More desktop inspiration...

As some of my friends (and wife) know, I love Transformers:Prime, the fully CG kids show that sadly just ended a month or so ago...  I'd never really gotten into this toy franchise at all until the movies came out, and now this fantastic show...

A bunch of new kids

I also love having toys on the desktop (by that, I mean the top of my real desk, not the one in Windows), and while hunting around for the usual Christmas bargains for family, I managed to find a few more of the now hard-to-come-by Deluxe series 1 figurines.  The reason I love this particular series of toys is purely on the fact that they look probably the closest to the characters in the show itself.

Out of the 4 newest ones, the only one I'm no fan of is Airachnid.  She doesn't pose well, and a set of very flat hands as well as being hard to balance.  Its a pity, but given how hard it is to find these now in any store...

Flat hands, bad balance... Ouch.

Bumblebee, on the other hand has not only a solid stance, he's also quite poseable.  He also has a pretty mean facial expression that just says "Serious".  This one actually looks a lot better then I'd expected after seeing the rather "toy like" pose that is on the back of the packaging.  Like Wheeljack, this particular toy has attitude...

Don't mess with the Bee!

The last 2 kids are not too bad either.  Soundwave looks particularly technical - though he does seem a little tricky to balance, and I can't quite get any dynamic posing from him.  But he looks very cool...

Knock out looks as he should - Arrogant (he has a somewhat sarcastic smirk on his face) and he stands fairly well.  There's some scope for posing, though nowhere as much as the others.

Knock Out and Soundwave - best of buddies...

I need more!!!

I'll be keeping my eyes peeled.  In fact, hopefully Cyber Monday will reveal some old stock in the USA that may be at the right price!  I know I shouldn't - with the piles of paper, DVDR's, mouse cable, books and BSG toys - my somewhat tiny desk is now starting to look a little more cluttered (thank goodness for the wireless keyboard).

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When is a cow NOT a cow?

When its a flying machine for a Swedish childrens show called Ljudhjältarna...

 Late end of 2012, I was approached by film maker, director and editor/compositor Arvid Eriksson (whom I'd met through a colleague when creating a conceptual 3D space capsule image for an indie film pitch) to produce a 3D steam-punk styled airship for a Swedish childrens show.  The plan - to create a 3D model that he could then import into Adobe Aftereffects and animate in post.

Arvid's a very talented director, producer, editor and compositor - and he's also a lot of fun and infectiously enthusiastic.  Obviously, I just had to say yes - and hey, nothing says fun like a flying air ship that travels through outer-space... On top of that, the conceptual art we had been given had a stylised "cow" look to it - 4 hooves, rope tail and wings that formed the ears.  This should be a blast...

The finished model as used in the opening titles

Getting it started...

Based on the concept art, I produced a very low quality proxy model using LightWave3D's modeler.  Exported out as an obj, this meant the model could be imported into AE by Arvid to animate and get his project blocked out quickly.

Rough out proportions, and something for the director to get started quickly.

Taking it from there...

There were a few things to consider during this project when it came to building this model...

Obviously one was that it really couldn't be too poly heavy or texture heavy since it had to be importable into a compositing package.  While most CG applications will quite happily render high poly detailed models, After Effects isn't exactly a full featured 3D rendering package - and that also meant a lot of internal custom shaders and texture mapping techniques I could use with my rendering tools would need to be instead based heavily on colour image maps and the general capabilities After Effects offered.

Most the detailing came from image maps, with small detailing modeled where needed.

One other thing was that the ship wasn't going to need to hold up to extreme close-ups.  That meant that detail models and precision texture mapping could be relaxed a little more then I'd normally need to with a more CG detailed project.  There did still need to be at least some detail to make the machine look real.  Details in the leg mechanics and wing/engine/rudder areas needed a little planning...

Details such as legs were low-poly - however the 'mechanics' had to still hold up.

However, there was a close-up pulling back from the bridge to show the pilot flying the ship (video composited into the shot) - but this luckily was achievable with higher-res texture maps and minimal additional modeling (there was some, but only on details where the lower poly tessellation stood out in shot)

Luckily for me, the only real textures that were noticable at full HD was the overall wood on the main ships hull.  To get this to look clean and sharp in a close-up, I simply created the texture map at 4096 rather then the original 2048 resolutions I'd originally been using.

Replacing the 2048 res with a 4096 higher quality image fixed close-up issues.

Then it all changed.

After Effects is not a 3D animation tool - we knew that - and as Arvid's project went on, the limitations of what it could do started to become quite apparent.  In particular, objects that would move a fair distance would render with artifacts (caused, I can only assume, by depth calculations messing up the back face culling).  It also doesn't offer any real animation capabilities to add secondary motion - and this meant the model did have a rather "stiff" appearance.

Worse still - Adobe's decision to remove 3D model support suddenly meant that this project would need older versions of the software to be edited (and make any future changes quite difficult).  With the newer releases of the software having no backward compatible replacement - Well...  You can guess the answer on that one.

It was decided that we render it in a 3D application (in this case, LightWave3D) and instead plug the image sequences back into After Effects.  This meant I could throw in more polys, and while I did add some more "detail", I still let the texture maps control a majority of the look and detailing.

Most the look of this section are image maps. The geometry is fairly simple

Additional small secondary motions such as the hook hanging below the belly of the machine could be added.  It also meant I could throw in some occlusion to add to the final look of the machine, as well as softer lighting and shadows that AE could not.  More believable motion blur for the spinning of the prop's later on were also very easy to achieve...

It all worked out in the end

I had a real blast working on this project.  In total, around 25-26 hours were spent with modeling, texturing and rendering on my end.  Arvid's work can be seen below.  Credits also go to David Giese, who also produced this project along with Arvid for Cinelandia and Scandinavian TV.

Make sure to check out both of these guys' websites to see some of the amazing commercial work that they do.


Ljudhjältarna, Title Sequence from Arvid Eriksson on Vimeo.

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Still stuck in the 80's - which is a good thing...

"Stick with it".  Its way to easy (specially for myself, and I'm sure many of you others out there) to jump into another project and tell myself "I'll get back to that one later".  Completing a project means making sure that you keep yourself immersed in it and follow it through to completion.

This retro 80's project is just that - and what's helping keep me on track is actually having the machines here next to me, which in turn inspires me to recall that childhood where I started my journey into computing.

So what have I been up to since my last post?  Well, continuation of that asset building to get together materials to produce a final rendered result.  With the cassette and cases all sorted and looking relatively good, a ZX Spectrum computer and some Atari game cartridges already done, its those last few peripherals that I need to load up and play my games that have to be done.

"From Russia...", ahem, I mean cassette to computer, "with love."

Obviously there has to be a way to feed that lovely magnetic data across, and in this case its with mono 3.5mm cables.  While these aren't finalised (textures/materials still need work), I decided to do a quick test render with the cassettes...

You may be wondering what that whole "Bedrooms to billions" tape is about.  Well, its not a game from the 1980's, but an upcoming documentary taking a historical look at the rise of the gaming industry in the United Kingdom where kids (like myself) could be game developers.  Nowadays, not so easy to do with huge studios and billions of dollars floating around...  Apart from perhaps the mobile gaming market, where indie games are still a possibility.  But I digress...

The cables are rigged up with a simple skeleton to allow me to bend, twist and curl them around.  Its important to be fairly flexible (no pun intended) with these assets so that I have options for a final composition...

On the subject of cables, I also made a start on the necessary RF cabling.  Yes, back in the day tuning in a channel on the TV set was the equivalent of a computer monitor.  Obviously being an RF (radio frequency) meant that the computers output would interfere with the neighbours TV reception...

RF plugs - just a little more tweaking to go... and a cable (obviously)

Watch and behold - ahem, that all important TV set

You would be surprised at just how annoying it is to try and find a decent side-on photograph of a small 14 inch television set from the 1980's using a google image search.  In the end I needed to develop my own model sheets for a classic small television through a mixture of reference photo's and some bounding box measurements from articles online for televisions.

"Roll your own" - TV model sheet, that is...

What I did end up producing from a few images was something that looks a little more 1990's then 1980's - however that's not to say that I'd be creating a scene from the 80's - just a scene showing old computer tech being set up...

But lets keep it real

I did find one exceptionally good website while browsing, and for anybody wanting to learn more about obsolete television technology, then the obsolete telly museum blog is a must-read.  I took another look at what televisions of that 1980's era were like, and today just built a whole new TV from scratch.

Once the key elements were noted down (curved CRT tubes, framed screens and the speaker/channel/volume controls on the left side (about 1/5th of the width of the TV casing)) the whole model came together in a couple of hours.

Before we had LCD, LED or Plasma... We had CRT.

Again, like the cables, the TV is still a WIP when it comes to textures and materials - but its one step closer to getting this project to completion...

Just making sure to follow through is the key...

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I'm in the clear!

I thought I'd better test out my cassette case model, as well as make sure I built a folded inlay for future models as not all games had the simpler flat cover...

I threw the front case surface onto the backing for the case to see how it would hold up visually, and I have to say it actually looks better then I'd expected it to.  Often this is where modeling flaws start to show themselves and I was all prepared to switch it back to black if I needed to.

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Just in case...

...a cassette case...  That's the only case we're talking about here.

Since my previous post for "Galactic Abductor", I've now modeled up the case for it as well.  The insert came from an online archive housed at the awesome World of Spectrum site.   The cassette label itself I drew up in Photoshop based on images I found on google.  The hardest part of that cassette label was finding that funky font for the AR - but in the end, daFont delivered one that was almost identical.

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Its a screecher!

Well, its a cassette - that screeches!  Its always interesting to hear young kids claim that they don't believe that computer programs could be stored on an audio cassette...  But in 1983, that's how we did it...  The screeching sound of bits and bytes as they loaded across to the 16 or 48k of memory of the ZX Spectrum...

 I guess the concept of how you can store digital data on an audio device sounds a little wierd - but then again, back in the 80's the whole concept of sending "video" via a telephone to have some kind of visual chat was also a pretty "impossible" to imagine concept.  A phone was for voice - a television was to watch video - and of course to use as a monitor for that home computer...

But look at where we are now.  Its common place to video chat with people, everybodies carrying around a computer in their palm, we communicate with people on a global level every second of every day...  In the 1980's, this was still all "science fiction" material...

Computer games on cassettes?!  Yup... Thats how we rolled back in the 80s.

 

Now, where was I again? Oh yeh, that screeching tape...

I decided to fill in a little time, and expand my assets for my whole 3D "8-bit phase" I'm going through, to model and texture up one of the very first cassette games I got with my ZX Spectrum back in the day...  Galactic Abductors, by Anirog Software.

Another quicky 3D asset.  One of my first ZX Spectrum games

Its a very quick model, created using just the usual generic modeling tools and a few bump maps.  But I'm one more asset closer to getting around to creating and rendering a nice composition...  The plan is to next model the case and inlay and finish this asset off ready for whatever comes next into my head...

Was it the first?  It was one of two that started off my ZX Spectrum experience...  The other being Frenzy, a clone of the classic arcade game Bezerk...

Anyway, enough reminiscing for this blog entry...  Until next time...

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Re-live the 80's with Illustrator.

I developed a design brief for my students that requires then to recreate their own work in the style of the 80's arcade pop-culture.  Its a great era and one that seems to be fairly popular even today with its pixel-art, rainbow electric graphic design asthetic and just the fact I grew up in that era also helps... :D

While its easy enough to create pixel-art in a bitmap editor such as Photoshop, Windows Paint or the Gimp - For some real flexibility artistically, Illustration software like - well - Illustrator is a better choice.  Because its vector based, pixel shapes are crisp and square.  They can be rescaled without pixel artifacts or antialiased soft edges.  And it can be manipulated with transforms, 3D extrusions and more without losing quality.

That means groovy poster art, alongside the usual pixel-level bit map export.  Some examples below show a range of ways that we can make the classic invader into a variety of visually interesting styles in Illustrator.  Of course, we can also export the original image in actual screen res. pixels too for those actual bitmap projects (ie. like game makers, etc).

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