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2010 yearly archive

8-bit Ada Animations

Sunday, December 26, 2010
animation
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I had the chance to play the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World video game at a friend’s house just recently and it got me thinking about pixel art. I’ve been playing a lot of animation lately and I thought it might be fun to make a short character cycle like the ready poses of the characters in the game.

First I needed a character to represent me. Ada volunteered. It took a few tries to get a good pixel version of her, but the third time was the charm:

Next was the animation. I spent some time looking at clips of the game to see what the other characters do while they’re ostensibly sitting still. Most do a simple 4 frame breathing cycle, but several are a bit more involved: moving fists, rocking back and forth, bouncing their hair, etc.

I decided to just make a run at things and see what I could come up with. Here’s my first pencil test. Key frames are blue, breakdowns are orange:

This cycle was a little too active. I also thought it might be nice to have 2 cycles, one general movement, and then one that I can throw in every few base cycles to break things up. Here’s pencil test number two:

This one turned out great. Here’s the finished version with color. This one runs 3 cycles of a fight stance, and then one cycle of Ada fixing her glasses. The animation runs 6 frames a second.

Press Start!

Quick Clouds

Saturday, December 11, 2010
sketches
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Cedar Creek Parkway

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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About a month ago the art gallery next door to where I work put up a solo exhibit by a local artist named Rich Bowman. Rich paints gloriously colorful cloud-filled landscapes in oil, you can see pictures of them on his website. Everyday as I walked in to work I was thinking “wow those paintings look great, I should really go in there and get a closer look”. Well last Friday (I know, a month later) I noticed they were taking the show down to make room for the next and so I rushed in and waylayed the poor gallery owner in the middle of her lunch to beg her to let me look through the canvases that were still up.  It was worth it, they are spectacular in person.

Anyway, after that I was in the local bookstore and happened to be flipping through an art instruction book about landscape paintings and there was one of Rich’s pieces as an example by the author. The other work in the book was pretty great too, so I broke down and bought myself a little early holiday gift . The book is Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice by Mitchell Albala.

I’m still only a few chapters in but so far the book’s been instructive. Ever since my oil painting class ended I’ve been thinking about doing some plein air painting but it’s a little cold outside here in Kansas at the moment. Instead I’ve been taking snapshots with my camera as reference for later, and reading through the book got me all ginned up to try something (plus I just wanted to say “ginned up”).

After all the fun I had with the gouache earlier in the week I thought I might give that a try again. It’s pretty small, 10 1/4 in. x 7 in., small seems to work a lot better with gouache.

This is the four way stop at the entrance to my neighborhood. I took the photo while waiting at the stop sign (I was stopped so it’s OK). All the trees here are bare save the evergreens, and the grass is dormant. At mid day it can look a bit bleak but around 4 in the afternoon when the sun is low it’s kind of picturesque.

White Coat and Goggles

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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I don’t know what this gentleman is up to, but I want in.

I’ve been playing with the oil paints for a few weeks and started in on this fellow from a fun old black and white reference photo I had lying around, but things just weren’t going well. For a change of pace I got out my watercolors and gouache. What a difference!

I decided to approach the gouache the way I’ve been doing the oils to see what would translate. I painted a quick underpainting in thin watercolors (you can see the remains of it at his feet) and then went back in with the opaque gouache over top.

This went really well, I can’t wait to try it again.

I painted a painterly cloud in painter (with paint)

Friday, December 10, 2010
painting
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A quick sketch to play around with the digital oil paint system in Painter. My laptop is a bit underpowered for Painter so I had to keep it small.

It kind of looks like a sky whale!

Cotton Wool Maquette Sculpture

Wednesday, December 1, 2010
concept art, craft
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Back at the end of September I read an interesting blog post by Dragan Bibin about his maquette making technique. Rather than clay Bibin uses cotton wool soaked in acrylic gesso to make a sort of cotton-mache sculpture. You can see examples of his models and the resulting illustrations in his original post.

I’ve been dying to try this ever since. I decided to give it a try with my little snooty slug, one of the orphan characters from this week’s photoshop painting experiment (bottom row, third from the left) . Here’s how things went:

Bibin says that he starts with a aluminum wire armature. I generally use steal wire for my armatures because it tends to be much cheaper. I’ve got a few spools of it in my maquette kit at different strengths. This base is made from 16 gauge wire, about the thickness of a wire coat hanger. This stuff is pretty stiff so it makes a good base but I generally have to bend it with pliers.

Just like a clay maquette Bibin uses foil to bulk up the model before any real material is added, so I did the same. I do the same thing for my clay maquettes. I’ve also wrapped things in a bit of 24 gauge wire to hold the foil and base armature together.

Alright, here’s where things start to diverge from what I usually do with clay. Bibin explains that the cotton and gesso need something other than metal to adhere to, so he wraps his armature in masking tape. I used drafting tape, same difference.

So I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard the term “cotton wool” before I came across Bibin’s post. From what I can tell it’s just the British name for what cotton balls and loose medical cotton dressings are made of, which I kind of like because I don’t seem to have a good word for it other than “cotton”. The important thing I think is that you’re using cotton that hasn’t been woven or spun into anything yet.

To begin the sculpture I painted a bit of gesso I’d watered down to about white-glue consistency onto the armature, then painted a bit onto a strip of the cotton, then stuck one on the other, and then painted more gesso on until everything was soaked. Then repeat.

Incidentally, if you’re following along at home might I make 3 suggestions. First, disposable gloves make this much easier and more fun. Second, have a jar of water handy to put your brush down in. If you let the gesso dry in the bristles of the brush its ruined. Third, spread a sheet of foil down on your work surface. This will keep gesso off your “clean” art table, and it won’t stick to the model while it’s drying.  After about 30 min here’s what I had:

At first the process was a bit slow. Looking back I should have added quite a bit more foil to bulk things up before I started. Having a thick layer of the cotton wasn’t a big problem, but it took a while to build it up.

After the first layer I left the model out to dry over night. The next morning the surface was generally dry but I could still feel some moisture from the inside from all that building up. It’s probably trapped in there forever now but I’m not worried. Up until this point I’d only been adding layers to the surface but now it was time to start adding features. I started with my slug’s posh lower lip.

The features that don’t have some sort of structure under them are a bit fragile when things are still wet, just like clay would be, but once things dry the model seems very durable. After adding the lip I took a break to let things dry but I really think I could have continued working just fine as long as I was careful.

On the next round I added a chin fold under the lip, and then in one last round I added eye lids and protuberances.

Bibin says in his blog post that once dry you can sand the surface. I gave this a try with a small rasp. The sanding is good for removing some of the larger bumps and uneven areas on the surface but unless you’re working with some sort of power tool I wouldn’t expect to use sanding to make a lot of detail. I did quite a bit of sanding on the model in the image just above but I doubt you can really tell the difference in the surface compared to the image before. You’re better of smoothing things out with your fingers and extra gesso while the model is still wet.

My model is still drying but once it has I’m planning to add a bit of paint to finish things off.

Compared to modeling in clay this method does not offer nearly as much chance for detail, but because you can do it with gesso and cotton balls I think it’s probably a bit more economical. I don’t really think things went any faster than they might have with clay, but if I were building a large roughed in model for reference photos or the like I would certainly choose this over the clay, and I wouldn’t feel bad about tossing it afterwords. Both this technique and clay are about equal when it comes to mess and cleanup.

Drawing My Studio

Tuesday, November 30, 2010
concept art, illustration
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Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you lived, say, a few hundred years ago? I think it’s kind of romantic to imagine myself living in a victorian manor house or as a medieval artisan but the longer I dwell on it the more I realize that, 200 years ago I would probably be considered blind.

Now, today, in 2010, I’m not blind. I have big thick glasses. Without them anything more than an inch or two from the tip of my nose is a blurry blob, but when I have them on I can see just fine. I pass my driver’s test, I catch things people toss to me, I do carom off furniture but that’s just because I’m clumsy. Vision wise I’m just fine.

The one caveat is that, to correct for my astigmatism, my lenses have a pronounced cylinder rating. This means that when I look directly on at a straight line like the corner of a room or the edge of a table it looks as it should, but as I turn my head and look at the line askance it begins to curve away from me as if the wall bowed outward.

When I first get an updated prescription the difference can be pronounced and things can look a little strange. For example with my glasses on it looks to me like I’m at least 4 inches further from the ground than without. But, after an hour or so my brain adjusted and everything looks ok again. After that I don’t notice the effect unless I consciously look for it. It’s not that I get used to things being curved but that my brain tells itself that the curved things are straight, which is pretty amazing.

I often wonder how this distortion effects the way I draw what I see. I don’t seem to have any trouble drawing things in perspective and as far as I can tell the straight lines I draw are actually straight. Still, it’s hard to say what the effect might be

It also makes me wonder what other optical effects my brain is screening out of what I think is the real world.

Consider this:

The lens in your eye focuses light on the back of the inside of your eye in an area called the fovea where the majority of your optical receptor cells are. However stuck in amongst those receptors in your optic nerve, which has no receptors on it. This causes a blind spot in your vision, an area where you see nothing. Everyone has this spot, but you don’t perceive it because your brain edits it out.

Or this:

When you fix your vision on something your eyes don’t stay still. Instead they’re continually making tiny jerking movements called saccades. This is because your brain will begin to ignore signals coming from your optical receptors that don’t change. If your eyes didn’t move then you would swiftly find yourself unable to see what you’re looking at.

Makes you wonder what you’re really seeing, doesn’t it?

Well this all brings me to what I’ve been drawing. I’ve been working on some backgrounds and interiors for my animation project and since it’s been a little while since I last did some real perspective work I was feeling a bit rusty. To sharpen things up a bit I parked myself on the floor in my studio on Sunday night and took a stab at drawing the room.

I have to admit I goofed off a bit, but after about 2 hours here’s what I came up with:

I’m pretty happy with it.

Part of that goofing off I mentioned was listening to things on my phone. When I was all done it occurred to me that the phone has a camera too and that got me wondering how my drawing and reality compare.

To draw the section of the room I did, I had to turn my head a bit. To cover the same area with the camera I had to take a few shots and stitch them together in the computer. Here’s what I ended up with:

I should say a few things about this image to begin with. First, it’s awful. The light in my room at night is not very good. Sorry. Second, in camera terms your field of view is determined by the focal length of the lens. For a 35mm camera normal human vision is in the neighborhood of 50mm. Lenses around 35mm or below would be considered wide angle (think fish eye) and higher around 100mm would be telephoto. My phone’s camera is equivalent to a 30mm lens. This means that there’s a degree of spherical distortion in the image. This is intensified by the fact that this image is stitched together from 6 pictures moving across the room.

So here’s the moment of truth. I’ve superimposed my sketch over the photo (deep breath):

It’s interesting to see what I got right and what I didn’t.

  • The general perspective lines (angles of the walls and ceiling) are pretty darn good.
  • I started the drawing in the back corner where the two walls meet, and based measurements of features near that location. As you move away from that center you can see that the differences increase.
  • Most of the things I measured carefully were rendered pretty well (windows, desk, back table with radio, computer monitors). Things I drew free hand did not fair so well (notice how big the lamp is compared to it’s photo).
  • Some things (the stuff pinned to the wall for example) I drew without regard to reality, so they can be ignored.

Keep in mind that there are three distorting factors here:

  • The distortion of the camera.
  • The fact that the drawing is in 2 point perspective, but reality (camera reality anyway) is in spherical perspective. This causes a lot of distortion towards the far right edge for example.
  • General “mistakes” in my drawing.

I put “mistakes” in quotes because I still think the drawing is pretty successful as a drawing. I also think it’s interesting to consider how my subconscious may be responsible for exaggerating the size of some objects like my lamp and radio while others nearby were basically the right size. I do interact with the radio and lamp a lot, and if I were doing an imagined drawing and wanted to emphasize certain elements in a room I might exaggerate their size. More food for thought.

To round things out I colored the drawing. I always wanted a green room. Here’s the final piece:

Unity3D Ladders

Monday, November 29, 2010
programming
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In case you haven’t yet had the pleasure, Unity3D is a modern 3D game engine akin to the Unreal engine or the Quake engine, designed as a platform to create 3D games for web, console, phone, and gas pump for all I know. We’ve been using Unity to design some of the games we make at work and so I’ve been learning the ins and outs of the API.

Unity is a fantastic engine with lots of built in features, but one thing that somehow hasn’t made it into the engine just yet is a system for ladders. You know ladders right? Those tall steppy things that get you up there from down here. Everyone loves ladders!

Well we needed some ladders for a project but good implementations seem to be few and far between, so I decided to make one myself and write up how to use it. Here’s a little excerpt from the docs:

In the game these ladders function as follows:

  • When the player comes into proximity of the ladder they will latch on. Once latched forward motion of the player is converted into vertical motion along the ladder.
  • At the extreme bottom or top of the ladder the player can move away from the ladder using the normal controls, or along the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, the player can only move side to side or up and down the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, if the player looks down below a threshold value, then forward movement will climb down instead of up the ladder.
  • While on the ladder, the player can press the jump key to jump off of the ladder.
  • When the player exits the ladder at the top or bottom they will perform a very small hop.
  • Ladders can be at any angle, however under normal settings the player can walk over objects at inclines under 45º, so in these cases a ladder may not be necessary.
  • Ladders can be any size and shape from wide ladders to narrow vines.

And here’s a little sample of what the setup looks like:

I put together a sample project from one of the tutorial projects that shows how to use the scripts. The scripts are written in JavaScript. For the documentation look in the Assets/Ladders Documentation folder. You can download it from from dropbox here:

Unity Ladder Example Project (zip file, ~ 85.2 mb).

note: since I wrote this script Unity has been updated to version 3. I haven’t tested the scripts on Unity3 just yet, but I think they should work just fine.

Painting Test Creatures

Saturday, November 27, 2010
concept art, painting
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I drew these characters for a project at work that ended up going in a different direction. The originals were simply sketches and they were begging to be colored so I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment a bit more with photoshop painting.

Each of the character I painted using a different approach. I still haven’t found a technique I really like, but I did realize that I have way too many photoshop brushes I never use, and probably never will again.

Kitty Rotoscoping

Thursday, November 25, 2010
animation
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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the States, and today my Thanksgiving started, as all good Thanksgivings do, with Robert Krulwich, science corespondent for NPR news and cohost with Jad Abumrad of one of the best podcasts on the planet called Radiolab. Well on this particular Thanksgiving morning Robert was talking on the NPR morning program about walking in a straight line, which for all sorts of fascinating scientific type reasons turns out to be impossible.

Now I’m not here to rehash Robert’s story, in fact I suggest you use your clicky thing to go over to NPR and listen to it. But, while you’re there, you’ll see an accompanying animation put together for the story. What the heck, here it is right here:

This animation was put together by Benjamin Arthur from rotoscoped video of actors. It looks SPLENDID. I love the way he uses hash marks to interpret motion blur.

So I thought to myself, my phone takes videos, I have a cat, what am I doing sitting here listening to NPR for?  After a few tries here’s what I made:

The first part is the original video of my cat. I started out just tracing around the video but I quickly found out that doesn’t work. There needs to be a continuity between the lines in each frame otherwise things jump around and jitter and thats very distracting.

After a few tries I scrapped the tracing and blocked out my kitty’s masses so I could see where things were moving. That’s the middle section in the video.

After that, I took another stab at rotoscoping. It took a number of passes to get all the parts to look cohesive, and the lines are still pretty jumpy, but at least they are consistent. In short, I had a blast. And, what a great way to study anatomical structures.

Lots of Little Colored Things

Thursday, November 25, 2010
painting
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So I was waiting for a meeting the other day, and to pass the time I started doodling some little creatures. Four hours later my meeting never happened, but look what did!

Fainting Couch

Wednesday, November 24, 2010
painting
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This is a quick digital painting test. I’m still trying to find a good way to blend colors in Photoshop painting. I painted the couch with solid colors and then tried adding washes of complementary colors to create the shadowed areas. I chose the blue and yellow because they have similar values.

I like the hues I got. The values are too soapy and midrange for shadows. Keep trying!

Foxes

Wednesday, November 24, 2010
painting
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If you’ve been following along lately you probably already know that I’m in the midst of building up my painting skills. I’ve been posting a lot lately about the oil paintings I’ve been doing in class, but I thought today I’d post something digital I’ve been playing around with.

Just as with my oil painting work I’m trying to get comfortable working directly in paint rather than doing a drawing and then coloring it in. Technically this means blocking in the composition with a large brush into large areas of color and then breaking those down into details, but it’s not an easy adjustment to make. Practice, practice.

The fun part (or the really daunting part depending on how you look at it) are all of the settings and brushes and textures and whatnot to choose from. I think it’s going to take a while to find a combination (or a few combinations) I like. If you saw my post last week about library studies for my Grunion project then you saw what a difference just working with different brush opacity settings can make.

I had a really vague idea of a fox winding it’s way through some trees so I sat down and just started. Here’s what I got on my first try:

Like I said, big blocks of color followed by transparent washes for detail. There’s some stuff I like in the bottom third of this one. The composition is a real problem however, and that stems from not starting from a sketch.

Next try! Start with a cursory sketch, just to sort of hold things together. Here’s how that went:

Ok, so here’s the sketch. You can’t see them here but there are a bunch of trees that the fox’s tail is wrapping around (I accidentally painted on the tree sketch layer so I don’t have the linework anymore, oops ^_^).

Here it is with some paint. Same approach here: start with opaque blocks of color and then shape them down with increasingly transparent brushwork.

So what have I learned?

  • Sketching? I still think there’s value in learning to sketch in paint, without lines. But that doesn’t mean not doing a sketch at all. I need to find a happy medium. Compositions don’t compose themselves.
  • Pixel color is not paint color, but pixels make mud too (just faster). I don’t think mixing pixel colors on canvas with transparent washes is the best approach.
  • The color picker is good for vibrant colors and greys but finding earth tones is a challenge.
  • What to do about color? Maybe sampling colors from an existing source would be a better approach.

Painting Class: Three Week Painting

Saturday, November 13, 2010
painting
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The past three weeks in class we’ve been working on a single painting. The subject was another still life of fruits and bottles, but because this would be a longer term project I decided to make something a little more abstract. For reference, here’s a picture of what the still life looked like:

Here’s what I had after the first day:

The first time around I was basically just playing. I tried to keep the objects cool and the background and sheets warm, but other than that there wasn’t much of a game plan.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the painting from week 2. I spent that week moving things around quite a bit and trying to introduce some values to give the painting more depth.

Here’s the painting now after week 3:

I basically had the composition worked out from the previous week, so the only things I dealt with in this last round were color and value. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Giving the paint a chance to dry so you can come back and make changes makes a big difference.

The Grunion: Library Studies

Saturday, November 13, 2010
The Grunion
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I’ve been working on location designs for a new animation project. The story (most of it) is set in a victorian library with large windows providing a sort of 19th Century version of film noir lighting.

In the interest of practice I started with some tonal studies on the computer. I painted each of these a little bit differently to try different approaches.

This first one I painted using transparent washes followed by linework. It came out looking a bit like an ink wash:

This next one I painted with the brushes set to completely opaque. I have to say this is my least favorite way to work. BTW, this is the library at the Skywalker Ranch.

This version (the original came from a furniture ad with good lighting) I used transparent washes but no linework, and started out painting large blocks of tone rather than from a sketch, and kept the brushes at a constant size.

This last version (it’s the library from Hurst Castle in California) I tried the mixing brushes in photoshop. They give the whole thing a sort of finger painted look.

With some reference under my belt I went back to pencil and started making things up. The sketch at the very bottom is going to be the final design.

greetings!

My name is Matthew. I'm a concept artist and illustrator and this is my blog. You can find out more about my work at my portfolio.

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