Words Have Power

'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

Getting Photofly Off the Ground

By Gene Turnbow, on September 20th, 2010%

I was very excited to see Photofly from Autodesk – this looked like a fantastic way to quickly model objects and buildings using nothing but photographs and the click of a mouse (and time waiting for some computing to be done on some server someplace to figure it all out and stitch it all together).

So I gave it a whirl – I had a ton of photos from India when I was there, where I had shot panoramas of various historic, legendary buildings and places, and I tried uploading them to the system to see what I’d get back. I was genuinely hoping to get something back.

So I clicked the submit button and waited. And waited. I left the computer on overnight. In the morning, I got up and looked at the screen – still nothing. After after a few more tries, I gave up on the thing and uninstalled it. I figured the technology was possibly a little too new to work very well. Months later after I had gone to SIGGRAPH and been invited to join the Autodesk forums on LinkedIn.com, I found that a lot of other people had had the same problem, made the same assumptions, and had come away empty handed.

Yoda, sitting in the passenger seat of my Fiat 850 Spyder.

Then I found the tips pages, which I could swear weren’t there when Firefly was first announced. Now that I have some guidelines on how to shoot, and what it can really do, I’m going to give it another go. I’m really interested to see if it can generated meshes from sculptures, because I started out in the motion picture business doing molds and makeup effects, and no amount of computer simulation can properly replace real world materials. If I can work in real clay and build my digital models based directly on my own sculptures, I’ll have an outrageous advantage.

I still have the molds from the Yoda replica I and my friends Michael Moore (not the director, a different Michael Moore) and Jeff Farley made in 1985, and I’m wondering if somehow I can get Photofly to recreate something approaching the original, either from the molds, or from the latex puppet we built (which after all these years, I still have). Making the Yoda replica was a labor of love, and it would be great to bring him back to life.

Now that I have what may pass for working instructions, I may be able to make some progress.

– Gene Turnbow

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