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Since this semesters is over, I'm moving the content of this class blog over to my personal blog. You can find it at http://uncannymudpuddle.wordpress.com/

13. Proposal(s)

Here are some concept materials I'm working on. I'm really not sure about which idea to pursue with what changes.
In order:

1. Elevation/'building plan' for the architecture/typography project. The blue shape is the camera angle seen in the first color plate.
2. Color plate/texture study for the architecture/typograph project.
3. Color plate for the larva loop project.
4. GIF loop animatic for the larva loop project.

12. Finished Project 2

Final video won't upload through blogger; will update with embed once Vimeo processes it.


Mars from John Leftwich on Vimeo.

11. short film progress

Class critique feedback

• the city could echo gross neural structures in its architecture -
• the information flows could react to stimulus that the audience is able to hear in the sound design. This stimulus could be universal, which would further help to contextualize the visualization. I really like this idea. It seems Brechtian, and reminds me of the feedback of Jess in crit last week: Something I seem to like to do in my work is expose the artifice of the object - make the illusion consciously imperfect.
• the buildings/city architecture could react to the information flows. I like this idea quite a lot as well - it's accurate to the metaphor and adds visual interest.

10a. Storyboards

Storyboards.

Concept: In both cases, I'm hinting at a process without literally showing it. In the first, I'm trying to show the action of a hay baler while abstracting the machine itself. In the second, I'd like to make a parallel between the architecture of a city and the architecture of the brain. Information will look like traffic flows.

Premise: What if...these are non-narrative, so concept and premise are similar here.

Color plate:

9. Project 2, progress update 5

Continued working on glass, debris, and UV. Tweaked sun-and-sky a bit. The glass is being a giant pain; in order to get shards that follow the curvature of the girders, I have to split them by hand, sculpt them, re-topo them, and then vert-jockey them into place. I have a few ideas for a better workflow, but for now I know that works...it just takes forever.

Here's my progress shot:

Project 2, progress update 4

From the list:

• UV mapped and painted the large  HVAC pipe
• Fought with Mudbox and crashing problems :/
• UV mapped the floor
• Refined the glass breaking
• Picked a camera position
• Organized my scene file into groups and layers
• Imported the toy
• Switched to Sun-and-Sky, which is what I'm hoping to use for the final. Started refining light settings.

The floor texture is strictly temporary, but I wanted something for some contrast/perspective in my test render. The only object that's actually textured so far is the curved HVAC pipe in the right middleground.

I suspect I'm going to have to re-do the UV mapping on my toy, since I did the UVs originally thinking I was going to have a normal standing-running kind of character. So the UV seams are on the bottom, and unfortunately, I think that's the part I want to have facing the camera.

Here's the progress render:

Project 2 progress update 3

Spent pretty much the whole day in the studio. From the list:

• Finished destroying the base
• Cleaned up the base geometry so I only have what's needed in the scene
• Created lots of debris...tiny debris, medium debris...
• Modeled a ground plane
• Positioned, repositioned, and positioned stuff some more

Here's a quick software render - no materials to speak of except a transparent blinn as a placeholder for the glass. I like how it's shaping up.

Project 2 progress update

Stuff I did:

• Modeled more environment pieces
• found and tested scripts for creating rocks and for scattering them
• started destroying the base
• found more Mars references

I had originally assumed I'd use a backplate for the Mars part of the image, but I'd really like to try a time-lapse effect here. For that to work, the shadows on the rocks in the background are going to have to move, which means they need be included. I figured that if I could find a rock-generator and a scatter script, that would just about as fast as cutting out dozens of rocks in 2d and putting them on image planes. Plus, if the rocks have 3d geometry, I won't have to deal with any shadow/transparency issues that might arise with 2d plane solution.

The scripts seem to work well. It will take some time to generate the rocks I need and distribute them, but that's the way it works sometimes.

Here's a quick sun-and-sky render. Obviously I haven't finished destroying the base yet, and I haven't even broken the glass wall. And I need lots more smaller debris. My approach there I think will be to create a bunch of little shards and then use dynamics to let them fall on my larger pieces that are already in place.

8. Project 2 Design and Logline

Logline:

In an abandoned Martian base, a child's toy is slowly being covered by sand.

I've already posted my character, and I'm still in the process of modeling my environment.

Moving along the to-do list:

• Collected pipe/HVAC references

Project 2 progress/research

I've made a master to-do list, which I put into Evernote (best note app ever). From that list, I've:
collected references for

• the toy texture
• the pipes/industrial parts of the base
• the big windows
• the airlock door (note: I may not need to do this feature. I'm not sure it adds to the implied narrative. It would be fun, but that's probably not a good enough reason to include it.)

I also finished the UV map for the toy and started sculpting a normal map and painting it. I found a neat stitch stencil for Mudbox that I think will work well on the normal map, and I started painting the diffuse map in Mudbox. I suspect the toy will end up being a mixture of Mudbox and Photoshop work, since lining up and distorting the bump map correctly for the cloth seems easier for me to do in Photoshop. Or possibly I'll use a procedural, but since I have multiple materials in this mesh, that may not be the best approach.

I've also started some lighting experiments using an unexposed Mental Ray feature called Environment Lighting Mode that I found at Elemental Ray (here). Very cool - in my tests, it's really fast for IBL, and if there's sufficient complexity of surface textures, the noise fades very nicely. That means that I can use FG like it's supposed to be used, just to smooth out the render and add that little bit of extra realism, and hopefully this will keep my render times in the not-ridiculous range. (Note: see also djx at http://www.djx.com.au/blog/ for great Mental Ray content.)

I'm using some HDRI images from http://www.hdri-hub.com for testing. My lighting test renders are really basic and not that interesting, so I'm not posting any of those. The blog post I linked to above is a great resource, though.

7. Final character design & environment concept sketch

I'm going a slightly way on this project - since my primary interest is rendering and environments, I'm going to use my character as a prop and animate an environmental factor - in this case, dust collecting around the character. The character will be textured as a toy.

First, here's my finished character design:

Here's my environment concept sketch - just blocking out basic lighting and a touch of color at this point.

6. Post-crit character animation

Room for improvement:

• There's still a lot of grain in my motion blur, and I'm not getting the best reflections on the legs. But I'm not unhappy with it.

6. An idea from my sketchbook

A period/urban environment sketch. 

5. Rendered Animation

Room for improvement:

• Gotta add some motion blur and reframe Camera 3.

4. Rendered character

My 'final' rendered model with texture. Liked the fur. It's pretty smooth when you use the software renderer.

Room for improvement:

• Some metal/damage/interface detail around the leg sockets would be nice
• I don't love the head plastic texture - I was going for the old beige computer case look, but since the head is the only part with that material, it might look odd
• The wings aren't nearly as subtle as I'd like. They're transparent, and they have a nice rainbow reflection at the right angle....but the veins seem fuzzy to me.

4. A sketch from my sketchbook

I've got a lot of environments I'd like to do.

Finished Model

 A quick render of the finished wasp medical drone model. Looking forward to rigging and texturing.

2. Finished Character Design

Based on feedback from our group critique, I refined the syringe/stinger area of the wasp in a sketch.

1. Character Design

Process

All three of my characters come from a common general concept - I wanted to mash up cyberpunk and horror tropes.

I started by brainstorming lists of creatures and mechanical parts in my class journal. I then played around with combining elements from the lists, writing down interesting combinations. From there, I did a little prelimenary sketching, just doodling from a few references.

When I had refined my concept a little, I located better references, and sketched and refined until I had a drawing of each concept creature. I used tracing paper to refine the sketches, transferred the sketch to my journal, and then inked each sketch.

Concept A. Wasp Medical/Torture Drone

Wasps are scary. Hypodermic needles are scary. That torture drone in Star Wars is scary. What if they all had a baby and it was flying at your face?

This may sting a little.

In the world my concept creatures live in, someone has found it useful to make insect drones to deliver medical payloads. And to keep things interesting, this person has made a drone from wasp, possibly just because they can. It's that kind of world. This wasp drone also has a scalpel leg and a tiny bonesaw leg, just in case that sort of thing would come in handy.

Room for improvement

• I would like to amp up the drone-ness of this thing. A camera eye might be cool.
• The legs or other parts could be more robotic - I don't know if this is really 50% mechanical right now.

Concept B. The Visible Grubworm

Veterinary teaching hospitals in agricultural areas have cows that are used to study digestion. They have a window into their gut, a round plexiglass window just planted right in their side. It's kind of like a laundromat for cellulose digestion. I know you think I'm making this up, but it's totally true.

The dude that made the Medical Drone Wasp knows about those cows. He's read about them. He thinks they're awesome. He doesn't have any cows around, though. (Can't have livestock in a dystopian nightmare world.) So he takes the next best thing - a grub, natch - and does something similar. He replaces about half the grub's outer shell with clear glass tubes, including the interesting bits at the back end where things will get metaphysical during metamorphosis. 

I keep wondering if they also taste like shrimp.

Room for Improvement

• There are interesting things to be done with the windows that don't have to look like intestines
• The legs and head could be mechanical, or there could be a window into the brain (might be very small, though)

Concept C. Hydraulifrog

The guy builds these things, and he works up an appetite. It rained the night before, so...frog legs. But there's no need to kill the frog, not when the guy's got a set of miniature hydraulics lying around.

He will have his revenge.

Room for Improvement

• I should work out how exactly the hydraulic components are attached to the frog's body.
• A camera eye would go pretty well here, too.
• Robotic front legs would mean no feet/toe rigging. That's pretty much a must.