VIST 205 Graphic Design Assignment 02

Assignment 02:

Selected one image from my previous six photos as my original:

Used Threshold filter. The first image is more simple and provides more contrast; the second image used more black in the threshold filter, adding detail:

Took second image from previous step and cropped out three smaller images:

And finally, used Posterize filter on the second image from the previous step, two color and two greyscale. I experimented with different levels of Posterization. Using fewer levels made the images more appealing:

VIST 205 Graphic Design: Assignment 01

Assignment 01

Six photos, two of each category: animal, plant, industrial/mechanical:

I Drew Robots Then I Built A Robot

My final project for VIST 106 at A&M was pretty cool. We built human-sized sculptures which were grouped into themes like jungle, aquatic, sci-fi, etc. I got asked to join the "industrial/mechanical" group and about 5 seconds into the brainstorming we decided we wanted to sculpt a team of giant fighting steampunk robots.

Drawing inspiration from Big O, Power Rangers, and others, we formed our team with specific combat roles in mind. Think your typical D&D campaign. We had a heavy brute robot, a sniper robot, a rogue/assassin robot, an engineer robot, and even a mage robot. My robot was the valiant leader of the group.

Here are some pages from my sketchbook showing my creative process. Since I draw robots all the time this wasn't really work.

Above, I started with a rough silhouette to figure out the pose. The leader needs to show confidence, courage, etc. Though it didn't appear in the final product, I liked the wide legged stance. Very Kurosawa. The big sword with the saw blade stuck til the very end.

 Above I was working out design details, trying to figure out the steampunk look.

 Eventually I inked out this concept: adding gears was cool, and it was fun to explore the possibilities of the heroic sword. Unfortunately it all just looked menacing and cruel when I was done.

Once I had a general concept of what I wanted, I simplified the body and proportions until I had something I could actually build with my limited time and college-kid budget. I guess it became less evil-looking on its own, perhaps due to the pose:

 

...And there's the final project. I'll post more of the actual construction process later. Looking back, it's fun to see my process of working out a design for the robot.

Pixar's Lightspeed Brings New Light to Monsters University

No, literally. Pixar's lighting/rendering systems were completely redone for their new film Monsters University. In my correspondence with Chris Horne, who studied Visualization at A&M and works Pixar's Lightspeed, he mentioned his work on MU:

I was on MU from May 2012 until April 2013 -- so yeah I worked on it for a *very very* long time as far as the lighting department is concerned. When I joined it was only leads + 1 shot lighter and me. It was a blast to work on because we completely rewrote our lighting system to be a raytraced/GI system -- and since I was on early I got to test the boundaries of it and figure out how we should light the show from a technical aspect. We really explored the lighting system - and I feel like a significant amount of work we did back then is going to live on in the way we light shows with this new technology. It was really unnerving and weird though to run into something new, ask some really smart people what the hell is going on, and hear back "We have no idea. It's all new. Good luck!" P.S. - the film is fully done and in the can as of this week (including credits, stereo, and all their international permutations, and the audio related to all of those). Creative production here finished maybe the 2nd week of April?

I was surprised that Pixar was just now using all ray tracing in their system. A few emails later I asked him if audiences will notice the difference in lighting:

There's a huge difference in MU compared to past films. Even people that don't know anything about our tech change going in walk out going "HOLY CRAP!"....but they have a hard time putting their finger on why it looks so awesome. Personally I see a huge difference between MU and Brave - there's more shaping, more little splashes of color, and everything feels a little bit more dynamic and pulled together. This is particularly evident in the toxic urchins sequence - where every single urchin is a light source. We couldn't have done that sequence in the past with our old technology. 

Historically we don't use raytracing. It wasn't until Cars that we actually supported raytracing (and even then it was a haphazard and mostly broken support). We really only used it for highly reflective smooth curved surfaces that absolutely needed to be truly reflected and not faked. We fake almost everything - mirrors, wet surfaces, eyes, shiny props like belt buckles/spoons/swords/etc. We obviously can't get away with that on Lightning McQueen - so we would cache out the scene into a brickmap (essentially a kd-tree with shading attached to the voxels) and fire rays against that (so even then....we aren't doing traditional raytracing). For shadows - we would sometimes use raytracing when we needed particularly awesome looking contact shadows. The same shadow would ramp off to using a shadowmap to help lower the expense. 

So our Director of Photography went to a studio that is so clearly raytracing averse and essentially said "We're raytracing everything. True reflection and refraction in the eyes reflecting actual SCENE GEOMETRY and not a brickmap. Yep - we're refracting through the cornea onto the sclera and iris. Oh and all your shadows are raytraced now - no more shadowmaps. Nope. None. Yes I know you like them but no. And global illumination! We're doing that now. By default. Everywhere. Oh and I almost forgot - all reflective surfaces will do real true reflection....and deciding what's reflective will be a shading decision instead of a lighting one. Yes you heard me right. Now get to work" It was extremely controversial, but it made a huge impact and really was one of the true success stories of the film. And now I'm working on that.

If you're advanced enough to understand the tech jargon above, good for you. For the uninitiated, ray tracing is a relatively advanced CG lighting technique which virtually simulates actual rays of light and all their interactions with the objects in your environment. In technical terms, Global Illumination lighting is like super hard core ray tracing. Both techniques use up a lot of memory. A more comprehensive explanation can be found here.

I was surprised that ray tracing in Pixar was historically a clunky, haphazard process. I always thought of it as this smooth, polished machine like something you would see at an Apple store. It's cool to see Pixar making history and advancing themselves over the past couple of years, I mean you can already see the difference in the images above.

Follow Chris on Twitter: @distastee
And follow me on Twitter: @masonsmtx

From the Sketchbook #3: Chinese Zodiac Part I

I've been wanting to draw animals recently and I decided to draw from the Chinese zodiac. I didn't think about the attributes of each zodiac sign, I just thought about what I thought the animal might look like if they were expected to put on clothes and act like people. I ended up with some really fun drawings that are nothing I've really done before.

Interview with BYU's Cynthia Hogan

A year ago I took an intro 2D Animation class at BYU with Cynthia Hogan, who animated for Disney and also animated for Warner Bros' Quest for Camelot (1998). I remember her saying she did character animation for Disney's Aladdin and I thought I'd get a hold of her again since we've just worked on an episode for Aladdin on the podcast. She was really nice and we had ourselves a little interview. Most of this stuff is basic information, but she had some cool experiences and behind-the-scenes info to share. Enjoy!

Background

CH: I attended California Institute of the Arts for three years. In my third year, Glen Keane came and taught my animation class. I learned more in that year from him than I did the rest of the time I spent at CalArts. I'd say that I can attribute my getting my first job at Disney to the miracle of having him as a teacher that year. I started in clean-up on The Little Mermaid and worked my way up to animator on Beauty and the Beast.

Disney's Aladdin

MS: Our latest podcast episode focuses on Disney's Aladdin (1992). Which characters/scenes did you animate in Aladdin?

CH: Back in those days animators were split into teams that would work on a certain character. The amount of footage a character had in a film would determine the size of the team. On Aladdin, I was assigned to the Sultan team working under Dave Pruiksma. He was a great animator and I learned a lot from him. The scenes I was given to animate start from the point Jafar comes in announcing that he's found a solution to the problem with the sultans daughter and end with the Sultan repeating "Desperate times…". There's a couple other scenes that I animated (When the sultan greets Prince Ali, and when the sultan starts to float away at the end). At that point I had only been a full-fledged animator for about a year.

MS: How did the different teams work together for scenes that involved multiple characters?

CH: Mostly we had a model sheet and then we would talk personally with our head animator about each scene as we were planning the animation and show it to him throughout the animation process. Sometimes the head animator would go over a drawing or two to help the animator get the right expression or the right feel in the action of the character. Then we'd take it to the director, get his notes and once he was able to approve it, the scene would go to clean up and the animator would move on to the next scene.

MS: What kind of deadlines did you have for the scenes you animated?

CH: At Disney, at that time, we were to get out 5 feet of animation a week. Some were able to do that much, others couldn't, some got out a lot more footage than that.

MS: I've read the character design/animation standards for shows such as Kind of the Hill and the guidelines for animating characters' motions/expressions are very specific. What guidelines did your team have to follow for the sultan?

CH: There was usually a head animator (or lead) who would work with the director to set the model of the character and figure out any specific character traits that might affect the characters movement. Then that lead would work with their team. We would talk about the characters personality, idiosyncrasies (the sultan LOVED small things like toys and things that could be hidden away easily), the actions the character might use or the things he definitely wouldn't do. We would also talk about the do's and don'ts of drawing the character in order to have some consistency in how the character looked.

MS: How did the increased use of CGI affect the deadlines/expectations for hand-drawn scenes?

CH: CGI really didn't affect the deadlines of animation especially back then. It may have added some time to the overall process of filmmaking but it didn't mean we had to get the scene done faster on the 2D end. Yes, the process of working 2D and 3D together was a bit of work, sometimes requiring printouts of 3D backgrounds to be sure that the character would register correctly in the scene. When it comes to 3D props: those were generally animated to fit the 2D animation … It was just easier that way.

MS: I saw how in Aladdin the characters' designs could be broken down to basic geometric shapes. Can you tell me more about that type of character design?

CH: The process of breaking characters down to simple shapes goes back as far as Mickey and perhaps beyond. Yes, some shapes work better for expressing certain character types (triangle shapes have a tendency to work for evil characters for instance) The thing that was our guide on Aladdin was an artist named Al Hirschfeld. If you look at his work, you'll see how it influenced our drawing and our animation. So Basic geometric shapes were and still are very important in character design to achieve appeal and unity in the look of the film. Also, for the animator, breaking the character down to its simplest shapes makes it much easier to move around. (End)

So the Sultan wasn't modeled after Richard Attenborough.

Don't forget to check out the Rotoscopers' latest episode: Aladdin - Take off your Clothes?

The skin of an Arabian. The body of a European. The voice of a white guy.

Lego Mech in Maya 2012

These renders have been finished for a while; I was bored so I thought I'd post them.

Programs used:
Autodesk Maya 2012, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8, the Internet

Robot model: 104933 polygon faces.

The other minifigure with the mechanical grabber arm is from my very first assignment from INDES 150 at BYU. 587922 polygon faces in the entire scene.

Meet the minifigures! All colors are taken from the official Lego color palette and I tried to model everything after actual legos. For example, the pilot's helmet is the same shape as the lego Star Wars X-Wing fighter pilot's helmet. I used some lattice deformers on the minifigures' limbs. I've noticed the Lego game/cartoon animations use the same effect.

Wouldn't mind working for Lego's animation dept. Some of the videos on their Minifigures Series web site are really lame.