Student Reel

More Dancing Particles

So there. Took forever to get some stuff to work, particle expressions can be very finicky. But they are starting to behave the way I envisioned.

Geeknote: created the movie from a Maya playblast using Shotcut on my MacBook as this weekend I did not feel like firing up my big machine with the Adobe Stuff. Very basic but useful program!

Flock Particle Lights

Dancing Particles

Played with nParticles a bit in an attempt to create frozen motion but created this sequence in the process:
 

I used a Motion Capture (MoCap) example that came with Maya years ago and made it emit particles. Very simple. Find better MoCap data I must!

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:
 

Old News: my Film and Video Reel

I posted my Film and Video reel on YouTube:

Original WobbleTV Leader

I recently enjoyed a reunion with the people involved in a High School play we wrote and performed way back when. Which made me look through some old video tapes. I came across the first broadcast of Wobble TV, the videotape that did not get me in to Filmschool that year. I did get in a year later.

 

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!

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.

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!

Number 7

Yet another moving thingy, glowing this time.