The Dream of Ink: UNHIDE Conference

‘The Dream of Ink’ is a beautiful animated short, put together by the amazing Lightfarm Studios for the opening of the UNHIDE Conference, the first event focused on Digital Art in Brazil. Directed and Produced by Rafael Vallaperde, the short is the journey of a little girl made of ink through a phantasmagorical inky world.

I love the art style of this piece, and the way the use of colour, the character design, and the beautiful fluid simulations all support the aesthetic and the story being told.

Also, check out the video below for a short behind-the-scenes look at what went into making this film.

UNHIDE Conference took place in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, 2nd-4th November 2018. It was hosted by the UNHIDE school of digital art.

2001: A Picasso Odyssey

Artist Bhautik Joshi has been running footage through Deep Dream, Google's trippy image making software, transforming the film into a vivid cubist spectacle. The images are generated using Deep Dream's deep learning algorithms, which can analyse image data and apply the style of one image to that of another. It is the technique that is at the heart of Google's image recognition tools, and their project to teach computers to analyse images and distinguish their content. But it also offers artists unique opportunities to create fascinating projects that fuse art and technology in surprising ways and generate compelling imagery that would be difficult to make using conventional means.

The footage that Joshi has chosen, from Stanely Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a perfect choice for this kind of treatment. 2001 is a film with a very clean visual design and bold, striking, and very recognizable images. Looking at Joshi's clip, you immediately know what the source material is. But the film is the story, at least in part, of humankind's relationship with technology, and to see it presented this way - at the cutting edge of where technology meets artistic expression - adds another layer of complexity to the subject material.

Joshi has also created a somewhat creepy video by feeding footage of Donald Trump's face into Deep Dream and fusing it with images of food, bullets and even teeth. Its a little disturbing, but it by showing the before and after footage the clip below helps to explain how the Deep Dream technology works.

Joshi isn't the only person using Deep Dream to making fascinating images. A number of artists have been feeding strange combinations of pictures into the software and generating some weird and compelling imagery. But he is the first person that I have seen creating images with such strong visual cohesion, and also the first I have seen to create video.

I'm fascinated by this, both the technology and its creative potential. I look forward to seeing what will come from it.

Method Design - AICP Sponsor Reel 2016

This VFX dance spectacular from Method Design must have been a dream job for the Houdini effects artists. Method was hired by production company RSA to produce this years AICP sponsor reel. Using motion-capture driven animation and dynamic simulations, the short playfully represents the AICP sponsors as dancing avatars.

I love this video. It's visually engaging and has a huge amount of energy, and the simulations are really creative. I'd love to have worked on this project. Congratulations to everyone that did.

Star Wars Sky Movies Promo

In order to get you ready for Star Wars Episode VII, Sky Movies is screening all six Star Wars movies, which you can watch back-to-back. To promote this, MPC Advertising have produced a stunning 30 second promo, which takes viewers on a whistle-stop tour through a the complete saga. With a combination of footage from the movies, and animated stills, the promo is a series of vignettes which represent each of the Star Wars Episodes, each of which is rich in detail. But for me it is the transitions between these moments which are the most compelling, and make the promo hold up for repeat viewings.

Directed by Steven Hoare, with Lee Parker as Creative Director and VFX from MPC, this promo is well worth a watch

The Force is with us this December with the return of #SkyMoviesStarWars, including all six movies and more. https://t.co/9Ctgs5ylDG

— Sky Movies (@skymovies) November 25, 2015

Scanning the President in 3D

“This isn’t an artistic likeness of the president ... This is actually millions upon millions of measurements that create a 3D likeness that we can now 3D print — and make something that’s never been done before.”

— Adam Metallo - http://www.siggraph.org/discover/news/president-obama-lands-first-3d-presidential-portrait

This President Abraham Lincoln plaster cast from April 1860 was the inspiration for the digital face scan

This news passed me by when it came out in December 2014, but its a remarkable testament to how far the development of digital humans has come. Barack Obama became the first US President to have his likeness digitally scanned and 3D-printed. Inspired by the plaster casts of President Lincoln, Adam Metallo and Vincent Rossi conceived of the project to digitally represent Obama, which was lead by Günter Waibel, Director of the Smithsonian 3D Digitization Program Office.

The process used a mobile version of Paul Debevec's Lightstage technology, which uses an array of 50 lights and 8 DSLRs to capture 80 photographs in a range of lighting in under 1 second. This quickly capture vast detail and lighting information from a subject's face. Lightstage has been used to create digital faces for a number of Hollywood films including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar, and Debevec and his team won a Scientific and Engineering Award (a scientific Oscar) for the Lightstage.

The Lightstage data was augmented with data from hand-held digital scanners, which were able to fill in the missing data from the back of the President's head. The entire process of digital capture took just 7 minutes, which is even more impressive when you consider that it took 15 minutes for the plaster to dry on Lincon's face. Of course, the real work started once they left the White House. The different data sets needed to be combined into a unified space and then optimized into a 15 million polygon model ready for 3D printing.

The files were then transferred to 3D Systems, who used a process called Selective Laser Sintering to print a highly detailed 1:1 scale bust of President Obama over 42 hours. The bust is now on display in the Smithsonian museum in Washington.

Further Reading

Smithsonian Institution Digitization Program Office press release    
Siggraph Article on the scan

Paul Debevec explains how the Lighstage works:

Making of Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider, sequel to the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, was announced at the E3 Expo last year, to some confusion and no small amount of controversy, as an Xbox One exclusive, at least initially. But I'm much more interested in the PC release, expected some time in 2016, for which I'm hoping that developers Crystal Dynamics will up the already beautiful looking graphics. In this video from E3 2015, Art Director Brenoch Adams and Lead Character Artist Kam Yu discuss how they brought Lara Croft to the screen, and frankly the results are stunning. This is one of the best real-time human characters that I have ever seen, and the level of detail they have delivered in striking. I particularly appreciate that the scars Lara acquired in the previous game have been carried over to the new model.
Of course, all we have seen so far are promos and tech demos. The real test will be how well does that asset hold up in actual game play. But things are looking good so far, and I have high hopes for what we will see come the Xbox release in December.

LEGO Jurassic World - “A Jarring Encounter"

In honor of the release of Jurassic World or, more specifically, the Jurassic World Lego sets, Lego has put out this cute stop motion animation A Jarring Encounter. Directed by Kris Theorin of Something's Awry, this short captures everything that is charming and iconic about Lego stop motion animations - quirky, slapstick comedy with unexpected punchlines in a recognizably Lego environment. This is what Lego animation should be.

In contrast Lego has also put out Jurassic Pals, a fully CG animation featuring Lego characters in a photo real environment, by CC Pixels. The short is well animated, and beautifully lit and rendered, and I take no issue with it technically. But if The Lego Movie taught us anything, its that the charm of Lego CG animation is that it obeys the rules of Lego physics. Lego is made of solid plastic which doesn't bend, it just rotates at the joints. It is also distinctively adorned with lots of small plastic studs, which allows for the interlocking of pieces and into which the character's feet snap. These facts about Lego are clearly visible in A Jarring Encounter, and The Lego Movie captured them so perfectly that people questioned if it was really CG. Without these elements, the Lego design of the characters is purely an aesthetic choice, and almost incidental to overall film.

So, in conclusion, the rule-breaking nature of the CG animation ends up falling a little flat, but the stop motion A Jarring Encounter is funny and charming, everything a Lego animation should be.