It’s telling that so many people inspired by Ray Harryhausen are talking about the effect of ‘his films’. They are, of course, referring to his animated creatures – like ‘Mighty Joe Young’, Ymir in ’20 million miles to earth’ or the myriad beasts in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’. The films that really were ‘his’, the ones he directed, are mostly less known fairy tales. No less wonderfully animated. No less inspiring.
It’s telling that no other visual effects artist has had comparable impact and I can’t imagine any other ever doing so – at least not as an individual (Weta has been having comparable influence as a company). The novelty of animated creatures integrated in live-action that Ray filled with life has – together with the Master himself – passed away.

Thanks for your inspiration, Ray!

Follow the flyfisher for an interesting testimony by Dayna Gross for the use of illustration as a tool for both internal and external communication, and therefore a classic management tool.

After rousing some decent interest in SubDiv technology and linking to modo and cgTalk, I thought I’d point to one of the trusted advantages that I use right now. I am working on a realtime project that I plan on marketing via pre-rendered films and images on webpages and youtube, etc. The use of SubDiv edge weighting (creasing) enables me to work with the same asset across all of the media I choose… just fit the level-of-detail to the medium and use the fitting normal and texture maps (not shown here). The rig, the mesh, the scene files are all the same.

Thank you, Pixar for releasing this technology open source… patents and all!

Popular books featuring palaeobotany are few and far between. I have a cherished copy of Douglas Henderson’s Dinosaur Tree – a wonderful portrait of the life of a tree, with dinosaurs reduced to passersby. (Want to make a documentary, anyone?) So I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Fabio Manucci’s review of this and another book on paleobotany called The Islands of Time. Enough introduction! head over and read the review (googlated into English).

I’m a subD addict – I use them all the time. I model with them, rig low-density cages and apply displacement maps that apply on subdivision surfaces – the advantages over straight up polygons and nurbs surfaces is just stellar. Pixar has made this technology open source and aside from Autodesk, has worked with Luxology, the makers of my modeler of choice, so it’s in my hands, right? Pixar! Dudes!

Well, that’s what I thought. Like most cg artists I know, I was sure that I was profiting from this technology. Truth is… not fully.  At FMX2013, Bill Polson made a great playdoyer for why the industry as a whole will profit from subdiv technology becoming a standard. And that’s subdiv technology, not subd… respect the authors: Ed Catmull, Mark Meyer, Tony DeRose (Pixar), Charles Loop (Microsoft Research) and Matthias Niessner (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg).

The advantages over polys and nurbs are well-accepted, and AlexK wrote them up in his review, so I’ll point to the bigger deal that had escaped me… computational efficiency.

Before you tune out, my artistic friends, let me rephrase that into 1) near-realtime feedback of dense, sculpted meshes that hold up under extreme deformation and 2) consistently transfer across various applications, including games engines.

There is no 100% implementation now available that allows all this (Maya and mudbox present the closest thing right now), but the promise is there – in the form OpenSubdiv. Bill talked about the choice to use the Microsoft public license because it includes the patents behind this technology (!!!) but also causes some legal issues which are preventing the Blender foundation from full implementation. A glitch which – Bill assured us – is being addressed.

Another key word is hierarchical layering – meaning that each subdivision level that is sent to the gpu for rendering can be processed. So things like displacement can be calculated in on the GPU while the low-density base mesh is being deformed on the CPU – in iterations. The importance of this can be summed up as efficient level-of-detail processing. For further technical advantages, I point you to this autodesk video highlighting their cooperation.

I’d like to sum the advantages from the POV of us artists, because we need to be vocal about getting this implemented across the board… from CAD software to games to film and vfx software. A world of play-nice toolsets and immediate artistic feedback that you can trust to hold up across pipelines is just too necessary.

1) model clean, lean meshes that subdivide according to defined creasing values (or edge-weighting) and send these meshes from one tool to another with consistent results (go to 26:50 in the video above)
2) get rapid feedback of detailed surface displacement not only while sculpting, but while animating and and lighting
3) manage large scenes efficiently via level-of-detail controls that optimize hardware usage. This applies to distance-from-camera controls as well as to localized displacement effects such as Merida’s horse Angus plodding through snow.
4) know that your work is compatible with further feature sets like ptex texturing

SubDivs? You know you want ‘em!

Amidst all the talk about open communication in scientific publishing, it’s refreshing to see a production blog following a scientific documentary. Highlights include water simulation tests and Hannah Foss’ account of the tropical copepod that snuck its way into the teams modeling workflow.

Achim Reisdorf (in German) explains death, humor and kitchen science. (Tip: Ben Creisler)

Respecting nature is so often portrayed as being contrary to the interests of people that you’d think it’s an either/or proposition. The article above by Scientific American reports on research on people, and finds that the nature preserves protect them too. None too surprising, and long overdue.

P.S.
I know I’ve been scarce. I’ve been in the dungeons of learning software and developing concepts. Nothing exciting to share really. Unfortunately, I won’t have much to share the next two weeks, either as I’ll be on the road. Perhaps I’ll finally manage mobile media management, but haven’t had much success with that in the past. So, if not… I’ll be back soon…

… doesn’t know where to go.

Der Spiegel reports that the German state of NRW (Nordrhein Westfalen) is canceling all archaeological activities. That’s right. The German state with the highest population,home of the Neander valley (Neanderthal) and countless Roman sites and cities is not just cutting back its budget to 3.3 million Euros next year, it’s completely capping the budget after 2014. No money for no one, no way no how. Not even to put things on ice until the madness ends.

You can SIGN UP against this craziness.

It’s relatively easy to visualize the blue-marble earth nowadays, out precious home planet cast against the vast emptiness of space. The very first attempts to do so – from artists with absolutely no extraplanetary experience -  reminds us that it’s not something to be taken for granted. Click the attempt below for a great article about these early attempts. It’s a very profound topic, considering that the actual effect of seeing the earth as an object removed from us, has (hopefully) changed the way we see ourselves.

John Hutchinson tweeted a link to his new paper. Wow. Fantastically illustrated, intensively interesting. Written so precisely and clearly that I even imagine I understand what it’s about. Must read science!

Because Matt’s off to see this guy, and I couldn’t find my post (bad blogging, bad) via search queries, here a repost of my stitching effort from the Senckenberg exhibit in Frankfurt. Click with care, it leads to the full size image.

Spent a bit of time on his mouth, finer fur.

Call me crazy, but I like Berlin. And one of the – okay, Heribert, you can stop calling me crazy now – and one of the things I most like about it is the diversity of museums and zoos. Seriously, there are museums everywhere, from bauhaus to Islamic Art to computer games and all sorts of history – and two zoos. There’s also a sort of fierceness about the role which culture plays in lending a city identity. So when I encountered this call for a new Berliner souvenir I had to play out the idea of creating something that pays this aspect of Berlin some respect. If we’re to feed into the consumer-craze of tourist tokenism, I’d rather take it up as an opportunity to point to this unique Berlin offering. Souvenir doesn’t mean character, but it includes character…

My take is a Giraffatitan in toon form called Boomboom. He loves Islamic patterns, Nefertiti’s nose and – while he appreciates an evening of fine opera – his acoustical culture of choice is dubstep … wouldn’t that be great to animate!?

There would be a realistic Giraffatitan outdoor life reconstruction in scale 1to1 at the Park at Nordbahnhof, adding a physical attraction between the Mauer Museum and the Museum of Natural History and tie-ins to the graphic character for printed beer krugs and back packs, stuffed figures, the whole 9 yards… and a percentage of profits going to the cultural institutes of the city.

I’m really interested in feedback, particularly from anyone familiar with Berlin. I’m not sure if I’ll enter, as this would need a good deal of work to make it presentation-ready and I don’t think this really has a chance. The souvenir competition is all designy… and I don’t read the call as the beBerlin folk looking for cultural plugs. It could propagate some awareness for what I consider to be Berlin’s true stars, though. And my only other idea for a fitting Berlin character is a cute little devil character that barfs when you squeeze him.

From the wet collection at the Berlin Museum for Natural History.

Modo has become my software of choice for pretty much everything but animating. With the new ACS kit from Lukazs Pazera this might be changing. Here’s a 3-day test run, from rigging and weighting through to animating. The curves are ugly – still have to get my brain around modo’s system there, but the kit makes the whole process amazingly smooth. Never would be able to do this so quickly without it.