Crowds, Particles, Muck, OH MY!

So, down to the wire again. Chris wants this thing out by December 15th for some festival submissions. We still have to hack out u5_14, the infamous crowd shot, so that means for me some painting of grime. Also, I have 3 more sky shots left on my plate. Oh gods of joy! Luckily the massive particle shot was ironed out and looks pretty good, I have to say. Oh but it will be nice to have this all FILM OUT.

One Offhand Comment

Said one thing and now I'm looking up pictures of water droplets on camera lenses. Will does a face-palm, Chris looks excited and happy. I wonder what I've just done.

First Final

poke for full size
This was the first shot I painted custom sky for. The over-all cloud scheme was arrived at by me and Chris Bishop, one morning. The deal now is that I have to make things match the rest of the show a bit more. We got kind of carried away.

Back on the Ship!

Hey, it's been awhile, but I'm up to more shenanigans, so I've re-upped the Goodship, and its ready to set sail again, but with some passengers this time, mainly Will and Chris Perry. I am working on the infamous Tower 37, aka Uprising, aka Uprising at Tower 37. If you want some more, I dunno, useful updates as to the over-all production of the film, check out Chris's oft-neglected blog. Here I will mainly talk about clouds. Lots of clouds. I am doing "sky fixes" which pretty much means I am doing custom sky for an increasing amount of shots. I also am supposedly doing color correction. We'll see how that goes.

I spent an hour and a half talking to Chris Bishop about clouds. He painted the original skies and has been on Goodship Uprising from its inception. I've started to have dreams about clouds, this is how much this is part of my life now. Kind of scary. Anyway, I'm off into blue. Catch you all later.

Hey, don't worry, just breathe

I've been low-grade freaked out for the past month. None of this is going to change until I actually get there.

Far from an Unqualified...Success

So since things got somewhat derailed thanks to OSX (I can't give any sort of detail in this as it deals with things out of my experience), Jackalope did not dance and more worryingly, frequently lost its legs. Apparently we will get something like documentation up on a website (working on that tomorrow) so you all will be able to see what we did (and perhaps there will be someone out there to improve upon it). There may or may not be a group of programmers working on something like this but far more technical over the summer. We are going to render some video or such-like for demonstration purposes.

I'm sure with some signal-normalizing and some tweaking it would work really well. Even in its broken state the jackalope was well received by people who had experience in Maya. So it was far from an unqualified success but it won on some level. Even if that level is only Div III animation students named Jeremy.

Burnt.Out

Omid has slept three hours in the past 24. I don't think Brian has done anything to the rig since the last time I saw it. I was in ASH last night until 12:20am or something painting some backgrounds after hovering around Zoe and watching her make glowing jelly fish while trying to be helpful in a vastly unhelpful way. Hanging around in there with all the Anim peeps scrambling to render shots was vastly entertaining-- not an environment to get anything done in.

Omid and Brian have a week to get their code together. Hopefully that will happen, as it really should have been done about two weeks ago. I've just been painting surfaces and its gotten a little boring. Perhaps I'll look into some of the lighting settings.

Object Mode

Been painting texture maps this entire time. Lots of texture maps. Jackalope is all modeled and textured, now I just need to paint an environment.

More importantly, we have a venue and a time...

___________-'^***^'-_____________

May 5th
HYPER INSTRUMENT CONCERT
7:05 FPH West or East Lecture Hall

May 6th
~:: 11 - 2 pm, ASH Lobby ::~
Come by and play with Jackalope, and the other crazy stuff that people have made:

--'^ Strings: a giant touch-interface synth, ASH 126
--'^ The Sound Room, ASH Lounge
--'^ 3D immersion, ASH 126

_______~~<*>~~________

The Entire Manual is 130 Pages

Do you want to see something awesome? Okay, I'll show you!

WINGS

Its terribly convenient for axially symmetric models like my Jackalope, and its got a total of five buttons on the top! AND you can set it up with Maya-like controls! ITS LIKE--OH MAN, I DON'T HAVE TO LEARN THE WHOLE BLOODY MAYA INTERFACE TO MODEL! AHAHAHAAHAH

The only problem is that watching Chris do something is not necessarily helpful, because he just clatters through it like its the easiest thing ever and then goes, "there is some nice documentation!"

Meanwhile: OH MAN, I JUST FOUND OUT HOW TO MAKE A CUBE, SWEET!

Hell, give me some sculpey and I'll give you a MODEL. But seriously, this is going to be way easier.

Preliminary Concept Art

ITS A JACKALOPE! Um, for some reason both Omid and Chris seem to think this looks like an ugly doll. Kind of irksome, but I like this dude too much to change it.



So Jake and I are supposedly going to have an intro to modeling on Friday. Barring any more emergencies. Slightly more interesting than making bouncing balls.

The "Getting Started" PDF is 756 pages long

Hey, you too can learn Maya from your own home! Have you ever considered the exciting world of computer effects graphics? Does your computer have 6 GB of memory? Do you want to make your neighbors and relatives cry with the beauty and depth of your creations? Autodesk Maya 8.5 has all you need and more to build your own stunning universe (with physics!)!

*Takes a DEEP BREATH* Anyway, so I made a bouncing ball the other day. It was strangely satisfying. Omid is going to eventually teach me and Jake to model, so in the meantime I've been perusing a somewhat baffling book called THE ART (cough) OF 3D COMPUTER ANIMATION AND EFFECTS THIRD EDITION, which has a picture of Shrek reaching out towards you on the front. It's very general and its a good introduction to various techniques and jargon, some of which I knew from my brief encounter with 3D imaging from Bryce, some of which I am vaguely familiar with through various television shows on Industrial Light and Magic, most of which I had no idea about and still don't. As I'm itching for something a bit less general (I want to pull on polygons, but I don't even know how to pull them in Maya), I was looking for tutorial stuff I could watch from the comfort of my room so I at least had some vague idea of what I am doing before going down to ASH and trying it out on my own. The Maya website is shiny and proclaims that you can now purchase Maya ULTIMATE 8.5 for 4,995$, a 3,000$ discount. It also says I can download a FREE version which puts watermarks on my images, and I considered this for a minute.

My laptop:
CPU Intel, 1.73 GHz
RAM 1014 MB

yeah, not going to try at this point. I at least need another gig worth of memory.

"the Throes of Artistic Appreciation"

I'm back with Omid, and working with the largest of the visual arts group on creating puppets produced in Maya that can be controlled using a Wii-Mote. Jake is our art lead, and Omid is the master-mind. Omid and Jake decided that what we were going for was something that could be picked up and used easily, something simple and intuitive. Chris is our benevolent over-lord and when he came by to check in on us he got on some long-thought-out tangent about creating a fine-tuned interface for Maya that would allow for immediate response to the artist and allow for more subtle and nuanced movement. I sort of glazed over at this point and while we all thought this was a neat idea, we summarily dismissed it as soon as he drifted away.

"The head bobbing is very compelling," he said.

I'm mostly excited by the prospect of actually learning some small chunks of Maya. Omid's enthusiasm has much to do with this, as he says modeling is fun. Of all of the things I've heard from the computer animation people, the most frequent complaint is that actually animating in Maya sucks. I guess that is the reason for Chris's starry -eyed vision, putting some physicality back into it.

On Lee's side the largest group is Max and Kat's insane hyper-instrument-integrated-light-visual extravaganza. There is a sound-room project as well, and both of these should prove to be very interesting.

In Which Tatiana Is Shown that Synergy and Cartoon Foxes are the Same and Contemplates Stereo Lithography

So I've decided that if I don't get to print something 3D, then most of this class has been a waste.

Well, that's a bit harsh. But its true that in the groups I've been in, the programmer calls the shots, no matter how brilliant (or not) the conceptual work. That being said, what I want to do for our last project is to print or cast computer-generated objects based on some sort of socially-salient data collected from the internet. So I at least need a programmer that knows web-interfaces and a few people that can model in Maya and/or are decent at the 3D library in Processing. The fundamental problem in this is that I personally contain none of the skill sets required for this project apart from having the idea itself. So, if my pitch was well received and I was able to go forward in my hare-brained object-generating escapades I pretty much wouldn't be doing any of the work, unless someone was kind enough to teach me modeling in Maya.

*Taps foot*

In Which Several Bizarre Things are Discovered

In Digital Art we broke up into East and West groups. Appropriately I was in West with Adam-owns-your-face-at-everything, and with Chris mediating and falling ever towards madness with his pantomiming. If I get to work with Adam I would be ecstatic, mainly because he seems to be interested in representing data in completely inscrutable but aesthetically pleasing ways. I just want to make physical widgets to live in the ASH lobby, things that would be both baffling and engaging. Most of all it must be things. Things that would filter the data out of the air like coral filtering food particles out of the ocean current. It is all well and good to program, but the world behind the glass cannot be touched, no matter how detailed your modeling.

Adam and Max want to make something completely ridiculous with the controllers for Rock Band. I guess it would be something like Anti-Rock Band, in which instead of being rewarded for playing the right notes you would be rewarded for not... for making as much sound as you want. They would reprogram the controllers to play back different sounds, and to complicate things further, in true digital art style, the buttons would also control a visualizer and a light show. Through our long and convoluted discussion of music we learned that Chris plays music by tapping on different bits of his car, that Ratatat is really just a programmer and a guitarist, and that John is the least practical-minded of any of us, even with Adam. His idea really had nothing to do with music (so that was a bad transition), but he wanted to do something that would represent and record frames of animation in a different way. His example was a group which laid down thousands of frames on a road and then drove over them in a truck equipped with a video camera. That idea was awesome. His involved something I could not visualize involving glass tubes, slices and shooting things through the tube. Mostly it just sounded dangerous.

If we had unlimited resources, no doubt would we come up with the most hilariously convoluted and overly complicated projects ever.

Slightly out of the Loop

I made a bunch of audio loops yesterday, none of which sound very good together. They all seem to have different beats and tempos and feels and so on. I suppose it would have been slightly more congruous had I figured out how to get csound to work and made my own stuff, but perhaps that is for another time.

Pretty much half the class have been trying to figure out how to manipulate sound in real time (again not following conglomerate LeeChrisPerrySpector's advice to "demo or die"), including us. Processing doesn't have methods for sound written into it, so several people wrote mostly incomplete libraries to ameliorate this, with varying degrees of success. Minim almost never has volume control, which is what we need. Brian apparently is using Ess to control the volume, but according to Lee (and the fact that I couldn't get the library to even load properly) its very unstable. Again we are walking the line.

A Dark Room

Our group member from Mt. Holyoke decided not to show up, and so I sat in a dim ASH talking in somewhat awkward bouts with Brian, the demur kid that knows me as well from Animation Forum (was he the one writing QT Sketch?), and again my memory fails me. He, like Omid, also wants to do an interface. We are both lost on the audio part of this. Hopefully we'll have Christine tomorrow as well as some ideas after Lee's enlightening talk (well, it should be, unless he noodles on about 'soul' still).

One bit of progress: We've decided that relying on email for coordination is a bad idea. WOOO!

In Which Tatiana Does Her Head In, And Learns Why You Start With Processing

Because its easy as pie to start.

Yes, I am looking at you, cheerful Python programmer.

Digital Patch Cords

The tangle of wires this brings to mind gives me no more solace...

Funny to think I entertained ideas of sound engineering. Now I'm going to have to learn at least some of it quite fast. Oh lovely graphical interfaces, where have you gone?

Now its flying down levels of abstraction. Sound is no more tangible than light, but it is oh so much more mysterious.

Post-Mortem

Cherubim is basically this program that allows you to arrange pre-loaded GIF animations. My original idea was this sort of interactive art piece where little gif animations would roam around a screen, and you could suck them up into bigger arrangements and then be able to tear bits off or explode it entirely.

I made myself useful last night by sitting in ASH 126 and testing the code Omid sent along to me. It took about 2 hours and 26 chapters of Rice Boy before he reappeared and before Cherubim ran without taking a huge chunk of the CPU of the main computer (if it doesn't run on that one, it won't run unless we figure out a way to send it through ASH's shady Beowulf cluster, FLY, which seems to live constantly at 80% capacity).

In this long period, I learned a few things about myself.

1) I was very scared about all of this. Why? Because I had no control what-so-ever over what Omid was doing.

2)There is an upside to being almost cripplingly pessimistic: things are super-uber wonderful when they work out, and when they don't its exactly what you were expecting. THAT GLASS IS HALF EMPTY, BUT ITS GINGER ALE, hell yes.

So after presenting my programs to Gabe, (Lee is still out sick, probably typing away nearly constantly at his email), I loaded Cherubim onto the main computer in ASH and ran it. It looked the same as the night before, but Omid was out in the atrium and he proceeded to show me all that he had done the entire night.

Attach Mode now worked. RETURN allows you to take and move the animations into position with the anchor points.

Resize Mode was added. ALT allows you to chose an animation with a click and resize with keyboard inputs.

Frame Mode was added, allowing you to pause animations, choose a specific one and cycle through each frame, allowing for timing changes or syncing animations. This was no where in our plans but it turned out to be a well-implemented and thoughtful idea.

Attract function was added. When white field is clicked and held in ATTACH MODE, all animations 'suck' to that point. This would later be 'animated', as well as a 'destruct' function as well.

Some primitive level of object and edge detection was written in, preventing objects from being dragged entirely off screen. This was the first stage in what will be a long and involved process to write object interactions into the program, which was part of the original idea.

GIF export function was added. This would be tweaked so that you could export arrangements that you liked and then have them re-imported into Cherubim, thus allowing some kind of recursive arrangement.

Omid was so psyched about this whole thing. I'm sure if it wasn't for his enthusiasm we wouldn't have anything nearly that awesome to show. Right now Cherubim is in 'alpha'. If we return to this, Cherubim beta will have more mouse controls and less keyboard input, some level of object interaction, gif export, more coherent animations, and a slicker interface that would allow the person to control what animations are displayed.

All in all, very impressive.

80% CPU Usage

The code has been cut down, the animations run...


now for all the other pieces

Its a long night and today is Valentines day

Stack Overload Error

Today is do or die. Today is the last day for building wings. I opened up urza this morning and looked at what Omid had accomplished in the night after our meeting in ASH (in which I discovered to my great sorrow that the stylus for the 9x12 Wacom tablet was missing). After loading the appropriate library so that the code would progress past the first line, my computer had a bit of a conniption fit, and only recovered after I had closed all instances of the Processing IDE.

The day before I had written the infamous infinite loop and unleashed the mother of all stack-overload errors on my laptop. My memory was eaten up in a second, allowing not even the task manager to start up (I have a huge complaint with how the task manager is arranged in Vista... why would you put it in some special screen that probably takes up far more memory than it should?). In this instance the limit of my knowledge of computer programming was put in sharp relief. I can't help Omid at all, and neither can George. We have to wait and see what happens. I cannot even see the progress as the code can't run on my computer (yet it does on the Macs in ASH).

I'm in over my head.

Apple Blossoms and Star Turtles

Certainly not the most exciting of sketches, but here are my first running programs:

Apple Blossoms
Uses img.get to collect color information from a pre-loaded image.

Turtle Star
A repeating star pattern built with Turtle graphics (interpreted for Processing by Lee Spector).

note: I've had some difficulty running Processing sketches in Mozilla. I have not tried IE, but I know the Opera browser works.

A Wind in the Door

So, we have two "real" days to work on this thing that I've spewed from the depths of my mind and that my team-mates have picked up and manipulated. The thing may turn out as monstrous as my inspiration: the Cherubim (that singular plurality) from the book A Wind in the Door.

Here is the fundamental problem with how this project has gone and is going. The conglomerate ChrisPerryLeeSpector foresaw in its infinite wisdom that the groups could not rely on a single person ("to do some super human task") to finish their project. However, programming something like what I cooked up is something far beyond my own meager programming skills, that it may as well be considered super-human from my point of view. If it is beyond the skills of the programmer in our group it is beyond all of us, and there is nothing a single one of us can do about it. If this kid proves to be an arrogant sort, we may just have a disaster on our hands. If he is not, I hope to all gods in ASH 126 that he has the sense to seek help. The process to me is wrapped up in fog. If he has a problem I do not have the knowledge to help him or even look for something that could help him.

IF IF IF!

I've started something and it has rolled away from me as quickly as its conception. We have no recourse. ChrisLee has pointed out the cliff and told us to fly. How many wings do I have to draw to save us?