More Painter Doodles

Here's another doodle I just declared done. Some kind of weird organ flower, stem cells gone bad I guess. the detail is nice but the composition is kind of random, its a doodle anyhow.




here are some close ups (somewhat killed by jpeg compression):










I'll add a higher res version to my gallery when I can...

invasion footage

Here's a link to the Invasion Sequence I worked on, from Danny Yount's website...





I did alot of the icky orange stuff that appears after the glowy planet thingy.

Intracellular Overdrive

Saw Invasion with friends and colleagues last night at the Grove. of course they raised the house lights at the end and everyone stood up. I complained loudly "sit down, this is the best part!!" ah but who listens...too bad we couldn't see it at the Arclight.

Anyways, the science in the film was laughable of course. The animations in the middle of the film lacked style or purpose, reminiscent of Discovery Channel type stuff with even less content. Our stuff at the end was much more stylish even though it had no basis in science. The best part was the CDC's imaging technology which allowed the scientists to see the virus rendered in 3d with raytracing in real time. No one tell Drew Berry that they have this kind of capability, he'll be out of a job!

There was one review I completely agree with, not just because he praised my work but mostly because he praised my work. I like how he described it in lysergic terms...

The best thing about The Invasion is, sadly, the psychedelic montage under the closing credits. These groovy, DNA-inspired images remind one of a much more enjoyable sci-fi film, Fantastic Voyage.

film journal.com

Personally I felt the film would have been better if they let the director have his way. I understand now why he wanted Lennon's
"Imagine" over out animation, a nice bit 'o irony. Instead it ended abruptly with a very "Star Trek: Next Generation" conclusion. "Everyone's DNA has been altered, we'll just spray them with powder and everything is back to normal". I think they had studio execs as extras, dressed as government spooks and military personnel, rushing in to end the film as soon as possible before another dime was spent.

Other highlights from the film include Nicole Kidman's numerous nipply underwear scenes, Nicole Kidman pushing down a creepy Asian boy (got a laugh from the audience), Nicole Kidman giving Daniel Craig, arguably the sexiest man alive, the "just friends" speech (at least now I feel better about my high school dating experiences, if it can happen to him, I guess it can happen to anyone), and machine gun toting marines facing a horde of zombies and not shooting! How can you not blow their heads off! The Geneva conventions specifically state that its okay to shoot civilian zombies, even though these guys didn't eat flesh, there's enough of a gray area.

One news clip of Karl Rove would have been great, the man is a natural born pod person.

OK, enough editorializing, back to shameless self promotion....

Molecules in Da House

Raise the roof! molecularmovies.com is in full effect! Visit this site for all your scientific animation needs. I'll be posting tutorials there in the future!

INFLASION!

I mean...INVASION!




Comes out this friday. My best animation yet is shown at the very end (right after the gripping coffee sipping scene!). I'm actually quite proud of it, can't wait to see it on the big screen. i worked with Dong Ho Lee who did some of the really cool shots, Alex Hanson who worked miracles on my renders with Shake and After Effects, Danny Yount who was the creative director and driving force behind the imagery, and Peter Harp who integrated the titles into the shots. While its light on scientific accuracy, it looks beautiful, can't wait to use some of the techniques I developed on some real sciencey type stuff. In the end I did something like 12 or 15 shots of intracellular mayhem suggesting the viral nasties who are responsible for all of Nicole Kidman's trials an tribulations. I dod some Zbrush modelling, Texturing, dynamic animation, particle effects, lighting and rendering. Go see it if you can! We'll be seeing it at the Arclight this Friday. Don't know how good the movie is but the last scenes are cool.

Post SIGGRAPH picture dump

OK, back from San Diego with most of my internal organs in tact. Here are some pictures from my fabulous trip. The people I went with and met and talked to were awesome. The show itself was forgettable and I can't really say much about the Autodesk or Houdini events, nothing positive anyways (Emerging Technologies Exhibit was more like "Crappy Art and Boring Machines exhibit"). The best part of the trip involved skipping my overpriced Houdini Master classes so that I could meet Graham Johnson and David Goodsell and visit their lab at Scripps...




Yup, got to meet David Goodsell, famous molecular artist and author of the "Molecule of the Month" feature on the RSCB site.




some of his analog artwork:



Along with David I met Graham Johnson, Scientific Illustrator and animator extrodinaire. I also hung out with 2005 Maya Master (back when it meant something!) and famous molecular animator Drew Berry. I met Eddy Xuan, who evaded my camera completely. He gave a Maya Master Class(which I missed) on Scientific Visualization. I got to see some of his reel, amazing stuff! And of course I enjoyed the company of the dynamic duo of Harvard molecular animation Gael McGill and Janet Isawa.

Gael and Graham at the Autodesk party (red alert apparently):




From left to right: Graham, Me, Drew, and Janet. Drew was enjoying the pizza-like foam rubber they served at the party (Gael took the picture to avoid appearing on this blog again):




Back to the lab...

The most exciting aspect of the lab was the 3D printer which created Gypsum and plastic models of molecular structures. I actually got to break a nucleosome (sorry guys!). Here are some images....
















here is themachine that maked the models, you have to dig them out of the sand with archeologist's tools.




OK, then it was back to SIGGRAPH for the Orwellian Autodesk user group and the Autodesk party aboard the USS Midway. There were fireworks...








and Go-Go Girls:








and there was Ban, who enjoyed the ambience...




Tuesday was all about the exhibit floor. Check out John Brown on the monitor at the Gnomon booth. We Hear and Obey John Brown!




My proudest moment... my face and design on the screen at the Gnomon booth!













I also had some artwork on the Gnomon demo reel!

At the end of the day I met up with the Wiley folks for dinner. This image is courtesy of Lee Lanier's blog on highend. I git to hang out with George Maestri, author of the ubiquitous "Digital Character Animation" books.




It was a good trip in spite of the stomach aches, nasty food, long lines, an inescapable party on the Midway, and enough marketing BS to keep me nauseous until next year. My apologies to my friend Kamal, who came with me on the drive. I didn't post any images of you since none came out. They were all dark or really unflattering .

Sig Sig Sputnik

I will be at SIGGRAPH on Monday and Tuesday. Monday is a whole day of Houdini master classes, Tuesday I'll be on the exhibit floor. Stop by the Wiley/Sybex booth around 10:00 am or so. I will be talking about my book (Maya Visual Effects: The Innovator's Guide) and demonstrating stuff for about an hour. Hope to see you there!

OK, a reader has pointed out an error on the CD that goes with my book. In the Zombie hand tutorial on page 29 I instruct you to "find the psdFileTex3 node" in the Hypershade. It's not there. the texture is in fact on the CD but the version of the scene that made it on the CD does not have the texture. So, to fix this you need to create a new psdFileTexture node and then use the file field to browse the CD. Select the zombieHandVeins.PSD texture from the chapter 2 sourceimages directory and then follow the instructions in the tutorial from there. I apologize for this mistake. These books go through several levels of technical and copy editing but mistakes can still slip through. Thanks for pointing out this problem. feel free to email me if more are discovered!

Pictures from SIGGRAPH and the new apartment next week...