Blarbus

Car and Head

 
 
Here's just a quick update on some CG models I've made using Lightwave 3D.  Both are works in progress.  I've got a lot of 3D work on my plate right now, so you'll probably be seeing many more updates like this throughout the spring and summer, especially as I start work in earnest on Nova Roma effects.

All Things That Are Underneath The Sun And The Sky Dome

This is a fake trailer I put together of an actual short film that Max Silver made during this last term at Carleton.  Why make a fake trailer?  Well, you might notice that every shot in the video is an effects shot.  Basically, I just picked out all of the effects and animations that I had made for Max's film, slapped them together and turned it in as my final project for Advanced Editing Techniques.  Since the requirement was that it be in the form of a movie trailer, I added a few basic titles and a ridiculous voice over.

Don't worry, it's not supposed to make any sense at all (although that doesn't mean that those of you are theoretically inclined can't analyze it and reach unintentional conclusions).

Animated crows and Suns from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

The big personal achievement here is the scene with the talking crows.  It's the first bit of extended character animation that I've ever done in either medium, and it's certainly the first in which I've had to lip synch the characters to pre-recorded dialogue.  Lots of time went into that shot.  It took about a solid day's work to model each crow, another to rig it, and yet another animate it.  With two crows, that came to a total of six days in the ole' Scoville media lab for forty seconds worth of footage (I will add, however, that were I to have done this with traditional cel animation, it would have easily taken double that time).

Needless to say, it proved to be a tremendous learning experience, and I'm now confident that I can produce effects and animations that contain articulated, sympathetic characters who can talk and interact with each other in a meaningful way.  Monsters, aliens, animated short films-- they're all possible now.

The Night Raid

I decided to try and make a complete scene, seeing as how I've been mostly fooling around with an animation here and a modeling test there.  Since I already had a spitfire and half of a soldier modeled, I decided to make a sort of WWII anti-aircraft scene.  You'll probably notice that the grass does not render any differently depending on how far away from the camera it is.  I don't know why this happens.  At this point, I just tilt my head, smile painfully at Blender's bizarre user interface and cry silently as I go and move on to the lighting.

I lied about the whole thing being 3D.  The background's a photo.  What can I say?  I'm starting to realize that the "whatever works" rule really is the most important of them all.

By the way, the image is sized at a generous 1680x1050, so if you've been looking for that new sexy wallpaper, now's your lucky day. (EDIT:  you might have to right click on the image and save it to get the full size.  Typepad's resizing the pictures strangely as of late.)

FULL RESOLUTION: Download nightraidweb.jpg (274.8K)

 

Watch The Skies

The next few effects shots started as an impulse to model a Supermarine Spitfire.  Once I had the model, I figured I might as well texture it, and once it was textured, I figured I might as well do a few shots.  In this first one, I created the background landscape using a free landscape generator called terragen and animated a slow sideways movement at a high altitude.  I tried to make an illusion of the spitfire flying with the camera by animating a few subtle up and down, side to side movements.  It's a little jerky, but I think it gets the job done.  The lens flare and color correction I added in After Effects helped to unify the two plates and cover up the strange matte painting I put into the horizon.

Spitfire Flying High from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

And I had to have it strafe something, because... it's a spitfire.  So this next shot I had it attack a guy on the Carleton Campus.  This was probably the most complicated shot I've ever done, with a total of 31 2D layers and 10 3D layers.  The reason for so many layers was that I wanted to put in the stock footage explosions in between each pair of 3D particle explosions that were meant to look like kicked up earth.

Spitfire Strafe from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Sorry for all of the technical jargon and effects tests lately.  After the next batch that's coming up, I promise I'll go make a short for you.

Carleton's Moving Castle

I was walking down a path on the Carleton campus today when suddenly I got a glimpse of one of the new dorms they've been working on these past couple of months.  I must say, they've really made a lot of progress.  I could've sworn that they were setting the foundations just yesterday.  That's modern technology for ya.

From what I could see, it didn't very much resemble the artist's rendition that they've got pinned up at the street-side fence of the construction site.  Maybe this is just some sort of elaborate scaffolding.
 

More disturbing was the feeling I got that the building wasn't moving properly with the rest of the world--almost as if it were jiggling.  The soldiers on the roof didn't seem to mind.  Then again they're probably too busy wondering why they look and walk like crippled football players.

Well, at least Carleton has soldiers now.  I was really starting to worry about the saber-rattling and illegitimate succession going down in Faribault.

And I could have sworn... was that a shmee on that flag?  No, I must be seeing things.  Too many roast beef sandwiches, you know.

Here, I managed to shoot some video of it.

CG Blender Castle Test from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Possibilities Expand

Well folks, after more than three years of trudging through the unforgiving depths of 3D graphics,  I finally feel as though I've got a hold of the basics.  It feels good.  My character animation ambitions reorganized and took another go at bringing down the rigging barrier after hearing the sweet tales of victory on the modeling front.  They were few, but they were a happy few; and when the smoke had cleared, and the field was slick with the blood of countless shoddy internet tutorials,  a dog came hobbling out on its hind legs.

Zombie Dog from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo

Previously, when I was doing that little thing with the green man waking up, I was using an animation technique called forward kinematics.  FK animation basically consists of rotating each individual bone on a skeleton to generate all of the movement.  Not only is it extremely tedious, it also produces completely unrealistic animations, even in the hands of masters.  Inverse kinematics, on the other hand, simplifies the process my making the armature act more like a puppet.  Instead of moving around tens of hundreds of individual bones, you simply grab the guy's hand and pull it around until it's in the right spot.  The body will react realistically to make your movement possible.

However, while IK is extremely handy to animate with, it's a far more complex skeleton system to set up.  You are, after all, creating the physical instructions for how your skeleton would behave in the real world.  Even with all this junk going on in my dog, it's a fairly simple set up as far as skeletons go.  Most will contain a series of restraints that dictate which direction joints bend, how far they bend, whether or not they can rotate and, if so, which axis they're allowed to rotate on, etc.

Simply put, this means I now know how to populate my movies with CG monsters, creatures, helicopters, castles, spaceships, planets, aliens,  arrows, boats, or any other goody I can think of.

That doesn't mean to say it makes the process any easier.  Hollywood doesn't pay visual effects companies millions of dollars for nothing.  All of this stuff takes an ungodly amount of time, talent and tedious labor.

But the end product is so tangibly satisfying and sweet that instead of complaining about how much a given sequence sucked to make, you can't help but start thinking about what you're going to make next.

Obese Monster

Huge breakthrough.  I was about at my wits end with this godforsaken software yesterday when I happened to come across an online modeling tutorial that caught my attention.  Up until that point, I had been trying to mold figures and shapes out of a single cube, by way of extruding and manipulating each individual vertex.  The tutorial I found introduced a completely new style--one that is sooo much easier to use.

Instead of molding shapes out of my cubes, as I had been doing, it treats the desired finished product as sort of an invisible mesh that you simply cover, piece by piece, with four-vertex planes.  It's like draping paper mache over something that you haven't even made yet, and then just filling in the blanks.  This means you get to work with edges of shapes instead of vertices, which are simply too fine a tool to be used in the broad nature of rough sculpting.

The other huge technique that I picked up is the practice of "Mirroring" your mesh.  The premise is relatively simple; when you're modeling a symmetrical object, such as a person or a car, you sculpt only half of the object, and the program automatically recreates an identical operation on the opposite side.  Essentially, you just have to sculpt half a person to make a whole person.  Of course, you can add in details later, like an extra leg growing out of the right side of someone's head.

So here's the head of my obese monster.  Mixed in is a wire pass to give you a better look at the geometry that's involved.  I'm particularly fond of that roll of fat at the back of his head.  You could really squeeze that thing and hang on.

Obese Monster from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Galloping Blarbus

Here's another animation test I did with Blender.  My goal was to try to find out how to make 3D text using bezier curves.  It's a rather dull piece of work, but I'm going to continue making simpler little experiments like this to try to get a hold of the basics.  Going for spaceships and character animation right off the bat might have gotten me interested in 3D animation, but I still have no idea what I'm doing.  In the past, this push-buttons-until-you-get-what-you-want technique served me pretty well, but now when I try doing it in Blender, I end up moaning, crying, and clawing at the walls.  Not ALL of Rome was built in a day.

What was originally meant to be a gallumph towards the text has unfortunately regressed into a gallop.  My apologies.

Blarbus Gallop from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

It's Alive!

    If you've noticed a lull in activity lately, it's because I've been stuck in a rather rude rut over the past couple of weeks trying to figure out how to rig and animate deformable meshes in Blender.  In other words: how to make a 3D stick man move.  Picture a boneless, flabby body laid out on the floor, and then imagine trying to build a tailor made skeleton from scratch to fit it.  Now imagine that your skeleton and flabby body don't naturally obey the laws of physics, so you have to reinvent how each bit interacts with the other--  how far the knees can bend, where the center of gravity is, how much influence one bone has over the other, etc.  That's 3D rigging in a nutshell.  The fun part comes after the mesh is properly rigged to the armature.  3D animation is an animator's dream, because the process is basically no different than posing a doll in various ways throughout the duration of a sequence and then watching the computer create motion by automatically filling all the bits that come in between.  All that's needed from the animator are the key frames.

    So here's my green guy waking up and discovering this strange new 3rd dimension.  He has some shading problems with his arms, which he's a little embarrassed to talk about, but he promised me he'd fix them as soon as is stickly possible.

Blender Stick Man from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Space Ship Test

A CG proof-of-concept for the same upcoming film.  At the moment, the mesh is still low poly and has no textures.

Programs used included Blender for modeling and animating, Voodoo for 2D tracking, and After Effects for compositing and engine flares.

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