January 2005 Archives

In 1924, the Hollywood sign had a companion, a giant red neon sign that dominated the hilly terrain above Hollywood Boulevard's Chinese Theater. In its day it was more noticeable than the "Hollywoodland" sign. Whatever happened to it?

If you hike up the hillside near my home known as Runyon Canyon, you can see the over 80-year-old remains of the sign, rusting on the hillside to this very day.

People hike past this ancient twisted metal every day without realizing what a piece of Hollywood History it is.

If you'd like more information about The Outpost Sign, there's a Visiting with Huell Howser episode (#1029) devoted to its recent "rediscovery" by the residents of Outpost Estates.

I was experimenting with techniques for creating an organic, varied line weight in vector apps like Adobe Illustrator and came up with this approach.

Cartoony illustration is not really my thing, but I thought it might be a good choice for a poster for local Jazz Festival. To get the varied line weight, I drew each line twice -- first forwards, then immediately backwards -- loosely retracing the first line. I let Illustrator fill the resulting closed loop. No stroke was used -- only fill. I was sort of going for a style like that in the old Anna Nicole Smith tv show main titles.

UPDATE 4/26/2009

This is an old blog entry from when I didn't understand Adobe Illustrator as well. Now I would use a Wacom tablet and create a 'calligraphy brush' with a round tip whose size is proportional to pen pressure, as I did in this reproduction of The Flammarion Woodcut

That style of working has a nice action, somewhat like a fine point brush dipped in India ink, or a nib, or even a Rapidograph, depending on how you set it up (haven't used one of those in a while)

UPDATE 5/23/2009

The new Blob Brush in Illustrator CS4 looks good. More on that when I finally upgrade. Until then...

UPDATE 5/30/2009

madpencil [myspace] [conceptart.org] is putting some great tutorials together on how to setup and use the calligraphy brushes in Adobe Illustrator in order to ink with presure sensitive variation in line weight:

Adobe Illustrator Inking part 1 [brush set-up]
Adobe Illustrator Inking Part 2 [inking]
more to come from him...

To sample a Maya file texture node at a certain pixel, you need to feed the file node the correct U and V values.

In this example, the middle pixel of the texture map, at the place where U = V = 0.5, is a rusty brown color.

I've created a ramp with the color (0.5, 0.5, 0.5) and mapped the R and G output values of the ramp to the U and V input values of the file texture node. The result? The very brown color you'd expect.

Let's try something a little more interesting...

Continuous noise in red and green, when applied to the offsetU and offsetV attributes of a tiled UV map, can create the impression of "digital ripple glass."

Download continuousNoise.mb Maya 6 scene file

Discrete noise, when similarly applied, can shake a repeating array of UV-mapped textures seemingly "out of its grid," adding variety to your 3D CG work.

Download discreetNoiseUV_8.mb Maya 6 scene file

Santa brought me an a limited edition (2000) resin sculpture of an ecorche figure originally carved in clay by visual effects artist and sculptor Andrew Cawrse, and offered for sale by Freedom of Teach

I have Version 1 (the least expensive one) and in spite of how it may look under this lurid un-white balanced incandescent lighting, the figure is actually very good.

If you're learning anatomy, and aren't quite "getting it" from books alone, this figure is a great additional resource.