wow, this is absolutely stunning. it always blows me away when people manage to do something different with a long established medium, especially when that new thing is not dependant on new technology. I’m sure this video was made easier with modern software but theres nothing in it that couldnt have been done in fleishcers time.
aside from the technical this video is so beautiful and so full of meaning for such an abstract set of images. it manages to tell so much and convey a deep sense of personal experience.
This is all the playblast I’ve done for a scene in Kernel put together in one film. this was a relatively easy fluid to do compared to some of the other I’ve been working on, the challenge with this one though is going to be getting a whole bunch of these to go of in sequence as a camera runs down a building. hopefully it’ll work out ok but theres always the possibility that there’ll be unforeseen issues that i have thought of or encountered. though i think by now i must have run into every problem there is with maya fluids. surely. surely…
looking pretty gooood. This is all Dan’s animation, I put it together with my effects and i think it looks really nice. havent posted in a while, i have a lot to show for the work ive been doing on kernal, but its in a couple of dozen enormous playblasts and im being lazy. ooh plus that little old dissertation i have to have done by THURSDAY. urgh.
So. smog. smoke. so much smoke. This is a collection of playblast from tests ive been doing for a scene in Kernal. I thought that’d itd be pretty simple to have some smog come through a sign and behave how i want it to. i was wrong. ive approached this scene in every single way i can think of and only just started to get it to look right. theres a few more playblast since the last one above which i’ll upload later.
The idea with this scene is that an automatic billboard turns round and smoke comes out. i just could not get it to look right no matter what i tried. i even tried emitting a fluid from a particle system, which initially looked really cool, but putting it in to the actual scene made it look like a mess. The technique definitely has potential for something, but not this.
so, i made some test. Initially these were going to be test for chimney smoke but they ended up looking more like a deep sea oil spill. Both were made with maya fluids set to very high resolutions. The highest I’ve used before is about 100, which i think equates to 100X100X100 which is… 1 million, right? i think so. So thats 1 million voxels working out my floaty fluid cloud. The first sim was set at a base resolution of 200, which equates to 8 million voxels, if im doing the math right. and the sim in this post is set at 300. 27 million. I didnt really think about that before i did it. not entiiirrrley sure i can even see any difference. I’ve also set up another fluid that is (hopefully) rendering right now and might be done by monday. that ones set at 500 base resolution. Thats… 125 million. woops. Sorry if one of the computers has melted by monday Georg. I’ll do the math first from now on…
did a couple of high res fluid sims. i’ll talk a little more about them in my next post
quick test for something in Kernel. I dont think i’ll actually be doing this part of the film in the end but i wanted to play around with a new tool. this took a surprisingly short time to render.
i used a script called emfxCLOUDS from creative crash that helps create some very nice looking clouds. then i made some point lights fly around inside it. it took something like 10 minutes a frame until i realised that it was rendering in maya software, then changed that to mental ray and it took 10 seconds to get even better results.
this is one of my favourite scenes in a fleischer cartoon, possibly one of my favourite bits of animation. it has NOTHING to to do with ANYTHING that takes place in the rest of the film, which is exactly the reason i love it. fleischer films always just did… stuff. for no reason that made no sense. its kind of like film amkers and animators aren’t really allowed to do that anymore. which i think is a shame. cos i could watch cartoons like this on a loop for a very long time.
Also thinking of getting a koko tattoo
I made another shiny. a ring from sonic. I’ll probably animate this in some way at some point.
I sort of love and hate doing ‘fanart’ type stuff. on the one hand I’m putting my own spin on stuff that I love from my child hood, plus i get a lot more attention and gratification on deviantart. But thats exactly why I dont like it at the same time. I put a lot of effort into the original work i put on deviantart (which to be fair i havent done a lot of lately) but a crappy picture of naruto on a scrap of lined paper will get a thousand views whereas my original characters barely get seen. now, obviously, i realise that probably sounds like i think im amazing, and, well, yes, i do, (not really) but there is a lot of shit on deviantart. like a lot. and the way that deviantart works means that it just encourages crappy fanart in an enormous circle jerk of tweeny anime fans. i’ve thought about trying out conceptart.org but it seems so much more professional, but then i guess i am a professional… or soon will be… with any luck. thats a bit terrorfying. i cant belive i only have half a year of uni left. sad :( i got a bit of topic. to summarise, deviantart sucks, im awesome, so is sonic. oh yeah on that note check this out http://dumbrunningsonic.tumblr.com/
very funny stuff, might do one of my own
Animated my rupee. Took a stupid amount of time to render 60 frames, which i then repeated to make it longer. I think i’ll wait till i can use the uni computers before i try anything more ambitious
Zelda Rupee (by SuperJitan)
My sister posted a picture of a load of rupees that someone rendered out and i thought ‘i can do that even better!’ I took a lot of information from zap’s fire and ice diamond guide but he uses 3DSmax for some reason and a lot of the stuff he was talking about dosnt really translate. so idid what i always do and twiddled some knobs and dials till it looked right. not really sure what more i can add to the shader, but i’ve learnt a lot about photoreal-ish rendering. im planning on animating a scene with a few of these falling out of a pouch or something. its already taking about 40 seconds to render with just one though so maybe when i get back to uni.
stumbled on this on deviant art. its exactly the same colours and lot of the same shapes that i see when i rub my eyes too long, which i learned are called phosphenes. ive always been kinda fascinated by these and i’d really like to do an animation of them. i imagine its different for everyone but itd be amazing to be able to visualize it in a more tangible way. i started experimenting in maya and already made some progress. might develop it some more over christmas if i have time
Test for H0le. Finally figured out how to do this. I tried it first in maya using nPaticles and some simple shapes and fields to get the particles moving the way i wanted to, then tried instancing them with planes, which worked great and looked pretty cool but the planes ended up spinning like playing cards reather than pointing to the camera like sprites. so after several failed attempts with different expressions and work arounds i tried using particular in after effects. i didnt get very far with this before realising i didnt know enough about either after effects or particular for it to be easier using them over maya. SO eventually, with the persuasion of Brian, I ended up in XSI. i used this a little bit to try and do some particle simulation last year and kind of hated it, thats the main reason i was so hesitant to use it. but with the ICE tree node system it worked out really well. getting the particles to behave was relatively simple, the only real problems were from not knowing my way around XSI, and it being very similar but not quite the same as maya.
The particles are shot out of a plane at a cylinder with an air force pushing them around it. then they were instanced with planes with a texture on them. rendered out of XSI with mental ray and put into after effects for the heart, character and all the glowies.
still some way to go to get this exactly right but its already taught me a lot and hopefully its a good visual taster of what I can bring to a 2D project.
H0le Particle Test (by SuperJitan)
