This Hieronymus Bosch like rendering of a still from Scatter Brain Matter, or The Evolution of Mankind was created by the Deep Dream - Online Generator. That site is owned by Google and the image manipulation is based on their research into using AI for image recognition. They turned an artifact that appeared in the process into a feature for this, it seems.
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".
Yes, finally I can say that I am done with my latest animation. Of course a digital animation / video is never really finished, just abandoned at a certain point. Today I started sending "Scatter Brain Matter" to festivals.
It already had a pre-première in the City at the November edition of BYOA, where i got some good feedback that made me fix something with music that I had tried to fix with sound effects. Overall the film seemed well received. With the amount of content being generated nowadays festivals are a bit of a lottery, let's hope it gets selected!
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.
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:
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!
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:
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?
Just to show that I am still working on the animation, here is an exploded Blob. You may wonder how violent my animation is going to be, but I can assure you this was unintentional. Wait, have I not stated somewhere that exploiting lucky accidents is part of my process?
[geek alert] So what happened? I added some joints to his trunk, detached the skin and re-skinned him. It turns out that you first need to normalize your skin weights to do this. New feature in Maya 2014? I have not experienced these kind of explosions before.
[Geek Alert!] Recently I started to like the new node editor in Maya, taking me back to the time when I enjoyed working in Softimage XSI. Today I was painfully reminded of why I had previously abandoned its use. It totally froze my computer three times this morning. When I finally got the Task Manager open (the first crash was so bad that Windoze did not even respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL) I saw it rapidly filling up all available RAM for no good reason. Bad Maya!
I have my three models, rigger and all. On to Animation soon!
[Geek Alert!] Allow me to rant about Autodesk® Maya a bit. I don't think I'm the only one doing some UV editing after rigging and it would be nice if that history could just be deleted, just like normal modeling history. But that would be too easy. Finally found a workaround with a MEL command (polyTransfer) which is of course quite different from the very similar menu reachable "Transfer Attributes" I got the result I wanted in the end luckily.
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!
I updated my animation demo reel:
Animation Demo Reel 2012 from Wobbe on Vimeo.
Now why would I be doing that?:^}
In the month since my last post featuring this Fleshy Blob, I have not been sitting still. In fact, I have flown across the country (paid to be flown to be more precize) to attend SIGGRAPH 2012 where I did not have WiFi in my Hotel and was too busy with meetings and sessions (one of which I organized) to post any updates.
As far as the "Scattered Brain Matter" project is concerned: the Blob model is basically done (with UVs) and I also modeled the thing it will sit on. Fall semester is looming large, progress will be slow but if I just spend at least an hour every day…
Judging by this blog you might think I have been a slacker on the animation front this summer. Au contraire! I am close to finishing the first scene for what may keep the title "Scattered Brain Matter". The next scene planned contains all characters I have in mind for this piece, so I am modeling the last one: a fleshy blob. The image shows it in its current state, next to the design. The belly is not round and or fat enough. And it does not jiggle yet.
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.
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!
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!
Eye Brain has been resurrected once more! But now he is sub surface scattered. So far I have only rigged the "tail" which now can stetch and contract considerably. Brains tend to not deform much, this one probably should not either. The Eyes need to be able to look at things, so I again need to set something up that flexes those eye muscles!
To appear in a short also featuring a fleshy blob and a one legged fingertip walker.
My stuff on these pages is published under:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
