Scatter Brain Matter, or the Evolution of Mankind

I have released my latest short film on Vimeo. After serious discussions around Thanksgiving, I added a subtitle to the work once known as "Mind Matter".

Scatter Brain Matter, or the Evolution of Mankind from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Flock Particle Lights

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.
 

We are Glass

Not really, but this thing seems to be made of glass. I updated an older experiment to test the new MacPro in my office at Monmouth University. Did pretty well rendering this with caustics and all.
 

 
Oh, you wonder what happened to "Scatter Brain Matter"? Well, the start of the semester got in the way. Need to find two days of time to finish it, but I do have picture lock!

Final Test (?)

Today I did a test for what should be the final effect for my animation "Scatter Brain Matter" (working-title-in-flux): a flood of running creatures:
 

The End is Nigh! I am rendering the one but last shot, and animating the final one. Getting really close to being done. I would have been even further along rendering if the power had not gone out at our house (twice) last night, killing the overnight render shortly after midnight. Luckily the surges did not kill my computer!

Once done with animation there is of course more compositing to be done, colors to be corrected, the edit needs to be finalized, sound and music added and mixed, titles and credits superimposed and whatnot. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

RGB.Machine

For my animation I need something to glow inside of a"crystal ball" so I created something based on the machine from Contact and had it leave particles behind in glorious RGB. I rendered it a couple of times with different settings, here is the result:
 

GeneraTurn

With the semester almost over I am about to go into hyperdrive to finish my animation before I start my new job this Fall. Here is a prop I need for the final scene. I could have left it out but that would have compromised the mind-matter bifurcation scattering subtext.
 

I showed the latest edit test for Scatter Brain Matter to my advanced animation students at Montclair State the other day, and one of them labeled it as very "Meta". So stay tuned!

Bring Your Own Brain

I showed a Work in Progress video at the latest BYOA and was happy with the response and got some good suggestions. Important things got in the way, but I am working again on the final scene of "Scatter Brain Matter". Here is another test:
 

Slowing Down Mental Ray

First, here is the obligatory line: sorry for not posting recently, have been busy.

Yesterday I pestered Mental Ray a bit, using many things known to slow it down: Global Illumination, Caustics, light radius....

With just a single object on a floor plane and one spotlight, this took over ten minutes to render. And you know what? I and seriously considering adding real depth of field. Oh, and then maybe animate it and add motion blur. While I'm at it, I should then also up the resolution from 720p to 1080p. Still, that will probably not half as bad as the radiosity render a fellow student of mine at ACCAD had running for a couple of weeks before it finally produced a very grainy image.

Why am I messing with GI? I took over a course at PRATT this semester: 3D lighting and rendering.

Blobber Mouth

Just in time for Halloween, I created a first render/animation test of the Fleshy Blob character for my upcoming feature length animation:

 

It needs a lot of work, obviously. But it is the last main character I need to complete!

Adding some Sharpness

If the title of this post deceived you into expecting some clever remarks here, you will be utterly disappointed. This is simply a post in the Animators Anonymous category to prove that I have been working. I actually animated quite a bit, getting close to finalizing the possible opening scene for what is still tentatively called "Scattered Mind Matter". Here is a test for what may happen to the tree like structures once the animation progresses deeper into --dare I (ab/mis)use the term?-- the technicum: it gets hard.

 

 

[Geek alert!] It turns out the mesh generated from nParticles is not exactly clean and polygon reductions does not work without manually removing all manifold geometry. Polygon Cleanup can do that automatically but results in crappy topology, so the polygons identified by the cleanup procedure need to be manually fixed. And the mesh also has a number of holes in it. I guess that just shows how hard it is to fit a polygonal surface over an isosurface,and that the solution is pretty stable is quite a feat.

It's Alive! It's a L...

I do not quite like the overly suggesteive way this thing thrusts up at first, but here is a test of how these tree like structures may come into being. In a bare wasteland or on little islands appearing in a vast bubbling ocean. Oh wait, I was going to try to not make this a mega project!

 

Towards a Unified Animation of Mind and Matter

I am still busy with several project hoping they will culminate in one animation. Here is a look development test for the environments of one of the scenes, possibly the opening of this animated epos of scatterer-braininess wrapped in procedural matter-of-factness :

 

 

[Geek Alert!] Maya would not be Maya if I did not run into a number of quirks while creating this test. For one the Mental Ray renderer does render the Maya environment fog, but when using the camera far-near planes these seem to get stuck at the fist frame when batch rendering. To fix this very frame needs to be rendered separately, so I wrote a small python thingy (program is too big a word for these few lines of code) that uses the command line render to start a batch render for each individual frame. Joy!

More Cross Hatching

Taught my last class of the semester today, so hopefully there will be some time to work on projects. I also need to write an article and will be visiting friends and family around the Holidays, so I cannot promise too much progress in the animation department, but it should be more than during this past fall semester. That flew by: did work quite a bit on a presentation that will be given at SIGGRAPH Asia this week, and spend time on home improvement (installed some new windows) and "gardening" (cleaning up the mess after an early ice storm devastated the tree in our backyard). Here is another look development test:

I created one using projected textures earlier. That technique worked but I was not quite happy with the end result and the amount of manual labor involved. There was no need to properly UV the objects but hand drawing several cross hatch textures was kind of involved. This new test uses a single cross hath pattern, distorted by (a rendered image of) the object normals (and the After Effects filter "Turbulent Displace"). I think I like this better.

Number 7

Yet another moving thingy, glowing this time.

All Progress is Slow...

..he says to himself in a comforting voice. Getting closing to actually starting to animate with these generated shapes. Just a little more look development on them.

How about a blocky retro look? This is what GIMP churns out when JPEG quality is set to zero.

Frozen Fireworks

I have been working on my basic L-System script (no fancy stuff like a rules interpreter) adding some gravity and randomness. The two on the right are generated from the same base parameters.

Earlier I worked on making these things dynamic, and posted the result on YouTube:

I animated the parameters driving the dynamics, and obviously setting them too high makes the whole shape come apart. So I need to use more points or push them around gently.

It's Alive!

It's life Jim, but not as we know it:

See previous post (or posts) for details.

Update (4:44 PM): Here's another one, which required some improvements to the Python scripts and Maya Expressions:

That's more like it!

Yes, more of the same. But I am getting close to what I want. I switched to nParticles for the curve creation and luckily my scripts worked with just a little tweaking. They started failing when I limited the lifespan of the nParticles, but fortunately Python let's you "try:" stuff.

And tonight after another hour of intense screen staring I have my desktop render an animation of this shape, simply by animating the size of the particles (the radiusPP to be precise, with an expression using the particleID as variable)

So, YEAH! The real work can start: creating an interesting piece of animation using this technique.

Still Static

I got my curves-from-particles and put-particles-on-rebuild-curves script working. Now I need to take the next step: animating this to create a creepy crawly tubular shape.