I was thinking about bioluminescent jellyfish as I played around with Artmatic.
The previous post explains about what you see here. Although unlike the last Artmatic structure I used, this one uses a similar tree structure. The modification adds a new effect.
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Lost in Tokyo City. This could be an interesting experience if you really don’t know what’s going on. It’s an uncomfortable experience being lost in a huge city. Everywhere you look you either see something different… or you see something repetitive.
I have uploaded the complete gallery online for viewing.
And the method? It’s really just tedious work over a span of several weeks.
Update: Seems like PetaPixel featured my works here. And I totally forgot to mention within the description: these are synthetic photographs made by tediously piecing elements from 1 photograph into multiple images. The other thing that you may have not noticed is that these are seamlessly tillable, in other words if you take the images (without the vignetting) the image will perfectly tile each other. The whole idea was that I would go and print these in mass loads without borders and would stick them up on a huge wall across space. This never happened, but I plan to find a way to do this sometime in the future.
These images, while they’re presented as photographic work, it also later became great texture resources for my film, “The Door to Tomorrow.” I mean, they’re just so useful on their own 
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In the last “Havoc post” I’ve shown you the assets of a particular scene in the film I promised that I would post how it would look. Well it took a while, but I did it and finished this scene off, now it just needs to be added into the film. I used Cinema4D for its super-easy-to-use clone tool and ultra fast render. Of course I can do this in Maya, I just didn’t for all sorts of reasons. Either way, The houses were modeled and UV mapped in Maya, painted using Photoshop and FilterForge. The fun stuff was in Cinema4D. By throwing the models into a Cloner Object, I can easily scatter the assets in various arrays and otherwise. I then applied a Mograph random which allows me to scatter the objects all over the place. I have control over the size and rotation as well giving me further randomness.
Rendering this is actually the cool part. Cinema 4D’s render engine is super robust. When I say robust, I really mean speed. I baked all the GI first per frame. This is mostly done automatically, though I enabled a couple settings to help the speed up the render. Further more, I optimized this render by baking some of the lights. It’s easy as Maya’s light baking, though at the same time there are several more interesting options that give Cinema4D’s light baking an further edge.
Either way here’s a sample of the render. You can click on it to see the large image.
The animation took around 3 hours to render, kinda long, but it’s with GI. I don’t think it’s not that bad. Anyway, I wonder if I should spoil the ending for this post as it is something I want to leave it quiet till the end of the animation. OR you can totally spoil it for your self by viewing it here:
The other thing I wanted to show was the compositions (layering) in After Effects. You can click on the image below to see the structure for yourself.
I also added a very quick and simple (and realistic) eye blinking within After Effects. It’s missing the eyelashes right now, and I have no idea when I can actually accomplish this within time. The hard part is the animation. We need to get that done first.
Havoc in Comps
That’s it for now. It’s almost there, it just needs to be done now.
So if you’ve been wondering “where is the animatic??” the answer is: I did it! And totally kept the render to myself for the whole time. Yes it’s the same thing only with the old doctor talking weird stuff. Come to think of it, I did go back and knock out several parts just over matters like “they don’t sound good” and otherwise.
Either way, allow me to introduce you to another concept: tools. Because “HAVOC” is being created at the speed of a rabbit racing away from a big, hungry wolf, I had to create some tools to aid me in quick creations of assets. Some tools are already available, like Adobe Illustrator which was very useful for making this:
The doctor’s castle is basically like a tree. Awesome. I used several new (and frankly, the best) features of Illustrator CS5 to assemble this work in about an hour or two. By the way, all the assets I’ll be showing you here will be used in the last shot. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but I don’t think it really matters.
Other tools were used to aid in creating backgrounds and simple assets such as windows. For this, I created a “generator” in a program I use often called FilterForge 2. Very useful for rapid content generation.
The Window Generator
These “windows” will be pasted onto a UV map for a bunch of houses and buildings I created over the week ends. I’ll be showing you those in the next blog post I guess. I don’t think any of them are ready for viewing yet. These windows will be seen from a distance, so I did minimum texture work on it, and went straight to just making sure it was reasonable and easy to use. Now because I am doing this procedurally, I can change parameters I set up around easily to create various windows instantly.
Example generation 1
The basic idea is to avoid doing repetitive tasks that can hinder work times and flows. But not only that, because the project’s scale is huge compared to the time I have, it’s just one way to save time and costs.
Here’s the source of the window generator.
I also wanted to save a bit more time making backgrounds for this one scene. So I patched together a background generator that will get me stylized vector backgrounds instantly.
3500x4000 pixel background generated with FilterForge
I have various parameters that I can easily edit to generate different moons, stars, and otherwise.
Yup. FilterForge saves the day.
Here’s basically the source for how FilterForge was patched to create the elements in the skies.
The generator for the Background
And of course, because it’s all procedrual I can quickly change parameters and make new backgrounds if I felt that the previous background wasn’t fitting the scene. Fun stuff!!
So those are some of the tools I made using FilterForge to create some elements of the film. Next blog post I’ll show you what it looks like when it finally all comes together.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this picture:
HAVOC SPIDER
Well! That’s pretty much it for now. I’ll update with more things next time!!
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Some FilterForge generator I created for the fun of it. Some 20 pictures rendered with AO.
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Here are 100 seamlessly tillable patterns I just created in FilterForge for the fun of it. Each of them are hand picked and designed by me although most of them are just randomly generated through the Pattern Generator 1.1. You can see the filter here: (http://filterforge.com/filters/8529.html) They’ll be resources available to the public via this blog and probably through my deviantART page as well. They will be licensed under creative commons! These are low-resolution previews the actual ones are 1k and saved in png. Just give me some time and I’ll have it available for free.
Stuff I'm making right now??
Some quickie concept using Studio Artist 4. That program makes things look cool. Anyway this is basically a photograph I took of a district I found in Japan. I manipulated the photograph a bit, and just roughly threw it together. Studio Artist 4 + Photoshop = amazing fun. I don’t know what this will be useful for, but maybe I’ll use it in the future for a project.
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Made some Quartz Composer based audio visualizer. Absolutely lovely plugins by 1024d (http://1024d.wordpress.com/) and kineme (http://kineme.net/). I used Kineme GL tools and 3D perlin noise from 1024d. Fun to use, useful, and very well designed.
Here’s another post. Circular recursion! I uploaded a version that’s 1920X1080. They kinda fit and don’t fit as a wallpaper. Sorry.
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Long time no post. Here’s a small project I began working on and kinda finished off a couple days ago. This is a fractal based on some distortions. All images by Skybase 2010.
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