This effect may remind you of Quicktime VR, or the Black Eyed Peas video for 'Lets Get it Started' (which makes me think Google Street View: The Movie)
I've written about this before, but never made a video, or gathered everything into one place.
More after the jump...
click to enlarge
Liquid metal morphing and dinosaurs for Philips CD-i discs in this 3 spot campaign. What more could you want?
For Disney's 'The Living Seas' (1985) at Epcot Center we needed to matchmove a computer animated undersea city to a live action sea floor. (Everybody loved the green, glowing wireframe back then)
In the days before programs like Boujou, much effort was put into using CG data to drive motion control systems, and vice versa. (Another notable example of this technique, also from 1985, can be seen in the video to the Mick Jagger song, Hard Woman.
More portfolio material (this was my first big job) after the jump...
I needed a clean, high resolution version of the public domain image known as the Flammarion Woodcut, so over the course of several days this week I completely redrew it in Adobe Illustrator. I am returning this particular version under CC license. (a reasonably close comparison will show that virtually every line in the image is different from the original) So if you like it, you'll find a high resolution version of it by clicking on it and going to the flickr page. Just keep in mind it's not the original version.
Sort of clockpunk, I think.:D
Here is a grayscale fractal Mandelbrot set image generated by Alex Calothis (he offers his generator for download)
Mandelbrot sets are graphs that describe the rate of a certain behavior of points in the complex plane. Colors are assigned to them arbitrarily.
One common method over the years for assigning color to Mandelbrot sets resembles the functionality of the Photoshop gradient map.
Above is what happens if you use a Photshop gradient map to colorize a grayscale Mandelbrot set fractal.
UPDATE 4/27/2009
In a way, everything gets 'gradient mapped' by our brains, since nothing is actually 'colored.' Things just reflect (combinations of) wavelengths on a scale from lower to higher.
I began to wonder if their was a 'grammar' or 'template' for 'riverboat' that was separate from the specific design, much as the underlying structure of this blog is separate from the particular CSS-implemented style (I use Minimalist Brown). What would, for example, a medieval riverboat look like? I could picture it.
When I was working on this paisley design, which I tried to open the paisley idea up to include natural forms like a butterfly, I used pattern brushes I created in Adobe Illustrator that I could quickly draw and place by fitting them around bezier paths. For the patterns, themselves, I was inspired by other paisleys, and mehndi. I started to wonder if their was a grammar for 'paisley' that could be translated to other cultures.
Some other questions I wondered about...
What would happen if I applied a Renaissance or Medieval style to the James Bond template?
Can one apply an African style to the Harajuku template?
Is there such a thing as a Graphic Equalizer for Images?
...might explain the popularity with many producers (although not all of them) of the 'It's Diehard in a (blank)...' movie pitch.
UPDATE 6/4/2009
Classic 80's Hits... Interpreted for Ragtime Piano
Multiply by pure black and you will turn your image black. Screen with pure white and you will turn your image white. Obviously.
Soft Light by 100% black and 100% white and this is as far up or down asyou can push the image.
It looks a lot like what happens when you multiply the layer by itself (square it) or screen it over itself (kinda sorta like square-rooting it). I know the math is not the same between Soft Light and gamma correcting by 2 or (1/2) - but it looks pretty similar, don't you think?
At the moment, this is how I picture Soft Light acting when I want an approximate mental image.
Here is Overlay by 100% black and 100% white. This is as far as the Overlay blend mode can push an image.
It looks an awful lot like a self-multiply or a self-screen 3 layers deep. I know a gamma correction of 3 or (1/3) is not the mathematical definition of the Overlay blend mode, but it sure seems to approximate the look, no?
At least this experiment works at the black and white extremes. I haven't done enough testing to see if it falls apart significantly when the value of the channel being screened is a gray well between 0% and 100%
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A growing Blend Mode Killer App list is here.
The math, along with some pretty good interpretations of the math is here.
If you planar project or camera project the image of a planet or moon onto a sphere, you can push in and get 10 or 20 degrees of rotation out of it before you hit a seam.
In the version above I threw in some bump mapping.
This may seem simple or obvious, but it can be very effective. I used this technique for all the Moons and Earths in Independence Day (ID4) - even the oblique Earth views with dramatic cloud formations in the foreground. In a movie you don't always have to solve the general case (a full CG Earth viewable from all angles) - you just need to solve the problems actually posed by the shots and camera angles in the film.
I noticed some interesting color at the edges of the type in this shallow focus photograph. I tried digitally blurring the sharp type using Photoshop lens blur and found (no surprise) that there was no such burst of saturation the the soft transitions at the edges of the letters.
Something to keep in mind when trying to use digital lens blur as a stand-in for real lens blur.
UPDATE 6/14/2009
click for larger view
Gaussian blur makes a poor substitute for lens blur.
via How a Lens Works
Real vignette caused by a camera on the left. A fake digital vignette using a simple 'multiply by gray' recipe on the right. Note the bland color in the corners on the right.
You can, of course, mimic a real photographic vignette more effectively - but you have do more than simply drop the luminosity at the corners.
In honor of the Fangoria Convention winding up today here in LA, I was inspired to bust out a few horror-related memories kicking around in the back of my head.
First: Bernie Wrightson.
When I was a kid, we used to make occasional trips for reasons of my English professor parents usually having to do with theatrical performances or theater history library visits. When we travelled, I used to manage to drag them on brief detours to places of interest to me, like Davenports Magic Shop or Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed in London, or, in the case of Bernie Wrightson, to the NY Comic Arts Gallery at 214 Sullivan Street. (update 10/24/2009 - or was it 132 E 58th St? See the signed and numbered show catalog below -- I guess if it was, it's gone now)
I had the poster depicted above hanging in my bedroom (to my mother's delight), and the full poster advertised the opening of a Bernie Wrightson show in Manhattan, and it provided the date and the time. As luck would have it, we were to be in Manhattan then, so I persuaded her to swing by.
Disclaimer: what follows is the hazy memory of a 14-year-old that dates to 1977. It may be quite inaccurate, but this is what I recall now.
We had to climb a set of stairs. The walls may have been white. On the second floor we arrived at a smallish gallery. The walls were white. On the left, immediately at the doorway, was a desk behind a low wall, so that you could easily see the desk surface, but you couldn't see below the desk from where we stood at the entrance. A man sat at the desk. He was friendly.
The walls featured a bunch of Bernie Wrightson artwork contemporary to that time. I enjoyed looking at it.
The man behind the desk asked if we had any questions. I forget what we may have asked, but his answer went something like this (as I recall):
Bernie usually starts with a small detail. An eye, maybe. And develops his work around that, building outward. (again, this is not a real quote. This is a paraphrase of a quote, dimly remembered, and may not be accurate)
The man behind the desk went on.
I have some of my own artwork with me. Would you like to see it?
Sure, I said.
The man behind the counter brought out some posters on heavy stock. They depicted nude, pregnant women in profile wearing gas masks. I recognized it as the work of artist Jeff Jones. I was pretty amazed at the time to be meeting Jeffery Catherine Jones in person. I was also a big fan of his work.
This was around the time that Jones shared workspace in Manhattan's Chelsea district with Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Michael William Kaluta, collectively named The Studio, so it is plausible that I am remembering this correctly.
UPDATE 10/23/2009 -- it's almost Halloween
Bernie Wrightson 1977 Catalog - signed and numbered
I notice The advertising industry's Clio Awards are turning 50 this year. Time flies.
I was a Clio Awards judge back in my 20's. At that time The Clio Awards were, shall we say... not uneventful
Nice to see they bounced back. :D
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UPDATE 4/24/2009
I've been going through old hard drives and uploading to this Flickr set anything that seems worthwhile.
"You never know what you gonna get..."
Here's an animation I designed for a logo I was provided by the client. This ran at IMAX resolution at the head of the concert film All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live! (2001)
A brief demonstration of how I use the Photoshop pen tool. My main points are:
I'm finding DAZ Studio 2.3 more useful to me than Poser was. For one thing, DAZ handles the 'background reference image plane' issue better than Poser does. For another, the one character provided, Victoria, can assume all kinds of shapes - even male - with more variety and control than Poser provides. I understand there is a way to get a rigged Victoria from DAZ into Poser but I couldn't easily figure it out.
Anyhoo. To match AZ and Maya cameras and scales:..
click image to enlarge
Scale is easy. The native DAZ unit is the centimeter. Note in the image above that to make two 1-cm cubes kiss face-to-face I had to move one of them 1.00 DAZ slider units.
The translation sliders read out in centimeters. So import your .obj files into DAZ using the Maya option, or any other option that sets the scale to 100% (no change)
click image to enlarge
As with Poser, the DAZ Studio camera has an (undocumented) horizontal film aperture of 1 inch. I chose a 15mm lens crazy-close for this test, so if I were wrong, it would have shown immediately.
So all of that talk about film formats within DAZ is really just a fancy way of describing nothing more than aspect ratios. They seem to put no effort into matching those film formats to their actual film format sizes - a key ingredient in calculating accurate angles of view. Most users likely have no basis for comparison and so don't notice the difference.
click image to enlarge
In summation - to match Maya and DAZ Studio:
To match Poser to Maya, set Maya's film back to 1 inch and work in PNU's in Poser
I picked up the April, 2009 issue of Spin Magazine to pass the time on my flight back from Easter with the family. On page 37 I got a bit of a surprise: a campaign for the 60th anniversary of Onitsuka Tiger designed by Amsterdam Worldwide featuring a visually ambiguous model of a sneaker-slash-island (the island being Japan)
The image caught my eye because I'm currently working on an ambiguous island model of my own, only mine will have a tropical 'tiki' motif, complete with a volcano and small trees rendered in Maxwell. (don't go too much by the illustration above - it's for position only, at the moment)
One thing I noticed was the decision in the sneaker print ad to frame so loosely as to reveal the edges of the painted sky backdrop. The other thing that really stood out to me was the subtle, but visible electrical cord in the ad. The volcano in my image will be internally lit and I also plan to incorporate a visible (CG) electrical cord into the composition.
In the same way that I hung my Tiki Moon on unnecessary 'wires,' or built my CG hot rod flames within the limitations of 4' x 8' sheets of virtual plywood, I like to add these misleading cues to my computer graphics.
"My philosophy is to use 3D CG to 'fly under the audience's VFX radar.' No matter how well you render a robot, the viewer will evaluate the work as VFX. If you render a painted wooden wall and some throwing knives, hopefully the viewer will evaluate the work as an image -- one with nice production value and a healthy budget for props and styling, but an image nonetheless."
-- A quote from my cgsociety.org gallery
More on multi-plane theatrical backdrops and photography.
More un CG celestial bodies on unnecessary wires: Paper Moon (game)
I had originally assumed a Fresnel lens would be too hard to make work, but I decided to give it a shot, anyway. I grabbed a cross section from wikipedia and made a surface of revolution from it.
It functioned quite similarly to the plano-convex lens - exactly as advertised.
I nudged the light source closer and farther until the beam looked fairly parallel. No calculations involved.
Here is the Maya / Maxwell file
UPDATE 1/8/2010
Here is the lens in .obj format
I had planed to model a Fresnel lens, and while searching for a good cross-section technical drawing of one I came across some interesting work from Adam Donovan from 2007 that is in many ways similar to explorations I'm making now.
I'm mainly interested in creating light modifiers for use in a Maxwell environment, so it doesn't matter to me what the lens looks like, only what kind of beam it throws.
The main advantage of a Fresnel lens is that it is thin and lightweight compared to a bulky, heavy plano-convex lens of equivalent power. [glass Nd = 1.51]
In CG I don't care about bulkiness or weight, so I opted to dispense with the Fresnel lens and use its plano-convex equivalent.
I used a portion of a sphere for a lens, and found the focal point by trial and error. A sphere doesn't have perfect focus, but a little spherical aberration is acceptable to me in a light source.
UPDATE
Changed my mind. I simulated a Fresnel lens after all.
Matte Painting Reference - Feathers and Wings...
The brightly colored front- and back-lit feathers in the rest of the flickr set were reference photos I took in order to create some test animation for the 'Glowbird' for the 3D stereo film 'Journey to the Center of the Earth.' The job ended up being awarded elsewhere.
Matte Painting Reference:
Some photos from May 2001 of a fire in Hollywood, California. The location of the fire is La Brea Avenue somewhere between Hollywood Blvd and Santa Monica Blvd.
Matte Painting Reference:
Some older images taken with a Nikon Coolpix 990 consisting of various demolition sites under sunny and overcast skies. Could be useful as reference for digital matte painting work.
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Architectural and Design Briefs Debris_DSCN0033.tif Image Submission
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I think whoever directed the Cadbury's Eyebrows TV spot featuring the song Don't Stop the Rock knows something about animation. I like the way the girl anticipates her first big head turn toward the boy with a little wind-up turn away from him.
(It's a detail all the spoof versions lack.)
When you use them as displacement maps (I used Mental Ray) you can really see the difference between 8- and 16-bit images. The 16-bit displacement maps creates a smooth surface. The 8-bit displacement map gives rise to lego-like terrace artifacts in the surface.
A lot of people say, 'I get it right in camera, so I don't need to push the images very far. Originating in 8 bits is fine for me.'
But what if you change your mind later and you need to create a key from a flesh colored arm against a not too different background. I think in that case you'll be glad to have the extra bits in between when you push one of those regions black and the other white.
(click for a closer look - note the artifacts)
(click for a closer look - smooth)
3D CG model with additional Photoshop handpainted details. More after the jump.
Powered by Coffee is a joke logo I came up with back in 2002. As I Google around, I see I was not the only one to think of it. The 'Powered by' meme seems to have been a popular one, both in gag logos and in serious ones.
I have forgotten what the original 'powered by' logo was, but I know it was for something technology-related, and looked like something you'd find at the bottom of a web site or on the back of a computer. The Powered by Coffee people for the most part seem to have drifted away from that key concept.
The coffee stain was sort of orange-y, and everyone knows the color for coffee is green, so I added purple to round out the secondary color palette.
A little needle and thread banner I designed for modestneeds.org back in 2002. I thought the 'stitch in time' idea worked pretty well. I was also enjoying playing with my scanner. I don't believe the design was used.
The needle and thread is available Creative Commons at 3k resolution at my flickr photostream.
Another idea I thought had promise based on the 'For want of a nail...' proverb. The wording in the banner is maybe a little awkward. The texture for the CG horseshoe nail was one I had developed for some tests for the steel sphere in the main titles to the movie Rollerball (2002)
I don't believe this one was ever used either.
LITE logo design.
Maxwell Render light transport and depth of field test. I like the look of it.
A reprint from my old pre-blog site to get the entry into the blog format...
Procedural Smoke Particle System Flash Actionscript Animation
Export a model from Poser to Maya using to .obj format and he seems to import very, very small. This is because Poser uses something called Poser Native Units.
According to Poser's documentation, a Poser Native Unit, or PNU, is 8.6 feet.
This means that a 6'6" man would be 6.5 / 8.6 = 0.756 PNU's tall. (six feet six inches = 6 point five feet)
When Maya imports the man, Maya doesn't know about PNU's. Maya just sees that the man is 0.756 units tall, so in Maya, which I have set to centimeters, the man comes in smaller than a sugar cube.
To match DAZ Studio to Maya, set Maya's film back to 1 inch and work in centimeters in DAZ Studio
A parabolic reflector carefully modeled with a Maxwell Render emitter placed at the calculated focus point of the parabolic reflector. As expected, a strong beam of light emerges.
In this HD youtube video I use Photoshop's 'Blend if...' function to create split tones and rich-looking sepia photographs.
You could use the same technique to de-noise an image just in the shadow areas of a photograph all under interactive preview control.
UPDATE 4/20/2009
Read the comment below, then click me
UPDATE 7/1/2009
I put this blog entry together mainly to look at the blend-if sliders - not so much to make sepia images, per se. However...
I was looking at these images tonight
The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East AfricanPhotographs 1860-1960
and thought I'd put something quick together to mimic their antique sepia photography appearance using a gradient map.
UPDATE 1/29/2010
According to Wikipedia the prohibition sign (also no symbol, circle-slash symbol, or universal no) is a circle with a diagonal line through it (running from top left to bottom right), surrounding a pictogram used to indicate something is not permitted. The No symbol is usually colored red.
Notice the definition calls for a 'pictogram,' not a word written out letter by letter. A written word defeats the whole purpose of the sign. 'Circle slash' signs are supposed to be able to communicate to an international audience across many languages.
If you are going to skip the icon, you might as well skip the red circle and diagonal slash as well, and just add the word, 'No.'
Just saying.
