coverZERO

Wacom graffiti

well i finished my degree. and so yes, i gave into the time-devourage that is Facebook. i decided to be a bum for a while in order to reflect and relax after being in education my whole life. i got bored after 3 days, i mean SERIOUSLY bored.. so, i productively got myself a new graphics tablet; the Wacom Intuos3 A5 wide, and decided to do some graffitis to test it out.. the coolest thing is that u can watch replays ! AND u can embed them ! sooo here u go..

finished !!!

and theeen, i carefully placed the render of the textured, animated and lit Binbody and Binlid into After Effects on top of the footage.  the alpha channel is picked up straight away and taken out.  then the shadow pass goes on top of this, the layer is set to 'multiply' and then blam, the shot is done.  a minor adjustment to the opacity from 100% to about 80% makes the shadow look all the more convincing.  it's all about subtlety.

i found some sounds to play with and left it to Jordan to do that part..  sounds are half of what makes this piece, and he did an excellent job of it i must say.  he also made the rusty texture used on both Binbody and Binlid, this ensured that they fit together as a pair, just like me and Jordan *smile*.  i just mapped his rusty texture onto Binlid's back.  this was left to a last minute job, the important stuff was out of the way.  i made the rest of the textures used on Binlid by playing with noise and bump maps in Cinema4D.  

i'm so pleased with the result..  it was such a relief to get it done and to see it from scratch and see the results looking this good is so satisfying !  

good stuff !

shadow pass

here is the rendering of the shadow pass using area shadows... it took all day to render.. but it was worth it :) i think this looks really cool by itself...

one tracking piece...

this is one of my characters i was considering using for Double Project...

the most difficult part was getting the lighting to look decent, here i've used Global Illumination alongside a few lights.  the tracking is not perfect because there is too much movement in the camera i think..  so this shot may have to be abandoned...

Beetle boogy

so earlier this week we were trying to think about how we wanted the scene to work..  i was thinking maybe we could have a really fake-looking CG car as the focus as if to say "this car is going to do something", and the bin can be somewhere in the background looking all inconspicuous...  we downloaded loads of CG cars from this website..  this Beetle stood out to Jordan, and i wanted a yellow car...  there is nothing but the model in the 3D scene because this was purely to test the shot to see if the car 'stuck' firmly to the ground,  so no lighting and basic textures.. 

we decided against the idea of having a CG car in the end, it turned out to be too much work which is not what we want to do anyway.  the Binbot is what we want to do..  the car would have to be lit and matched to the scene as well as Binbot.  in this scene the car is not stuck to the floor and is bouncing around..  this extraness is not necessary.  so we said no to the Beetle boogy.

Binlid's first rig test

a half done walk test thing, first the walk was ''acted out'' using my camera phone and whatever was close at hand, which turned out to be my mouse :)  it is very much a rig test to see if all the parts moved how i wanted them to move..  but i sort of got carried away with it.  i love his little crab legs !  mmm...

Traktor's aliive !

I NEEDED A FOUR LEGGED WALK CYCLE !  DESPERATELY !  how do you find a robotic looking creature thing with four legs to use for reference ?

you Google for hours on youTube.  that's how.

i love the look of this shot, it's so simple which is why it works so well.  it's lit really well and the textures look realistically beaten up...  the movement is excellent, and even better it looks like one movement that's been looped.  the Traktor fits into the scene so well...  Jordan loves this video, he wants to use the legs to use for his Binbody..  and i want to use the movement as a guide for Binlid's walk cycle.  there's some bits on the end of the video where it looks like a small breakdown of 'how it was made'.  i love that kind of stuff i want to do one for this project..  and the best part, Jordan wants to do it as well !  it's great how we see the same thing *sigh* we're so good together :)

dude with GI and shadow

below is the result of finding that button in After Effects, it turned out that it as actually one button click that took out all the white from the shadow pass ..it is the mode button on the actual layer.  so now i know that, i can make shadows and lighting look really good.  this is another test shot from another shadow / lighting test, so the shadow is not near perfect, but it's there !  and so is GI..  this time i put a small bit of transparency on the shadow..  i definitely need to work on my lighting skills when working on 3D compositions...

dude with shadow

yay i finally got a shadow working...  still can't remember how to properly take out the white from the shadow pass...  so annoying :( also the shadow is super black because this is another test, to fix this i just need to adjust the opacity of the shadow layer in After Effects.  the shadow pass layer is placed underneath the 3D with the alpha because it looked wrong when placed on top, as the 3D dude has no texture at the moment...

dude with GI

i tried lighting the scene with Global Illumination, this method works well with still image composites..  but i'm not so sure about using it with footage...  there's also some lights in this scene to cast shadows, but i forgot how to properly remove the white from the shadow pass rendering in After Effects..  i bet it's something really simple like a single button click somewhere...  :(

Cedric learns to walk

i needed a walk cycle for a maggot type snail creature thing...  i couldn't find reference for this anywhere on the web, even after hours of Googling on youTube...  so i used my head muscle and came up with this..  it's my submission for the D&AD character brief, and it is brief since i ran out of time with it.  it took forever to render even over 5 machines, and THEN i realised that the texture wasn't mapped on properly :( poo.  but oh well, one day i'll render out  decent version.  for now this walk cycle is pleasing.  ignore the cabbage picture at the end..

dude on path

so i tried to place one of my little dudes on the footpath outside my house.  as i was filming nothing, people who walked past regularly stopped and stared.

awesome

Some guy, known only to me as Flight404 created a process which produces visualizations based on the song and levels in it. He then integrated the lyrics to create a pretty stunning visual effect. The song is “Lovely Head” by Goldfrapp.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

some coool tracking

Krapooyo !

i love the animation and the cuteness of the seed dude. i think it has so much character. the setting looks surreal, and i love surreal thingies...
http://krapooyo.free.fr/

new levels for gaming...

groups !

today were supposed to choose our groups.  We each showed what we wanted to achieve and whoever had ideas wrote them up on the board.  These ideas were then posted up on KCDigitalArts, and we were supposed to decide whose ideas we liked and then we were to form groups on this basis.  

i posted up this clip from youTube..

So i want to do a transforming spider mouse.

yaaay !

i finally got my cube to stick to the table !  it was simply a case of orienting the scene properly so that the 3D axis is positioned precisely in the scene where the 3D object is to go, now it's simply a case of working on shadows and lighting...

problems do have solutions !

I FOUND OUT WHY MY 3D THINGYS KEEP FLOATING NOW !  when creating the camera solve in PfHoe i quickly realised what the orient scene button actually does..  can't remember if Boujou has this button, or maybe i neglected to pay attention to it..  work continues to decide which program is better suited to my needs.  this morning i have learnt that orienting the scene is what makes 3d thingys stick to the floor and not float about !  and it wasn't a problem with my QuickTime.  wooop...

here is an example of what happens when the scene is not oriented properly...  the camera is also moving too fast for the points to be trackable in pfHoe.  The movement must be slower and a lot more steady for the shot to be successful...