This Was No Boat Accident

Two posts in one day, which is more than I do in a year. What could have brought on this case of blog rage?

The Simpsons jumping the shark.

I know that I'll probably be in the minority here. A lot of people still hold The Simpsons in high regard, although a lot of people feel that the show is well past its golden age. I really didn't fit in either camp until To Surveil, With Love

Lip sync the opening to a Kesha song? Matt Groening and the gang have both influenced and lampooned pop culture for two decades now, but with this they cross over to the other side of the street, begging the popular kids to sit at their lunch table.

The Simpsons started out as part of a struggling Fox network (indeed it propped up Fox at one point). They were the unruly brats of TV, such an ingrained part of pop culture that even heads of state couldn't help but put in their two bits (I'm looking at you, Herbert Walker). After twenty years, they are now middle aged gazillionaires, and the writing staff alumni has gone on to run their own shows for wads of cash as well (and, of course, rule late night TV). No longer the bad boys, they now find themselves to be "The Man".

They could have parodied the song, or even the whole instant pop diva culture that the music business has devolved into. But sadly, they spent a kings ransom to animate their opening to a popular but eventually forgettable song from a soon to be forgettable singer. Ten years from now, is this idea going to seem as good as it was in the writing room, or is it going to be a "oh no, how did we ever think this song was cool?" moment. If they had done this 13 years ago to "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba we'd be looking at the tape today and howling with derisive laughter.

Losing the show's pathos was sad. Losing the show's satirical edge is pathetic.

KGH

MTV, The Blind Hog, and the Acorn

MTV used to be Music Television. I think. Just out of college when it originally booted in 1981 I was already too old for their demographic, so I was aware but not much enamored of it.

MTV networks has changed identities many times since then, like a cable channel that's part of the federal witness protection program. (Ack! Someone over 25 is watching! Hide us!). But somewhere along the line they actually got something right. A program that wasn't aimed at a strictly male demographic, skewed over their age target audience, and was blissfully absent of any mention of anything Jersey--bovine or otherwise.

Daria was a non-spin-off spin-off of
Beavis and Butt-head and was the only other product of MTV animation that lasted more than a season or two. It was so far afield from everything else on the channel that it is a wonder that it lasted for 5 seasons. (IMHO it was the injection of the "song of the week" into the soundtrack of the show that made it valuable to the network as a marketing tool--sort of a non music video music video. )

Some die-hard fans are unhappy about the music changes, a result of exorbitant fees for music licensing, but I'm not one of them. My opinion: striping the show of the original music is an IMPROVEMENT. It allows the show to live up to the timelessness of the characters and stories, and not be bogged down in a retro version of Name That Tune.

The complete Daria is out on DVD, at long last struggling free of the RIAA straight jacket. I think it ranks alongside King of the Hill as proof that animation is as powerful a storytelling device as any three camera brain burp currently broadcast today.

KGH

P.S. WKRP was devastated by the removal of the original music. Hypocrisy on my part? Hardly. WKRP was a show about a small top 40 radio station, not about a small generic elevator music radio station.

LKF Although B&BH was a creation of Mike Judge, the character of Daria was created by staff writers at MTV working on B&BH. Mike Judge gave permission for the spin-off but had no hand in the creation or execution of Daria.

Twitter is the New Black, and I Have No Idea What That Means

Keeping up with the kids and their darn loud music and hoola hoops is an avocation of mine. The technology advantages they have today--texting to alleviate the boredom of driving, email so they can help poor Nigerian princes with their finances, Double Stuff Oreos for, well, just 'cause they're there.

Granted, keeping my toe in all this technology has left me puzzled. This amazingly erudite blog, for instance, averages .34 hits per month, which probably means that some guy reads it but doesn't pay full attention. Facebook seems like a wonderful place if you're interested in cyber farming or acting out your Sopranos fantasies.

And then there is Twitter. I hear that people on twitter have thousands (some even millions) of followers. So I instinctively got an account and waited for the masses to follow the missives generated by my never ceasing data mining of my Science Fiction DVD/Bluray collection.

For example.

LKF-- in 1st draft of 2001:ASO Dave Bowman's last word; " My god! Its full of ham!"

And this.

LKF--James T. Kirk's favorite method of computercide was the phaser (60%). Talking them to death was a distant 2nd at 40%.

You can't just wander over to the guys dozing off at the Genius Bar in your nearest Apple store to get this info.

Still, I figure that all those big twitter accounts had to start with just the one follower. I mean, for months and months, just the one follower. Right?

Just a thought.

KGH

P.S. LKF "Little Known Fact". Sorry for the confusion.

Haiku for Me, Haiku for You, Too.

Working at the Big Red Q was an opportunity to see a lot of cool stuff, and then pull my hair out when nobody paid attention. To be fair, the company was running on borrowed time (if only I had known then) and was only interested in what Dell was introducing next quarter so they could at least look like they were keeping up.

One of those cool things was BeOS. These guys had a multi-tasking OS that booted in 4 seconds from a hard drive, would fit on a floppy, run in a few hundred K of RAM, had a tough-as-nails journaling file system, and a wicked cool user interface. And nobody was interested. Not with the fantastic possibilities that Microsoft was promising* with Windows ME. So BeOS got kicked to the curb and finally folded.

Now, after 8 years, some really dedicated people have an alpha release of Haiku, which is BeOS rising from the ashes like a somewhat procrastinating Phoenix.

If you ever used Be, then this is cool news. If you haven't, then you may have a copy of Haiku in your future if you really want to squeeze some performance out of that cheap netbook you bought on impulse during some late night Woot-off (no, not me. Never).

Check out the links.

Footnotes:
* promise (n, v) An oath or delcaration to perform a stated act or duty, as in "If you continue to talk to BeOS we promise to cut your bulk pricing discount to zero. Its a nice little factory here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it, capice?"

Odyssey of Ike

You can run but you can't hide.

We live in one of the mandatory evac zones in Harris county, just about 8 miles from the Galveston bay and 2 miles from Armand Bayou. So with barely 5 hours notice we packed up and headed north to Conroe, Texas. Thought being 90 miles inland would be enough.


Nope.


We set up shop in a Holiday Inn Express (I now view those commercials with a great deal of irony). We got past the bulk of the storm okay, even slept through most of it during the wee hours of Saturday.

Then the power failed at 6:30 am.

After 24 hours with no light, no phone, no motorcar, not a single lux... oh wait, that's another story. Anyway, Holiday Inn Express (es) are little boxes with no opening windows, and the emergency lights in the hallway failed after 2 hours. When the cell phones went out at 4:00 pm, we were cut off from the world completely. We managed to get through to some dear friends in Colorado who went on a search mission for us and found a room for one night at the Hyatt Regency Houston. Yep, HOUSTON. We drove 4 hours for a Holiday Inn and we could have stayed in downtown Houston and not risked death by hyperthermia.

Since we couldn't stay more than one night (Hyatt was a command post for Centerpoint Energy and Houston Police), we were still in a pickle. Then, around 4:00 pm Sunday, we got through to our house and got the answering machine (we left one circuit active to run the burglar alarm). Hooray!

We're back home now, with just a bit of roof damage. Spent 30 minutes cleaning the fridge and then settled down. Even had cable! (Uverse from ATT runs TVIP over the phone lines). We are thankful for all the prayers of everybody, and hopeful that the rest of Galveston and parts north will recover soon. We lived and worked in Galveston county for many years, and know many of the places that are now just debris and sand.

When we got home, the flag in front of our house was still standing. Pretty beat up, but still there. Pic at the top of the blog says it all.

Kelvin

P.S. Soon after taking the pic, I could hear Marine One flying overhead on the way to Galveston.

Robots Redux Fin

After a few weeks of work, I entered the robot image into the Hash monthly image contest. Sadly, Mr. Roboto and his space-suited minions did not fare well. There are some pretty talent people who enter these things, remarkable since the user community is relatively small compared to the Autodesk/Alias juggernauts. Glad I entered, since it motivated me to get the project in shape before I filed it away. Maybe I'll dust it off in the future.

The top four of the sixteen entries are here

http://www.hash.com/imagecontest/Sept08/



Kelvin

Domo Arrigato, Mr. Non-Autonomous Exoskeleton

So there I am, revamping an old animation project, and feeling pretty good about the whole retro idea of adding rivets for that steam punk flair, when I get asked the dumb question "Hey, what are those dudes doing?". I reply with indignation "Reading the blueprints, what else?".

After the kids quit laughing and go back to their loud music and hoola-hoops, I plop down in my rocker, take a big gulp of Ensure double fudge and admit that the idea of blueprints in space really does date me as an old coot.

So off I go to update the whole thing. First thought?
Cyber blueprints! That's the ticket. After a bit of work and a quick test render, I began to hear the youngsters' music getting louder, their hoola-hoops getting hoopier. This is not so much cyber blueprints as television for the presbyopia set. Perhaps they're selecting their dining menu for the 4:30 early bird special at the Space Cracker Barrel.



Well, if there's anything that I learned from Peter Schickele is that sometimes horribly inept plagerism can pass as originality. Set the wabac machine for 1977.



Here's the holo blueprint projector inserted in the scene (a alternate render of the lower left quadrant), showing that I've still got work to do with the transparency and glow settings.




So here it is. I'd go rub it in those punks faces, but its past their bedtime.

I miss Siggraph. *sigh*


Kelvin





Edit: Here's the final, final version to the right. kh

Robots Redux

While cleaning out the hard drive I found parts of an old project I did several years ago. It was lost during the move to Colorado (it got backed up on media that didn't survive the trip). Here is an AO render of what's left. Most of the models are a rev or two out of date, but you get the idea. I'll be using it for speed testing a dual Xeon server I'm fixing up for my poor man's render farm.

This is the lighting test done shortly before the crash and burn. It was halted just after the (still) mysterious robot color change in frame 293.

Now would be a good time to wash this taste out of your mouth by going to see "Wall-E", Pixar's latest film by the guy who directed "Nemo" and helped write "Toy Story".

Kelvin

On a Scale From Ichi to Ju, I Give It A Hachi

I've been feeling down lately, with everybody buying PS3s to go with their XBox 360s and such. So much technology, so little money. So to hop on the technology bandwagon, we ordered a Roku, the new Netflix enabled video streaming appliance for your TV.

A lot has been made about how Blockbuster is fighting back against Netflix, and how Netflix is spending big bucks to get ready for the next round in the movie rental wars. The Roku is the first shot, with more salvos on the way (LG is reported to have a Netflix enabled Bluray machine launching before Christmas). I'll live with it a few more weeks before final judgment, but so far I'm reasonably impressed.

1. Its small and inexpensive. A review I read slammed it for its styling (or lack thereof). Frankly, I have ethernet switches in my junk box bigger than this. If you have a boxed set of Law and Order next to your DVD player, you've already taken up more space than the Roku. Plus, tricking it out would have pushed it over the magic $99 price point.

2. Its easy to use. The interface is clean and has very few levels. The setup is simple, the hardest part being the entry of your wireless access code using the teeny remote.

3. The picture quality is good. Not great, but good. Looks fine on a standard TV. HD sets may make this a moot point very soon.

Not so impressive:

1. It streams from Netflix. Period. It is not a browser or MP3 player or anything else. In fact, you have to go to Netflix first and put programs into your queue to use the Roku. You can't add selections from the interface. So put on your slippers and trek out to the laptop on the kitchen table, you lazy bum.

2. I had to use HDMI input to my flatscreen. I only have two, and they are hooked up to my cable box and upscaling DVD player. The component outputs did not make my HD set happy, so I had to sacrifice the DVD players connection. So I'm using a rare resource to pump SD video into my HD set. The firmware needs to be upgraded for this. Of course, since the box doesn't do HD yet, an upgrade is already in the works. (of course, upgrades promised are just that. Promised.)

3. Content. Everybody's complaint, and the biggest thing keeping this from being a kyuu or even a ju. A lot of TV shows are available, and some that aren't available even in DVD form from Netflix. But movies are pretty poor in the selection department. Until then, you can spend hours upon hours catching up on the new Doctor Who or reliving AJ and Rick's exploits in San Diego without really missing the movie selection. But You Will. Maybe not now, or next week, but soon, and for the rest of your...

...oh, who has time for blogging when you can rewatch the episode where Higgins has to give Zeus and Apollo their bordetella boosters?

Kelvin

(BTW I still haven't mastered my Sega Dreamcast, so an Xbox would pretty much be a waste in my living room).

"Now that's doing it old school". Indeed.

One thing I miss about living in Colorado is the active ASIFA Denver chapter. Really no one down here in oil country to talk to about such things, and I've given up after the third "Ollie who?" response.

Of course, if you're one of those in the know, great treats in both "The Incredibles" and "Iron Giant" (Both Brad Bird films) were the cameos of Ollie Johnston and his lifelong friend Frank Thomas. In the Iron Giant they were the crew of the wrecked train, a tribute to Ollie's long fascination with railroading. In "The Incredibles", well, read the title bar.

The last of Disney's "Nine Old Men" have followed Walt home.

Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

In a world where any studio with a few bucks and a half baked story idea can make a 3D CGI feature (I'm looking at YOU, Sony!), we see once again that Walt Disney had it right 70 years ago---its the story, stupid!

DVD extras are a lot like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks--most are pretty lame. One consistent exception to that has been The Simpsons DVDs, where not only do you get a clever and funny menu system, easter eggs, etc., but each episode gets a well-executed commentary track. (How many times have you tried to listen to a director's commentary only to realize that you paid more attention to the film than he did?)

With The Simpsons Movie, Groening, Brooks and the other producers have outdone themselves. Although its always been possible to do, this is the first DVD I've seen that actually PAUSES during a commentary to allow time to explain, in detail, whats on the screen (if anyone knows of a previous example, please comment).

At approximately 30 minutes in, Al Jean pauses the movie to explain the saga of a joke that was constantly being pulled and re-inserted during audience tests. Usually if a director tries this, about 5 minutes of film has gone by while they're still explaining the fascinating story of a 10 second shot that no one noticed in the first place. Here, you not only get to hear the story (the church/bar gag just as Springfield gets "Trappacinoed" was constantly on the verge of being cut altogether) but you don't feel that you've missed out on anything. The video image stops and goes to B&W to let you know that the world is okay and your DVD player hasn't gone crazy.

At the hour mark, they actually stop for a 10 minute digression into the physical demands of the voice recording process. Its a bit long, and Ms. Smith belabors a point that seems odd for someone who's a voice over artist (she didn't think any cartoon before had evoked such a deep emotional response--did she somehow miss Dumbo and Bambi as a child?). To that end, perhaps a heavier hand in the recording booth could have shortened the distraction.

Lets hope that in the future other movies make use of this technique. At the very least hope for fewer commentaries where it is obvious that the only things the people talking want to do is get out of the booth and go sleep off their hangover.

(NOTE: Before anyone blogs me at length, I realize that the DVD isn't really paused. They just substitute a chapter in the program's VOB structure that has a held frame in it. In reality you're just watching a longer version of the film. But its still a feature that needs to be used more.)

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