WIP Tuesday, September 2nd 2014

I said I was going to do it, so here I go.  Due to some unfortunate weather conditions, I was unable to take photographs outdoors, so I took some indoor ones.  I kind of got stuck in a Starbucks, so I decided to use my time there to work on things.  Here are 4 photographs I took (of many), one of which I might start working on turning into a 3D image.  I will try to take some more tomorrow, but after that, I will have to pick one of these (at a time) and dive in to the 3D.  I hope to have some stuff blocked in for tomorrow, maybe more.
Any comments on which (if any) you like?

But I decided not to leave it there and just take some photos, I also wanted to work on brushing up my drawing skills.  I need to keep working on it, and I am hoping to find a modeling session somewhere locally I can go to weekly.  If anyone knows of one, I would be eternally grateful.  So right now the image isn't finished.  I am getting used to my new Wacom iPad pressure sensitive pen, as well as the way Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for iPad works.  So a lot of this was learning and experimenting, but I would like to keep working on this.  I hope to keep doing these daily as well to improve my drawing and visual story telling and lighting.  Still haven't finished the actual line art.  I want to work on the girl more, a lot more, add more detail, and fix a few things.  I only have base color and roughed in shadows, so I have a long way to go yet.

If anyone knows of a tutorial or suggestions for techniques for using Sketchbook Pro, I am all ears.  I'm just starting to learn this stuff, so I hope I can pick it up and start making these faster and better as I go.

So that's if for WIP 1.  Stay tuned for tomorrow!

Returned from SIGGRAPH 2014

In order to keep everyone up-to-date, SIGGRAPH 2014 was a BLAST!  Vancouver is an amazing and beautiful city, and I must say dealing with Canadian airline security and customs was easier than dealing with USA security and customs.  (Also Canadian money is so pretty and colorful.)

Behold my fellow SVs!

While I was at SIGGRAPH, I helped out a lot with Studio, which is where cutting-edge applicable technology is showed off.  This is stuff like 3D printers, auto-stereoscopic (3D without glasses) displays, and various other technologies.  They had some really cool stuff this year, including a printer than could essentially print a relief on a 3D object.  Imagine printing a texture, like a snake skin or pattern, on the back of your phone cover, with a full color image.  That was the station I worked at, where the Roland printers could print on just about anything.  I ended up staying with them for several days helping them print on phone covers and more, and I even managed to get my own business card holder printed on with a texture.  It looks (and feels) great!

Definitely a technology I can see hitting it big in the near future.

When I wasn't helping out at SIGGRAPH, I managed to do a little site-seeing, and I've got to say Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities around.  I loved the view with the shore line, the water with the planes and cruise ships, the ocean liners in the distance, the beach and city beyond that, and the cloud-covered mountains in the back.  Not to mention the local sights, like the Steam Clock and Chinatown.  It was a blast.

Steam clock in the middle of Steamtown.

The one draw back to the week was an old foot injury started to act up, so if anyone saw a Student Volunteer walking around with a crutch, that was me.  Luckily it cleared up and I was able to walk, crutch-free, for the last 2 days.  I even managed to go on a studio crawl where I got to check out the actual studios for Sony Imageworks, Motion Picture Company (MPC), United Front Games, and East Side Games.  It was a great experience, and I got to talk to a lot of talented people.  I just wish it could have gone on longer.

Inside the convention center, the world was waiting.

Because of my injury, I didn't have the time to post more on this site, and I also noticed some of the posts I did make accidentally were posted on a different blog I run.  So I will re-post those, and apologize that I wasn't able to keep up with more posts during the week.

Every day was like this!

Luckily for me, the powers that be at SIGGRAPH have been working on ways people like me who have graduated and no longer able to be student volunteers will be able to continue to volunteer in the future.  I have to look into this and see what how it works, and I'll post anything I find out, but it is one of those things that only a select few will even be eligible for.  We'll see how it turns out.  Next year in L.A.!

Sweet Dream roomie...

I was also fortunate enough to be able to have several portfolio reviews with amazingly talented people from Dreamworks, Disney, and Blue Sky.  These guys were great, and I got some top-notch feedback for my portfolio.  I want to thank Josh Staub, Eldar Cholich, and Frankie Liu again for all the work they did to help us volunteers, and all of those who dedicated time, money, and talent (and anything else).

And on that note, I am currently working on a new series of projects.  These are going to be photographs (and possibly paintings) brought to life in 3D.  I am going to try to create everything from scratch, with a focus on the texturing and lighting.  I really want to push myself and learn some new stuff, and if I can, I hope to add some camera animation and possibly some particles and/or fluids for fun.  I will be starting this tomorrow, and I will be attempting to keep a DAILY BLOG on here (at least 4 times a week if not more) posting all my Work in Progress (WIP).  I will be starting this ASAP, and I want to push myself to see how fast and how detailed I can make these things.  I will really need to build an audience here as well to force myself to keep up with the work, as a way to help me with motivation.  I am eager to get started, and can't wait!  In the meantime, I have also been working on a new short film, called "H2O No!", but production is still early and slow, so I need these shorter faster projects to help me out now while we get the ball rolling on H2O No!.  I will also be posting work on my portfolio site, HixonArt, as well as other sites like CGSociety.

So stay tuned and tell your friends!  Let's get dangerous!

Image Based Lighting and more

So last time I showed some photographs I took studying light, specifically time of day outdoor light changes.  I have been working on a short animation that involves an outdoor shot of a market as the sun sets.  Right now it is suffering from rendering errors that our renderfarm occasionally puts in, so my next step is to fix all those.  I also have a slight displacement problem, but the other big factors include the light colors and positions of the street lights.  I have a lot of work to do to make this scene work, but once it is finished, it will look really nice.

Time of Day lighting test 4 from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that isn't all I've worked on.  I have also been taking this to another level and creating a scene that uses actual photographs and actual light information from the environment and integrated by own CG element into the scene.  In other words, like action plate CG integration.  I went out and took a series of images at SCAD Atlanta's DMC, where I captured "background plates" and environment maps.  These environment maps are made as HDRI so they hold more information than a regular image, and are then manipulated in a program called HDR Shop to fit into my CG scene.  I can then use this to capture the light information in the scene to capture the ambient light, and then tweak it from there.  I also had to render in passes, so I could isolate everything from the shadows to the reflection of the chairs to the ambient occlusion.  I finally used Nuke to composite it back together, and voila!  Movie magic!

 
Image Based Lighting with CG Character Integration from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that's not all!  I've been a REALLY busy bee.  I can't show anything currently from my last 2 projects I've been working on (not to mention math), but you can check out my other blog to see updates to my senior film, Last Light, at LastLightFilm.blogspot.com.  Besides working on my film, I have been lighting and rendering and compositing Michelle's film, Leaping Place.  It continues to be a challenge, but this entire thing must be done in one week, so it's crunch time!  I'll update more on that later!

A Study of Daylight

So our next lighting project is to make a time of day study and recreate it digitally.  Now we are not actually trying to mimic the exact lighting in the scene, that is we aren't re-creating the study digitally, we are supposed to do more with it.  We have to make an outdoor scene with a transition of light from across the day.  I'd love to do the entire day if I have the time, but that is a big 'if'.
The first step, of course, is to make the study.  Unfortunately, at the time that I was able to make this study, the weather did not cooperate with me, and clouds moved in to make the sunset completely overcast.  While this is a great study of ambient light, it isn't showing the sunset colors like I had hoped for.  However, I plan to take another study of the light at sunset when the weather clears (and I have the time.)
For now, here is my study, showing noon (winter time), dusk (overcast), "golden hour" (overcast), and dawn (twice).  I plan to add more to this soon, we'll see how it goes.
(These are photographs, not digital renders.)

Noon (Winter time)

Dusk (Overcast) 

Golden Hour (Overcast)

Dawn

Dawn (closeup)

Book Covers

My next final this quarter is from my photography fundamentals II class, which focused on the digital side of photography, that being Lightroom and Photoshop CC.  Thankfully at our school, we get he entire CC suit for free as students.  Unfortunately, as soon as we graduate, it expires.  So while I have it, I'll use it.

Many of you may already know I am very familiar with Photoshop already.  I used to work at National Geographic doing image editing, everything from retouching to restoration and archiving.  I even managed to do some heavy compositing work for outside customers.  I also worked freelance for several years doing everything from cataloging to wedding albums and more.  So when I started taking a class on the fundamentals of Photoshop, I was skeptical I'd actually learn anything.  Well, I'm sure my fellow students got more out of it than I did, but I did actually learn some techniques and workflows that are very useful.

The hardest thing about this class for me was having to actually take my own photographs for everything.  Usually I'm handed a photograph, which already looks awesome because a professional took it, and I just have to make it look awesomer.  However, now I had to work with my own pictures, and discovered how hard it is to make something look good when it wasn't taken properly in the first place.  Several of these photographs turned out to be a little less than perfect, but that is why I am at school, to get better.  And once again I've learned a thing or two about taking pictures especially with the intent to take them into Photoshop to manipulate them later.

So for my final project, I had to pick 4 of the top New York Times Best Sellers and create new book covers for them.  I came up with 4 ideas, and 2 of them had to be redone (it's hard to go from a widescreen format way of thinking to a vertical book cover format).  The books I chose were Sycamore Row, Ender's Game (I do not support the ideologies or politics of the author), Identical, and The Racketeer.  These are not official, and only student work and I have no affiliation with the authors or the publishing houses or the New York Times.  I researched a little about each book to get an idea of what the story was about (I did not have the time to read the books themselves), and based my pictures off of that.

I will be posting more of my Photoshop work from earlier in this quarter soon.  So for now, Enjoy!

The Return of Photo Editing

So besides animation and visual effects, I've also been working on Photography, specifically Photoshop retouching.  Now I am very familiar with all the tools used in retouching in Photoshop, and I am familiar with many of the basic and advanced techniques used.  As such, I was worried I would be in a Photoshop class that would teach me nothing.  So far, while the class has been mostly review for me, I have learned a few of the more airbrushing techniques I haven't used before.  YAY, more to learn in Photoshop!

So right now, I have been learning portraiture retouching, working with multiple layers of edits and a variety of techniques that not only use a non-destructive workflow, but also provide flexibility to do edits I found tedious and difficult before.

So hopefully I will have 2 or 3 images to post soon.  I'll keep you all posted (I wanted to make sure everyone is alright with me posting them here before I do it).  And who knows, this could lead to some more freelance work or photography gigs.

Snow globes

Just in time for Christmas.... oh wait, isn't there another Holiday or 2 between now and then?  Ah who cares about those holidays, we all know the only holiday that counts is the one where people spend the most money.  At least that's what stores seem to think.  Honestly I love Halloween and Thanksgiving, but for my latest project in my Renderman class (VSFX 319), we had to model snow globes.  While one girl in class actually did do a Halloween themed snow globe, I couldn't help but equate snow globe with Christmas.  So I decided to model Santa's Workshop.

The assignment was specifically to learn IBL (Image Based Lighting), which is a way of taking a very specific image (HDRI) of an environment and putting it in a scene, allowing the computer to calculate the lighting of the scene based on the values in the image.  It's kind of like taking an environment and putting it into your scene.  Sounds magical, but it is really not going to look right.  Imagine taking motion capture data and just leaving the raw data on the character and displaying that in a movie... it doesn't look good, trust me.  Animators need to adjust and tweak and fix the raw data into something that looks good and suitable for the character.  Just like that, I have to take this IBL and tweak it, add lights, adjust values, etc. to make the lighting look realistic like the object belongs in the scene.

We also had to use a specific Global Illumination technique, and actually got to play with 2 methods of it.  One uses Point Clouds to calculate illumination and occlusion, while the other uses ray tracing.  The point cloud based method is faster, stores the data to speed up processing later on, and developed by Pixar, but prone to inaccuracies.  The raytracing method is longer, but more accurate.  I used a hybrid technique where I raytraced, and then stored the data to speed up the processing.  It took about an hour and a bit to render these, but it was surprising to see some students with render times ranging from 20 minutes to over 4 hours!

I haven't quite dialed in the lighting all the way yet, and I am still working on the camera focal length (so expect more updates on this one later), but for now, I am relatively pleased with the results of my work, but I'm not going to leave it there.  For now, though, enjoy these three images.  Ho ho ho.

Photography assignment 1

This week we went over our photography assignment in my fundamentals 2 class.  The class is really focusing on Photoshop, something I am incredibly familiar with already.  This first project actually didn't involve any Photoshop at all, but did go over Lightroom editing tools I wasn't familiar with, so I am glad to have learned them. 

My concept for this project was to explore the interplay of themes at the Davidson Arabia Natural Preserve, specifically the nature aspects versus the derelict man-made structures that still riddle the area.  For now, enjoy the images.

Photography Final

So today, I delivered a presentation for my Photography final.  In short, my assignment was to research an existing Photographer, and as I mentioned n a previous post, I decided to research Michael Eastman.  Specifically, I decided to try to capture the feel of 2 of his projects, Urban Luminosity and Vanishing America.  My project is called City and Country, and is meant to show a contrast between images of the city life and country environment.

For the City side of my project, I took pictures around Atlanta, including the beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel, and outside The Loft.  In all, I took about 160 images of this set, but for the final project, I had to choose 5.  I already posted several favorites that didn't make it into the final project, and I may add some more later.  These images were all designed to focus on the transmission and reflection of light, with a low ISO for high quality, and long exposures to catch as much detail as I could.

For the Country half, I went to Pendelton, South Carolina,  where I visited the historic areas and went off the beaten path to a few other areas, including an old train yard that was falling apart and covered in rust.  It was my favorite place to take pictures, but I started to run out of time as the sun was setting and the last few images got too rushed.  In the end, I took over 200 images from Pendelton, and chose 5 for my final, although I will post more later that really loved but didn't make it into the project.  These images mainly focused on the textures and wear/aging of the objects and locations.

I did do Photoshop editing to these images as well, to try to match the aesthetic Eastman uses, or something similar at least.  For his Urban Luminosity, he would saturate colors, clean up the dirt/debris (but not completely), and present a clean and vibrant image with patterns and colors boarding on the edge of abstract.  I cleaned up the majority of my City shots where I removed distracting dirt/debris, while enhancing colors.  For Eastman's Vanishing America images, he would often darken and enhance the sky, desaturating it while increasing the contrast and details.  Other than working with the sky, I would apply a slight desaturation (using an adjusted "Black and White" adjustment layer at low opacity) and bringing details back into the highlights of the image.  There is a huge advantage to working in 16bit with camera raw, which allows for HDR images and really pulling in the details lost in shadows and highlights.  While none of these are actually HDR in my final, I did bracket my images which will allow me to get HDR out of them, and I did work with HDR on a few that didn't get into the final.  I will be presenting more of these later.

Enjoy!

Photo Preview

Today I have for you a preview of my final project in my photography class.

The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it.  Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer.  After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman.  Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive!  He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba.  His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place.  You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.

Usually his images are of textures and play of light.  I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work.  I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta.  Here is a preview of some of these images.

I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.

In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study.  But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.

Enjoy!