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...
Holly Theatre Restoration Part 1
I'm in the process of creating a series of visualizations for the upcoming Holly Theatre Restoration in Medford, OR. Here's my first rendering that features the newly rebuilt theater marquee. I created the model and the rendering using Blender (internal render engine). I had previously helped the restoration effort by colorizing some historic photographs.
There's more to come. I'm currently finalizing a rendering of the theater's blade. If time permits I'm also planning an animated walk-through of the interior.
You can learn more about the Holly Theatre Restoration project here.
Zumeo
I just added a profile to Zumeo. It's a pretty interesting way to connect with companies seeking employees so I'll give it a shot. Coincidentally I discovered that it was started by some folks right here in Southern Oregon. You can check out my profile here.
More Fun with Cycles
I'm having a great time experimenting with Cycles. Today I created a photo-realistic fluid simulation with an orange slice. It's in a style similar to some of the high-end studio videography that you see in commercials with fruit and water. I'm planning on turning this into a quick 10 second video snippet for future portfolio updates. Who knows? It may even evolve into a larger project further down the road. The workflow in Cycles makes turn around times on pieces like this easier and faster.
Cycles for Blender
I recently took the new Blender Cycles render engine for a test drive and I can't believe how amazing the results are. I would have expected technology like this to be available another 1-2 years from now but it's astounding that we're seeing something so advanced in experimental Blender builds already. I did a quick product visualization render this weekend and I can't believe how well it worked for me. It literally took me 15-20 minutes to set up my lighting, create all my materials, and send it to render. When I tried to render at 720P with my GPU, my graphics card didn't agree much with it. Now, I am cheaping out with an NVIDIA GT9500 so I wasn't expecting great results to begin with. However, if you have a card in the GTX series or higher, I'm sure things run much more smoothly. There's no blessed version available at Blender.org yet so you take what comes with an experiment. In the meantime, though, this is definitely going to take the place of Yafaray as my raytracer of choice and it's going to completely change how I work (for the better of course). Here's what makes Cycles so great:
- The ability to choose GPU or CPU rendering
- The ability to quickly and accurately preview your materials and lighting in your viewport
- Quick and easy depth of field controls for your camera
- Quick and easy material creation using Blender's built-in node editor (including a really nice default glass shader)
- Removing the need for lights by just having a "light emission" material
- EASY render dialog settings (no more hours of tweaking final gather settings)
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.