topo lines

Figured out a way to topo lines on geometry. here's  a sketch. inspired a little by the Kuitca show at the walker.

1968 Catalog

Now starting thinking about the next scene, peopling it with images from 1968 Sears catalog...

Chimera

Now thinking about reworking surfaces in 3d space. Here i just mixed up a layered texture for the figure - one channel skin, one channel electronic circuitry from a video camera repair schematic. More in this direction i'm sure.

Door

Having spent so long on the animation, I spend an evening just playing in the studio, looking for a way to break out of the way I've been treating images  a little.  Not quite right here but wanting to reinterpret perspective a bit.  My studio door, a little like those van gogh floorboards shortly before he whacked off an ear..

Hair method

Well, scratch that last post, I'm back on the hair method after a few attempts to work out the issues by rendering separate layers and compositing it all back together again. Spiral camera track and waterfog, make traditional compositing quite  hairy, pardon the pun. So the new strategy is to work with a different renderer, slower but with some compensation for paint effects in depth.  

Splitting a hair

After much hair pulling over artifacts showing up in the few strands of hair being used as seaweed, it hit me that this stuff is designed to be used en masse with other similar colored strands so it may cut corners on color rendition.  So i dumped the whole idea of using maya Hair products and just swapped out some paint effects brushes set up to resemble hair.  Still have to brush them in right but nevertheless moving on.

Oxymoronish

A wee distraction trying out toon shading in maya. This may come in handy on another project, but it makes me happy because i was trying to do this another way and it got very, very, very unpleasant.

 Basically it's a render of the outlines only, with a wiggle to the outline. It suggests a handdrawn animation, but with 3d drawing so it's kind of oxymoronish.
A movie sample is here.

Paint Effects Hair

After 'wrassling' , as my grandfather used to say, paint effects hair for a day, I've opted for the cheesy solution, render out separately and then composite the images back in at the required opacity. I tried to save some processing power by limiting the damn  hair to just a patch nearby but this becomes way obvious and I'll have to do it once again. Tomorrow.

Render Farmers Note

Gearing up for a good summer batch of render crops here. I'll be posting a few images from "The Hungering Deep" as they start to come in. Good rainy days needed. My old G5 is clunking along at a reliable if unimpressive pace. Brother Steve's speedy machine will take on some of the more challenging rendering.

Working on hair this morning. Resisting the temptation to get too far into the technical details of virtual hair. Now hair as seaweed.