Tuesday, April 1, 2014
What do we say to stock footage? Use it!
"I want b-roll that shows robots solving problems…like Skynet, but not!"
Um…okay!
Our editors already had b-roll of little baby robots solving games, learning to walk, all that awesome goodness, but the producers wanted something more. What to do? Lets have a shot from the perspective of the problem-solving computer.
I surfed some stock footage for inspiration, until I found footage of a rubics cube on black. What better problem to solve? I thought of how a computer might handle solving the problem of the rubies cube, I thought of a chess player - analyzing the setup and calculating a number of future steps to make. So…voila! Throw in the Iron Man inspired computer thoughts and throw it over the stock footage, and you have this piece featured in Season 3 of The Truth About Money!
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Hard work…awesome results!
For the past few weeks we've been developing a TV pilot about a personal chef…Not a show about cooking, more of a 'day in the life' sort of thing. We wanted to really have fun with this one. So that's what we did.
Dinner for Hire follows the life of Chef Bernard Henry, a French CEO-turned-Personal Chef in the DC area. He's quirky, he's fun…the food isn't bad either! Take a look at the fruits of our labors! I was responsible for the graphics package - all animations and graphic elements you see in the show.
Bon Appétit!
Dinner for Hire Pilot from Three Roads Communications on Vimeo.
Friday, March 7, 2014
The Re-Boot: Asteroids and Nanobots and Drills…oh my!
Wow! It's been so long since my last post! A lot has happened since I finished the Henry rig - I moved across the country, I got a new job, and have worked on LOTS of projects!
Now is my time to get back into it. In the past 2 years, I've been working for a boutique video production company outside of Washington, DC. I worked my way up from answering phones to essentially 'being' the graphics department.
One of the more exciting projects has been creating pieces for Season 3 of The Truth About Money with Ric Edelman. There is a new segment in the show called Future Finance, where future trends in science, health, and technology are discussed. This was an animator's dream to work on. Why, you might ask?
When your producer charges the post-production team to b-roll interviews about subjects that don't exist…what do you do? Make your graphic artist do it! Satellites that reflect energy back to Earth? Nanobots that cure cancer? Drilling for minerals on asteroids? When we needed the impossible, we turned to CGI.
And that's where I came in! I'll be sharing tidbits of the out-of-this-world b-roll I created for the show. Today, I'm sharing one of my favorites. In an interview, a scientist talks about a potential source of energy by drilling on asteroids. I created an 'asteroid' (a flat poly with mountains and terrain generated with a displacement map) and made a couple drilling stations, or what I think a drilling station would look like.
On the final render, there was a slight flicker coming from the displacement map on the asteroid terrain. With no time to re-render, I came up with a quick fix - making some haze in the atmosphere in After Effects and creating a bit of a gaussian blur on the edges, as if the viewer were looking at the drilling site through thick glass or a lens. Add the stars, other asteroids (I pictured this taking place in the asteroid belt) and voila! Now we have that b-roll.
Now is my time to get back into it. In the past 2 years, I've been working for a boutique video production company outside of Washington, DC. I worked my way up from answering phones to essentially 'being' the graphics department.
One of the more exciting projects has been creating pieces for Season 3 of The Truth About Money with Ric Edelman. There is a new segment in the show called Future Finance, where future trends in science, health, and technology are discussed. This was an animator's dream to work on. Why, you might ask?
When your producer charges the post-production team to b-roll interviews about subjects that don't exist…what do you do? Make your graphic artist do it! Satellites that reflect energy back to Earth? Nanobots that cure cancer? Drilling for minerals on asteroids? When we needed the impossible, we turned to CGI.
And that's where I came in! I'll be sharing tidbits of the out-of-this-world b-roll I created for the show. Today, I'm sharing one of my favorites. In an interview, a scientist talks about a potential source of energy by drilling on asteroids. I created an 'asteroid' (a flat poly with mountains and terrain generated with a displacement map) and made a couple drilling stations, or what I think a drilling station would look like.
On the final render, there was a slight flicker coming from the displacement map on the asteroid terrain. With no time to re-render, I came up with a quick fix - making some haze in the atmosphere in After Effects and creating a bit of a gaussian blur on the edges, as if the viewer were looking at the drilling site through thick glass or a lens. Add the stars, other asteroids (I pictured this taking place in the asteroid belt) and voila! Now we have that b-roll.
Drilling Station on Asteroid from Amanda Newcomb on Vimeo.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Oldies but Goodies: Part I
I've been trying to find some of my older animations. I have a lot of rotoscoping and converted 16mm films I did in college I've been trying to find. Artsy fartsy stuff. Some of the ones I've been trying to find are unfortunately, still on film. Others are lost on some buried hard drive. As I find them, I'll post them.
Some of the ones I DO have, though, are some of my later Emerson creations. I came from a more 2D background, hand-drawn animation and scratching the emulsion off of film. Things like that. I made some charcoal illustrations for a Jaques Prevert poem. Though the perspective is a little off on some of them, I still like the piece overall.
I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty over it.
The next semester, my last at Emerson, I got more into 3D. I had taken pretty much all of the classes Emerson offered at the time, so I took the capstone course, where you work on an individual project for the entire semester. It was like producing a BA Practicum project, only it was in the New Media department. At the time, New Media and 3D was very VERY new at Emerson.
I have an addiction to incorporating tangible art into my projects. I guess it makes me feel like even though there's nothing in the 3D generated world that's actually real, there's still something I can still see as tangible. It gives it more of a feeling of texture to me. I love texture. Charcoal, watercolor paper...hey, even elephant skin. It's something tangible to touch in a totally un-physical realm.
So what did I do? Everything is 3D, but everything is also modeled and textured from an object I physically painted and made. I hand painted all the textured seen.
In terms of the content, the world through a child's eye is an amazing thing. There is innocence, and they (typically) have an idealistic way of seeing things that goes beyond what you see with the naked eye. Everyday things become extraordinary. BUT...when children get older and turn into adults they loose that way of looking at the world. And that little tragedy is represented here as a metaphor: a pop-up book. Enjoy.
Some of the ones I DO have, though, are some of my later Emerson creations. I came from a more 2D background, hand-drawn animation and scratching the emulsion off of film. Things like that. I made some charcoal illustrations for a Jaques Prevert poem. Though the perspective is a little off on some of them, I still like the piece overall.
I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty over it.
The next semester, my last at Emerson, I got more into 3D. I had taken pretty much all of the classes Emerson offered at the time, so I took the capstone course, where you work on an individual project for the entire semester. It was like producing a BA Practicum project, only it was in the New Media department. At the time, New Media and 3D was very VERY new at Emerson.
I have an addiction to incorporating tangible art into my projects. I guess it makes me feel like even though there's nothing in the 3D generated world that's actually real, there's still something I can still see as tangible. It gives it more of a feeling of texture to me. I love texture. Charcoal, watercolor paper...hey, even elephant skin. It's something tangible to touch in a totally un-physical realm.
So what did I do? Everything is 3D, but everything is also modeled and textured from an object I physically painted and made. I hand painted all the textured seen.
In terms of the content, the world through a child's eye is an amazing thing. There is innocence, and they (typically) have an idealistic way of seeing things that goes beyond what you see with the naked eye. Everyday things become extraordinary. BUT...when children get older and turn into adults they loose that way of looking at the world. And that little tragedy is represented here as a metaphor: a pop-up book. Enjoy.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
FINALLY. The "Henry" Rig
I started modeling Henry last summer. It didn't take me too long to actually model him, I used Maya for the actual model and did some fine tuning in ZBrush.
It took me about three months to texture and sculpt the displacement/normal maps. I was working on several other projects at the time and painted for about 2-3 hours a day for several days per week. Very pain staking but I love the result. I plan on having a nice print of him displayed in the next CDIA gallery showing.
The rigging. Oh, the rigging. Simple enough, he has a typical IK set-up in the legs, spline set-up with clusters in the spine. The trunk has preset positions that can be accessed from the main trunk control, very much like a finger control set-up on a bi-ped rig. The most unique part of the rig is the two hair follicles, one in the belly, one on the tail, that allow that geometry to hang and sad with the body.
The ears are the only thing I would change. I used soft bodies controlled by a series of joint chains throughout the ear. It was very temperamental, more then other kinds of dynamics, it was time consuming, and I don't think they look as good as they could. Looking back, I would have used nCloth.
As a rig overall, its functional! Take a look:
It took me about three months to texture and sculpt the displacement/normal maps. I was working on several other projects at the time and painted for about 2-3 hours a day for several days per week. Very pain staking but I love the result. I plan on having a nice print of him displayed in the next CDIA gallery showing.
The rigging. Oh, the rigging. Simple enough, he has a typical IK set-up in the legs, spline set-up with clusters in the spine. The trunk has preset positions that can be accessed from the main trunk control, very much like a finger control set-up on a bi-ped rig. The most unique part of the rig is the two hair follicles, one in the belly, one on the tail, that allow that geometry to hang and sad with the body.
The ears are the only thing I would change. I used soft bodies controlled by a series of joint chains throughout the ear. It was very temperamental, more then other kinds of dynamics, it was time consuming, and I don't think they look as good as they could. Looking back, I would have used nCloth.
As a rig overall, its functional! Take a look:
Thursday, May 3, 2012
The many Hairs of my younger self.
The BANE of my existence.
Yeah. Dynamics.
So why the heck do I insist on using them?
I made my 'little girl' character a while back to put in a scene with Henry, the African elephant I made. I hope to have an entry about specific rigging techniques I used for Henry, but for now...the girls freaking hair.
I wanted to use myself (a much younger self) as a reference.
Everyone say "AAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW".
Okay, whatever. I'm still ginger. Now when I first made her, I wanted to use hair. I knew I wanted it short, so I rigged up fur that is controlled by hair particles. I should never have done that. While it moves and floes more realistically, it was very hard to control. She looked like a monkey. Even though I made the geometry of her body a rigid body so it couldnt pass through, it still did, making it look like some kind of Curly thing from the Three Stooges (original please, I'm not touching this 'remake' with a 10-foot pole). The result is....yeah...
No.
I'm not putting that on a modeling/texturing/dynamics reel. No way! Solution: Game Hair. Now why didn't I think of that in the first place?
I love painting textures in ZBrush and Photoshop. The girl's face is painted entirely in ZBRush. Even Henry is sculpted and painted in ZBrush. Henry took about 2-3 hours a day for 2 months to do. For the girl, I painted a patch of hair in Photoshop, threw it on an alpha card, and sculpted her hair out of alpha cards. SO MUCH EASIER. Genius. Here's one of the links I used as a tutorial:
http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html
The other one I used, which went into more detail about what custom brushed and painting techniques to use in Photoshop, I forgot to bookmark like an idiot. But if you google "paint hair" and "Photoshop" you'll get tons of references. Just use whatever will help you most for the project you are trying to accomplish.
Well, here is the final product:
Yeah. Dynamics.
So why the heck do I insist on using them?
I made my 'little girl' character a while back to put in a scene with Henry, the African elephant I made. I hope to have an entry about specific rigging techniques I used for Henry, but for now...the girls freaking hair.
I wanted to use myself (a much younger self) as a reference.
Everyone say "AAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW".
Okay, whatever. I'm still ginger. Now when I first made her, I wanted to use hair. I knew I wanted it short, so I rigged up fur that is controlled by hair particles. I should never have done that. While it moves and floes more realistically, it was very hard to control. She looked like a monkey. Even though I made the geometry of her body a rigid body so it couldnt pass through, it still did, making it look like some kind of Curly thing from the Three Stooges (original please, I'm not touching this 'remake' with a 10-foot pole). The result is....yeah...
No.
I'm not putting that on a modeling/texturing/dynamics reel. No way! Solution: Game Hair. Now why didn't I think of that in the first place?
I love painting textures in ZBrush and Photoshop. The girl's face is painted entirely in ZBRush. Even Henry is sculpted and painted in ZBrush. Henry took about 2-3 hours a day for 2 months to do. For the girl, I painted a patch of hair in Photoshop, threw it on an alpha card, and sculpted her hair out of alpha cards. SO MUCH EASIER. Genius. Here's one of the links I used as a tutorial:
http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html
The other one I used, which went into more detail about what custom brushed and painting techniques to use in Photoshop, I forgot to bookmark like an idiot. But if you google "paint hair" and "Photoshop" you'll get tons of references. Just use whatever will help you most for the project you are trying to accomplish.
Well, here is the final product:
Monday, April 30, 2012
Tea Time Redeux
It has been some time since I visited my tea room. I decided to come back to it to make some improvements. Now, it should be known, since I'm going to be using this piece in my generalist reel that when I modeled the assets in this piece, they were intended to be more cinematic. This means that they have way more geometry then they should. There is no way that I would want these assets to be used in a game. And that is my only regret. Had I extra time to do a major overhaul of this piece, I would remodel the assets so they only have as much geometry as needed.
That said, I did add some dynamics to the scene. I have a reputation of wanting to throw dynamics into everything, which is the reason for most of my head-bashing later on. In this particular instance, I added steam to the teapot and water pouring out to make the matcha. Again, because of time restraints, they aren't as polished as I would like, but they serve their purpose.
The best part of finishing this scene (worst, really) was when I rendered the beauty with all of its dynamics. I spend quite some time getting the water to pour out of the pot in a believable way, and I think my attention to detail for the pour itself took away from what happened AFTER the pour. Because, when the teapot tilts back to stop the flow, this happened:
Haha, yeah. Water isn't supposed to splash upwards and defy gravity. Unfortunately, I discovered this like....they DAY BEFORE I needed the final product. Like I said, big time constraint. What's a girl to do?
Playing with the dynamics and re-rendering the entire segment again was out of the question. I needed a quick and dirty solution that would be believable. The problem area was only in the last 100-ish frames, so I decided to only re-render THOSE FRAMES...but without any dynamics. It wouldn't take long to do because, well, no dynamics. In post I put the two layers on top of each other. Then I got my rotoscope on in After Effects and masked out the crazy-gravity-defying-water so all you can see is the clean, dynamics-free layer. Phew! Not the best way to solve the problem, but it was the best I was going to get in the time I needed it.
So enjoy my traditional Japanese style tea house, complete with self propelled matcha set!
That said, I did add some dynamics to the scene. I have a reputation of wanting to throw dynamics into everything, which is the reason for most of my head-bashing later on. In this particular instance, I added steam to the teapot and water pouring out to make the matcha. Again, because of time restraints, they aren't as polished as I would like, but they serve their purpose.
The best part of finishing this scene (worst, really) was when I rendered the beauty with all of its dynamics. I spend quite some time getting the water to pour out of the pot in a believable way, and I think my attention to detail for the pour itself took away from what happened AFTER the pour. Because, when the teapot tilts back to stop the flow, this happened:
Haha, yeah. Water isn't supposed to splash upwards and defy gravity. Unfortunately, I discovered this like....they DAY BEFORE I needed the final product. Like I said, big time constraint. What's a girl to do?
Playing with the dynamics and re-rendering the entire segment again was out of the question. I needed a quick and dirty solution that would be believable. The problem area was only in the last 100-ish frames, so I decided to only re-render THOSE FRAMES...but without any dynamics. It wouldn't take long to do because, well, no dynamics. In post I put the two layers on top of each other. Then I got my rotoscope on in After Effects and masked out the crazy-gravity-defying-water so all you can see is the clean, dynamics-free layer. Phew! Not the best way to solve the problem, but it was the best I was going to get in the time I needed it.
So enjoy my traditional Japanese style tea house, complete with self propelled matcha set!
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