It’s too bad there isn’t a cleaner version available anywhere: I assume this is due to aspirational concerns. I noted that their Monster Samurai short is apparently “in production” as a series, which I believe means they hope someone will buy it. It seems to the be the old and hopefully-dying model of animation development: show only tiny slices of something you’ve already made, in hopes that someone will want to buy the rights.
This is the first sixth of an animated feature made from 1961-64 by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. It’s adapted from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, and depicts the rascally Monkey King in his battle against the Heavenly Army.
Sakakibara was co-director of the awful Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. “Monster Samurai” is no Citizen Cane, but the designs are cute, and I like the swoosh effects.
Continued monotonous congratulations to director Pen Ward, co-directors Larry Leichleiter, Hugo Morales, and Frederator Studios in general on their smash hit “Adventure Time,” proof to everyone everywhere that people like things that aren’t lame.
I will withhold congratulations from Nickelodeon, who assisted in the short’s production, until they successfully refrain from scuppering it somehow like they did with Ren and Stimpy and Invader Zim. Until then: take that, network TV, the internets, and all other forces of evil!
SF-based Encyclopedia Pictura just released their long-awaited 3D video for Björk’s single “Wanderlust.” The 3D version will be released April 14, viewable with standard blue and red lenses, but for now the first two D’s will have to do.
[Update: They took down the full-length from YouTube for no apparent reason, now all we get is this 30-second preview… but you can still see the full-length High-res Quicktime. Dorks.]
Only the water and some set pieces are 3D; the rest is carefully-composited footage of real live objects, sculpted and built out of actual matter, and filmed in front of good old-fashioned screens of green. This making-of video shows a lot of sculpting and other hard-core stagecraft.
There’s also an awesome interview at studiodaily explaining all kinds of juicy technical details, including the methods used to shoot the video in 3D.
This article summarizes the use of edge loops in mid-res polygonal facial modeling and related anatomical theory.
Waiting for Jell-O
Faces are weird objects. Mechanically, a face is a nylon sock full of pressurized Jell-O mugging a hydraulic cash register wrapped in sentient rubber bands. It stretches and puckers, slobbers and sloshes, and rattles all around, especially in flap-n-snaps.
Modeling such a thing in 3D so that it looks natural when it’s moving is tricky. There’s a technique known as an edge loop which is useful in this situation, but to use it successfully you must understand the theory behind it.
When modeling for animation, potential motion must be taken into account. Certain shapes allow for certain motions, and other shapes will fight attempts to be animated. In general, edges or boundaries between shapes act as hinges, allowing bending, and extra detail allows expansion without distortion, like the corrugations in a bendy straw.
If available memory and processor power were infinite, an infinite amount of edges and detail would allow for any motion, limited only by the rig — however, here in reality we must find a balance between the amount of detail in the model (aka its weight) and functionality.
This just in from the Troubleshooting Desk: 3ds Max 8 and 9 do not play well with Microsoft’s Direct3D 8 or 9 drivers as served by this author’s Nvidia GeForce card in XP, at least with ForceWare Release 169.21. Both versions of Max, while using Direct3D, exhibit periodic viewport refreshes that overwrite any other UI elements including windows, menus, and dialog boxes.
Switching from the Direct3D driver to OpenGL in Customize > Preferences > Viewport has solved my problems. Your mileage may vary.
Awesome stop-motion/live-action remake of the best scene in the best movie ever. The sound alone still gets my blood up, on par with the TIE fighter noise.
There are a number of charts and graphs online showing relative populations of cities, metropolitan areas, urban agglomerations, and what have you — but those are vague, empty numbers that leave no impression of a city’s soul.
A bird’s-eye view of a city center gives me more useful information. In the myriad buildings and streets, I see pressures of geography and history coming to bear, thrusting buildings up from the very bedrock like towering, quivering stalagmites of willpower, money, and insatiable greed.
So I took a few screenshots and dropped them here: “City Comparisons.” See if your city’s in the roster — compare and contrast!
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, pop. 1.0m:
Houston, Texas, USA, pop. 2.1m:
In a satisfying validation of my Internet heavyweight status, YouTube finally took the hints I’ve been dropping and started the slow, insidious process of upgrading their image quality.
According to this Motionographer post, YouTube has begun offering higher-quality versions of some of their videos, available either via a link underneath the video or via an alternate link, which is the original URL plus “&fmt=18″.
There’s also a Firefox plugin available which will select this option by default when viewing videos.
And an observation, compliments of blissbat: “It’s a whole movie about R2-D2.”
Funny she should say that: according to the Wikipedia entry, the sound designer is — bingo! — Ben Burtt, sound designer for Star Wars, which makes him essentially the voice of R2-D2. And to top it off here’s a quote from director Andrew Stanton: “I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie.”
The lighting and rendering is quite spectacularly realistic. Again, straight from the wiki article:
After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt they “had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said ‘Hey, let’s do that with air.’ Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anamorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.’” […] A cinematographer who worked on live action films was hired to advise Pixar on replicating science fiction films from the 1960s and 1970s, including elements such as 70 mm frames, barrel distortion and lens flare.
I think I need to go take a cold shower after that last sentence.
