'If you want to be an artist, do it. If you want to direct, or act, or write, don't think about it, do it. Take a chance and jump off the cliff. You can build your wings on the way down. As long as you love what you do and do what you love, you won't fail. Love is the key to everything. --Ray Bradbury, 2009
'To all who come to this happy place ... Welcome!' --Walt Disney, July of 1955
'If you can possibly afford it, always buy the best. You'll rarely be disappointed.' --Alex Sherman, 1994
'Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.' --Samuel Clemens
'Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. ' --Leonard da Vinci
Got a bunch of pictures of a place you’ve been, or need to create a digital model of an existing object or person for a project you’re working on? Photomodeling (the process of creating a digital model of an object from photographs) up till now has been a laborious, painstaking process. It’s faster by a long way and more accurate than building it by hand, but at the end of the day it’s still a huge pain and you have to have everything set up just right before you can even start taking the pictures to do it.
Try this on for size – Autodesk Labs has created a Photo Scene Editor to go with its Photofly project. This utility allows you to just go walk around a building (or a person, or a tabletop object) and just snap a bunch of pictures. You then upload them to the Photofly server, and it does the processing for you, returning a textured 3D model as an output. That can be loaded into Autodesk’s Image Modeler format, and from Image Modeler you can export to a number of other formats. It figures that you can’t just export directly to an OBJ, by the way – this utility is free, and will function until August 1, 2011, and they’re trying to get you to buy Image Modeler. I imagine that at some point it will become part of Image Modeler anyway, but for now, if you can get your hands on a copy of Image Modeler, this will be outrageous to play with.
I shot a complex series of photographs of the interior of a memorial monument in the center of Hyderabad that would be perfect for this. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Voodoo creates a digital camera using data points from the scene
Say what? “Camera tracking”?
Camera tracking is a really confusing term. What it really means is, “the process of computing the movement of a camera relative to stationary objects within a scene such that a digital representation of that camera and its viewport can be used in the creation of new visual elements for that scene using a computer”. In other words, it’s the process of analyzing a sequence of frames shot in either film or video so that you can make objects or characters you make in computer animation software look like they’re in the scene with the other stuff that was there when the scene was originally shot.
Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? It is. And, it sounds expensive – and normally, you’d be right. The computer software that does this normally costs several thousand dollars – or it comes as part of a bigger piece of software that does.
So what if you want to do camera tracking, and you don’t have a bajillion dollars to spend? That’s where the Voodoo Camera Tracker comes in.
This is just too cool not to comment on. Yes, I’m geeking out here – this is an article on Make.com on how to create old-style Cylon armor as papercraft.
The reason this caught my attention is that one of my first jobs when I first started doing FX was building the Cylon suits for the Universal Studios Tour in a small shop in North Hollywood in 1979. I spent three months making parts out of fiberglass and prepping them to be vacuum metalized and made into costume parts. The interesting thing here is that the costumes we made looked a lot better than the real thing did that they used for the show. For the show, they used vacuum-formed plastic, and they used simple reflective mylar tape to make it all look chromed. We tried that for the stage suits, but it looked really dreadful, you could see all the tape seams that the cameras hid so well when they shot them for the TV show – so we were saddled with this laborious, painstaking process that would stand up under close scrutiny from three feet away.
I’ve spent a lot of my life studying animation informally, and then I got myself a position at a major motion picture studio (Rhythm & Hues) and for the past six years I’ve been immersed in the art, technology and culture of feature animation. I’ve helped write the animation training curriculae here at the studio, and I had a chance to visit the topic of the Twelve Priniciples of Animation to support some of the coursework I helped develop.
I thought I’d share.
The material here came originally from the “Illusion Of Life” by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston.(pp.47-69), and has been quoted and paraphrased by a number of other seasoned professional animators since then who know far more than I (and I’ve added some of my own observations as well). The original idea behind these was to describe how animation ought to be done in hand-drawn animation, but most of them apply equally well in computer animation.
Animation is animation regardless, of course, whether you use a pencil or a computer. Computer animation isn’t 3D animation any more than hand drawn animation is 2D – we simply use different tools to achieve the same end, and the result is a two-dimensional representation of the action regardless of the method used to produce it.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention, let me direct your attention to Krypton Radio. It’s a news site focusing on the virtual world Second Life, run by some friends of mine – but it’s also an internet radio station, specializing in music having to do with comic book superheroes in some way.
Surprisingly good stuff, an ecclectic mix, and they have some things in their play list not being played anywhere else. Go have a read, and have a listen.
Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s most notable secular humanists and one of the greatest writers of all time, came to speak at the Simi Valley Senior Center last Sunday, and I took my wife and son to see him. It was a fundraiser for the city library – Mr. Bradbury’s a huge supporter of civic libraries. It was a small gathering, but I figured I probably wouldn’t get very many more chances to meet him. He’s rather elderly now, eighty-nine years old and he’s had a stroke that makes him wheelchair bound and makes communicating very difficult for him. He’s still writing, though, having just published We’ll Always Have Paris, a collection of his short stories – and working on a new book as well, despite the stroke.
I can think of few people who have influenced me in my life as much as Ray Bradbury. I’ve been reading his work since I was about fourteen years old, when The Martian Chronicles was assigned reading in school. I’ve met him on three occasions, each time about fifteen years apart. And each time, I came away with something new, something remarkable, that kept me going for the next fifteen years. This most recent time was no exception.
We gave him a standing ovation as the attendant wheeled his chair up onto the stage, another attendant pouring him a glass of red wine, which I have come to know is something of a tradition when he comes to speak anywhere now – or if not, then I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my implying that it is.
He gave the same speech he gave the last time I saw him speak, fifteen years ago. A lungful of air was only good for three or four words, and he was weary with the effort of speaking at all. But he pressed on, sometimes quiet, sometimes passionate, and the audience broke out into laughter or applause at various points. He closed his eyes, and tilted his head back and concentrated on his own words. He was clearly reciting his speech by heart – or was it his heart that was reciting his speech for him?
The next time you think to yourself, “I can’t do this, they won’t let me do that” – think about the boy who harnessed the wind.
There’s no such thing as luck, really – it’s just a matter of being in the right place with the right stuff, often enough or long enough for the right time to happen by.
Where are you, and what have you done today?
My whole life has been one of exceptions. Every career I’ve ever chosen has been one that’s nearly impossible to get into. For each one, I just went ahead and did it, and looked up the how of things later, and it’s been a great life so far. If you do what you love, and you love what you do, as it turns out, the money takes care of itself for the most part. If you’re really passionate about something, you’ll get good enough at whatever it is to convince people to pay you to do it.
Lately, of course, I’ve been planning things out a little bit more, and haven’t been quite so impulsive, and I’ve been working one job now since 2003. I thought that opportunity was something you had to go out and catch, but I was apparently wrong. If you pick the right spot to stand in, and just keep doing what you love, the opportunities will come to you.
Don’t stress yourself out over it. You’re not living for the stress, and you shouldn’t feel badly for not having conquered the world on your first try. It never happens that way anyway. But what does happen is that people do find what really makes the world make sense for them, and then after that very little matters. You don’t have to accept other people’s definition of success and measure yourself by that. Your success is whatever it is you do that makes you think to yourself, “Yeah. This is it. This is where I want to be.”
The hard part, of course, is deciding what that thing is, especially if you’re either gifted, or pan-disciplinary, or both. To make that decision for yourself, you need to turn off other people’s voices that tell you what you should be doing, and look into your own heart and find the things there that you cherish. They’ll give you the clues you need.
When your life is a blur of work and driving to and from work and being so tired from work that you don’t even have the energy to sit up and watch television when you get home – when things you thought were being handled for you aren’t being handled at all and it all winds up on your shoulders anyway – you start to lose the meaning of it all. Nothing matters anymore. You start to wonder why you keep doing it day after day after day with no reward and no purpose, and no joy.
Stop and look around you. No matter what, that tremendous weight of responsibility you carry is only made worse if you forget who you are, what makes you you and why you started down the road you took in the first place. If you can’t remember why you started down that road, and you realize it’s taking you to places you no longer want to go, it’s not too late to turn around, go back up the road a piece, and pick a different one.
Better choose – you only get to travel so many roads in your lifetime. You’d better make each mile count. And on the way, don’t forget to look around and enjoy the things you enjoy. You have a right to it.
Look yourself in the mirror every morning and ask yourself, “If I got to choose what I’d be doing today, would I voluntarily choose to do this?” We’re not guaranteed a tomorrow. Your lifetime might be ninety years – or only thirty-two years, and only one more day after that. Your days are the most precious thing you have.
So it’s not idle frivolity to “stop and smell the roses”. You need to stop and smell the roses once in a while to make sure that the roses are actually still there. And if they’re not, you need to go find some.
The best content for your production is arguably the content you make yourself. However, sometimes the best content is stuff you just buy and use, because it’s not center stage content or the time and resources required to create the content exceeds the time and resources you have.
And then there’s this one other site I found, called Animeeple, which trades in BVH files (motion capture file format animations). This looks interesting, but the free animations they offer are a rather poor enticement to go further, and I don’t know anybody who sells animations through them. It might be worth a sniff or two.
I can think of few people who have influenced me in my life as much as Ray Bradbury. I’ve been reading his work since I was about fourteen years old, when The Martian Chronicles was assigned reading in school. I’ve met him on three occasions, each time about fifteen years apart. And each time, I came away with something new, something remarkable, that kept me going for the next fifteen years. This most recent time was no exception.