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!
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.
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?
I spent a few hours to assess where I am in porting the Eye Brain character from Lightwave to Maya. The resulting image is a tad dark, but I do like the painterly quality of it.
Note to self: deleting the materialInfo nodes in Maya is not very clever as the objects will loose all hardware shading. So that is what they are for! Ran createNode many, many times...
So where am I on Eye Brain? Many models done but no antagonist yet. Need to scan my hand for that.
What to do, what to do? Next to dealing with some uncertainty in my professional life, I need to decide what creative project to focus on next. I have at least three in the pipeline. Here is a look development test I created for ">Hello World":
Usually NPR cross hatching relies on properly laid out UVs on all objects. For "Seeing Red" I generated the UVs for the ground plane procedurally based on the world space coordinates and normal direction, but that is not an option for most objects. In this test I do not use UV maps at all but in stead project hand drawn cross hatching patterns onto the scene from the camera. Since the camera is moving, there are two projection position (the start and the end) and I had to add one extra to fill in a gap as some of the wall was obscured from both positions but visible inbetween.
But I am not sure I like this look for this project. I may use the technique (but not the look) on an older stalled project in stead: Eye Brain. That is the second project in waiting. A new project is brewing, involving integrating a CG version of this hooded character and some yet to shoot HD video. Or should I do something abstract again? Or maybe think up a project that does not take months to create? Make up my mind I must!
I had been working on my Eye Brain animation in Lightwave 9.6. At school we switched to Maya, and so have I. To get an idea how much work it is to port the whole thing, I exported the last Lightwave Scene I created as FBX (using the standard settings) and imported that into Maya. Not too shabby! The first render came out all white since all the lights, which were all spotlights with falloff and shadow, were imported as point lights with no shadow or falloff. Most UV maps even came through, unfortunately only one per mesh though. Oh well.
To get everything back to where I was is going to take a while though. What to do, what to do…
And a happy 2010 to you too! I do remember last years resolution, so I had better get going and create new work. Now, I do have three project I could work on. Since it is (or was last week) the season for lists, here is one:
Whatever the project: Animate I will!
The image is taken from the University of Bremen and shows that there is no sea ice where my wife is heading. She left today
Unfortunaly I cannot yet say that I am finishing up my EyeBrain animation. I am about to send my previous work, Seeing Red, to a couple more festivals I have decided to finally attend to the last fixes that were needed on that animation. Almost done!
Have been working on the new animation as well: a lot of set dressing. The image to the right is part of that :)
No blue death screens for two days in a row: fingers crossed...
So this is as far as I got with my animation this semester. Hope to find time over the summer to make more happen! This semester the advanced students in my class (students who took my 3D class last Fall as well) also created some animations. I just uploaded a gallery of student work.
In my post about the box I build in Lightwave, I referred to an installation I once read about, I think it was about a year ago and it was probably in The New Yorker. I just found my original notes on it: "...like the interactive installation box that closes when you get near it and slowly opens up again some time after you move away". Ha! Now I know where I read about it, I thought. So it was slightly disappointing to see the note next to it: "&rarr get Ref". D'oh!
Anybody know this installation from about a year ago? Anyway, here's a new version of the box:
Not the one I'm living in (just kidding), but build to be an antagonist to EyeBrain. How is that going to work? I'm not saying! At least not yet.
Has something to do with an art work I read about a while a go, need to find that reference. Here's a YouTube video of something that is just as annoying: an "Ultimate Machine" that turns itself off as soon as you turn it on (via Boing Boing, via Make)
Heres Yet Another Turnaround, added the tail-tentacle-spinal-cord-thing to my EyeBrain model
Yes, need to work a bit on the rigging and animation of that "tail", and it would be nice to grow some scattered hairs on it
Yes, another brain turn. Now with Eyes. Add a tail and EyeBrain can be animated.
I am doing this in Lightwave since that's what I'm teaching at Montclair State. Have been struggling a bit with the IK system, their base system has some quirks*. There is another system, called IK-Booster, which seems to be easier to manage. Downside is that it is quite different from what I know from other 3D software packages. So it is not something I am going to encourage my students to use, since that knowledge will not be very useful unless they stick to LightWave.
* It seems the IK gets evaluated before any "point at target" constraints, which makes having eyes look at a target a bit harder. Especially if you have these muscles on the side that need to move with it. Finally got rid of all the bones in the muscles and faked it...
In last weeks issue of The New Yorker (Feb. 12 2007) I read an interesting and at one point scary article about philosophy and neuriscience: 'Two Heads" by Larissa MacFarquhar. It is a portrait of Paul and Patricia Churchland, both philosophers at the University of California, San Diego. Their view on the influence of neural processes on philosophy used to be really controversial in a field focussed on language.
Where it gets scary is when they start talking about abnormalities in the brains of people on death row. Even though they acknowledge that the cause for the deviations might be the very fact that the brain's owner is on death row, they seem to be open to preventive incarceration of people with a brain condition that predisposes them to commit violent acts. That's even worse than than what happens in a Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, where a convicted felon is conditioned to get physically sick when he as much as thinks about violence. In that case free will is taken away from someone who has actually committed crimes. Locking people up for having a specific brain condition is denying them free will in the first place. Do weird brains not often have the potential for greatness as well?
There was a time when peoples skulls were measured to determine if one was apt to being a crook. A practice long abandoned I though.
Reading the last paragraph of the article I started to doubt if the writer fully understood the philosophical subject matter. On the issue of a human can experience what it is like to be a bat, the writer concludes ".. a philosopher might after all come to know what it is like to be a bat, although, since bat's can't speak, perhaps he would be able only to sense its batness without being able to derscribe it." thus equating thought once again to language, the very thing the Churchlands seem to have been rebelling against!
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