Studio ArtFX

: Name: - Terrence

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Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Just goes to show you what happens when you step away from the computer for a day. I just spent the last two hours catching up on email, Usenet and ICQ. Yesterday some cool friends from Dstorm came into town and we traveled to check out a couple of major studios using Lightwave 3D in their production pipeline. Needless to say, at both EdenFX and Digital Domain we saw how it was done by the pros. These guys mean business when it comes to visual effects. Just check out their galleries!

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Monday, October 28, 2002

I haven't actually played a video game in a long time. Even when I did, I was strictly a console player. Yesterday I had a chance to see some of the latest greatest stuff out there on the PC. On top of that, I saw a few trailers for upcoming games as well. What impressed me was just how far the visuals in real time 3D games have come. When I looked at Unreal 2003 and the trailer for Halo 2, I thought this finally looks good enough to be used for entertainment forms other than the games. They looked a lot better than some of the all CG TV shows have come and gone after all. This got me thinking about Machinimation. This technique is marked by users who take the Quake or Half Life type engines and use the tools to script linear movies rather than interactive or game experiences. The quality was, of course, limited, the last time I checked it out, to the look of those old games. There was potential, but that was about it. If machinima animators were to get hold of Unreal 2003 tools or those of Halo 2 (same engine as the first Halo) what could they do? Why aren't TV shows being planned for real time rendering this instant?!

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Saturday, October 26, 2002

Who would have thought that there were still Boolean operations where you hit the button and wait for hours to see the result!

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Thursday, October 24, 2002

Speaking of 2D works, one of the scenes I have been working on today offered the chance to get into some very classic 2D cartoon techniques. Thanks to Aura, once again, even these methods of old can be easily accomplished with a little digital effort.

In other news, I finally had the opportunity to watch the other Ralph Bakshi film that I purchased recently. American Pop was much much more impressive than his previous Lord of the Rings effort. One of the main reasons was simply, consistency. The film stuck to one style throughout rather than jumping between rotoscoped animation and solarized or processed live action footage like the Lord of the Rings movie. That effect was far too distracting from what could have been an incredible piece of work. American Pop, I would say, probably more closely approaches what would be an ideal film done in that style. I know that some animators are totally against his rotoscoping method and style, just as many are against the use of mocap in films like Final Fantasy. I am all for it as both films were after something which I believe has yet to be achieved in any other method of animation.

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Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Production continues on J4A episode II. One of the things that I always like to keep in mind and remind people about my work, is that I am never attempting to make a 3D animated film. I view what I do as 2D, even though I clearly use 3D elements to speed up the process and accomplish those things otherwise impossible for a one man show. Still the final product doesn't come out of Lightwave, and there is rarely a total 3D scene which can be referenced when looking at a single image. Much of what shows in the final scene is the result of 2D work, be it painting, compositing or animating in Aura Video Paint.

I will talk more about this in coming posts.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Today I had a chance to view the Ralph Bakshi animated film version of The Lord of the Rings. There were certainly some excellent things to be found in this film however, there were also some very disappointing visual aspects. It seems the live action reference used for the film was worked as more of a "process" rather than a technique. The scope of the film was large, perhaps too ambitious. I am left wondering whether or not things would have been done differently with more time or money. The scenes that shine really do shine. Tomorrow I will view American Pop, which was made a few years later. I am curious to see what was done differently between the two.

In other news, production continues on J4A. Even though R&D has ended, that doesn't mean that learning has stopped. Sometimes each new scene done can offer a new challenge and new things can be learned. Things that will make future work better.

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Monday, October 21, 2002

I haven't posted any J4A images in some time I noticed. Production is underway on Episode 2, and still going strong. There's a lot of cool stuff coming up, so keep on the lookout!

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Saturday, October 19, 2002

You may remember a while back I wrote a good bit about R&D that was being done for the improvement of the animation I do. This includes new tools like G2, but also playing with new edge techniques and the like. Aside from the contribution said R&D has made to the look of J4A, I thought, after suggestion by a friend of mine, that I should show some of the other developments which have benefitted from the tests.

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Friday, October 18, 2002

Today I hit Amazon.com and ordered some interesting examples of animation. Two films from Ralph Bakshi. "The Lord of the Ring" and "American Pop" which are both on DVD. I have never been a huge fan of this director's work and have seen very little of it, but he is talked about a lot and I think it worth checking out. I may speak more on these works when they arrive and I've had a chance to view them.

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Thursday, October 17, 2002

Full animation production on episode II of J4A is underway and going quite well. The extensive R&D done between the two episodes is paying off in increased productivity. Soon there will be an update of the services page (or, I guess actually BE a services page) with a new version of the anime reel.

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002

For those who might wish to download the J4A Quicktime teaser, right-click and "save target as" from here!

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Tuesday, October 15, 2002

I have decided to upgrade to BLOGGER PRO due to my inability to, otherwise, post to this page mere moments ago. Now that it has been done, things are running smoothly and I can post again.

In other news, The storyboards for Episode II of J4A have been completed and full production can soon begin!

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Monday, October 14, 2002

Here it is! The JUSTICE 4 ALL teaser trailer!

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I decided to put together a small teaser trailer for J4A so that I can show some of this stuff in motion. It will be in quicktime format the same as the anime reel. It should be up later today, or tonight.

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Friday, October 11, 2002

This Must be Posted About

For all you independents out there who want to do live action production, you better read this! Apparently JVC announced in Japan the release of a consumer, high definition 1280x720 (720P) camcorder for release next year in the $2,500.00 price range. Yes that is twenty five hundred and not thousand dollars! I personally am interested if for no other reason than that this baby can link to the computer, possibly through firewire, and provides a codec, which means I can also do animation at this resolution and in this format for possible future theatrical projection! This sounds like an industry changer!

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I am up late yet again, but great things are happening. Great things. I am mostly done with R&D. I think I am satisfied with what I have learned and it is time to get back into full swing production. Funny thing, though, is I just purchased another plugin set. This time it was Eki's Plugpak which is a set of plugins including the popular "Overcaster", which fakes radiosity at much higher speeds, and "Skygen" which creates some very realistic sky and cloud images. I won't add this too the R&D list though. I will learn as I go!

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Wednesday, October 09, 2002

The Realistic Character Revisited

Edges are something I haven't visited for some time. There is a reason for that. Most of my favorite anime films are the type with the super sharp, sometimes nearly imperceptiple edges on the characters. These are usually the higher quality features. Recently, though, after talking at length with a friend about edge drawing, I started paying more attention. Yesterday, for example, I watched the newly released Beauty and the Beast Special Edition. This gave me a lot of new ideas for things I could be doing with edges to further solidify the hand drawn appearance of all that I do.

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Monday, October 07, 2002

I can certainly see a change in the way things are done on the horizon. I've been doing a lot of R&D for the past couple of days, and have learned some incredible things about Lightwave, some of which are not necessarily new, but a few that are. Either way, it pays to take the time and delve on occasion. One of these new occurances of a change in working methodology is G2 from Worley Labs. Within mintues of using it, I was hooked on the Realtime Preview window, now a must for working in Lightwave. It's that powerful. The next step, especially for the type of work that I do, is the Art Mode. this method of shading is clearly a powerful addition to the cel shader's arsenal of tools. It's also a lot more powerful than it looks. It even works with procudral textures. A lot can be done with this!

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Well, R&D Days continues today. Yesterday I tackled some soft body dynamics problems, pretty much solving any of the issues which plagued me throughout the last few shots of J4A episode 1. I can now have the hero's capes and hair flow with great elegance and get it done fast! Now I move on to many other tools and tests. It's amazing after working one way for so long that you tend to forget other possiblities. There are some great things hiding in Lightwave which can significantly improve my speed and workflow. So, I continue learning...

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Saturday, October 05, 2002

Oh, and I also forgot to mention... BACKUPS. Even though I've had the Pioneer A04 DVD burner for a while now, I have only used it to do DVD videos. Today that changes as I do a major backup session. I have never had a major problem in the past with crashes or loss of data except once, and that was not on my production system. A virus took down my old Vaio system. The only thing lost permanently was a lot of email and contacts, and the original music for Chaos. As much as I've learned my lesson, I still don't back up often enough. I am doing so right now!

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FINALLY! I am done with the sequence which attempted to bring about my demise. I don't think I've done so much cloth simulation ever! Well I at least think the result was more than worth it and I learned more than I ever thought I would. But anyway, see for yourself. Only a still, but...

Well, it never hurts to be prepared, and it never hurts to spend some time to really get a handle on new tools. It's R&D time! I may post examples of what I learn...

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R&D. There's never enough time for it. Still, it's a very necessary step, best done between productions. This would have saved me a good bit of the problems I've been having the last couple of days. After halting doing actual shots and just taking time to figure things out, I seem to be back up and running. At least, the last shot is finally coming together. I can't say, however, that I feel totally comfortable with what I've learned. As a result, I think I'll be taking the next two or three days for some much needed R&D. I have many new tools at my disposal, including one much awaited G2 plugin from Worley Labs. These things must be learned and time must be properly spent on them. To assume that even updates to tools I once had will work as they did or with the same settings can be a mistake. Sometimes, better also means totally scrapping the old ways.

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Friday, October 04, 2002

A hard lesson was learned today. Originally when I created the hero characters, I modeled these very dense high resolution capes for them and used them to calculate cloth dynamics for some still renders. (Those images can be found in the archives somewhere.) Well, such a thing may seem like a good idea for nice printed stills, but when it comes to actual production, I quickly found out what level of mistake I had made. When I animated these guys flying around and then had four of them in a single scene, I noticed that the cloth dynamics calculations would add up to some outrageous amount of time to do all of their capes an dhair blowing (this was based on a single frame for a single item on a single character taking *minutes* to calculate). Needless to say, the models are now being simplified. Unfortunately, no new images as a result, unless maybe you're going to be up til four like I am!

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Thursday, October 03, 2002

I foresee my anime reel, which I guess none of you have ever seen since there is no real link to it anywhere on this site, being updated very soon with new content from J4A!

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Well, I didn't get nearly as far as I had hoped today, but a lot was learned so I wasn't held up for nothing. It's interesting doing this type of work where one artist tends to do everything. The one artist is then responsible for being a character animator at one time, a cloth dynamics TD another or even a particle FX guy. The problem is that you don't do any one of them all the time. I probably haven't messed with particles since I fired missles across a rooftop in Shadowskin. Needless to say when I setup particles tonight, I couldn't remember my basic settings so it took me a while to stop my particles from flying immediately off the screen. The tools changing, though I will admit for the better, doesn't help either. I started the transformation sequence for our heroes. Tomorrow I intend to finish it and wrap up Episode 01.

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Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Variety was the order of the day today. A wide variety of scenes featuring different types of animation and effects, including view screen effects and 2D camera work. A fairly rough day overall as well, as you can see by what time I am finishing up. More than worth it, though, to watch this stuff output to TV.

I am nearing the end of animation on the first episode of Justice-4-All. As with any animation using this method, the more you build, the more your library serves future production. It will be really interesting to see how future segment production flows.

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