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!

Scattered Eye Brain

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.

Big Foot, Two Arms.

I have been wokring in Maya a bit. As I am teaching Advanced Animation this semester, and since all the students want to animate characters, I thought I'd create a test of one myself. I have a project in mind, one of those ballooning animation ideas, which has a similar character in it. Here is an animation / render test:

My plan is to build on this test and combine it with the original idea for EyeBrain, which is a scene that was cut from my Thesis animation "if(!NULL){". Maybe I will even throw in the tree like structures from the recent Maya Experiment! Do I have a title yet? How about "Minding Matter (Dark)" or "Dark Mind(s) Matter". "Never Mind the Dark Matter" maybe?

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.

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.