How to make Ub Iwerks spin in the grave

While others roam the world on behalf of legendary filmmakers or captains of the computer world, some retreat to their solitary studios to produce ground breaking avant-garde film.

I choose neither path.



While working the tech booth at our church, I occasionally make little bumpers to display in the time between the band set up and the start of service. Its not a requirement-- usually no more than a handful of people see them. This particular 20 second filler loop was done with Toon Boom Studio, a great package for 2D Flash animation. (Too bad the blog site won't let you post SWF files). I particularly liked the minimalist story: Boy meets girl- boy gets girl - boy, girl and some turkey stand in the autumn foliage, blinking.

For those who don't get the visceral thrill from the NTSC test pattern like I do, it breaks the monotony.

As usual, feel free to run to Wikipedia to figure out the blog's title for the complete InfoTainment experience.


Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

quisnam lego custodis

Over the weekend, with in laws in town, I decided it was about time to read "Watchmen", the landmark graphic novel from the eighties by Moore and Gibbons. Although I had known of and was familiar with the overall story, I had not gotten around to actually reading it. I really don't have a good excuse for not doing it earlier. Just busy in the eighties, I guess.

While I don't agree with several of the themes presented by Moore and Gibbons, I do admire the sheer audacity of attempting to redefine such an established art form in one fell swoop. And the artwork is marvelously old school, complex with repeating themes and motifs that belie its deceptively simple 3x3 layout. ( A wise choice, as too many dilettantes have tried to "redefine" comics by using inventive artistic techniques tied to pedestrian stories.

You still have two years before Hollywood decimates it with the big screen version (and, no, I don't reflexively label every Hollywood production as lame, but I don't see how the original story can stay intact till the end after having been in development for TWENTY YEARS.) If you've read it, you can see why I don't imagine the ending will remain intact.

So, for most of you, dust it off and give it a read (or dust them off if, like my sister, you have the original issues).

Uverse redux

Now that I've lived with ATT's Uverse service for a few months, I thought it would be good to do a quick update...

First, the service hasd been remarkably reliable, with only a handful of outages (mostly on the HD channels) lasting a few minutes. After Comcast, having a cable service that's up 24/7 is a nice change of pace.

Second, ATT is obviously serious about updating and expanding service, such as the Big 10 football network, a series of 10 cable channels covering said conference (one of them HD). And you gotta love BBC America if you're a MI5 or Doctor Who fan . More changes are on the way, which leads us to...

Third, ATT seems to have an odd definition of programming "upgrades". One of these improvements is the elmination of all west coast feeds. That's about 20 channels, and its quite convenient when you're channel surfing and catch a glimpse of something you want to watch from the beginning--just see if its on the west coast feed. I'll miss that.

Fourth, ATT has dropped their digital music channels for the MTV/Microsoft "Urge" programming. Needless to say, MTV seems to have no room for Gospel or Contemporary Christian music (no surprise there). I give this "Urge" marketing thing about 18 months before everybody bails.

Fifth, and this is not completely their fault, but Microsofts's CE OS takes an unbearably long time to boot, and the router/access point can't initialize if the set top boxes are trying to download their code. This means that a minor power glitch (common in our neighborhood) can take down the system until you spend the 45 minutes to manually bring it up. So each STB in our house now has a UPS attached to it. This is the kind of system flaw that makes grown engineers weep and wail.
(edit)
In other system flaws, MS CE can't manage the hard drive well at all. I've recorded at least a dozen programs that play back as either a black screen or just 3 frames of a program. Sometimes you can get the program back by rebooting the system (a 10 minute chore) but other times its just taking up drive space for no good reason. More proof that MS CE is no substitute for TIVO.

Sixth, and I'm kinda picky about this, but the channels are over compressed. Most people could live wiht it, but I can spot a compression artifact a mile away, and it makes some sporting events unbearable to watch. The HD channels aer better.

Seventh, and not exactly a flaw, but the room to room DVR functions aren't ready yet.


Bottom line, its still been worth the change from Comcast, and the flaws are either livable or can be worked around (for $50 in UPS hardware). So if you have ATT IPTV in your neighborhood, its worth checking out.

Happy channel suring.

Its a Big U(ni)verse, and You're Not

You know, if it weren't for marketing and advertising, today's youngsters would have no useful outlet for their inability to spell. Which brings us to Uverse, AT&T's fire across the bow to the cable companies and Verizon. And even though its not quite FTTP, its the next best thing for people living in older neighborhoods who want an alternative to Comcast or TimeWarner (or, in our case, both). Goodbye cable, hello IPTV!

AT&T installs a converter to go the last leg from the neighborhood wiring station to the home, which makes it similar to DSL in terms of using copper pairs for the high speed signal. But instead of converting to a digital signal at a phone jack in the house, the technicians add a converter in the phone access panel at the residence and generate a cable compatible signal that uses the existing cable in your home. Once in the home, a router takes the signal and diverts it to the three (in my case) STBs . (I'm still not sure why they need this extraneous routing leg, but its there.)

You may ask yourself "Gee, isn't this digital stuff already available from my cable company?" (edit --lame Talking Heads joke deleted) . Well, yes and no. We had digital cable for a year, and its anything but ideal. Sure, the upper channels and subscriber stuff is digital, but a great deal of their content is still analog, and their signal quality is iffy as well. Some of the local channels were unwatchable, and there was visible ghosting sometimes. Then there is the issue of outages, which averaged about once a month in our neighborhood (max time was two days, the average length was about half a day). So when the local phone guys came to test the lines for signal integrity, I was more than interested in hopping on the fiber bandwagon.

So, here's the upside:
1)We get three boxes, one of which is a DVR, all of which are HD capable (11 HD channels are available, 26 if you count things like HBO HD, etc ). That's 300 plus channels for $74 bucks (plus misc charges, of course). Cheaper than Comcast, and theres even a package in the $50 range.

2)We get a wireless router that goes with our high speed internet, which is available at different speed grades. We have the basic express, but you can get upwards of 5mbps BOTH WAYS (Comcast only provided 256k upstream).

3) For the first year, the HD content is free. After that, its a $10 surcharge.

4) While not expected until the fourth quarter, the boxes have an upgrade in the works that allows the two STBs to stream off of the DVR. (Yes!)

5) 360+ channels available, with more to come. Since this is IPTV, they can add channels to your hearts content, since you don't have to steam them all simultaneously in the neighborhood.

6) You can program the DVR remotely via your Uverse webpage. I already have this feature with my Snapstream BeyondTV, so I'm glad I don't have to give it up.

7) Some of the channels are West coast feeds, so you might have missed the start of something on the East coast but not the West (too bad this isn't true for the major networks. If you miss the first 2 minutes of "According to Jim", the show just doesn't seem funny. Oddly enough, I apparently have missed the first two minutes of every episode of "Jim" I've every seen. I'm sure there's no connection.)



Here's the downside:
1) You use up your existing cable wiring, so forget about routing an antenna to use alongside Uverse. (You can avoid this if you have cat5 wiring throughout your house. Which would mean you probably have a boy named Elroy and his lovable mutt Astro).

2)Its inconsistent. The HD channels look great, and a lot of the other channels as well. But some of the lineup is over compressed. My first evening with the system found me surfing to Adult Swim to catch Futurama. I almost threw the remote through the TV. (Futurama and the Simpsons don't get much lovin' from mpeg. Big areas of solid color with lots of motion but no naturally occurring blur to disguise your compression artifacts. Ack!)

3)Bandwidth limitations can get tricky. Sure, you can record four shows at once, but not in HD. In fact, we've only been able to get one HD stream at a time, so no watching one show HD and recording the other. This is a household limitation, so if you want to watch the big game HD you better not have a kid in the next room watching the Wiggles in HD or you'll be locked out.

4) "I know TIVO. TIVO is a friend of mine. Uverse is no TIVO." The DVR functions are rudimentary at best. You can pause live TV and record shows, but that is it. No way to get those programs off your DVR, unless you want to hookup a VCR. (How 80s can you get?) And you'll get a hoot initially from all the errors in the programming guide (ABC News is listed as "Music" and Nancy Grace is "Action/Adventure"!) but the fifth or sixth time that your recording didn't happen because of a guide glitch, everyone stops laughing. ("program did not occur within the scheduled time". So what, is that any reason to not record ANYTHING?

5) Don't unplug the boxes! Lose the connection to the IPTV server, and you may have to spend a good hour getting all three boxes plus router up and running. Each box takes between 5 and ten MINUTES to boot initially, and they have to be cycled sequentially, not concurrently. (Me thinks a Microsoft OS is afoot, my good Dr. Watson)

6) Customer service. Holy cow, that's a whole post by itself!

7) Not all of the local channels HD content is available. It would be nice to have the ancillary channels for things like weather radar (hurricane season, you know). And the Weather Channel is missing the local radar and forecast data as well. Bummer.

Enough for tonight. I'll post a bit more on the tech, and a lot more on the end user experience. As of this writing, there are four other wireless networks that have the telltale signature of Uverse that my computer can see. That's not good news for Comcast.

Good night all. Lets hope I'm spared my recurring dream of standing in line for the Simpsons Movie and walking by mistake into the Underdog live action flick. Night sweats indeed!

*(for those who missed the title reference)

Kelvin

Long Shot

I'm struggling with the temptation to go cloth simulation for clothing. On the one hand, you get some really cool results, and every animation package worth its price has it these days. Still, you get wrapped up in running simulations on cloth, hair, grass, etc., and you wind up a techno toy junkie who forgets the big picture. The verdict is still out.

Sidekick in business casual. I've got two, maybe three outfits for the hero in mind, but her sidekick may end up with a larger wardrobe. Wilma and Bettie had an excuse for wearing the same outfit week after week. My characters don't.

Headshot

Just a shot post to prove that I haven't fallen off the edge of the earth just yet...

This head shot of the sidekick character isn't quite ready for prime time, but close enough to post. The body is quite a different matter. Modeling spandex uniforms makes doing a superhero pretty tame. Making a character that has more natural clothing is another matter altogether. That's the next hurdle, which I'm working on parallel with geometry fixes to the first character (see Model Sheet Madness above).

Model Sheet Madness

Just a quick post, with a few notes. As you can tell by the test renders, I have quite a bit of work ahead of me to get all the artifacts out of the model. A lot of it is just model maintenance, tweaking control points so that the polygons deform properly with the bone structure. Some of it is aesthetic in nature, such as the torso shading or pelvis, which either render poorly or (by a quirk of control point placement) with a little too much "anatomical correctness".


A few notes about the pose sheet (I know its not a complete model sheet, so don't flame me about that):

(1) The outfit was originally all blue, but Marvel did the solid-blue outfit to death times four (well, 3.5, since Ben only kept his pants). Yellow makes it a more Wolverine color set, but there are only so many combinations of primary colors, okay? Also, yellow fits in with the back story.

(2) The face is a texture, but it is generated in a 3D program for animation. This makes it a two pass rendering process, but a quick one. I got this idea from my tour of the (now defunct) Disney Florida animation group. They showed us a preview of the (then) unreleased Mulan, and explained some of their tricks in the Caps animation system. If you keep the camera movements to a minimum, you can pull it off.

(3) The nose. Yes, it is part of the 3D model, constructed to look like a pen illustration. It hinges on a control bone, so it can be pushed to the side for the proper perspective, depending on the shot. Example: If you wanted to do a straight portrait, the nose would be angled out 10 to 15 degrees so that it would read properly. Again, a small amount of work for a better render.

(4) The boots and gloves are white. Yes, they look black, but black boots with black shading look, well, black. By making them white and giving them a really bizarre shading profile, they look black with specular highlights.

(5) Line weights. In a tip from the Scott McCloud books, the line weights surrounding the character is twice as thick as the detail lines. This doesn't make much difference here, but in scenes with a busy background it makes the character stand out. Scott has some other psycho-technical info, but it just looks good to me. (This is another two pass technique. That makes three passes so far. The final images will probably be around 5 or so. Let's hope they render quickly!)

Enough for today. Please hit me with comments. The more critique, the better!

Kelvin

Addendum May 7

Here are a few shots that show the issues and workarounds with the toon shader. (Yes, I know one knee is backwards in one shot, and the geometry of the chest is all askew. That's why they're outtakes.) The boots, shown here in closeup, had a white line on them for detail that didn't look very clean. A lot of the old DC and Marvel comics just had them black, since they couldn't do a lot of fancy stuff in the old four color system.

The image to the left is a standard render, showing the true colors of the gloves and boots, and all the ugly geometry. Also note that the nose color is off, since it is a truly flat piece of geometry and the face is curved, thus the shading difference. I thought a more casual pose would uncover some flaws in the model, and boy, was I right!



Finally, a standard shade in a a traditional pose. Note how exaggerated the geometry had to be to get it to read properly in a 2D render. This is not supposed to be the new Wonder Woman starring Dolly Parton. I'm still tweaking to get things to behave more consistently.
Also again note the nose shading, etc. I really like this pose. Its got a lot of the character's personality in it.


Okay, I'm done posting reject images from the morgue.

'night one and all.

2D in a 3D World

Ever since "Toy Story" made 3D CGI films a growth industry, we've had to put up with a lot of garbage from the Pixar wannabes, and not just bad animation-- bad plots, wretched character designs, uninspired writing-- the list is endless.

Of course, I myself have been a 3D dilettante ever since the acquisition of my Amiga 1000. It seems like yesterday when I would sit patiently for 30 some odd hours for my little 8Mhz 68000 to churn out a frame of animation. Good times, good times.

So over the years I've dabbled and tweaked and played with quite a bit of software, and I always keep getting drawn back to the question of style. I've always had a soft spot for traditional 2D artwork, and I still haven't seen a single frame of 3D that can convey the subtle expressiveness that Chuck Jones and his unit at Warner Brothers cranked out on a monthly basis.

As it happens, I submitted a script to Fox a few years ago when they had an open call for new animation projects. As it turns out, they went through quite a bit of labor and discovered this bright (sic) fellow named Seth MacFarlane (really sic). And as luck would have it, he already had a show on Fox, so it seemed fitting to just give him another. Though a bust in the in the competition, I've become quite attached to the little story that I churned out in two weeks.

Of course, what's keep me from making my own little movie, sticking it on YouTube, and becoming famous overnight? I mean, other than the fact that YouTube pretty much sucks away time like its great grandfather, the television. A more obvious reason is style. I've played with anime, primitive shapes, traditional CGI, even Japanese stick puppet theatre. None really struck me as a style that was going to work.

Until last winter.

After getting fired up by Scott McCloud's latest book (see previous post), I've done a lot of research and now, at last, I think I have an illustration style that fits the story.

So, here is the culmination of quite a bit of time laboring away to create some reasonable hacks to bring a 2D look into a 3D animation work flow. The first workable model for Candee Jones, a.k.a. Superchick.


More later.

Kelvin

All artwork and images copyright 2007 Kelvin Hickman

Life 1, Model Fight 0

Our long, national nightmare is over. At least, the model fight is for me. One of the reasons for the competition was to spur myself and other 3D artists to work through the doldrums that keep us from doing 90 percent of what we'd like to do (write a book, run a 10K, watch an entire episode of Boston Legal). But life comes at you fast (sounds familiar) and I have to admit I've been derailed onto other things. However, I can always bask in the glow of having created one 1/100th of the Shinto shrine I set out to.

Its not as good an excuse as getting hired by ILM, but it'll do.


One reason for my distraction was the publication of Scott McCloud's sequel to "Understanding Comics" . For those of you who haven't read his landmark deconstruction of the modern comic book, eh, graphic novel, then you've missed out on a fascinating journey through one of the most underrated art forms around. His new book, "Making Comics", does more than deconstruct-- it gives you practical insight into the creation of a comic, with a wealth of information. But don't fret, its not a how t0 book packed with obvious tips (Thirsty? Try water! In a Glass!). It continues his in depth analysis of the art, and explains why some things work and others work even better.

So, while I haven't finished my model, I think I've done something a lot more interesting--taken a stylistic step in CGI that comes close to what I've wanted for my long suffered short film.
But that's a topic for another post.

Soon.

Really. I mean it.

Kelvin