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!

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:
 

Blob Fail

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.

Moving Atoms

Coma across this today, and at first thought it was a spoof, some clever marketing ploy. An animation created by moving individual atoms around? Who is crazy enough to try that?

A Boy And His Atom - The World's Smallest Movie from Nico Casavecchia on Vimeo.

On the IBM website there is more info to be found. Those dots are really atoms.

Twodimensional Eye Virus version 0.0

 

Dug up the old javascript files used to create the first of the Multidimensional Eye Virus animations and adapted one for HTML5 canvas. Most of the work was done on the train in and out of the City to teach at PRATT. On a netbook.

Sit back and enjoy!

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"

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.

Chess.set

It should not have surprised me that this took me a bit longer to build than I had hoped for as this prop will be featured prominently in my upcoming animation Scattered Brain Matter. But here it is, all six pieces and the board, available in two trendy colours.

[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!

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!

Morning News

Theme of this mornings news seems to be the thin line between the virtual and the real. An interesting article in Slate on 3D printing (The DIY Copyright Revolution - through the CAA newsletter) claims that that technology will radically change intellectual property as we are dealing with useful objects. Left aside the fact that the writer fails to show how these 3D printed objects might be useful, there is nothing new here (as a comment from First Banana confirms). Yes, the objects themselves may not fall under copyright protection but the designs will. Try printing Mickey Mouse figurines!

The other article that caught my attention was "Ship's anchor cuts Internet access to six East African countries" - the real getting in the way of the virual. For real. The way the internet is set up it did not result in a total blackout, but still.

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.

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.

Lindenmayer

I thought setting up a basic L-System to counter the growing tubular shapes would be relatively simple. And I guess it is if you actually are a programmer. Finally got a basic version to work. Again written in Python, generated in Maya.

I did find some examples on-line but that code was rather dense and I need to mess with it. Now let's see how I can randomize this and make it grow. And preferably sway in the wind. So I am wondering again why I cannot be satisfied simply animating a cube...

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.

More Curved Particles

Today I worked a bit on creating a more interesting particle system to convert into curves. The one to the right is quick result. The geometry is created by simply extruding a circle across the curve that traces the path the particle took over the course of 1000 frames.

The object on the right is created from the same curve, but this time I put particles back on the curve. To get the particles spaced more evenly I first had Maya "redraw" the curve. This is more in the direction of what I am looking for.

I want the particle system to split resulting in a branching of the curve. After yet another hour of tinkering (why are collisions events in Maya not object specific by default?) I think I may now have a particle system that could maybe yield an interesting result. So tomorrow (?) it is back to scripting. The script now traces a single particle, the new one needs to trace many.

Earguy Returns

For my animation classes I am looking into ways to make it less technical and more animation. Rigging is always very time consuming, so I will try and use automated rigging. As a test I took an old mesh and rigged him, using DSN RapidRig Basic.

Rigging took no more than an hour, but there are quite a few weights left to paint. Promissing, huh?

Oh, yeah, the topic this week is lattice deformation…

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

Fingers Crossed

A hopefully minor setback: The aforementioned Blue Screens started appearing more consistently and seemed to point at a failing hard drive. The occasional loud clicking sound was not encouraging. I had just about decided to go and buy a new drive, and install the entire system again: it is the system drive that seems to be dying, when my wife asked if it could be a loose cable. Well, theoretically, maybe. Opened up the machine, took the drives out, put them back in and booted up the machine. It finally finished the diskcheck (/repair) I had asked the system to perform, and has been rendering for four hours straight since (it had been crashing within two). So, fingers crossed!

Update: After chugging along nicely for the entire weekend, this Monday morning (June 14) it actually finished the two renders I need to move on, a total of 574 frames! I bought a new hard drive anyway, since I was thinking of re installing the system before the crashes started as the system was getting sluggish. Better to no re-install on a flaky HD, right?

Documents moving mysteriously on Windows 7?

Even though I switched back from Os X when I bought this laptop, I have been pretty happy with Windows 7 so far. Yesterday I ran the usual updates and cleaned up the startup settings, killing useless background processes like some Windows media player internet thing which I did not even know existed and is of no use to me since I do not use Windows Media Player (and if I did I would not want it to connect to the internet without my explicit consent). Then I booted my machine this morning and my entire documents folder was gone!

I was using a "documents" folder and not "My Documents" as I find that name silly for everything on my computer is mine. I frantically looked in the recycle bin, fearing my infant son may have pressed delete. No luck finding my stuff there either. I did finally locate everything: all my files were moved to "My Documents"! Aargh! The weirdest thing: all references to "documents" still work, probably because there is a library (an addition to the OS for which I have found no use yet) called "documents" which points to "My Documents"

I guess I need to conform to the Microsoft conventions and use "My Documents"… Sigh.

I am wondering: is it just me or did this happen to anyone else? A quick search did not reveal anything.

Testing, Testing, Dimension Three

Seriously moving into the fourth dimension with my new Multi Dimensional Eye Virus animation.

A lot is fixed. Found more room for improvement, which will unfortunately involve more scripting. Oh well. But I am NOT a geek!