left in a few minutes. Using the touchpad on my laptop. (via Drawn!)

Update: could not help myself and played with it again the next day (image on the right, just using shaded mode). And then found out that if you press Contol you can select a color to draw with. So I guess I need to play with it a bit more...

Hooded

I never wore hoodies. When I was a teenager they were not really around much and never having paid attention to fashion I never got to wearing them. Until recently: I went to buy an expensive coat, which turned out to be less than half the original price during the After Christmas Sale, and the one that fit best had a hoody. A detachable one, so not much risk there.

When it is cold and windy, and the wind chills have been fierce lately, it is actually real nice to pull the thing over my head. But I did notice that it is almost like wearing what in Dutch are called "oogkleppen" (blinders, the things they put next to a horse's eyes to limit his field of vision). With a hoody on your head you get a kind of tunnel vision, and you peripheral vision, the part most sensitive to movement, gets no stimuli whatsoever. That feels weird, a bit claustrophobic. I notice I turn my head more when I wear it. That is the one thing I do not like about it. The same reason I do not like to wear small spectacles: your view is limited by them.

And so this character came up in my mind, wearing a extended hoody for true tunnel vision. With headphones on top to block out audio. While sketching, I discovered he is riding a skateboard while checking his so called smart phone. May turn up in an animation, like "Hello World (Working Title)"

Hello World (Working Title)

As promised, sketches for my new project that is currently filed under "Hello World (Working Title)"

These images of the initial character design and a pivotal scene from the beginning of the animation (the walls of the room / large cubicle fall down to reveal a big open space) were created during SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans. The story has evolved somewhat, but is nowhere near finalized. The screen is no longer attached to the guy, may be floating. The chair still is.

The world that is revealed could contain the Eye Brain…. The whole thing should be somewhat dream like.

More Doodling

The semester is finally drawing to a close, so it is time to reflect on things past. Like the discussions that transpired during the last two faculty meetings. Something about digital artists versus more traditionally oriented ones. Or was it practical thinking designers versus fine artists? My notes and doodle are inconclusive. I know we discussed the merits of having two people at the helm of a department reinvented as school. Or lack thereof.

No idea what inspired the image below though. Must have been totally immersed in the arguments.

Making a line in Maya

With the semester just about over I found some time to port a Python script I wrote for Blender to Maya in the hopes of animating the result nicely. I got stuck in Blender when I ran into transparency / alpha issues with the node based materials. Probably fixed in Blender by now, as the issue with nodes not being animatable has been addressed. Here is a test:

Only a curve is generated procedurally, the rest is a hand "crafted" test. Found some stuff in the old script that should never have worked. The line is still intersecting and there are a few more issues, some of which I may not actually care about as long as it looks good.

Earlier Posts: Animated Swirl, Plane Render

I have absolutely no idea how this thing got 308 views on YouTube in about an hour...

Another Ball

Turbulently displaced this time.

Can Maya come out to play?

At Montclair State we switched to Maya this semester (from Lightwave) and that meant that I had to update all my lectures and instruction. That did take up most of the time I spent at the computer. But all work and no play make not only Jack a dull boy, so after Thanksgiving, after the Family left, I found an hour or two to play and stumbled across the fact that every single point on a Mesh can be animated individually:

I rendered it using Mental Ray with a shader that is using the distance to the center of the sphere to change appearance a bit. No bones, blend shapes or other deformers, just point animation. Though it may be considered pointless. But that is the point of play, right?

Faculty Doodle

I cannot help but doodle during faculty meetings. One of my colleagues asked if I was paying attention at all. It actually helps me focus, to keep my mind from wandering. You can see these drawing clearly cover the topics of grading and how to objectively measure student performance. Especially is the one with the student working on the tip of the tongue.....