Dr. Manhattan process

From Wired we have a description of the process for bringing a unique digital character to life. I really like that they were able to unify the glow effect (the character must illuminate the real life characters) and the tracking.

Color Space

Color defines a space. How we use this space depends on what our media can represent (consider the difference between our eyes and the monitor) and what we need it to express. Typically in computer graphics we first think of the RGB color space. This space is useful from an engineering point of view (we need red, green, and blue emitters to make a color pixel), however it can be very difficult to work with as human/artist. What other color spaces are there? How is the HSV color space different from RGB? Why might a human find this better to work with?

Just Awsome

Slow Motion Punches to The Face from Eduardo Wydler on Vimeo.

Think about how one might model these dynamics. What kind of deformations would be required to make a character do this?

In case you hadn't heard...

February 18, 2009

Albuquerque Journal

3-D May Spell Jobs for N.M. (UNM involved)
By Michael Hartranft, Journal Staff Writer

New Mexico stands to gain nearly 100 new high-technology jobs under two commercial partnerships with the state's supercomputer program, including a pioneering venture with film studio giant, DreamWorks Animation.Backdropped by Encanto, the state's supercomputer at Intel in Rio Rancho and the heart of the New Mexico Computer Application Center, Gov. Bill Richardson announced that the Cerelink Digital Media Group of New Mexico is teaming up with DreamWorks to explore “cloud computing” or remote rendering for film production. The project would create about 30 jobs in its early phase.The governor also introduced the Insigniam Innovation Discovery Center, a health-care consulting business that recently moved to Albuquerque from San Francisco. It plans to use the supercomputer to develop solutions for improving health-care quality and value, Richardson said.Insigniam plans to hire 60 to 65 people this year and could expand to 300 over the next four years, managing partner Lee Akay said. Former Intel employee and Cerelink managing partner Richard Draper said the trend in computer-generated films is moving toward 3-D. As such productions require millions of computing hours, there is a need for cost-effective computing capacity. “The answer is New Mexico,” he said. Cerelink and DreamWorks — whose films include “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda” — will jointly explore developing technology and infrastructure for the studio to be able to render computer-generated 3D films in New Mexico. The NMCAC worked with UNM, the state Department of Information Technology, National LambdaRail and Cerelink to test an ultra-high-speed link between New Mexico and Hollywood. “As far as we know, no motion picture has been rendered remotely, so this is truly an R and D effort,” Draper said. The initial phase will take a few months. “At that point, when DreamWorks and Cerelink are satisfied that part works for remote cloud-computing, then that's when we start looking at the next phase, which is to hire folks to start doing animation here as well as the rendering that would be done from the studios in Los Angeles,” he told the Journal. He said about 30 jobs would be created during that time. Draper said Cerelink will not use the supercomputer in the first phase, but that it holds potential for animation companies down the road.

Introduction to Adobe Scripts

Trevor Morris has a nice introduction to scripting the Adobe Creative Suite applications. Read up! We will be using Adobe tools for post processing our animations. (Note: this tutorial has two parts).

Here is another easy tutorial with nice examples.

The Uncanny Valley

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness."

This post is in reference to a comment in class about the "corpse effect". Here is a clip demonstrating how to achieve the corpse effect using photoshop:

Tron

Here is a nice clip of the 80's CG Movie "TRON" set to some classic 80's music.



Notice: The objects (e.g. light cycles) were created using CSG, also try to guess how one might achieve a live-action glow effect nowadays.