Enhanced Vision

My video City.FLow() from 2010 has been included in the Enhanced Vision – Digital Video, the latest online exhibition organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Committee. The site went live this weekend: check it out!

Animation Abandoned

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!

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:
 

Blob Ready to Rig

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…

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.

Another SIGGRAPH over...

Chuck Csuri
Originally uploaded by Wobbe F. Koning

It went by fast. SIGGRAPH 2011 has already wrapped up. It was held in Vancouver this year, which gave me the great opportunity to combine it with a visit to my sister who lives there.

Highlights? Speaking to award recipient Charles Csuri, who was still working daily at ACCAD when I studied there. Seeing a number of great animation in stereoscopic 3D, including some created by students! Visiting the compact exhibition floor was also pretty productive this year. And I think my favorite session was ILM's production session on Rango. They completely separated out animation from lighting / rendering in their production pipeline. Which seems to be the exact opposite from what PIXAR is doing. So I just had to ask how they handled shadows, for instance in shot composition. They don't. They did not run into any major problems with it though.

I had not actually seen the movie yet, but got that chance on the plane back and it is one of the more interesting animated features of late. By far. The flight was long enough to also view Megamind, but I watched most of it on fast forward. Not my cup of tea. Even though I kind of liked Monsters vs. Aliens by the same studio

Just before I left for Vancouver I managed to squeeze this out:

I think I know where I want to go with this but first we go and take a family vacation. This blog post is coming to you from the waiting room of our car dealers service center. They should have free WIFI everywhere!

Left Brain / Right Brain

Yesterday I saw a presentation by Donald P. Greenberg entitled "Left Brain / Right Brain: round two". Quite fascinating. Apart from a computer graphics history lesson (the image to the right shows prof. Greenberg in front of a slide depicting a Lunar Module Docking simulation from 1967) he had a lot to say about creativity versus rationality and the importance of taking Computer Science courses as an artist and to take art classes as an engineer. And how to stimulate faculty working across department and school lines in a interdisciplinary manner.

After the talk he stayed to answer questions from a group of NYIT students (who are taking computer graphics with the event organizer Yuko Oda) and there was some fascinating discussion on whether computers can be creative, and if they need to be self-aware to achieve this. One of the more practical points Prof. Greenberg made that I fully support is that it really helps students to understand what goes on behind the interface of a computer program: you have to "...know what is behind the software so you are not constrained by what you think the software can do".

As representative of the local ACM SIGGRAPH chapter, which co-sponsored the event, I had the privilege to have lunch with Prof. Greenberg and Prof Oda. He is remarkably fit for his age, and extremely sharp. A very inpirational visit to the City!

Back from SIGGRAPH 2010

I am back from Los Angeles and kind of recovered. Here are some of the things I saw at SIGGRAPH 2010. This year I had no time to blog from the conference. I spent quite a bit of time working for the SCOOP podcasts and videos which can be viewed on ACMSIGGRAPH's YouTube Channel.

3D stereo was big again this year, but the display that impressed me most was a computer generated hologram with full parallax. As a graduate student at Ohio State I created animated holograms of my 3D character Earguy, but they only had left/right parallax: only 3 dimensions in the horizontal direction (just like Avatar, by the way, and all the other stereoscopic 3D movies). At the Emerging Technologies I saw the "An Interactive Zoetrope for Animation of Solid Figurines and Holographic Projections" which not only had left/right AND up/down parallax, but was interactive on top of that. Impossible to video or photograph since it was set up facing another interesting exhibit that displayed bright and colorful images on bicycle wheels.

In the adjacent Art Gallery, which was very focused on haptics (stuff you can manipulate of get feedback from by way of touch) which is not my thing, had an interesting piece called "Tools for Improved Social Interacting", a clever piece with an explanatory video with good content but not so great cinematography that reminded me of my "New and Improved Smiling Device"

Of course I also saw some great animations and a lot of friends, old and new. Another successful battery recharge.

Yes, I took the pictures accompanying this post and they indeed depict the exhibits described. In case you VVOh!\|[)3red

Back to the Future

By Leo Hourvitz, a friend from the SIGGRAPH Systems Managers team, I was alerted to YouTube user VintageCG who posted a plethora of clips from the early days of Computer Graphics. Which of course includes a lot of stuff from my Alma Mater ACCAD, like this 1982 demo reel for Cranston / Csuri productions

Real interesting stuff, amazing at the time, very crude and sometimes cheezy for todays standards. A great bit of history, my student should all see this stuff. Would it be possible to convince them that back then it was really hard to make anything in 3D?

I think it is about time I follow through with my plans to put my own vintage stuff on the WobbleTV YouTube Channel. I will keep y'all posted!

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.

MetroCAF 2009

It has been a hectic time since I accepted the position of MetroCAF 2009 chair about two years ago, but a week ago all the hard work culminated in a successful screening of the best students animations from the NYC metropolitan area. A good crowd of about 350 came out on that cold night.

Just in time students of mine from Montclair State University completed the opening animation:

It was created using Lightwave. I did also work on it a bit and took care of the postproduction.
I will be posting images from the event on the NYC ACM SIGGRAPH site soon.

Those Canadiens

This post is not about the Canadians whom I met at this years SIGGRAPH Conference, though I should have been blogging from New Orleans but was too busy enjoying the experience. Did post a few photos on Flickr

Just came across this post on Drawn!. "Jue" was created by Georges Schizgebel in 2006. Amazing animation, especially since its hand painted and not computer generated. Wonder if an "ordinateur" was used somewhere in the process...

MetroCAF 2009 Call for Participation video

From the award winning entries to the previous two editions of MetroCAF, the local student animation festival I am chairing this year, I edited this promotional video. Since Google Video is no longer accepting uploads, I now also have a YouTube account (hurray, another username and password!) with the name that I used for my early video work: Wobble TV.

The music is "Wake up" by bluebottle, a creative commons file I found on ccMixter.org

UPDATE: Found out I actually have two YouTube accounts: you can simply sign on with your Google account. Aargh! Anyway, also put my last latest animation "Seeing Red" on YouTube. In HD!

LAX

I'm at the airport, leaving Los Angeles. The plane has an hour delay, so I have a little time to reminis over this years SIGGRAPH conference. As always I had a great time. Highlights? Really enjoyed seeing a lot of artwork from the Blue Sky animation "Horton hears a Who", which apparently is not going to be published in a book. Saw a number of interesting technical talks, but now that the developments in the computer graphics world are mainly incremental with tiny steps, there was nothing shockingly new.

There were a few amazing images on display though: holographic computer prints! Not the way we (that is: Harris Kagan in his Holography lab at Ohio State in the late nineties) did it analog by multiple exposures of computer generated images printed on slides, but by printing directly on the photographic film. It actually turned out that the guys who were with the exhibit of these images had no idea how traditional holograhphy is done. The images were stunning, but I did not take pictures of them because they would not be able to display the dimensionality of the images

As far st the Art show goes: one installation stands out: "Echo Location" by Kirk Woolford (U.K.) and Carlos Guedes (PT). If you walked in front of it, it displays a cluster of white lines moving frantically over a background of what seems to be an old castle, moving through the door or window like opening. When you stand stand still long enough, the lines slow down and eventually form a human figure. I like the atmosphere of the piece

But the best part of the conference was meeting people and as always: being inspired by the strong computer graphics community!

It seems the delayed plane is finally at the gate, so I'm signing off!

You may wonder: how come he has internet at the airport. Well, I was quite suprised to find a "co_presidents_club" WiFi network, and even more so when it turned out to be open: no password. For those of you who may need internet at LAX: go to gate 60!

Computer Animation Festival

Got an early start at the SIGGRAPH 2008conference today, with a presentation on "Teaching Computer Animation for Results" where the importance of knowing the basics was stressed. Not the software is the pivotal issue, but knowing how to have your objects convey the proper weight through their movement. Or as Karen Sullivan from Ringling School of Art and Design put it: it is not about moving objects, but about moving an audience". I do not entirely agree with her observation that we are in the business of entertainment. I teach at a fine arts program so there should also be an element of Art in there

Kevin Geiger (like me a former ACCAD student and currently heading Animation Options) showed an interesting animation off off YouTube that I like to share with you all: Believer by Jim Ellis. (Kevin also blogs about the conference)

When next I could not get into the technical session I had picked because it was full (e.g. the room was too small) I went to the Computer Animation Festival (CAF) screening and enjoyed two hours of animations. There was a remarkable amount of European student animations in the selection. The CAF is completely changed since last year, and unfortunately they killed the Electronic Theater where the best of the best used to be shown. But still, watching this many animations of high quality is always inspiring. No clear favorite form me yet.

If you are wondering how the cowboy music saga from last night ended: I do not really know, but when I returned to my room it was quiet. Until four in the morning at least, when the next door neighbor returned and again played the TV loud. I banged the wall, heard some cursing and the volume went down. Let's hope that's the end of it. Slept well for the most part

The image shows Sandro Alberti (who made the T-Shirts for the International Committee), Kirsten Cater (One of the International Committee chairs) and me in front of the International Center booth

Sleep I must!

Right now I'm enjoying what I think to be the constantly looping music from a DVD menu coming through the hotel wall from the room next door. Nobody is responding to anything in that room, someone from security is now banging on the door with just as little result.

So, I have some time to blog about my day. Spent spent some time on the exhibition floor, where companies display there ware, and at the "New Technologies" exhibit, which used to be called "Emerging Technologies" or "E-Tech" for short. Most of the things on display have to do with haptic displays and the like, not quite my cup of tea. Went to a few talks as well.

The evening I spent at two Japanese parties with Miho, a friend from grad school. Free food again :), and we had a good time. In the photograph it seems like I gave Professor Kawaguchi quite a scare when I used my flash.

And to come back to what I started this post with: I'm now in the lobby, the only place here with internet access. It is midnight and I would rather be asleep but the continuous loop of cowboy movie music is driving me bonkers. Apparently the lock on the inside of the door is on and security is now fetching cutters to cut the lock and get in. Did I mention the alarm in the room is also going off? If there indeed is somebody in the room, he (or she) cannot be feeling too well

To be continued...

Ed Catmull

Today is the first day of the conference, which for me started off with booth duty at the International Center and an Education session, followed by the International Committee lunch.

In the afternoon there was the awards ceremony (my former professor Stephen Spencer received the award for outstanding service) the conference officially kicked off with the keynote by Ed Catmull, the computer graphics pioneer who is currently heading both the PIXAR and Disney animation studios together with John Lasseter. It was not a technical talk but addressed the issue of how to have a creative team create the best films by working as an open community. Quite insightful!

I found it interesting when he mentioned that when the goal he set for himself while a student, namely creating an animated feature which he then thought would take ten years, left a big gaping hole when it was finally achieved twenty years later. A huge: "what's next?" Building a healthy studio community was the new goal he then set, and while this might have been achieved at PIXAR, Disney still has a way to go there. Although he made it sound like the new Disney production coming out this fall will suck a lot less.

And now I'm off to the Chapters Party!

Meetings Day

Sleep last night was OK. There was a reason the Hotel was cheap: no AC (but luckily there is no heatwave) and really thin walls. My next door neighbors were watching a action movie 'till after midnight).

Today is the day for pre-conference meetings. Spent the morning in the Education meeting, than off to the conference center for the Chapters meeting (I am the secretary of the New York Chapter). Good food today, with the education dinner coming up tonight. Which is good, since feeding oneself tends to be a bit of an issue during the confence, especially in L.A. where the conference center is kind of in the midle of nowhere. That is to say: that wasteland of empty parking lots is filling up with new buildings soon!

As for the picture: looks promissing for the conference, right? :)

Late Lunch at cafe Mogodor

Went into the city today, to meet with Nick Porcaro. I met him at this years SIGGRAPH Conference during a presentation on Open Source software. He is working with painter / graphic designer Ellen Levy, who joined us briefly for coffee, and is investigating ways to turn these paintings into 3D objects using Blender. He is a musician and has been working with her before, combining his music with her painting(s). An interesting project that will not be easy to pull off: how do you add a third dimension to a broad brush stroke, with a method that should be semi-automated?

I am not really doing anything in Blender at the moment, since I am working on my animation in Softimage XSI and teaching a course using Lightwave (the image accompanying this post I created in Lightwave to show UV Texturing). But I will be attending the Blender New York Conference next weekend, at least Saturdays sessions (The big conference is this weekend in Amsterdam). One of the issues I run into when teaching 3D (or any other computer based course actually) is the access student have to the software. Using open source software, like Blender, would eliminate this problem, since all students can install it on their own machines. I know students are really good at getting their hands on software, but this would actually be legal! Downside: the documentation on open source software usually su... is often not all that good. Not to speak of the GUI issues. But in both respects Blender is actually not half bad. For open source software.

Live from SIGGRAPH

Since SIGGRAPH 2007 a lot has happened for me. For instance: yesterday was my first day of teaching at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. And will start at Montclair State University in a little over a week. So I still didn't get to blogging about this years annual SIGGRAPH conference. Jared Bendis, even though his visit to San Diego was a stop on his way to Africa, posted an obscene amount of photos here, including a not too flattering photo of yours truly he took real early on day 4. Here's an image I took of him late on the Friday before the conference. The gentleman on the right in Thierry Frey, ACM SIGGRAPH director for Information Services

Hmmm, it was probably not really late when this picture was taken. Even though the time stamp says 11:43 I left my camera on Eastern Time. Having just flown in it was late for me though