Bust #6
I've been enjoying a pleasant break over the last few days after a pretty hectic schedule. I took some time to do some quick sculpting. I haven't been closely tracking the sequence of my sculptures but by my rough count, this should be #6 so thus it will be...
I put a bit of work into creating the strong separation of the jaw so I accentuated that pretty heavily from underneath with the lighting.I created a polished, marble-like material in cycles to accentuate a wider range of lightness and darkness. I get an equal amount of enjoyment out of lighting these pieces as I do sculpting them.
On a completely separate note, I'll be doing a presentation on the EMDA 203 curriculum tomorrow at 1:00 at SOU's Digital Media Gallery as part of SOAR. I'll be presenting some student work and talking about the curriculum. Also, a couple of weeks down the road I'll be at the Digital Innovator's Conference here in Ashland. I'll be representing my freelance multimedia business and also SOU's EMDA program. I may be presenting more EMDA student work there. So far, there's nothing worked out yet as it concerns the EMDA presentation but details are forthcoming.
Processing
I've been working with Processing a lot lately as it's part of the EMDA 203 curriculum. It's been touted as a multimedia programming platform specifically built with artists in mind.
So far I've found it to be pretty enjoyable to work with. The potential to design large scale multimedia pieces appears to be boundless. I look forwarding to seeing what I can do with it. I'll be lecturing on the concepts of procedural animation this Tuesday morning. I'll also be doing some live demonstrations of examples in Processing.
Check out Processing here.
On that note I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I recommend checking out Form and Code by Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams if you're interested in what some artists are creating with computers. Regardless of your thoughts on conceptual art, it's a unique and fascinating account of digital technology and its relationship to conceptual art. It also outlines a lot of common techniques used in the medium.
Sculpting for Sanity
The majority of my working hours for the last two months have been spent inside of Illustrator. Now don't get me wrong, Illustrator is an excellent tool and is a good avenue for self-expression however as many of you may know, it's easy to go a bit stir crazy when all you do for weeks is draw vectors. In order to maintain my sanity I've been doing some digital sculpting. I've been playing around with Mudbox a little but mostly I've been working with Sculptris. If you haven't tried it before, please do. It was a program initially developed independently and distributed for free but since then Pixologic (of Zbrush fame) has acquired it and is now distributing it for free as a jump-off/training tool for ZBrush users. As anybody who reads this blog knows, FREE is my middle name. Kudos to Pixologic for smart marketing as well because now I'm very curious about trying and potentially buying Zbrush down the road.
Sculptris is a blast and it's incredibly easy to learn and pick up. I don't know about other folks but I vibed very well with the program from the beginning and have been producing some pretty nice sculptures. I've been doing very quick bursts of creative work to free up my brain. Surprisingly my work (and my sculpting) have benefited greatly. I've never partaken in traditional sculpting but I was surprised at how easy it was for me to start creating organic models immediately. I've been using very little reference materials however I have found a few time lapse sculpting videos online and have found the techniques shown in them to be invaluable. Here's my latest creation. It's some sort of a goblin creature that originally started out as eye and ear study. I decided: why not work on some teeth as well? I'm still doing some tweaking but in the meantime I dropped it into Blender for a quick Cycles render and it looks great (and a little disturbing). As anybody who's tinkered with digital sculpting knows, one thing quickly leads to another. It gets addictive pretty quickly. Sometime I'd love to do some time lapse screen captures of my sculpting techniques. In all I've maybe spent a total of 90-120 minutes on this piece so far. That's not too bad considering how long it would probably take to build this with polygons.
Where to from here? Well, I'm going to be posting a lot more of my sculpture work. Also, I need to get myself better acquainted with the bump mapping and painting tools inside of Sculptris. I get the impression that you can create highly realistic (and expressive) results once you master those particular aspects of the application. Keep an eye here for more of my sculpting work.
Does everything I do need a lengthy explanation?
Nope. Sometimes I just like to have fun.
I did a presentation on lighting and shading to Miles Inada's Art 354 class this week. I created this quick scene to demonstrate toon shading. I actually had a lot of fun making this so why not put it up here?
By the way, I am going to be an adjunct faculty member for the Spring 2012 quarter at Southern Oregon University. I will be teaching a lab section of EMDA 203 (Interactive Media). Sign up now. It's going to be pretty fun.
EMDA is SOU's new program for Emerging Media and Digital Art. You can check out their website here.
Corona SDK
I've been busy for the last week becoming familiar with creating mobile content using Corona SDK. Corona runs off of lua script and its API is incredibly easy to pick up. A lot of functions that normally require several lines of code in Actionscript 3 can easily be written with 1 or 2 lines. Overall, I really enjoy it. I recently delved into physics and sprites which are all made incredibly easy with Corona. I created an app with an animated disc that you can drop down onto a random arrangement of bumpers (think Plinko). Shaking your device rearranges the bumpers. I created the graphical content with Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. It appears to play nicely with graphical and animated content.
I wish I was able to post a screen capture of the application in action but camstudio does not appear to be playing nicely with the simulator app. I'll figure out a way to show it soon but in the meantime, here's a few screen shots.
LMWISDOM
I added a short piece to my portfolio highlighting all of the animation work that I did on the new LMWISDOM video. I was originally going to include this in my fall update but the product went through some rebranding which required some modifications to the animated content.
Cinestyle + Canon 600D + Premiere + After Effects
Download Video:
MP4
WebM
HTML5 Video Player by VideoJS
I'm always looking for ways to offer a wider variety of services. Lately I've been working to build up my video production capability.
As a result, I've been working with my Canon 600D to get it shooting professional looking footage. I've partaken in a good amount of tweaking, reading, and tutorials to get myself (and my camera) up to snuff and now I'm very pleased with the quality of the video I'm getting out of my camera. When I first bought my DSLR I was pretty skeptical about its ability to produce professional looking footage despite having seen a lot of great stuff being shot on DSLR cameras. I figured it took a lot of upgrades and money to get to that level. I already had a lot of experience doing post production, editing, and color correction so when I was searching for a new photography camera, I only thought it was natural to find one with a strong video capability in case I ever wanted to expand into that area.
When I started out, the footage I was shooting was horrible. As a matter of fact, I had seen better video shot on some iPhones. A large part of perfecting the footage was learning how to work with the manual settings. Of course this seems like a no-brainer. Typically if you customize something properly, it's way better than the default. It took me a while to get a good feel for all the manual settings as I'm not a videographer by trade but I was in a much better starting point than if I had gone into this with no exposure to video cameras and video production. After this, a large part of the equation was getting a good picture style or color profile installed on my camera. Seeing as I'm a post-production guy and a tweaker I wanted something that didn't necessarily look glamorous in its raw form but preserved as much color data as possible for post processing. I tested a handful of the top profiles out there and decided that Technicolor Cinestyle was by far the best.
From there figuring out my post-production process was a snap. I worked my footage into something neutral with Premiere's 3 way color tool. From there I imported my pieces into After Effects where I applied some color curves and a small amount of tint. I built a custom high pass filter for sharpening and added a tiny bit of vignette. Piece of cake. I see a lot of people relying on Magic Bullet looks to get good color corrected footage but honestly I found the tools in Production Premium to be more than sufficient for getting very nice looking grades. Once you get the hang of them, they're fairly simple to work with and give you a very wide degree of control.
So going forward I actually have an exciting new video post project on the horizon. We're going to use my DSLR for shooting and I'm planning to do all edits and corrections in Production Premium. Should be exciting. You'll see the results here first. In the meantime, if you're curious, check out my test shot above. You'll see how a little spit shine makes a big difference.
Quick Tip: Shape Key Array Hack for Blender
I was building some interior architectural elements for the Holly Restoration project when I came across a way to create shape keyed duplicates in Blender. If it was a little less cumbersome, I wouldn't call it a hack but let's be realistic, this is a HACK. This is pretty useful for certain kinds of architectural work. Say you want to create an array of meshes in a formation but their shape is altered along the length of the formation. You want the meshes to be real and sound geometry in case you're exporting it to another program. Yeah, the array modifier would be a good place to start. Sometimes you can get what you want if you add a curve modifier to the array however, the results may not be to your satisfaction. This works well for a handful of elements (5-10). You probably wouldn't want to subject yourself to this process for a large number of elements though unless you scripted it.
- Create the first mesh in your "array."
- Go to the Shape Key list (under object data) for the mesh and press the plus key twice to create a shape key and a basis.
- Select "Key 1" and enter edit mode (tab). Move and modify its geometry to suit your needs for the final mesh in your "array."
- Exit edit mode (tab again). Duplicate the mesh to account for how many pieces will be in your "array."
- Now select each mesh and move the "value" for Key 1 to reflect where each mesh should be in the array (for example, for 6 meshes your first mesh would have a value of .2, the next would be .4, so forth and so on...).
- Now go through your meshes and select the black arrow next to the shape key menu. From there select "New Shape from Mix." This creates "Key 2."
- If you want exportable geometry, just go to each mesh and select the shape keys from the top down and delete them with the minus sign. This way, you'll retain the latest modified version of the mesh as the true geometry for the mesh.
If you python scripted this process, it would potentially be pretty potent. Maybe this is a future scripting project for me? If you keep your shape keys for your array then there's a lot of potential for animating the array for motion graphics.
Now a member of SOFaT
I'm excited to be accepted as a new member of Southern Oregon Film and Television. I recently attended the local video conference for the annual Oregon Film Office meeting and had the pleasure of meeting a few members. I immediately knew that this was something that I needed to get involved with. I look forward to networking with other video professionals and offering my skills to future projects.
Southern Oregon Film and Television is an organization that brings together professionals that cover all aspects of video production and post-production. In addition to connecting a strong community of professionals, SOFaT also works hard to promote Southern Oregon as an excellent location for film and television production. You can learn more about SOFaT at http://www.filmsouthernoregon.org
Holly Theatre Restoration Part 2
Here's a rendering of what the new blade (pylon sign) for the Holly Theatre will look like. Like the first rendering, this was built, rendered, and composited in Blender with the internal render engine. I was told that my marquee rendering is now being featured on promotional cards in Medford restaurants. I'm currently working on some interior renders.
They started working on the facade the other day and the building is already looking much better. Check out the story on KOBI. The story features some of the historic photographs that I colorized.
More to come...
About
My name is Randolph Jones. I work with my clients to design and develop a variety of digital multimedia including 3D visualizations and animations.
This is a space where I share knowledge and talk about my latest projects.
Perhaps you like a design featured here or maybe you have a technical question? Please feel free to contact me.