Björk - Wanderlust

for all who own red/blue 3d Glasses... Björks new Video can be seen in 3d!

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/04/bjork_wanderlust_3d_video

Theoretically it should be quite easy to do.
I think for a 3d Shot there have to be two cameras in the scene that are nearly on the same place (as it is with human eyes)...

but then comes the tricky stuff I can only guess. Either the images from one cam is renderd out more blue and the other more red or the effect comes through adjusting/ adding colorchannels in the postproduction... Unfortunatly I haven't at the moment the time to make huge experiments.

Not Animating

My actuall plan was to animate a first shoot last weekend but the morph targets went crazy and moved not only the face. Instead they translated the whole character sideways in a very unpredictable way... impossible to animate something.

Today during the animation lecture we fund the mistake. It was a kind of "wrong stack order, wrong collapse timing "-ISH and maybe hierarchical fault with the Pivot involved. *sg*

So...basically I have the pleasure to practise my deforming skills a little more on the newly to create morph targets that have allready been created once... Oh, doesnt really matter... I have lots of time disposable to do every step at least twice *sg*
But yeah, the second approach of the face morph targets gets really better

Skin Test - Buzzcat

maybe would it be a good idea for me not to try to make a perfect rig to skin fitting...

maybe a 80% good version also works - I'll think about this idea during the next few hours of work on the vertex weights...

Yes, I know its time consuming and stupid to weight vertices manually but the envelopes are a kind of limited I just found out. Because if the proportions of your model are a bit out of normal then the envelopes can't cover all the areas the connected bones should influence.

My workflow looks at the moment like this:

1. adjust envelop -> test animate (petrifying shock 'cause it moves somewhere and somehow)
2. manually adjust vertecies -> test animate
3. - 1000. just as I did in step 2. (I could spend weeks on it...)

Buzzcat in zurich

While working out how to ajust the envelopes of each bone I let the cat pose in as many different poses as I can imagine to detect faults in the vertex weights.

In this picture here the cat takes a little walk along the schanzengraben in zurich ;-)

Some of the parts of the skin behave quite odd at the moment. For Example if I move the shouldes down the chest vertices pierce out in the totaly wrong direction... quite tricky to ajust

Illustration - just for fun

I am too much in front of screens. As longer as I continue to work like this the bader gets my performance....

So distraction is the action for perfaction ;-)

Today I explored some areas of Notts by foot, went to a teahouse and made some doodles there. They are very much inspired by the latest bookish things I read... "Johnny the homicidal maniac" and "Amphigorey" by Edward Gorey.

When I was back home I redraw one of them a bit larger and added some kind of goreyish graphical structure to the areas to make the whole comic look more interesting.

BC_an animated Rig Test

Here we are... a working rig for the cat. It does quite all the things I want it to do. After a week working on it today I just realised, that I maybe should have built the rig in to the body.

So far so good... at the moment I guess it needs two or three days to deconnect the rig and fit it in to the body. GOD HIT ME WITH A LIGHTNING, DAMN DAMN DAMN!!!

Manchester

A lovley picture from the Hilton Hotel in Manchester I took when I was there last week with my brother.

Around 5 min later it started to hail havily. I think this is one of the reasons the gray of the sky is so amazingly colorfull!
I really like the composition and the tones of the picture. Its all grey but yet so full of colour... if you watch it on a good screen.

Thinking about this... Its very hard to properly present digital art because of the big difference in reception of the final pice of art. A well lit painting in a museum looks normally very good and is no comparison to a screen work. Even it I would spend hours on refining a photo in photoshop, if you look at it on a bad screen all the work is done for nothing. The audience will only get the idea but not the finetuned finished piece of art...

RIG - a test

One of several atempts to make a rig for the cat.

Nothing is linked, wired or hierarchiesed. There are just the splineIKs in the tail and the spine so far because I have NO IDEA how to link this stuff together...

I found somewhere in Max a tutorial how to rig a biped - doesn't work very well for my purposes.

Sillybilly - the final mesh

Her is the slightly modified final mesh for SillyBilly.

I added little floating eyeballs and made the lantern more bony

Buzzcat - the final mesh

Finally I arrived to finish the mesh for the cat.

The modelling of the head was quite a pain because it looked a long time like the head of a chiwawa dog. After long hours of looking at cat and dog pictures and modifications on the heads geometry it lookes now like a strange kind of cat...