Colours of Autumn

I imagine this is what Autumn looks like in the world of Mr Toots.

Scene Mockup – Pipeline Test

This is a relatively rough version of a final rendered frame. It has been modelled, textured, lit, rendered, comped and graded to a level that is comparable to what I expect to achieve for the final frames. It’s not normally that important to go through this process if you have a pretty good idea how it all needs to be rendered and what you need to do in the comp. Every project is different, and every project I seem to work on has some special dietary requirements that aren’t always obvious until you have tested the rendering pipeline from beginning to end. For the amount of lens effects I hope to use, if perhaps only to experiment with, require a 16bit z-depth and only by going through the full process was I aware of this. Therefore, I have had to implement this into my pipeline. I have tested using TIFF’s, RPF’s, ond OpenEXR’s and due to file size and flexibility I’ve chosen to add OpenEXR into the pipeline. It doesn’t really require any additional setup as, 3ds Max and After Effects now come with OpenEXR support but Photoshop does however require a plugin, which is available to buy from fnord along with some additional plugins for After Effects.

Anyway, this is the kind of look I was aiming for. The challenge was trying to achieve something close to the developed concept artwork I created just after the new year. This particular composition required a different overall colour but it’s definitely in the right direction. Oh, some objects are actually floating, that’s not a bad lighting solution and there’s another iteration of detail to go into the environment yet.

Blue is a darkness weakened by the light

Should your glance on mornings lovely

Lift to drink the heaven’s blue
Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view -
Give to Nature praise and honor.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of colour
Where its broad foundations lie.

— Goethe

Horstmann Environment Concept Art

Another concept image of Horstmann within his environment. This one is made up of twenty or so other images that have been sliced up, masked, transformed and merged into one image. I have also worked into the image with Photoshops painting tools. I think this image is lacking some detail around the periphery but overall it’s beginning to take shape. The coloured tendrils stand out really well despite the deep blue saturation within the shadows and darker areas.

Click for larger image.

To Rework Or Not To Rework

I’m having troubles with my mind of contradictions at the moment. I decided a while ago that I wouldn’t be using the piece of music that was the original inspiration for the idea, a piece of music by Philip Glass titled ‘Cue 2B( Piano)’. I came to this decision after storyboarding and timing it out as an animatic, everything felt very rushed and wouldn’t really make much sense if squeezed into a mere minute. Now though… I’ve created a new animatic and re-timed it to flow naturally, doubling its original length but it doesn’t feel quite right… It has lost something. It doesn’t really make much sense, and now I’m wondering if it ever did. I guess it was quite an ephemeral idea when I drafted it out a while back but now I feel closer to it and I don’t want it to just be a visual piece, or maybe I do? I want it to be a dance with light and a siege of colour… but is that what it was always going to be? Surely an idea extracted in raw form is very rich and telling even if it doesn’t necessarily make much sense. Sometimes when an idea seems to fight its way out it comes out all jagged and tail first… but is this the best way to present an idea, covered in soil and dripping with afterbirth? Or should an idea be cut and polished and set in silver bezel… Does reworking it purify it’s truth or deny it of it’s original honesty? I guess this idea spans many subjects, art, music, film etc… Kandinski Vs Chuck Close? Hmmm… So anyway, I’m not sure whether to rework the script into something little more meaningful or whether the meaning I feel is lacking is already captured within. I guess it’s one of those contradictions of ideas that will just kind of go one way or the other. I think I will. I’m not sure.

“We would that words
become shooting stars,
like gods,
that they would rise up from the dead page
into living forms of light and dark,
into fountains of colour.”

William Shakespeare

Particular Colour Sketch

I love Trapcode Particular… I decided a while ago that I wasn’t going to use it for the butterfly on  ‘A Siege of Colour’ as I felt the  butterfly element required more control within the 3d environment than Adobe After Effects, a primarily 2d package,  could offer. I did however continue testing Particular as it might be useful in post to embelish the butterfly element or compliment it in some way. After time the testing gradually became playing, as you begin to understand the controls more and more it becomes more like an artists tool and you can pretty much just throw particles around like paint. Well anyway, it’s a lot of fun.

This video is a reletively simple setup of particular but has got me quite excited about developing some more sketchbook videos using music to drive a procedural setup. I’ve got a lot of things in mind but it’s sometimes best just to see where the animation takes you so I’m trying to not really think about it too much. Anyway… As fun as it is playing with particles I feel like I’m straying from my main project a little so I should probably get back to the lamp.

The music is a short section from ‘Green Grass of Tunnel’ by Múm.

Coloured Brush Stroke Trails

This is the latest pre-vis for the butterfly trails. It’s a little dark but will make more sense within the context and will also be illuminated by the lamp. It’s made in 3ds Max using an overly complicated process of making splines from nulls attached to the wings of a butterfly, animating lofts along the splines an then duplicating the loft objects at specified points in the animation and removing the animation followed by animaing individual UVWs for each separate object as the butterfly passes through it.

I’ve removed the butterfly from this test and I quite like the idea that the butterfly transcended it’s physical form into pure colour. I don’t think it’s important to the story that the butterfly is seen as a butterfly, it’s probably more important that it is seen as an abstract form, more ethereal and less mortal.

A Flutter of Colour

Well I’ve finally managed to apply some colour to the butterfly. I’ve been prevising the colour trails from 3D through to post and am starting to get some exciting results. I really want the trails of the butterfly to look painterly yet ethereal and the only way I’ve been able to achieve this seems to be a painstakingly long method of modelling and keyframing rather than the numerous procedural techniques I’ve been developing. It actually feels much more like painting at the moment rather than CG.

Babbitt’s Light & Color

“LIGHT reveals the glories of the external world and yet is the most glorious of them all. It gives beauty, reveals beauty and is itself most beautiful.” Edwin D. Babbit

I’ve been captured by Edwin Babbit’s book entitled “The Principles of Light and Color”. I can’t stop reading it. It was written in 1878 and apparently not very well received by the medical community due to the suggestion that light and colour could have healing effects on the human body. I’m trying to remain aware that the work was written over a hundred years ago and that much scientific discovery has happened since then and it’s this very thought that keeps my mind dancing back and forth between new understanding and new ‘old’ understanding. The way it is written is very different to any scientific writings I have experienced before, he uses elegant adjectives to embellish theories and writes with passion about subjects usually documented with a more objective approach. I haven’t read like this since i was ten years old, reading Roald Dahl under the bed covers by the light of my Sega Game Gear.

In first chapter “Harmonic Laws of the Universe” he writes about unity and diversity and how the these combine to reveal harmony. He uses three images to illustrate his ideas:

Fig 34 and Fig 35 are described as equally distressing and a violation of the regular development of nature. The first (fig 34) immediately resembles the work of Jackson Pollock and the second (Fig 35) reminds me of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and even John Cages’s 4′33″. It’s fascinating to think in the century following this book, artists began using the principles Babbitt is discussing in their work to explore alternative directions in art beyond the aesthetic.

Anyway… It’s got me hooked and it’s got me thinking… about light and colour and Horstmann and the butterfly.

Take a peek for yourself:

Smokey Trails

The glowing tip of a gentlemans cigarette whispered a few ideas… “Why not?” he said… “Well maybe I will” I muttered with soft regard… And here are a few concept ideas for ‘La Smokey Trails’.

The above three images were produced using Photoshop. I’ve used a reference image off the web as a background image (blurred for a little depth). The butterfly is from a previous test render, which has been rotated and sheared for a better angle. The smoke has been produced with a mix of painting and smudging techniques and built up with additive layering.

The idea is that the butterfly and background remain the same so I can focus on residual form of the butterfly. These examples are variations of a smokey trail left by the butterfly as it waltzes through the air… Hmmm… I like them… I think I need to work on some that are less ethereal… More of a solid edge, maybe try out some liquid or ink like versions. All of these ideas are easy to produce in 2D but trying to animate these in 3D is going to be a little more complicated. If I go with the smokey trails I’ll probably be using FumeFX in 3ds Max, if the inky spill works well I might say hello to Realflow for some liquid lovliness… It’s been a while.