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?

“Precision isn’t in itself a problem, but for the human foible of mistaking precision for accuracy.”

Alex Wild from the fascinating and beautiful Myrmecos pretty much sums up what I’ve been mumbling about concerning abstracted representation. Check it out: the trouble with photosynthetics. While there, check out the intense macrophotography made with the freeware program CombineZP.

3D does some things with great efficiency and accuracy – things like solidity of form, staying “on-model”, etc.. Other things it doesn’t do all that well, like quickly adhering to the odd whims of its human user. These characteristics have a bit to do with the technology itself, but mostly it has to do with the interfaces used to access it.
Solidity of form is of course a big advantage when it comes to paleoart… you want that profile and front view to match, you want the jaw to rotate from where it should. So, artistically, there’s a lot going for 3D.

But there are also some pitfalls. As I mentioned earlier, a swell-looking skeleton can allude to accuracy that it doesn’t possess. This is comparable to the uncanny valley phenomena experienced in the representation of realistic humans. In this case, the pretense of being bone invites unintended readings – it presents general details such as surface irregularity and specularity, but lack those key elements that make that bone recognizable. Thanks but no thanks.

The beauty of technical illustrations are that they concisely filter information, representing relevant details. Here we see a skull cast of a stegosaurus, an illustration of a kiwi femur and the skeletal reconstruction by Gregory Paul that I used as reference for my 3D version. The illustrations screen information down to those elements that the artist is interested in, respecting further details only as far as they form context.

So, I set out to create a skeletal reconstruction in 3D that has the graphic clarity of those in 2D done by artists such as Gregory Paul, Scott Hartmann, Archosaurian and Dinomaniac. More than anything, this requires stylization, so that the intended information can be conveyed, but nothing more. It should immediately read as an artistic reconstruction. Hopefully, it would look good and be useful in communicating specific attributes of what makes one animal different from another, illustrating evolutionary relationships as well as functional aspects of a specific design. The stegosaurus above is my first attempt at a dinosaur, and my second after the human. I already see necessary tweaks in the skull and other areas, but I’m happy with it as a first step. Feedback welcome. Here’s a close up of the head with teeth:

Like I said. Feedback very welcome, particularly if you’re involved in paleontology.

Note: posted similar content at ArtEvolved.

Click the bone drawings by Emma Schachner to head over to Dave Hone’s thought-provoking arguments for illustration in service of documenting fossil bones. Describing legibility arising from the process of artist-driven abstraction, he has this to say:

“technical drawings … make things in a sense ‘more real’ – by highlighting important features of a bone or leaving out the unimportant or distracting to make the image clearer.”