Cordyceps Fungus

Again, nothing to do with animation.. but ESandra just sent this to me and I had to share it with more people. This is insane.

(you need to watch it with sound or you won't know what's going on)

Paprika

Thanks to the incredibly awesome Sarasota Film Festival I get to see this on Saturday! I'm excited. It's directed by Satoshi Kon, who also did Millenium Actress, Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent (which are all worth checking out -partic. Perfect Blue) and is a master at messing with audience's heads, and making the medium of animation work for him - he takes advantage of the things specific to traditional animation in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. His work is definitely worth checking out for those of you that aren't familiar with it.

~ Cat

Senior Show Poster!
The theme this year is cheesy horror/sci fi flicks, and we all did a poster for our piece that is, in most cases, not actually related to the content of the pieces. The show is May 4th, 7:30PM at MCC Neel Auditorium (..as you can see on the poster) and it's open to the public this year.

Website Updated!

FINALLY made myself work on my site just a little more. I added an updated demo reel and.. if you look for it, you might just find my thesis..

It still needs A LOT of work, but I figure I need to get over my fear of showing it to people.

I decided to take a short break from working on my new lipsync this weekend and do some quick runs with Gwynne's character for my reel. The second one still needs work (it gets a little rough in parts) and I think I'm definitely going to be expansing it somewhat. Who knows, it might make an appearance in the Senior Show somehow.

Jog cycle

Scared run

~ Cat

This has nothing to do with animation:
The New Map of the Brain

...although, I guess if you want to get technical... it has a lot to do with understanding behavior, or at least the reasons behind the way we act... and seeing as animation is all about creating the illusion that there's something going on inside that shell of a 3D model, this is at least somewhat relevant, right? Whichever way, it's interesting.

Anyway, it's a main page that links to a collection of articles on where science is currently in understanding how the brain works. It's from Time, so it's written in layman's terms, which is great for me anyway. Enjoy!

~ Cat

PS - I turned in my THESIS last night, but I still have a bit to do before I start spreading it around the internet... Next I start my final project, and I will definitely be posting process as I go (this one'll be short, so I'm allowed to do that.) I should have something up around Thurs.

Everyone, go here. Learn about animation:
John K. Blog

Thanks to Cameron for posting this gem on the school forums.

~ Cat

I haven't bothered to google translate the page, but the understanding is that Ghibli has made a movie in oil paints. It's supposed to come out in Japan in May. It's beautiful.

Mezame

***EDIT - it's not made by Ghibli, they're distributing it. Also I heard somwhere else that it's about 30min long.

Studies from Figure Anatomy

Honestly, they look pretty creepy layed out like that.. Just did some scans so I can put something other than gestures up on my website.

~ Cat

Whoops...
Misplaced CM... Haha.

Rendahhhhhs -
Only say positive things, I'm out of time...

Haha, j/k. C&C would be appreciated, although any changes will probably have to be post -SIGGRAPH submission.

~ Cat

Spinning Science

It's admittedly a bit late to be making big-ish changes like this.. but the textures I had before really weren't working with my characters. Hopefully this is working better.

~ Cat

Bad idea to bring political content into a "professional" blog, but I want to.

So there's this ongoing media frenzy about the report that the IPCC just issued. Many of you have heard of "the release of an authoritative and disturbingly grim scientific report in Paris that said global warming is "very likely" [90% certainty] caused by mankind and that climate change will continue for centuries even if heat-trapping gases are reduced. It was the strongest language ever used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose last report was issued in 2001." (ABC article )

But here's the thing about it. According to Junk Science.com, what the IPCC actually released was a summary of their report. The actual report will not be released for another 3 months, during which time it will be edited to make sure that it is consistent with the summary.

....Read that sentence again. Does that sound a little backward to anyone else? You may argue that we have no more reason to believe junkscience.com than the media... but all of the author's claims are directly cited... and he provides links to IPCC documentation concerning the process, whereas ABC.com doesn't really cite anything. Anyway, it's worth looking into. The fact that the Summary for Policymakers has been issued should mean that it has been approved - in which case a "detailed, line by line discussion and agreement" has been made, which sounds pretty good to me, and I'd like to the think that the IPCC isn't being irresponsible about their statements.. but it stills sounds questionable that the summary should be issued before a review of the actual reports has been completed... and that the individual reports will potentially be edited to suit the summary. (Sorry I keep reiterating.. it just sort of... blows my mind a little. Maybe there's something I'm not understanding completely.)

It's not to say I'm against us taking care of the environment, and I don't even necessarily think the media-frenzy over the issue is a bad thing. (Although I'm still not necessarily convinced that scientists have reached a consensus on industry's effect on the situation - see discussions on the effect of water vapor on global temperatures - I don't think setting regulations to limit our impact on the environment could possibly be a bad thing.) I'm just a little concerned about this incredibly backward-sounding move that the media is broadcasting in a somewhat misleading way, that's already having a gigantic impact on environmental policy worldwide.. that's all. Heck, junkscience could even be a hoax.. it's not like you can ever really expect to find the truth on the internet.

~ Cat

Lighting WIP. Still working on the time of day.. the bottom image is more what I'm going for - mid-morning-ish, although still not perfect, and the top two are what I had for our in-class crit yesterday, which look decidedly later in the day. Lots to do... Meret still just has a basic color map, and terrible UVs, and a lot of the environment textures aren't fully resolved. Let's see how much work I can get done in a week!

~ Cat

I'm sure everyone's posting this everywhere, but I thought I'd pass it along too.
Nocturna trailer

Wow, thinking about it, traditional animation works so much better for cats... Ah well.

~ Cat

Unfortunately, after only a couple of weeks of being back at school, I've grown tired of all music... or at least any of the music that I have access to (Pandora, radio, shared iTunes in the labs..) so today I started playing through some of online lectures that my Games and Society teacher linked and recommended to us, and most of it is really great stuff.

TED Talks
This is from an annual conference hosted by BMW which brings together the worlds leading experts on "ANY subject area offering something fresh and important." They all run about 15min, although I wish they were a bit longer, seeing as everyone is being forced to rush - but I guess it's more about a general survey of knowledge in multiple areas as opposed to anything too specialized.

The most worthwhile ones I've seen so far have been from Bjorn Lomborg (talks about priorities in dealing with the world's problems), Robert Wright (how the responsible persuit of one's own personal interests lead works in favor of humanity) and Wade Davis (National Geographic - speaks about the steady averaging out of world culture and language).

Also interesting is this talk by James P. Carse about finite and infinite games (as well as religion and unquestioning belief)

~ Cat

PS - if anyone wants to recommend any music to me, I would appreciate it. The problem is that I can't really work to anything slow (which is why Pandora and the radio are letting me down) and I'm tired of dance music..

I was poking around the internet today and discovered that my favorite series, the Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake were made into a "fantasy opera" at some point. They were already made into a BBC miniseries in the early 90s, which I strongly recommend to people looking for something a little different and slightly uncomfortable, but I thought I'd put this out there (not that any of us will probably have the opportunity to ever see it..) Looking through the images and listening to some of the [sort of boring, typical-sounding] music (which you can listen to here) it seems like it could either be very interesting (as Peake definitely gave them enough to work with) or... not really worth anyone's time (like that production of Faust I saw last summer...) Not to give the impression that I'm much of a theatre person anyway.

But all of you should read the books. I discovered the site through an interesting path actually - I was reading about the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which I'm now very curious about and saw the term hysterical realism, which sounded interesting, and read that Peake's work could be described as such. Also in there is a mention of Moby Dick, which I'm currently [slowly] reading - and I'd recently noted was similar in style to Gormenghast. Go me.

~ Cat

Pan's Labyrinth

One more since I'm thinking about it:
Pan's Labyrinth Interviews off of Rotten Tomatos

Nothing super-insightful if you're looking for some sort of in-depth talk about the film, just a couple of words from the director and a few actors. Interesting to see anyway. (Also, the guy in the Pan suit is going to be the Silver Surfer in the new Fantastic Four - when he's not CG. I don't know why they're making that movie.. but.. the Silver Surfer is pretty cool.)

~ Cat

Attempt to add content to my blog:



Also, since I seem to post in pairs, uhh, here's some more figure stuff if anyone cares. They're from last semester and awkwardly arranged in a doc I threw together to get my teacher's opinion on what to put in my portfolio.

Zune
If anyone hasn't noticed, Microsoft has a pretty cool advetising campaign going on for Zune. Here's a collection of commercials, all roughly based around the concept of sharing. (Play button when you mouse over is for video, eye is for stills)

While I'm at it, other really cool advertising sites to check out:

Psyop
Of particular interest is Psyop's Propaganda section, in which they advertise for themselves. The Psyop Anthem, along with one of their other commercials were both in SIGGRAPH's electronic theater a couple of years ago (how I found out about them in the first place)

The Mill
The Mill is an effects house, so they have some film stuff and music videos as well. A list of their showreels is on the left menu set - under "showreel" (obviously). It seems they've changed the setup from overall reels (they used to have a CG one, NY, London, and overall) to reels of full commercials (arranged by.. director??). That really bugs me, actually... I prefer viewing colletions of bite-sized, awesome effects set to music... but I'm sue they had their reasons.

Also, illustrators - I'm stalking you all through the social network that is Blogspot. Keep up the posting - I love seeing your stuff, regardless of whether I actually know you or not. On the same note, I'm going to make an effort to start actually posting a bit more (we're getting into rendering, so I'll actually have something to show soon) even though I don't think anyone actually reads this thing.

~ Cat

Also, since I'm thinking about my blog right now - I just wanted to post this quick image of Meret, seeing as the last image I posted of him was before a bunch of changes.



Textures are not final, and this pose isn't even very strong.. but I wanted to get something up here that wasn't the old model.

Since I can't really post any thesis stuff, here's some new figure. December crit on Friday - who's excited??

The first 2 are 1 min, the last is.. 2 hours?

Website

I'll probably still be changing some stuff, but it's done as far as this week is concerned.

Thesis Story Progression -

I was going through my work for portfolio, and I found all of these "Hero Shots" drawn throughout last semester. Interesting to see how my story changed.. It started with a little girl who was afraid of germs that had to clean a bathroom, then changed to cat trying to protect his 'temple' from a frog in Egypt, then out of Egypt to a patio somwhere and then a completely different story about a cat who wanted to play with crickets that the frog kept eating (animatic I passed with).. and now it's different again (went back to the patio situation)

Dear Traditional Media,

I missed you.

Love, Cat

Cat Learns a[nother] Lesson about Planning.

I figure blogs are all about sharing as you learn - not just posting really pretty finished pieces - so I'm going to share with you all the story of my Meret model. It's a long and twisted tale of poor planning and knocking your head against a wall repeatedly (figuratively, of course..)and it's not over just yet, but I can still share. Here it goes.

Meret was originally intended to be a graceful, neat (tidy) cat - the reason behind him being a cat, in fact, was to contrast the cool, graceful motion of a cat with the clumsy, bouncy movements of the frog. In my current animatic, however, I seem to have forgotten about all of that. On the first day of CA I also decided to make him into a quadruped.. without any planning whatsoever, and I got this awful looking model:



So... it was bad. Then I played with it for awhile, but I still couldn't seem to make it look like any sort of concept I had of Meret:



...and made a lot of different versions of it because I didn't like it:



Then, it suddenly occured to me that there was absolutely no way to make a bipedal cat look graceful... So I decided to change it. I made another, pretty rushed turn around to fix him:


And I'm including this because I think it's funny:



I got the body to a reasonably good point:



But I'm still not happy with the face - SO- Tony showed me this really cool paint-over method. You take a screen grab of your model and just paint on top of it in grays in Photoshop - cleaning up your shapes and whatnot until you like it. Then you pull it into Maya as an imageplane and get to work making your model look like it.



So, the point of this story is to a) keep story in mind. What does your character need to look like in order to best support the story? Without a graceful design, I had destroyed all reason for Meret to even be a cat in the first place. b) Plan well. I could have gotten to the point I'm at a lot faster if I had simply sat down for awhile and drawn out some more variants before going into Maya... which is a lesson I've learned many times before... but I may have to learn a few more times, it seems.

~ Cat

Thesis is scary.


ALSO! I just remembered that I'd intended to post this awhile ago. It's a card I made for my bro's birthday. If you don't get it, go here:

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Macquettes.

Letsee how much work I can churn out in the next day and a half.

Medal:

He's on to you.....



(only first pass lighting.. )

Facial!

Expressions for the captain- I still have more to do on them though.. I can't push most of them enough because of the teeth and mouth pocket.. Textures still need work too - the teeth are glowing.

Meret and Frog Facial Expressions -

These are from awhile ago, but I felt like posting them because I like them... These are my thesis characters - Meret and the Frog.

Good news! I figured out how to set this thing so that non-members can give me comments! So please, comment away!

Now I just need more content.

Navy Captain -

And this is what I'm working on at present. Our company is making a boat sim sort of video game and for fun, at the end depending on how well you do, this little captain guy pops up and either shakes his head at you or gives you a medal or something.. so I get to make this guy! I should have spent more time on the design.. but I didn't. Also, this is a project that had been canned immediately after I started it, and then just recently picked up again. I would say I spent about 18 hours on this model? Minus lunch and talking...

Angle Character Library

As most of you know, I've been working this summer at a place called Angle, inc which does visualizations for companies trying to win government contracts (i.e., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman). My first and largest assignment was to build a new character library for use in their simulations - so my job was to update an old model - or well, pretty much completely rebuild it, rig, weight and texture it. I had to make different ethnicities (black, white, asian) outfits (coveralls - or "poop suit", officer coveralls, officer khakis and a work uniform) and accessories (baseball cap, hat, hair options, float coat - the helmet had already been modeled)

I finished it awhile ago (except there were originally going to be different height options and that part sort of got forgotten/abandoned) and I threw this picture together tonight to stick up here to show the different outfit combinations - and that I rigged them as well - although you can see a bit of spottiness in the weighting...