You really have to love the internet when it comes to reference material. My task for today? Build a schoolbus. Doesn't sound like a big deal. We've all seen them growing up right? Well, when it comes to vehicles, it's always the little things that you don't think about, but make all the difference. So the solution is to make a quick trip over to Google and use their image search utilities. Using their advanced image search, I can get school bus images filtered so that only the "wallpaper" size images come back. Not only do get a host of great full color school bus images, I don't have to sift through hundreds of postage stamp size images in the process. This technique is great for whatever you might need reference on!

I would have put the animation for this scene up, but we already have an animated gif on the page. Maybe it's time I started thinking about that in advance, especially considering what's coming up!

Well, here is a clip from the scene that lead me to the big new change. It's simple, but when doing this type of work alone, every little speed boost helps, and I needed a solution to that little issue for a long time. I'm probably going to regret posting this as that other animated gif of the hero flying over the city is still down there somewhere. It'll disappear next time I post but...

Well, you learn something new everyday. In the past, when doing facial animation I would use the embedded endomorphs in Lightwave and animate them with the slider-based Morphmixer. Based on how you created and named your "morph maps" you would get a panel in the animation system with sliders attached to each map which you can then keyframe. By naming alone, you could organize your maps into groups, which would each get their own tab, and therefore their own panel. In the past, I had always divided the face into groups similar to how an animatronic puppet is controlled. The brow area and all it's targets would be a group, the eyes a group etc. This was fine for the full CGI animation I was doing in the past. Things often changed every few frames and flowed smoothly from one pose to another. In this anime style however, that is not the case. Things need to be set exactly on every single frame, and so I found myself jumping from panel to panel to keyframe things even if they didn't move at all! So I renamed all of my Morph maps for the main character, placing every map involving the face into a single group and therefore a single panel. I will lose all previous facial animation (except with a copy of the old model) but I prefer to move forward to a better method and let the old ways drop by the wayside.

Well today my DV equipment finally got hooked up and I did, what I guess you could say would be, my first day of "dailies" for the Justice-4-all show.

Being halfway through the animation for the first episode of the show, it may seem a bit late in the game to finally check a video preview, however my technique is pretty formulaic and as such I have settings which I consistently use to insure proper color levels and that nothing would come out "illegal" for NTSC. Everything is looking good so far.

Recently, I was asked to serve as a judge for the Wavy Awards 2002 China, artistic competition. One of the entries, my pick for winner of the animation category, was done by ONE guy, using Lightwave 7.5, and all rendered with radiosity. Not sure if it was done using the quicker "background mode" or if it was standard Monte Carlo, but it got the result regardless. This short film does have a lot going on with dinosaurs, mechs, robots and a kid fighting with a crowbar. Radiosity can definitely get the job done and obviously is not too slow if planned properly. This is a true example of that independent Lightwave spirit!

It should be noted that while typing this message, and preparing this image for your viewing pleasure, I was able to confirm with DStorm Shanghai that "Zark" the Wavy Award 2002 China entry from which these images come, did, in fact, win the animation competition!

Well, actual animation production has officially begun on the first episode of Justice-4-All and things are currently moving at a great pace.

Of course, as with any production, there are always going to be those little things that you forget from the last one. For example, remembering to render with image dithering turned on because when you start doing effects, you find that even 24bit images can color band. Add to that the issue of constantly changing software. I ask you, is it really necessary for our software to evolve out from under us between productions? I can understand improvement. Everybody wants the latest, greatest features. Still, I swear that from one production to the next things truly don't work the same. Simple things that shouldn't change in my view. Maybe it's just my perception that changes.

With that, production actually begins. No more tests. No more preparations. Nothing beats diving in and getting down to business! Although I naturally don't want to put any more animation on this page to fight for bandwidth with the gif below, I will, at least, update with some noteworthy stills from the production. More on that later!

In what may be my most dangerous move yet, since making this blog based news page, I am attempting to embed an animated gif into the list of news posts. It's not the smallest file either, weighing in at 640KB. I suspect not a problem for high bandwidth viewers, but could take a while for others. Either way, if there are any problems, don't hesitate to hit that contact button and let me know. Think of it this way, I was planning to embed a Quicktime!

The image shows a bit of what I was testing, in terms of cloth simulation, and how it came out. Take a look!

Cloth simulation is not to be trifled with. While I will admit that I am attempting to expand beyond anything I've done before, I am far from satisfied with the results I am getting. This is by no means a knock against the technology, which is nothing short of amazing. I am actually astounded by what it can do. I now need to figure it all out and work it into what I need for this show. That, I guess, is the trick.

In other news, as I mentioned earlier, but did not actually dive into, it's time to face the evil that is cloth! Yes, cloth simulation, which will be paramount for the capes of our heros in J4A, must be tackled first and foremost. I expect I will have a eye-opening and prosperous day ahead, and I hope to have some animation to show you by the day's end!

I guess I hadn't really got the still image bug out of me. More about this on a later date.

Next on my agenda is a subject often difficult to deal with. Cloth.

Cloth simulation in 3D animation can be extremely tough to tackle. Luckily for us, the technology gets better all the time. As the software improves we also have faster and faster processors coming out. What that gives us is the one thing really needed to make cloth work. Time!

Time to experiment is all that is really necessary to get good cloth simulation results. Usually we artists have no such time when the show has to be done next week. However that isn't the case on this project. We have the time to get it right. Of course I won't be doing that experimenting tonight. Look at the time!!

THE REALISTIC CHARACTER

There is much debate in the world of animation, especially anime, on charcter designs. Many fans are immediately turned off by the sometimes overly realistic character designs used in films like Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh and Blood: The last Vampire. With Ghost in the Shell, there is the problem of diverging from the popular manga designs, so that's easy to see. As for the others, I think it has to fit the type of film that is being done. The character designs of Pokemon wouldn't work in Memories: Magnetic Rose any more than the character designs of South Park would work in Grave of the Fireflies. For me, the movies with realistic character designs tend to have the darker more serious stories that I happen to be attracted to. While I'm not doing something necessarily dark or seriosu right now. I still like the realistic character.

More 2D muscle flexing. Now I'm satisfied. back to the task at hand...

2D OR NOT 2D

That is the question. Even though the computer has taken such a strong hold on our artistic lives we must never forget the origination of our art. I do all of my planning, storyboards and preproduction on paper with a Sanford #2 pencil. I never want to let those skill go the way of the dodo for the sake of computer art. Still, there's so much that can be done on the computer in the 2D realm, with software like Aura. Ever since Dpaint blasted across Amiga computer screens in 1987 I have been transfering those skills to the digital medium. Inspired by the work of comic artist Alex Ross, here is my return to 2D. A great exercise. Flex your 2D musles!

Well, it appears I was wrong. It turns out I stayed up working and the main set piece, a classroom, is done.

I am almost done with the main set piece for the J4A project. This will likely be completed early tomorrow morning. After that the actual animation and completion of scenes and sequences begins.

For all you artists out there, how many have really taken advantage of the web as one of the best resources for reference materials? Do you realize that you can find anything out there? If you need to find an image of a Bell telephone from 1921 because you need to model one for your project, it's probably out there! Never overlook the power of the web and the wealth of information and images therein.

Today I got to view a PDF proof of an article I wrote for Computer Graphics World magazine Japan. I wrote parts of the article in English so it was interesting to read it back in Japanese. Of course it was nice to see the images and text nicely laid out and to see how they presented the different techniques about which I wrote. I hope to do more writing about what is truly possible in today's world of independent animation in the future!

Well, I read maybe a whole page of X/1999 before coming up with something else to do. Then I was on the computer til nearly 4:00 AM. I Am going to read some X/1999 tonight. I also want to watch FLCL before I go to bed. Then there's that matter of finishing the web page.... and...

So I took the day off and I was met with nothing but boredom. Aside from a few interesting phone calls, nothing. Still, I have come up with the idea to end all ideas... heheh... More on that later though. Right now I am going to read some X/1999 before bed.

Today I am taking my much deserved and very much needed day off. That's not to say that it's all a total loss. I am actually looking at some animation and doing a bit of studying. The target for study today: [Project ARMS] I am looking at episode I of this new series, from the creator of [Spriggan], and asking 'what makes it tick?' In the study of animation I look for things like pacing, camera work, background setups etc. By studying how different shows, especially those of differing budgets, get over their respective obstacles, an artist can better plan their own projects based on the realities of time and schedule limitations!

THE FACE OF VILLAINY This type of character is almost always the hardest to represent when combining 2D and 3D in the fashion that I have been doing. Especially this type of hairstyle. Were it done as a volume instead of with flat planes, it would certainly show in the shading. 2D paint and touch up become the order of the day to get the exact effect desired. Well, don't have to play with Motion Designer at least.

THE SOFTER SIDE When creating a female superhero character, things are done quite a bit differently. This mainly pertains to line drawing on the female character. Part of this is in the model technique, where you will not find the "V" shaped sharp crease method. Still, the most important factor is in the edge drawing panel where, different from the male character, one of the options is simply not used. That option is to have lines drawn at surface borders. It may be difficult to see in an image this size, but you may notice that she doesn't have a line drawn under her eye. This is one of many areas where leaving out lines can make a female character appear more attractive and generally softer. Unlike the muscles on the male hero, too many lines in this case simply get in the way of the beauty of the character design. Of course, she still needs Motion Designer on the cape!

CREATING A HERO When creating the Marvel Comics style superhero character, the important thing is getting line detail on the character's muscles. This is not something you want to rely on textures for. The lines need to move and change as the character deforms. This is best handled by manipulating the geometry of the model. Since one of the cel line drawing aspects is set to draw on sharp creases, this gives you the ability to control where the lines will draw. Forcing a sharp crease around a muscle is achieved by creating something of a "V" shape at the edge where you want a line.If you can imagine 3 points very close together on the "V" for each poly line then you can see how the line detail can be controlled. It may be a bit difficult to see on an image this size, but I think the general idea is conveyed. Oh, and don't forget to have Motion Designer on the cape of course!

NEW TECHNIQUES

NEW TECHNIQUES For this latest production, all new character creation techniques are being employed to take the quality of the characters of this show to an entirely new level. In the past, early cel shaders used a technique of modelling relatively flat character faces and employed <

image maps to create the hand drawn look. This certainly looked more hand drawn from some angles, but had problems when the character was viewed in profile. This also lead to the need to hand animate the painted face map. Add to that the trouble with matching line weights from the painting to the CG lines. So I decided to try all 3D geometry, modelled mostly flat on the face like a doll. This allowed the use of morph targets for facial animation, but the character's face seemed plain and lacking life. Now with the latest Lightwave 3D 7.5 and UV mapping tools, a combination of both geometry in the face model and simple textures gives the best of both worlds!

JUSTICE-4-ALL

The Criminal Justice Commission of Palm Beach County, Florida has teamed up with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office to do a video series based on their Citizens Criminal Justice Academy. In a radical departure from the typical educational video however, this group has decided to take the production down a very interesting avenue.


"The challenge was taking ten weeks of lecture-laden presentations and translating them into 10 half hour videos without putting the viewer to sleep," said Kevin Bair, video coordinator for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. "We came up with a concept we felt was a sure winner. Playing off the idea of a "Justice Academy", we created four Marvel-type superheroes to guide us through the presentations."


Known as JUSTICE-4-ALL, the four superhero characters would face various law-breaking villains as topics are raised in video vignettes. These fantastic portions of the video series will be handled in the medium of animation. To tackle that task they turned to Studio ArtFX and animation director Terrence Walker.


"As a government agency with a limited budget, we never imagined affording professional, high quality animation," Kevin Bair continued. "With Studio ArtFX, not only will the animation be better than we expected, but quite possibly this series of videos could set a new trend in government video production. Our law enforcement hats off to STUDIO ARTFX and Terrence Walker."

FREE STUFF FROM NEWTEK

Newtek Inc. one of the companies that will likely headline our links section, as they are responsible for the software that makes what I do possible, have released a remarkable texture library to the digital artist community for free! The library, containing textures at 1600x1200 resolution in JPEG format, is currently online at their site. Be sure to grab them all and keep checking back there for the next batch!

One thing that I would like to note right off the bat, is that this page is still very much under construction. Not all links will work properly as of yet and some will goto pages with little or no value. This will be the case for a short while. On the bright side though, look at this! More posts in just minutes than I've done all month! The whole Blog thing is fairly new to me too. I've been on them before, but never ran my own. If you run into any major problems with the page, feel free to mail me and let me know!

This is my first test of the new Studio ArTFX web page. It is a BLOG now. Being so, it should be really easy for to post regularly, AND I can do it from anywhere in the world!

From the looks of it, things seem to be working!