3D Modelling & Animation – Week 10

Work

I’ve found myself struggling to come to terms with the modelling side of Maya this week. It really seems like we’ve entered a completely new world of CG. Obviously we could have spent a lot more time learning these concepts and in fact I probably would have preferred the semester to be weighted more in that direction. Animation seemed much simpler to get a grasp on. Having said that though, it is a lot of ground to cover in a 12 week semester, particularly when it’s running in parallel to 3 other practical subjects (but that’s a winge for a different post).

Moving ahead from my capsule of last week, this is the first strange problem I came across…

…I got it in my head that everything must be beveled when modelling, to allow light to pick up the edges of the polygon. However, it didn’t want to play nicely with my capsule. After some hunting through random settings, I managed to get the above crazy looking shape. It would be cool, if it wasn’t completely useless for my project. I decided to move on without the precious bevelled edges.

One capsule was fairly manageable, but two columns, surrounded by capsules was a prospect that quickly became a little harder to navigate…

I found that when selecting capsules to rotate or move, things became quite problematic. Not only when the selection would pick other elements that I did not intend to choose, but also when grouping larger sections to edit. Grouping tended to change the point of rotation from the centre of the object to the centre of world (zero on each of the axes), or another random position. This is one of those quirks of Maya that I would like to get to the bottom of, but under the pressure of quickly evaporating time, I simply did my best to work with it.

I then decided that keeping things on different layers and colour coding them was the way forward…

…this image shows the base of the tower as well as a couple of the surrounding buildings, which will create the backdrop for the tower.

If time permits, I’ll be adding some smaller elements, like signage, street posts and a few more background buildings, before moving onto the texturing and finally lighting. But I’m going to have to move quickly!

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3D Modelling & Animation – Week 09

Inspiration

After the relative ease of dealing with the dice last week, I looked at some architectural ideas for my modelling project. I have always been a fan of minimalist design, and the seemingly simple, geometric shapes of minimalist architecture sounded like a perfect direction for my project: simple, but if done well, very effective.

A couple of great architects I came across via ISO50 were Tom Kundig and Jamie Darnell. Not only are these fantastic examples of minimalist design, but the lighting in a couple of the shots really caught my eye. Lighting seems to be something that can make or break a CG model, and a carefully considered lighting design, coupled with some clean, minimalist lines could be a good move.

An architecture student friend of mine then suggested that I take a look at the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. It pretty much ticks all the boxes: great design, check; simple but quirky character, check; it’s in Japan, check… it’s all there really. Sold.

Image: archiCentral

Work

The obvious place to start was with the capsules. To save myself a lot of work, I’ll be duplicating them until the cows come home…

…it’s not a flying start, but I’m on my way.

As pointed out in the tutorial, a narrative is fairly important for this project. We won’t be doing an animation – just modelling and render – for this work, so the image really should be saying something. And a building doesn’t say a whole lot without some context. So I have decided to use my idea of strong lighting and set the image up at night.

Ideally, I would like to create some of the buildings surrounding the Nakagin Tower (but to a lesser detail) and have a few of the lights on inside these skyscrapers. Instead of people inhabiting the buildings though, I would like to see silhouettes of people standing on top of the Tower and the surrounding structures. With some eerie night lighting, this could set up a kind of dialogue that whilst fairly abstract, could hopefully spark a bit of conversation.

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3D Modelling & Animation – Week 08

Thoughts

I’ve found myself falling a bit behind this week after a dose of the flu, a few exciting new tests at the doctors and The Finders Keepers markets…

Not attending the lecture or tutorial was always going to put me behind the 8-ball for this subject, as we cover so much ground so quickly. I have already found modelling to be a far more complex topic than animation and given the choice, I think I would prefer to stick to the latter. There are so many layers (literally and metaphorically) in modelling, that it’s easy to find yourself quickly lost, and in my case – frustrated.

Yet again, my respect for those artists that do 3D work well has jumped up a few notches.

Work

Asking around to see what I missed during the tutorial, I was pointed in the direction of the dice texturing lesson. Of course, a dice is quite literally the most basic 3D polygon you can come across, so probably a perfect first step for me.

The main lesson here was to understand that to texture a shape, you need to imagine it as an unfolded, flat version of itself. In the case of the above box, it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination…

The above shows the flat texture laid over the top of the unfolded box (shown by the white outline). This is in the UV window of Maya and will likely become a heavily used tool in the future. Here is where you can line up textures, resizing and fitting to each polygon, so that when it is again in its 3D form, the edges don’t look unnatural. Of course, in the case of the dice, it’s not really an issue…

So there is my very first texturing effort. Simple, but I’m guessing it’s a method I’ll be using for the final modelling project. I doubt that I’ll be taking on anything like a human face though – the unwrapping of a polygon that complex sounds nothing short of frightening.

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Digital Composite – Week 10

Work

Work, work, work. I’m inching closer to having these two triptychs finished up now. The direction has changed a little for one of the series, but I think definitely for the better.

The first series, based on the National Security Hotline campaign has taken shape as a questioning look at the Australian media. My first instinct was to point the finger at the politicians that created this policy, but I then realised that this policy is in fact based on a great deal of public opinion. And these opinions are often shaped by ugly, headline hungry, tabloid ‘journalism’.

I’ve had a growing attitude that we should be holding journalists more accountable for the stories they run. Quite often, writers like Andrew Bolt and talkback hosts like Alan Jones (I’ve deliberately avoided the term ‘journalist’ here) seem to really escape any reprimand over what could often be termed sensationalist pieces at best; poorly researched, bigoted and deliberately inciting public outrage at worst.

So, instead of the easy target of the politician, it’s time to go after these guys…

…these are almost finished now, and I’m really looking forward to putting them in some strategic places once they’ve been printed up. I’d love to see a double-take as someone realises that they’re not one of the original campaign.

The second triptych is all but ready for printing too. These are now much more graphic than they were previously, and have given me a chance to spend some quality time in Illustrator…

…I tried to keep these fairly clear and direct. Each poster represents a different point surrounding the ‘boat people’ issue, with a graphic to hit the point home. The title, and barbed wire element was carried through each and the red, white (black) and blue are a final reference to the Australian flag.

I’m going to try and get these to the printers as soon as possible, so I can allow myself enough time to do a test print of each. After the poor printing results of the last project, I’m keen to avoid a repeat of a sub-standard print.

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Multimedia Authoring – Week 08

Code Development

It’s going to be a recurring opening statement for my (late) journal entries this week that I’m officially now behind. A week of being sick, running a music stage at The Finders Keepers markets and an overly ambitious freelance schedule have all ganged up against my uni work and at this point, they look like they’re winning the battle. Fingers crossed they don’t win the war…

After breaking my sketch up into more managable sections (RSS feed/silhouette/particles/sound), I decided to begin from the top of that list; with the RSS feed. Using a combination of romeFeeder and NextText, the example sydicated feed sketch on the romeFeeder site actually suited me quite well. However, I want to have the feeds arriving one after the other, from the top to bottom of screen and not disappear until there is input from the participant. Which is where things got a little bit trickier.

Fortunately, the NextText library puts a bounding box around the feeds, so that makes it easy to figure out the height of each feed, regardless of its dynamic length. However, it’s noted on the NextText documentation that this figure isn’t totally reliable, so I’m just hoping that I can still make this sketch function reasonable well in spite of this shortcoming. The point I found myself stuck at was actually getting those heights to play with each other.

As I’ve found to be the way with Processing, often you know how the code should come together, you just can’t find the right syntax. Kind of like learning a new language: you know what you’re supposed to say, you just can’t find the words. And so I found myself trying to not only calculate the height of each feed, but then take that figure and add it to the previous height, so that the latest feed would sit below the one before.

So simple in theory. Execution was the hard part.

Source code

(Yes, I’m still having troubles getting Processing sketches to display properly. I’ll update these posts as soon as I can figure out what the problem is.)

Instead of progressing down the screen, the feeds are laying one in front of the other. I have managed to keep them on screen – instead of disappearing – and starting at the top of the screen, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

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Digital Composite – Week 09

Work

Following on from my attempt at a subtle political message, I decided to create something a little bit more direct and graphic: activist posters.

Presenting my work last week, it was pointed out that there was nothing in my image that suggested that my subjects were in fact doctors. There was no signifier. This struck me as being a massive downfall in my work, because without it, I’m really just attaching my own story to the work – the audience has no real opportunity to create their own narrative. At least not one that helps me convey what I’m trying to say in the image. So for the final project, I’m going to really hammer it home.

Still drawing a lot from The Design of Dissent, I decided to work on two triptychs. The first, being a subversion of the obscene Australian National Security Hotline campaign. Similarly to my previous project, I would like to turn these posters on themselves, in a John Heartfield kind of way, for this campaign truly is propaganda…

Whilst this will be a fairly straightforward graphic exercise, the trick will be how I make these my own, whilst still retaining the feel that they are referring to these posters. After creating them, I’d really like to do some simple composite work that shows them in situ – maybe on a bus shelter or train station.

For the second triptych, I’m going to take on an issue that I’ve started feeling quite strongly about of late: boat people. Recently I was at my childhood home, watching the news with my father, when it was announced that a boatload of asylum seekers had been found. Something along the lines of “this wouldn’t have happened if Howard was in” was heard to be muttered from across the room. I spat something fairly unconsidered back in response, and that neatly marked the beginning of what I’ve noticed to be a marked increase in talk of the boat people ‘problem’.

There are all kinds of things wrong with our Government’s policy, but what really upsets me is the general feeling from the public that our shores must be protected from these people arriving at all costs. For all the rhetoric, finger pointing and money spent, I can’t think of one person actually asking why are we afraid of these people? And let’s be honest, that’s where this anger grows from: fear.

My first mockup effort was a bit dry. Looking like a UNICEF ad, or something similar, it didn’t really get the instant impact I was going for…

It also included a lot of text, which rambled a few different points about the current situation. I decided that these would be better served as their own individual posters, each making a separate statement, but clearly being from the same series. The second mockup was a little more successful…

Heading over to Illustrator, instead of Photoshop, clean, clear, vector graphics should be more helpful for this project. Whilst the above image has a long way to go, I think it’s heading in a good direction and could easily be expanded into several posters, creating an activist campaign.

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Digital Composite – Week 08

Work

After my disappointment with the outcome of the original shoot, I decided that rather than trying to save the images in post production, I would shoot once again. I’ve found that in the past, attempting to force poor material into something workable is far too time consuming, particularly at the business end of the semester. Although I had in my mind what I wanted from the shots, I was short on time and in retrospect, poorly prepared. Racing down to a location near a local railway yard, I dragged along a couple of mates to try and catch the last rays of the winter sun before they – and my last photo opportunity – disappeared entirely.

Once we arrived at the location, the sun was already disappearing behind the rooftops of the surrounding houses – something I should have taken into consideration in pre production. I only grabbed a couple of mediocre images, before the first location was unusable…

Scrambling around to find any place that still had a bit of light, I was fortunate enough to stumble across a bright orange shipping container. It was a little bit sketchy getting in there, but I think in the end it was a great find. The colours and composition were much stronger than my original ideas of a simple urban landscape…

Finally, I decided that a portrait framing would be more effective for this shot. It gave me an opportunity to shoot from below and give the subjects more of a heroic pose…

There wasn’t one singular shot that I liked entirely, so I decided to composite parts of my favorites. The final image ended up being combined from around six different shots and gave me a chance to spread the action around the frame a little bit more…

The accompanying media release gives more of an explanation for the duo. My goal for this project was to bring people’s attention to the way they judge what they see through their own associations. Many people would see this image and assume they are graffiti artists, vandals, or even terrorists. I wanted to turn that back on itself by explaining that they were actually doctors, fighting a new disease that was afflicting large parts of the population: Consumerism.

The colours and structure of the frame came together quite well for me, and in the end, I was reasonably happy with the result, especially considering the problems I had during the shoot. However, maybe unsurprisingly, I then had printing issues to contend with.

Whether it’s fortunate I work in a shop that has a brand spanking new large format printer is open to interpretation. Whilst it’s a great printer, we have it set up to print on canvas, not any paper-like media. So for me, this was a crash course in how much colour profiles can change the output of a printer. Not only do the colours look different, but the everything down to the amount of ink that the printer puts onto the page changes. This had pretty dire results for my first print. It looked like something that came out of my home printer when the ink has all but completely run out.

Many, many tests later (not to mention trialing different printer drivers, colour profiles and paper types), I… gave up actually. There came a point that I had to let it go and just use the best print I had. Obviously, I would have liked to get as high a quality print as I could, but when using a printer that uses ten ink cartridges at around $120 or so each, there’s a limit to how much stuffing around I’m able to do.

For the final project, I plan to steer clear of the shop printer, although I will put in some extra time there at some point, getting to know the printer a little better. I think it’s already shown me that I can learn a lot from a better understanding of how the process works.

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Digital Composite – Week 07

Work

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the most productive week for me. Along with being sick all week, my photo shoot certainly didn’t go to plan. Not that I should be surprised – it’s the lecturer from this very subject that continues to remind us that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And it will happen at the very last minute.

I was helped out by a professional photographer friend of mine for the night shoot I did this week. It was partly because he was only available at night that I chose to go with a night shoot. In retrospect of course, I should have done something with much more light available. After discussing the look I was going for, we did some test shots in Angel Place in the city.

The shot above are done with a separate flash. It was a long exposure image, and several held poses were ‘flashed in’. Whilst I really like this effect, it has its own meaning and isn’t something that really fits with my concept, so we moved on.

Now, dressing your friends up as protesters and having them run through smoke in the middle of the city isn’t the brightest idea, so here is a little ‘thank you’ to my willing volunteers: Jonny and Kate.

To achieve a photojournalistic, in the moment type of shot, we tried following the action with the camera as my models ran past. This gave the effect of blurring the background, whilst the subjects stayed relatively in focus.

And then we tried adding some smoke.

After doing this many times, I decided that we really weren’t getting the effect I was after. Whilst it really did capture some movement and excitement in the shot, it wasn’t really expressing a strong stance from the subjects and therefore not conveying the idea I wanted – that these people are possibly someone that should be feared.

So I returned to the original concept of doing something that sits somewhere between a posed shot and an action shot.

The end result was much closer to what I originally had in mind, but still lacked the power I was looking for. The stances come across as being forced and the smoke has more of a ghostly effect. This is of course because of the night shooting.

So whilst I learnt a lot from doing this shoot, I’m going back to the last-minute drawing board. I’ll be doing a late afternoon shoot this time (I like the long shadows we managed to capture in the above shot), so I can get more of a billowing, flare-like smoke.

Inspiration

Image: Stefano Rellandini

I found this image of an Italian protester that really captures so much energy that I love. Whilst this isn’t as ambiguous as I plan my image to be, the separation between foreground subject and background is fantastic and something I will keep in mind for the re-shoot.

This one I found from an old blog post is possibly closer to what I’m going for…

Image: AP via BBC

In this instance, the break between foreground and background is created with water, but it’s just as effective. The pose of the protester is also a lot more open to interpretation, which could be useful for my concept.

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