Alias unveiled Maya 7 before a large and enthusiastic crowd at its SIGGRAPH '05 Alias Users Group meeting in Los Angeles tonight. Maya 7 looks to be a great update of the popular product.
This is by no means a comprehensive review, but here are a few new features that caught my eye:
Siggraph 2005 begins today.
I'm inspired to dig out a column I wrote about SIGGRAPH '97 for the industry trade paper, Backstage/SHOOT.
This is how I saw it then:
With a little tinkering and the right movie as input, you can make a displacement node perform UV mapping within Shake, putting an ordinary still image into motion.
Draw something from reference. Let's say it's a skull.
Hide the reference and draw it again from memory. Focus on essential planes and basic forms, not little surface details.
You will be imediately confronted by what you don't know about it. Is the mastoid process above or below the teeth? What is directly above the last molars? Things like that.
Write your questions down.
When you use terms like "above" and "below", make sure your questions are phrased in terms of the imaginary axes of the object itself -- not the axes of the paper. If you ask questions like "In this particular view, is the base of the nose above the base of the back of the skull?" you will be memorizing a drawing -- not an object's form. The idea is not to memorize a series of drawings, but to learn the object itself, so that later you can use what you learned to draw it from any angle. In the photo above, the blue lines are not a fixed grid in paper-space; they are the edges of cubes. When you turn the skull off axis, mentally turn the cubes off axis as well.
Draw it again from reference. Answer your questions.
Repeat the process with and without reference until you have fewer and fewer questions and can draw the object well without reference.
Move on to another view of it and repeat the process until you don't need reference for any view at all.
You may be surprised at how fast you can develop a "conception of form" for a complex object.
The feedback question / answer loop is better than staring at an object and trying to memorize it through sheer force of will.
The nineteenth century French artist Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran was a pioneering proponent of this general sort of learning method.
When rendering a sphere, people often put the highlight in the wrong place. The highlight does not belong "at noon."
It is true that a diffuse sphere, like the Moon, will be brightest where the sun shines most directly -- where it is "noon."
However, a sphere with any "shinyness" to it will have its hot spot not at "noon," but in the place on its surface midway between the angle to the light, and the angle to the viewer.
Make some waves with this custom Maya shader which uses a MEL script to generate concentric spherical waves of animated light and darkness. It's a 3D texture, so it will flow over any objects you create. The waves emanate from a Maya locator.
I like an approach to drawing from the imagination that uses anatomical knowledge to "muscle up" a simplified skeleton. Robert Beverly Hale seems to think like that as he draws. So apparently does Glenn Vilppu.
Doug Jamieson takes this way of thinking and shares more of the details. In Draw From Your Head, he presents the system he taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
People of all skill levels will benefit from this book. It's currently out of print, and can be hard to find and expensive to buy. I've heard prices for it ranging from $20 (for one lucky individual) to hundreds of dollars. I got mine recently for $50, and I'm pleased with my purchase.
I've always had a bit of a soft spot in my (head?) for comics, so I thought I'd check out the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con last weekend.
Parking in San Diego was scarce that weekend. I took a hint from the Comic-Con web site, parked in a distant lot (still paid $14 for the day), and walked to the covention itself.
I registered on-site and although the line looked like it could represent a 2-3 hour wait, it moved so fast that I was inside in more like 30 minutes.
I only budgeted about four hours for my entire visit, so I skipped the many presentations and classes and confined myself to the exhibition floor.
I think on some level I imagine myself making a comic of my own some time down the line. I found myself interested not so much in the slick presentations of major corporations, but in the stories of the smaller imprints.
Here's a sampling of some of the people I met:
UPDATE 6/12/2009
Actually, why not just use paths in Photoshop? They allow you to draw them outside the canvas area as needed. Seems like the best solution of all, but read on for other ideas...
UPDATE 6/11/2009
Bert Monroy mentioned in Deke McClelland's Martini Hour 017 that he does all his perspective work in Adobe Illustrator on the infinite workspace that extends well beyond the document. Great idea!
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You know your lines need to converge to a common vanishing point. But what do you do when that vanishing point is so far along the horizon that it is not within your composition?
Here's a guide I put together on how to plan a perspective grid in Photoshop when the vanishing points are far off the page.
On October 16, 1989, Bernice Kanner wrote in her regular New York Magazine column, On Madison Avenue, about how Nike and Reebok were duking it out for market share.
The real story, I think, is that for the first time a professional broadcast television commercial was about to be produced solely on consumer level computer hardware and software.
In April 1993 I designed a cover for American Cinematographer magazine. The idea behind the image was to create a metaphor for digital filmmaking by using technology to blur the boundaries between the sound stage and exterior location photography. The cover story it illustrated was one of the first articles to introduce producers, directors and cinematographers to the then new concept of digital postproduction itself.
You might find it interesting to note the use of the term "digital domain" on the cover. That turn of phrase was in everyday use at that time in post production as a way of explaining new movie technology to clients. "Once we get your film into the digital domain..." was a common way to begin a sentence in the industry. When James Cameron (cleverly) named his company Digital Domain later in '93, everyone else by my recollection made a conscious effort to stop using the phrase for fear of giving free advertising to the competition. Now you never hear it except in reference to the actual company.
When this April 1993 issue of American Cinematographer hit the stands, Francis Ford Coppola called me to find out more about the creation of this image.
UPDATE 7/30/05
I feel as though I have just come from a real life version of this stage I envisioned back in 1993.
I attended the Directors Guild of America's DGA DIGITAL DAY 2005 today, a great program which culminated in a wrap party on the new "Smartstage" at Occidental Studios in Hollywood. A high-definition camera on a motion-captured boom arm photographs foreground figures on a 90' x 60' wraparound bluescreen stage. Fast computers generate match-moved 3D backgrounds and composite the two in real time.
Pretty nifty.
UPDATE 8/3/05
Some coverage of the DGA Digital Day event:
