Motion tracking with Maya Live. Who needs to buy toys when you can just make virtual ones!
I took some video footage of Silas on his Jolly Jumper and added in geometry and a bunch of nparticle balls for him to play with. There are a load of tracking mistakes that I could have fixed if I had used a few more tracking points but I was lazy and wanted to explore around with other things. The hard part was keying in his feet so they could kick the balls. I had to do that part by hand. This took forever to render, which is one of the reasons I was trying to set up the PS3 maya mental ray satellite earlier in the week. That did work out so I just had to let the ‘ol mac crunch away for a day or two. I wanted my mac back for other things so I didn’t bother rendering reflections. It was a fun side project. I like it and might try to do a few more things like this. I want to do something with a matte painting next. Where should we send Silas? hmmm… the possibilities are endless.
Maya Mental Ray fun. This morning I was playing around with fur for the first time and I thought it would be interesting to see it against something wet looking so I read up on shaders and build the water shader and attached it to an Ncloth spear. At first I struggled to get this to work with a final gathering pass but I had too much flicker even after adjusting my min and max radius’. In the end I faked the same look and got the render time down to a minute a frame from four. I faked all of the glows with animated lights.
Here is a fun little sequence I found in my sketchbook from a few weeks back. I’m in the process of trying to scan everything so there should be a lot of new art up in the next few days.
Digging though some old files I stumbled across a document explaining my character design ideas for the Space Chimp Aliens.
A Space Chimps Guide to alien Life
At first observation biological classification on the Planet wazoo appears chaotic, irrational and non-sequidor in nature, on closer inspection though one will find a clear distinct set of rules and laws at play. Life on the planet Wazoo can be categorized into three major kingdoms: Vegetables, Fruits, and Nuts. The macro view is that all life on the planet wazoohas evolved from plants.
VEGETABLES
The world
General overview: low on the evolutionary ladder, characters of the Vegetable kingdom tend to be background/environmental elements that generally interact out of reflex and instinct. Vegetables can be distinct individual structures but often tend to clump or organize into larger symbiotic communities. Vegetables, though possessing the capacity for mobility have not evolved any sort of conscious behavior and therefore if left to themselves will generally be content to do nothing. Instinctually lazy they will always choose the path of least resistance.
Design: relatively simple and primitive, very organic, curves, branching structures, etc.
Locomotion: vegetables are limited to simple, non-efficient, rudimentary form of locomonition, for example; crawling, pulling, pushing, sliding, blobbing, pooling. For survival reasons they generally tend to flock together in large migratory herds.
Color: their lazy nature, lack of individual identity and conservative ideals has led the vegetables to lean towards pastels and more muted colors.
Diet: The rich mineral makeup of the planet wazoo
Vocalization: none
Senses: mainly touch, occasionally ocular and smell. In general vegetables have only a single sensory organ.
Cognitive Skills: Vegetables are only able to do simple functions. Though incapable of complex actions their symbiotic relationships with each other is often capable of achieving complex results.
FRUITS
The good guys
General overview: These are distinct characters with an ability to reason, the range of their mental abilities is relative to the phylum and class to which they belong. There are four main Phylum omnipedal, aerfuga(flying), quadrapedal and bipedal. Bipedal being the most intelligent and omnipedal the least. Fruits have distinct and complex communal organization traits. They tend to share strong bonds with their collective environments and tend to suppress selfish ideals. Curious and docile by nature, the fruits tend to be open, creative, sensitive and forgiving. Unfortunatly for the fruits the higher their mental skills the greater their sense of self doubt, hence the general trend of communal rather than individual identity. Fruits tend to look before the leap. Actually they are often so involved with looking and thinking about the various possibilities, variations, reasons for and against leaping that they never get around to leaping at all.
Design: Fruits are made from a gelatinous clear medium and range from the simple to the almost simple, omnipedal being the simplest, followed by aerfuga , quadripedals and then bipedal. Organic smooth, rounded shapes keep the fruits relatively easy on the eye. Smooth and shiny.
Locomotion: Their strong cognitive skills have allowed the fruits to evolve the ability to manipulate their gelatinous structures into many distinct forms of locomotion.
Colors: happy bright colors
Diet: Herbivores
Vocalization: relative to mental capacities
Senses: all
Cognitive Skills: Generally bright, generally put others before themselves
Common descriptors: elegant, bright, fragile, tidy, friendly, radiant, rhythmic
NUTS
The bad guys
General overview: These are distinct characters with a strong inclination towards action and impatient repetitive activity. Millions of years of thoughtless activity have led the Nuts to evolve into asymmetric, bulky, inefficient, clumsy, awkward, poorly balanced creatures who live in the now. A lack of foresight, hindsight and common sense, compounded with a generally good work ethic has led them to being the dominant species on the planet Wazoo. It is difficult to categorize the nuts into distinct Phylum for their erratic rather infunctional evolutionary track is absurd and therefore indefinable. The fate of their species is ruled by the survival of the luckiest. They tend to leap before they look. In the words of their most famous leader, we are gathered hear today…hey look a cloud!
Design: The most complex on the planet but least thought out. Impractical, non-symmetric, tacky, gaudy and awkward, with a flare for flamboyant wastefulness.
Locomotion: Currently the trend has been bipedal motion even though it is awkward for many who have more or less appendages.
Colors: Tacky, bright, intense clashing
Diet: Omnivores, know to eat rocks, sharp sticks, poisoned fruit punch and discarded gum on occasion.
Vocalization: Talk a lot, very opinionated and expresses. Enjoy complimenting each other and themselves.
Senses: all but common sense
Cognitive Skills: Slow, forgetful attracted to shinny things. It has been theorized that they have a very strong collective subconscious
Common Descriptors: Funny, Funny looking, comic, strange, odd, lost, theatric, over the top, #*%&!, awkward, off-beat
After getting bumped from story and character design there wasn’t much for me to do around the office. Still I tried to be productive and help the art department out as much as I could, but it was very uncomfortable. I was no longer welcomed in the Space Chimps universe. For the next month I mainly just waited around for my contract to end. Here are a few of the loose ends
Hong Kong Alley way
Out in the west
For a shot with the pope
just insert a chimp bull rider
planet landscape idea
Hams father was a famous space chimp in the early space days
After a few months in the story department I was pulled aside by the Directors of Space Chimps and told that they were impressed with my designs and I was asked if I would like to take them a few steps further. They offered me the character designer job which I excitedly excepted. I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to collaborate with our production designer, Dean Taylor! The man did Nightmare Before Christmas for petes sake!
From the beginning one of the big goals we set for ourselves was to create an alien world which was rich and diverse. The last thing we wanted to have was three or four creatures repeating though out the movie. I decided wasn’t just going to design creatures that were mentioned in the script. I was going to draw all the ambient ones as well. So to create a logic to the world I started from the ground up and created a Kingdom, Phylum, Class structure. I built rules and limitations and then built off of those. One of the big ideas was not to design specific creatures but to design elements and then mr. potatohead them together to build thousands of characters. (note: I was really impressed a few months ago when I saw theSpore creature creator which was essentially the same sort of thing I was thinking of.)
Once some of these basic elements were in place, everything just poured out.Everyone was really happy with the work and in no time I had a long list of approved characters. But the party wouldn’t last long.
Barry Sonnerfeld took over as creative producer and everything at the studio was turned on its head. In a character design meeting that I wasn’t invited to Berry cut everything Dean and I were working on. After everything was cut, I was told my “aliens were too appealing” and that “they upstaged the main charcters.”
Here they are in all their overly appealing glory. let me know what you think.
Here are some panels I drew showing the chimps arrival and departure from the planet Zeta.
ARRIVAL: This “was” my favorite scene in the whole movie. The wormhole was going to be mix of Pink elephants and some of my favorite abstract animators: Jordon Belson, Oscar Fischinger, Len Lye and Norm Mclaren. It was going to be a wonderful departure from the normal screensaver look for these things. Alas… it never came to be. ( p.s. sorry didn’t have time to write up the text on this one.)
DEPARTURE: Once again the script didn’t explain how the chimps actually got into space so we the board team had to make it up. We invented a volcano to parallel Hams circus cannon act and reverse engineered it into the rest of the story.
After 1700 kms of driving Virginia and I have made it down to LA and are now lost in a forest of cardboard boxes. The big move is finally over and we are trying to settle into our new apartment on the West Side.
After ditching the Uhaul truck we rushed over to Sigraph for all of the usual chaos. We were too burned out to really dig into the new tech but we had the fortune of being able to run into a lot of old friends and sit down for a few interviews. It was especially nice to pass by the Animation Labs booth and have a moment to talk with some of our Jerusalem friends. Looks like The Wild Bunch is moving along and gearing up for animation. Best of luck to the Lab!
