microraptor

Doh
When you have so many projects on the go at the same time, you tend to drop the ball on something. I found out at the end of last week that in the rush of all last week’s projects I’d done just that.

When I got the job doing the animations for the ethical investment fund, I produced three alternative design ideas and emailed them all to the client.

She responded telling me which one she wanted and I got going on doing all the modelling and animation and rendering out all the animations needed to produce the final set of videos.

So far so good. When the first animation finished rendering, I was very pleased with it and happily sent it off to the client.

It turns out I’d misunderstood her – she actually wanted to go with the other option….

However, now I’ve done the first one, it looks great, so she’s now not sure whether to go with what I’ve done or get me to start again.

I don’t mind – it’s just that the version I did was much more time consuming than the other option, and I could have done with the time last week!


Anyway…

Monday I managed to polish off another of my monthly newsletters and get at least some way through my latest illustration commission for Nature.

Nothing is real
It’s all go, though and Tuesday was spent at a posh hotel hearing about the new version of 3ds Max courtesey of Autodesk…

Every year, they like to do a press event and it’s always a good opportunity to meet up with some of the other 3d freelance journalists (most of whom are journalist/animators/designers/all kinds of stuff). It’s also a good opportunity to hear from people who use 3d at the cutting edge of effects, animation and games… just to see what’s possible.

This year it included people designing green buildings by measuring the amount of sunlight light that would fall on an office worker’s desk before the building was built to stop them pulling down their blinds and turning on the lights.

There was also an interesting talk from a guy who works for a company servicing Ford motors….

Apparently when you see an advert or read a brochure for a new car, it’s highly unlikely that the photos you’re looking at are actually photos.

Most of the advertising for cars is created before the car is actually built. It costs them 2.5 million to build a prototype for photographing and even then, getting it to a location to photograph it means risking breaching its security – and in the paranoid automotive industry, leaking a car’s bodyshape before its launch is very bad indeed.

So instead, they build a 3d model and create the photos entirely digitally… the guy presented us with 2 pictures – one a real photo and one a CG model…. We couldn’t tell which was which.

I’m guessing this kind of replacement for photography is a lot more common than we think… and it’s probably on the increase.


Today
Today, I’ve been back on my new documentaries – or at least a very small part of them.

I’m designing a microraptor – one of the most bizarre dinosaurs ever to have lived.

The creature has wings on both it’s back and front legs and nobody is quite sure whether it’s a dinosaur or a bird. It clearly is designed to take to the air, though quite how it would have flown and how successfully remains a mystery.

Having roughed out a basic 3d shape and refined it in z-brush, I’m coming to the conclusion that this was a beautiful animal – such an elegant shape. That said, designing it is taking ages - This has to be one of the most challenging 3d models I’ve ever made. The combination of feathers, scales, and colours I’m trying to use means an awful lot of messing around.

I’ve created the basic shape as a solid object, which I’ve painted in z-brush (using some custom made feather brushes I converted from photoshop brushes I found on the net). I’ve then had to make the wing-tips semi-transparent with the shape of feathers – and I’ve had to do that by creating a separate transparency texture in Photoshop. In addition to that, I want the feathers to stand out – so I’ve had to create a bump map as well.

That’s the flight feathers, but there are also downy feathers on the body – and I’m experimenting with doing them as hair. The trouble with that is that hair is increadibly demanding and takes an awfully long time to create on a complex model (like the models produced in z-brush).

Even rendering the hair takes ages and I’ve had to create yet another matte to define which bits of the body need hair and which don’t.

All in all, it’s very time consuming.

However, since lots of dinosaurs apparently have feathers, getting them right is essential to my next documentaries… if I can’t get them to work, I’m going to find the programmes very difficult to make.

New Max
One of the problems is that I’m working on an old version of 3ds max – version 8… primarily because the new version which handles hair a lot better costs about £2500.

And having seen it in action yesterday it’s also got a lot of other features that would be particularly useful to me – the ability to easily animate quadrupeds is definitely one – as is the option of rendering just parts of a shot very quickly to see how they’re going to look…

So what to do?

Well, stand by, because I have a plan….