Reinvention

Telling a story is hard, all that build up leaves so much hanging on a climactic emotional pay off that may not evening be coming. That's the beauty of the pilot episode, while it still needs that cathartic moment of character development there is a greater focus on reeling the audience in to a world of intrigue and mystery. At least that's what tends to happen in the genre I have chosen. This isn't easy either though as the line between mystery and confusion is a fine celluloid thread, blurred further by audience interpretation.

These thoughts are some of the conclusions I have come to as a result of finishing the script of Specimen Paisley which you can read here, I sincerely welcome feedback providing it is constructive and gentle, I am after all a fragile artist, and much will be told through the way the animation is put together which can't all be described within the confines of a script. Or is that just an excuse for bad narrative? Enjoy

Specimen Paisley: Script

At one point after re-reading the script I found the ending so unfulfilling that I began pondering an alternative idea out of desperation, thankfully I had Loz reassuring me I was onto something that wasn't a complete waste of time, and so I began re-writes.

Also during the summer I have been perfecting little details in Noel's shaders, nothing noticeable but the eyes have a little more life to them now (complete with corneas and all), this is pretty much the final look I've settled on for old Noel.

You My, Brown Eyed...Old Man

Here I managed to get the illusive portal light mental ray shader to work with an area light acting as a window. This helps the light channel final gather rays from outside into an interior. This creates finer detail indirect lighting without having to cast a million billion rays outside the room itself.

Oh Sweet, Sweet Sub Surface Scattering.

Not only shaders have been experimented with, but also different methods of indirect lighting. This next one uses only global illumination from several area lights. The colours are much richer than final gathering but the overall image has a much darker look as light doesn't seem to be bounced into all the nooks and crannies quite so well.

Grease Paper Skin.

This is my magically coloured version of the Cornell Box. I added a blue ceiling to see how colour bounces from all sides. In this way I can test how the shaders react to different lighting conditions. One of the biggest impacts the colours have is how much weaker the bounced light is, bleeding colour- but creating a much dimmer scene than the bright white room from the first render.

Cornell Paisley.

G.I Vs F.G
Fight!

Here are two identical renders with the two techniques replacing each other so as to illustrate to different aesthetics they achieve. Ideally both would be used together to reap the benefits of each but this is costly in render time to the extreme when weighed against the meagre benefits of combining the two techniques.

Pixel Propaganda

A short making of for a (French?) animation worth keeping an eye on.

850 METERS, the making-of : #3 Design, Modeling and Texturing (VOST-FR) from THURISTAR on Vimeo.
Something to help justify my position that blogs, and internet academia in general, is contributing an enormous amount to intellectual debate: especially around videogames.

This animation is from some guys whose rigging blows minds and bends meshes with such extraordinary ease and sophistication that even this stunningly well done facial and character rigging doesn't quite do it justice. Humorous too.