Shea Gym

In you're interested, here's a link to the first draft of the Shea Gym conversion that I've been working on with Dan Tohlen. The rendering has been slow, so I've only been able to do the master layer and an occlusion layer. No time for anything fancier than that. At this point, the biggest problem is that the client now wants the gym to be round, like Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV. OMG. That could be some work.

Awesome 3D Architectural Images

Check out these amazing architectural images.

CGArchitect.com

Aniboom

If you haven't been here yet, be sure to check it out. Good, bad, brilliant and everything else.

Aniboom

Sorry about the delay. Dan Tohlen and I have been working on the visualization for the Shea Gymnasium renovation. I'll pust some screen captures and a brief clip real quick. In the meantime, here's an interesting item on crowdsourcing an animation short, which will be coming to a theater to you in the near future. Called, "Live Music," it's a short animation about an electric guitar and a concert violin that fall in love. A similar site can be found called, Aniboom. Check it out. Here's the article, from the New York Times.

An Animated Film Is Created Through Internet Consensus.

Check out this amazing 3D video from Iran

Check this out. Obviously authored in Iran, I'm wondering what software they used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKRFQH0o8Dk

Inspirational Samples

Here's a link to an on-line magazine I subscribe to. It showcases extraordinarily fine work by illustrators and animators from all over the globe, but mostly Europe.

http://www.itsartmag.com/index.html

News of stuff

I've gotten the OK from department chair Eric Tao to run an animation course during the winter break. The course (if everything goes right) will have a double emphasis. One thread of the course will be targeted primarily at high school and community college types who want a working introduction to Maya and 3D modeling. The other thread will be a lab/workshop scenario where Spencer Lindsay and I will help CSUMB students fine tune their modeling and animation skills, with the emphasis being on professional level production. I'd love to get your input on what you think will be most helpful for newbies and for Otters wishing to upgrade their skills to professional level.

Boot camp

I'm working with Spencer Lindsay on offering a course during the winter break that would be a two-week intensive. There are still many, many details to be worked out and nothing is guaranteed but I'm in the planning stages so I'd like to know what advice you have to offer in what should be done. At this point, all ideas are worth consideration.

Visit to Mission

Hi, for those of you paying attention. I went and visited Don Shields today. He teaches animation at Mission College in Santa Clara and we had a great discussion about teaching Maya, including short cuts and his recommendations on course expectations, student workload and all sorts of other things. He invited me to go to an industry meet-up in SF tonight, but I wasn't prepared. I needed to come home, walk the dog, work on my book and so forth. Also of note is the Animation Boot Camp being offered by Wave Street Studios (on Cannery Row) and run by a woman named Jane Barrymore (I think). It looks like it's all traditional approaches, with pencil and sketchpad. Maybe I can talk Spencer Lindsay into doing a digital animation boot camp at CSUMB between semesters. If I can work it right, we may be able to offer it through extended ed and also set it up for course credit, though I'm not sure about the last part. More later on that. A course like that could offer you a chance to fine tune your skills, particularly with modeling and lighting, which are Spencer's strengths. Still a maybe. Stay tuned and tell your friends. I also need to get this blog onto Facebook but I haven't spent any time getting that done, yet.

Conference

I'm here at a conference session that has a great title but is really the same old boring stuff (for lack of a more polite term). My video/animation came off reasonably well, so that was encouraging. I was afraid I'd get laughed at but some people were reasonably impressed. If I had to do over again, I'd do the whole thing in 3D but the render times were killing, consuming huge amounts of time for small snippets of time. If you see the piece, the 3D parts took 30 hours of render time. More later, if you're interested.

If you're so inclined, I'd like you to download a demo copy of Mudbox and/or Z Brush and let me know what you think. I'm thinking of using those programs for doing modeling in 305 and maybe 405. Let me know what you think.

Get the word out!

Please let everyone you know (who has an interest in CSUMB animation) about this blog and let's get this thing moving, vital and an active part of the program. We've got good students and good alumni. It's time to start making the connections so we can leverage our assets (pardon the Wall Street geek speak). Now that I have a bit of progress with the NMC thingee (its official title), I'll put more effort into this blog. 

Conference Animation/video

Pardon the absence but I've been working very hard on the design video/animation for the New Media Conference here in Monterey, that starts tomorrow. I've got a working version posted that has some things I'd like to improve on (like the sound and the timing) but it's got the basic ideas in place. A short summary: There are rules and guidelines in 2D design. Because of all the screen content people engage (rather than print content), we need to revise the 2D rules to incorporate the concepts that screen display brings to the material we design. Screen design uses 2D concepts, plus it incorporates motion and the illusion of depth. Because so much commercial and editorial design content is moving from print to the screen, I think these are important ideas to deal with. I hope this makes a difference. Let me know what you think. 

ZD4: The Impact Of Depth And Time In Design

Ola

For the past week, I've been working an extraordinary amount on my video/animation for the New Media Conference, which is being held in Monterey in conjunction with CSUMB. What I'm working on is the idea that the new era of graphic design has to incorporate depth (layers) as well as time and that these two new added concepts can be worked with using the same kind of rules and guidelines like we have for 2D design (focal point, contrast, repetition, alignment and so forth). I haven't yet seen any articles or scholarly research that deals with how you create emphasis of design content in 3D space, or how you create or diminish emphasis by adjusting timing of elements, whether in motion or appearance. All this blather is predicated on the idea that most content will begin to incorporate the fact that all screen content implies layers and depth as well as time and change. I've got a link to it here:

http://classes.csumb.edu/CST/CST405-01/world/z4d01.mov

Some of it's pretty esoteric but let me know if it makes sense to any of you. If you really want mess with your friend, give them a couple of glasses of wine (or whatever) and see if they can explain it back to you. Working on this, I'm finally coalescing my final thoughts for my book which will take up the rest of the summer. Stay tuned and post when you can. 

The project is coming along reasonably well, except for the rendering of the 3D components, which is really taking a drag on the time, but that's not news to any of you. A thirty hour render for 20 seconds of content continues to be a royal pain. 

Spencer's blog posts

Here's the link to Spencer's blog posts. We didn't get the RSS or or connection worked out in time, but I've just been there and he's got some very cool pix of E3 so far with some Spencerian commentary to go along with it. I suggest you go visit for a bit of gizmo envy.

Spencer's blog: http://www.lindsaydigital.com/blog/

Link to ITCD animations

For anyone who hasn't seen these, the linked page has a list of sample animations by ITCD students.

http://classes.csumb.edu/CST/CST305-01/world/index.html

Sunday News

I haven't heard back from Spencer about blogging from E3. Hopefully that will turn out. He told me about some exciting things coming up down there. I wish I could go but it's pretty expensive and I have the project for the New Media Conference I'm working up. This week, I'm planning on going to see "Up" in 3D and if anyone wants to come along, let me know.

I'll be putting together a clip of the highlights of last semester's 405 class pretty soon. I'll also try to revise the 3D student highlight reel. I'll also start getting Pearsall to give me more updates on his work. Some of you who've been around CSUMB remember Jeff, who went on to do graphics for a company that specializes in tags, bumpers, commercials and that kind of stuff for handhelds. Jeff has been prodding them to do more 3D. They wanted to use 3DS Max, so Jeff's been teaching himself to use Max (traitor!) and he's pretty encouraged by his progress. He heard that they were building a waterpark in Morgan Hill and pitched the idea of a fly-through to the developer. The developer was non-committal but referred Jeff to the overseer of the downtown Morgan Hill redevelopment and (last I heard) it was looking promising that Jeff would be doing the fly-through for the whole project.

Don Shields, the instructor at Mission College that I met at the Oren Jacobs talk is also at E3 (lucky guys). When he gets back, I'm going to meet with him and compare notes about modeling and animation. He has his students Z-brush for a lot of the modeling and has them hand-key all their animation. He doesn't like using MoCap because of the clutter of the scripts and all the time it takes to clean them up. He's not that keen on Motion Builder because he says it's designed basically for 3DS Max and it's not so seamless with Maya. That's a bit different than the story I got from Alias, so I'll have to look into that. If the budget isn't too gruesome, I'll try to get Motion Builder and Mudbox on the 123 animation computers next week or the week after.

Mike Machado promised to upgrade the 123 computers to our latest version of Maya (2009) and I'll check on Monday to see if that's been done. Stay tuned and post something of your own if you think it's worthy. Till then.

Short break

I'm in the middle of grading and working on a project/presentation for the New Media Conference in Monterey (mid-June). I've got a project going about how the emergence of depth and time as abstract concepts is changing the way we look at design, both as a process and an end product. I'll try to post a link to the earliest version of part 1 today.

The most important news relates to the presentation by Oren Jacob at West Valley College a couple of weeks ago. Oren is a fascinating character who worked his way into Pixar in the early nineties and moved into a leadership role over the next few years. I think he mentioned that his highest profile credit is being responsible for all the particle effects in "Finding Nemo," and with all the water shots, the particle effects are an impressive effort. I think he was listed as Chief Technical Officer, or something like that.

What I really liked about his presentation is that he reinforced a number of things I've been saying over the years, not that I'm all that brilliant, but the key concept is to create work that has a look and feel that moves beyond just technical competency. He said, in some many words, that he can teach most anyone to use Maya (which is what they use), but he can't teach the creativity and the sense of new ideas that make for memorable content. What I really like about that philosophy is that it ties in so seamlessly with what the university experience is all about. We aren't a trade school and you can learn to use the software through all sorts of ways, both cheap and/or expensive. What makes your work memorable is the ability to bring all sorts of new ideas together in a creative and challenging way to get the audience to see and feel things they might not have experienced before.

To do that, you need experiences in other cultures and other ways of thinking, taught to you by university classes and classmates. That's why it's important to know the culture and mythology of a place outside your comfort zone. For those of you who do the research, you'll find out that a major part of the storyline for Shane Acker's new film, "9" comes from aboriginal culture and their belief that the soul is not complete in the afterlife unless all the souls it's a part of (in physical life) are accounted for. That all gets pretty deep and heavy but it's what makes the story resonate.

So, Oren reinforced my viewpoint that says you need to develop a personal statement that connects deeply through cultural networks and personal experience to really get ahold of the audience's attention. Beyond that, he had lots of great tips for getting noticed and one of the things I most appreciated was his suggestion that doing work, putting it on there on YouTube and waiting for things to happen is a pretty good idea. If it's got staying power, word of mouth will get you some notice. Word of mouth can get you from YouTube to the big leagues if you handle it right.

While up there, I met Don Shields, who teaches animation at Mission College and he and I compared notes about teaching Maya, the game industry and other nuggets that I'll forward in the near future.

Welcome

For a few weeks, I've been thinking about ways of better connecting the CSUMB animation community. The growth in animation, game design and related fields is astounding and I come across interesting items, tidbits and major news almost daily. Last week, I finally decided it was time to do a blog to post news, clips, messages and opinions about animation (and its relatives) in a place where people and students I know can share.

In this blog, I'll try to keep up-to-date with news and events that might be of interest to those of you in the CSUMB community and the region.

Please forgive the goofy name of the blog. It's the best I could come up with. I tried to be cleverer, but it just wouldn't come. My best stuff seems to come out impromptu.