- Do you see this tree, Colin ? he asked
- Yes I do.
- Are you sure?

Edwige Lelièvre is developing an npr MMORPG. As you know, I find this to be a venture well worth pursuing. Many popular games have been fighting the realism of their own engines to take advantage of stark visual looks, and the rare developer has even developed a dedicated NPR engine - Eskil’s LOVE.

What I like about Edwige’s work is the literary enhancement that plants her world on solid footing, and works well with the ‘drawn’ aesthetic. (I would like to see the designs pushed further. ) Head over to her production blog and check it out. I very much look forward to seeing this progress!

Visual effects houses can be the best, most fun and high-tech sweatshops on earth.

Lee Stranahan writes to James Cameron in a bid to raise public awareness of this issue that will - unfortunately - be nothing new to anyone working in the industry. I have to praise Lee for leveraging his own considerable reputation for this cause. Not convinced this is an issue? Listen to another industry giant Scott Ross.

http://www.vimeo.com/9178331
Check out this film by Kevin Megens, Floris Vos, Arno de Grijs and Andre Bergs. Music and sound design by Alex Debicki. Script by Jan Eduards. Produced by il Luste. More info at the film’s site. Thanks to Keith Lango for the heads up!

Of course it has great energy, fantastic designs and bold cuts - all built about a very simple and effective dramatic concept. What I’d like to highlight, however is the stylistic consistency; they make a world rule that there is no gradient. The characters are hard-edged polygons, the city and props as well. A simple decision seen elsewhere. But what makes this take particularly effective is that the makers stick to their guns. Check out that sunset. Have a look at that camera flash. Harsh, bold angular color fields. And they possess energy.

I often observe this battle in my students - and it is a battle. You make a stylistic decision. Cool. But then there’s this image of what a sunset looks like and instead of plodding through the process of finding a method to communicate that from within your rules, you make an exception. And - in the worst case - the film comes undone. In the best, you lose potential. As Pivot clearly demonstrates. As David O’Reilly continuously demonstrates.

Check out the energy of those bold decisions. Consequence!

Die gefährlichste aller Weltanschauungen ist die Weltanschauung der Leute, welche die Welt nie angeschaut haben

The most dangerous of all world-views is the world view held by those who have never viewed the world.

(This is my own translation attempting to respect the linguistic playfulness of the German original. Weltanschauung would be more closely translated as ideology.)

Extracted from Prof Dr Reinhold Leinfelder’s opening speech of the Reef exhibition at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History. edit: 1) Dr. Leinfelder has a blog, and he was so kind as to point me to the article in which he was able to place this fantastic quote. It’s a slightly different version of the text, one that appeals to me even more, so I’ve corrected this post. I should also mention that it is used in the context of the appreciation of the world’s reefs, which we are rapidly destroying. If you follow my blog, you know this is a matter close to my heart!

If you can read German, be sure to visit Dr. Leinfelder’s blog!

Any professional will - in the course of mastering their trade - learn a language which is more differentiated and precise than that of a layman. This difference can be be painfully experienced when, for example, an artist trained in visual communication deals with a client trained in marketing concerns. Or when a seasoned musician listens to a beginner play bi-tonal midis. Head over to the next-to-last post at cognitive daily. I will sorely miss this blog, as it is one of the few that dealt with perception studies - a key ingredient to understanding the complicated issues surrounding non-photorealistic rendering.

Yesterday was Draw a Dinosaur day. Sorry to any interested participants for the late notice - you may take some comfort in the many diverse entries. (Click the image to teleport over.) Above is my favorite by Jess.

Seldom does creature design approach the credibility of paleoart. Well, the talented artist community at cgHub does an admirable job of complimenting fantasy with (albeit far-fetched) plausibility. Task: present the newly discovered Jelly Bubbled Broad Back to an eagerly awaiting world. Result: inspiring and fun creatures that show how much the fairly unconnected disciplines of paleoart and creature design can learn from each other.

At the worst of times, the difference between creature design and paleoart is a film creature that causes laughter instead of fear, because of its obvious inability to exist - or perhaps a life reconstruction that ignores the potential to fascinate an audience and instead opts for dried-out clinical presentation. In the best of times, its a mountain troll in Moria or an Alien in Sigourney Weaver’s spaceship.
What do these disciplines share? Everything from a disciplined observation of anatomy and ecosystem to a imaginative yet responsible creativity in presenting fascinating creatures within a restrictive framework of either scientific knowledge or story plot. While one primarily services the logic, the other concentrates on entertainment.

Lots to learn from each other, methinks.

Check out this Sundance festival entry by Adrien Merigeau. There’s lots to praise here… this is a beautiful film that tackles more complicated emotions. In short, a young man returns to the forest of his childhood to see his father - and confront his memories. The young man is represented as a wolf, and he is accompanied by two friends, a fox and a cat. They are all very familiar, very tame - and beautifully animated. This animation is broken by filmed sequences of foliage and this jarring stylistic change works quite well… the brutal father is lent understanding (if not sympathy) by the ironic obviousness that he’s an animal. It’s the youths that are unnatural. The photographed reality of natural elements hammers this home, revealing two worlds without judgment that tragically fail to coincide.

Ever wonder what your favorite video looks like when rendered in the cyber-glory of ascii text? Wonder no more. Click the above sample image to beam over to Peter Nitsch’s insightful blog, and make sure to stay a while. There’s some provoking stuff over there. Particularly if - like me - you’re interested in the materiality of cyberspace.

Some of my regular visitors will be perplexed by my increasing occupation with things like dinosaurs, bones and long-gone ecosystems. Well, here I reach out to you: Good ol’ 2D aficionado Alberto Mielgo does some nasty cool animations with clever social sidewipes. His colors alone are worth checking out. Camera and all-round design are the icing on top.

Yesterday, I wrote about Brett booth’s comic-style theropods, and today I encountered a small wave of images that I find relevant. First off, Brett posted some true comic dinosaurs, the first time his two disciplines overlapped. Typical in comics work, Brett had little say in story (sentient Dromeosaurs survive in Cryobooths to attack humanity) or color (”they couldn’t pull off anything but green and brown”) and the load was heavy (22 pages on a tight schedule). Check his paleoart out in yesterday’s post.

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Next, Michael Ryan (Paleoblog) reviews a new William Stout book and the look is quite ‘comic-bookish’. Graphic inking pushes out contours and surface details, while pigment washes fill out surface coloration. Shadows are also communicated via the inking, so these color layers are a very flat and saturated.

What’s interesting about William Stout is that he is a very skilled and knowledgeable artist who delves into the research material and masters numerous artistic techniques. He is also skillfully diverse and categorizes his work as belonging to genres such as fantasy, fine art, comics, prehistoric and concept work (or film design). Its revealing to see what categories the artist assigns his own work to.

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Below, two Glacialosaurus by Stout (not 100% sure about the first one) first in an oil painted mural style, then in comic style . Below those, a gull painted in yet a further watercolor style. The artist categorizes these as ‘prehistoric’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘fine art’ respectively. Further dinosaurs can be found in the comics gallery - ie. Alien Worlds features a buxom-babe loving tyrannosaur.

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Lastly (for now), the German magazine Spiegel reviews the artist Walton Ford (here a gallery to click through). Here is a fine artist working in large format aquarells that demand a price tag of $40,000 and hang in renowned museums around the world. And still - as the Spiegel reports - “the artist has yet to truly make a mark on the international scene. Perhaps because he seems to be a Ford among artists and not a Ferrari. Certain critics find his oeuvre too illustrative ,recalling the style of the gifted ornithologist and artist John James Audubon”.
The painting above seemed particularly relevant - almost a counter-weight to the comic style dinosaurs above. Its called Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, and is based on the iconic woodcut by Albrecht Durer, who made his version based on a sailor’s crude drawing . By in turn basing his anatomy on Durer’s, Ford highlights on the popularistic portrayal of natural subject matter that hasn’t even been experienced by the artist - a subtle, fantastic surrealism and very relevant in a world in which nature is most often experienced via television documentaries. The stylistic decision is there to push the right buttons, packaging social commentary in the scientific authority of a specific figurative portrayal. Its helpful here to be familiar with the artist’s more common outright humor, so here I add another of his works. In Le Jardin, the harmony alluded to in the title is little more than a momentary respite in a battle dictated by the natural order.

What strikes me is the power of assumption that a stylistic means can create. The inked line and flat colors of a comic immediately calls up dramatized low-brow story; popular but not exactly credible.  A finely worked aquarell with skillful anatomy alludes to scientific correctness, but struggles for high-brow recognition from art critics, even after proving itself in museums and art collections. Crazy world.

Brett Booth launched an interesting discussion at his blog - which is well worthvisiting for the fantastically detailed theropod drawings, as seen above. Brett comments about his work being referred to as ‘comic booky’. As he is a professional comic book artist, he says, not very surprising. But what elements of his style trigger the association with comic book art? And how does this association affect the perception of his imagery? Apparently, the association questions the credulity, and Brett goes on to explain the plausibility of the very cool-looking quills and feather-like coverings he dons his dinosaurs in. As it turns out, they are in keeping with much modern research as to the relationship to feathered specimens such as protobirds and also with proposed thermal regulation of juvenile specimens. They are also well-thought out and - quite frankly - cool.


Which is another association with comics art. Its visually exciting. And so Brett manages to package knowledge of the science with pop-culture - something I find commendable.

This music promo for Labuat shines for a number of reasons. It takes a simple, painterly stroke and fills it with life by connecting it to the viewer’s input - a simple interactive component that packs a surprisingly huge payoff. The stroke is further directed by the music, thinning out, twisting and splattering at key moments. Surprisingly simple, but impeccably executed. Congratulations to the makers:
concept & direction by HerraizSoto & Co, creative programming by badabing! and animation by Jossie Malis.

Last week, Tatjana and I departed on a long-awaited day-trip to Ingelfingen, located about half-way between Stuttgart and Nurnberg. Our destination: the Muschelkalk Museum Hagdorn. Muschelkalk is shell limestone and timewise refers to the middle Triassic. There were too many impressions and discoveries to put them all here, so I’ve selected a few highlights here. If you’d like a higher resolution of any of the specimens, contact me below.

(edit: opened up the fold for easier access)

The region represents a fossil belt of sorts, with important fossils not only from the Triassic, but other geologic periods as well. It’s also a reputable wine belt, and the vineyards were an abstract visual pleasure along the way. We took off in the middle of a snowstorm. Perfect museum weather.
For an outsider such as myself - unfamiliar with the region and unfamiliar with paleontology, it takes time to appreciate the workings and interconnectedness spanning the various participants of this field. There are the industrial interests of stone quarries, the passions of fossil collectors, the diligence of scientists and the subsequent mixture of all these that results in the museum. The result that the public at large sees is a cleanly rendered illustration of a long extinct plant or animal, at best coupled with an explanation of what what we are seeing tells us about us and the planet we live in. The truth is much less placative, much more diverse, and much more interesting…

The Hagdorn museum very successfully reveals the existence of this wealthy differentiation, planting the knowledge of long lost ecosystems with the rocks that can be found outside. And it does this with surprisingly little text. (Potential foreign visitors should note that the texts are all in German at the moment, but this is planned to change - and I’ve volunteered my services in this undertaking.) The combination of photographs, illustrations, models and fossil exhibits is carefully balanced and concisely informative.

This clarity is continued throughout the museum’s lighting concept. The museum is beautiful. It celebrates the ancient wooden beams of the historic building it’s in, and is lit with understatement. Except for key moments such as the fish above, the lighting recedes into the background until you ask yourself why all the exhibits are so clearly legible.
Here some further impressions:

The first floor covers the aquatic ecosystem, from mussels, starfish, sea cucumbers and sea lillies to aquatic reptiles  such as Simosaurus, nothosaurs, placodonts (cyomodus) and icthyosaurs. Upstairs, there trip continues with archeosaurs such as Batrachotomus, as seen above. This exhibit is typical for the museum… wonderfully laid out, so that the structures and relationships are either clear or clearly alluded to. One species is presented in one space with a wealth of various fossil elements and explained via concise skeletal reconstructions, illustrations or sculptures, while text on the window fills in general knowledge about the animal. Labeling isn’t complete, yet an informed layperson such as myself found my way about just fine.
I’d been warned that its a “collector’s museum” with many overlapping examples. My impression was the opposite… each fossil was displayed within the context of an animal specimen or ecosystem (or both) and I kept catching myself wishing that the dusty side wings of the Berlin Naturkunde museum would be likewise refreshed.

top: Psephoderma; above: Callisomordax and Trematolestes

A personal point of interest was gerrothorax, as I’ve been trying to create a life construction, and now can re-approach the task with a skeletal reconstruction. But what’s one highlight among so many? The museum is populated by fantastic specimens from the region. Dr. Hagdorn’s own collection forms the cornerstone of the museum, with objects such as Gerrothorax contributed by the renowned collector Hubert Dona. Since last year, Werner Kugler’s private collection expands the museum with its considerable scope.


Tatjana and I had an unfair advantage in that the director and initiator Dr. Hagdorn showed us around in person, an honor that was particularly rewarding in getting an impression of the ecosystem surrounding cronoids, or sea lillies. The fantastic specimens are made all the more interesting by the stories of their discovery and discussions of their L-systems-like growth pattern.

If you should be in or around southern Germany, make sure the Museum is on your agenda. If not, watch the museum’s website and keep it in mind should you ever travel through. Most importantly, if you have the good fortune to live in an area with so much to offer, make sure to take part in local efforts to display and communicate them. I am in awe of Dr. Hagdorn’s accomplishment. To initiate and populate a museum as a community service is in itself a Herculean effort, to do so with a minutely researched knowledge of the content is another, and to put it all together with such a fine grasp of exhibit design and  is quite simply remarkable.

Thanks to Hans Hagdorn and his wife Karin for their hospitality and inspiration!

ps. I’ve been swamped with work lately, hope to continue with other personalities form the region. Drop a note of encouragement if you’d welcome this.

When Mike Taylor from SVPOW isn’t butchering wallabees or boiling lizard bones, he’s dispersing some very fine insight into all things sauropodian. He lately tried his hand at a brachiosaur cervical out of folded paper, but with all due respect to his many other talents, it came out looking like a tissue box. So I decided to help Mike out. Mike, click the pic to download. Then print it, cut it out and fold to your heart’s content.

The very insightful James Gurney gives a heads-up to John Balestrieri and his work on the painterly simulation of photographic imagery. Hope to digest this more at a future time, for now I send you over to GurneyJourney without more ado.

Here a bit of my private happiness: a sunrise from our window and a burning log that Tatjana and I enjoyed during a recent cold spell… glowering like Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle. Despite the strife of the last 6 months, there have been wonderful small moments like these, and a few major ones like the recognition received from my students.

I wish everyone a wonderful 2010!

The artist perspective is rosy. The producer / company outlook is very bleak.

Well - that’s a catchy soundbyte to motivate you to head on over to fxguide and take in the whole thing because it exudes hard-earned knowledge about this tightly calculated business. Whether you’re a novice or expert: this is required reading.

To paraphrase: the business is eroding down to a mass of freelancers, while the films are increasingly being sold by wham-bam effects orgies that can only be delivered by the management capacities at the big five. Interesting observations and solid conclusions.

I say ’small’ as I consider polish getting a system from 90 percent to 100 percent. But really, that last 10 percent takes just as long as the first 90. Polish is no small task; it is just about small unseen things.

Fine-polishing an animated sequence is an often underestimated expenditure, and so adversely affects many an ambitious project. Read the rest at Gamasutra. There’s also an interesting mention of the dangers of meandering, another issue I often badger my students about.

ArtRage 2.5 offers a convincing experience of digitally mimicking traditional media. It is the most “material” of the digital painting tools out there and is so much bang for its buck - very affordable at under 100$ - that I have no inhibitions about endorsing the new version release here.

So - go buy it.

BTW - does anyone know if 3.0 supports the wacom tilt sensitivity?