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.

All Progress is Slow...

..he says to himself in a comforting voice. Getting closing to actually starting to animate with these generated shapes. Just a little more look development on them.

How about a blocky retro look? This is what GIMP churns out when JPEG quality is set to zero.

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...