Defense

I held my defense today. Here is the presentation I gave. I think it was received fairly well. Thank you to all who showed up.
 

DIGM 651 - Week 8 Update

Hours:

Website prep: 3 hrs
Presentation prep: 6 hrs

DIGM 651 - Week 7

I submitted this for the SIGGRAPH international poster competition:

Hours:

Website Preparation: 3 hrs
Siggraph Poster Competition: 3 hrs
Autodesk Contenst: 3 hrs

DIGM 651 - Week 6 Update

Hours

Paper Writing: 3 hrs
Website Preparation: 3 hrs
Submission Preparation: 3 hrs

Dry Run - May 5th

DIGM 651 - Week 5 Update

This week involved a mountain of loose ends, but I finally have something I can show. I expect to roll out the site for evaluation shortly. Here’s a link to the site. It’s not feature-complete, but it’s enough to start getting feedback:
http://www.danieljoelnewman.com/animating_ancient_ontogeny/


I also spent sometime writing up text for our IndieCade submission. We are planning on submitting last term's game, Stompster (The Apologetic Monster).


Hours:

Presentation Prep: 2 hrs
Submittable Animation Prep: 4 hrs
Stompster: 1 hrs
Resume & Portfolio Prep: 3

For Week 5

Link to Web portal

DIGM 651 - Week 4 Update

This week I sent in a submission for the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize. Of the four categories, I submitted to the National Geographic Digital Modeling and Animation Award. This is one of the awards that Evan Boucher has won in 2011. Interestingly, on the 'Past Winners' section of the site, there doesn't appear to have been any winners in this category since him.  A lot my footage wasn't quite ready, but since they requested only a 30 second clip, I was able to pull together the best shots. Also, I included an early preview of the background music in this clip.

I am also preparing for my talk at AMI 2014. I am scheduled for Friday July 25th.


Hours:

Thesis writing: 4 hrs
Literature Search & Reading: 3 hrs
Lanzendorf Prize Submission: 3 hrs

For Week 4

DIGM 651 - Research Day Review

Last Thursday was Drexel University's Research Day. It was a long day of standing and talking but it was enjoyable. 

Throughout the day we had judges come to our posters and ask us about our work. Sometimes, the would put a small green sticker on our station, sometimes a large blue sticker, sometimes they wouldn't leave any sticker. I never found what the stickers actually meant.

Overall, I received mostly positive responses from visitors. Someone from the academy seemed to enjoy the work I had done. I was able to field most questions. 

One piece of negative feedback I received involved the organization of content on my poster. 

Also, unexpectedly, I also won an award from the Westphal College for my poster. Thanks!

Hours:
Poster prep 3 hrs
Reading 1 hr
Submission preparation 3 hrs

For Week 3

I am in the final few week of production. Several shots are nearing completion. I think that everything foreseeable has been accounted for. It's just the unforeseeable obstacles left.

The shot up above is one of the final ones depicting unfortunate juveniles trapped in an ephemeral pool.

At some point I had accidentally put a color filter on the water. It became a little too "wine dark sea".


The shot up above was a well-planned experiment that went wrong. I had been trying to get the mud substrate to act a bit more responsively to the characters. To do this I had followed the 'ripple' workflow I had used for a previous shot. To achieve the more viscous properties of mud, in the 2D fluid parameters I set the Damp to 1.0. I rendered out every frame of the 2D fluid simulation and plugged it into the displacement map of the mud. It worked, but it not very well due to a variety of timing issues.

I have been researching compositing techniques using the software package Nuke. In the past I have used After Effects as my main compositing software. Nuke offers at more node-based workflow which might ease compositing complex effects (like chromatic aberration).

For Week 2

This week I spent time going through what I've done so far. I set up a google spread sheet with all the shots I plan on doing, their progress, bugs that need fixing, etc. Most of the animations have been carried out, they just need the refinement of a second pass. I have made a few attempts at rendering with Drexel's render farm. So far, I have been unsuccessful. 


  I have also set up a list of milestones for the following term. Some of the dates are concrete due dates, but other are milestones to shoot for. Ideally I would like to have a submittable animation by Week 4, in time for the Lanzendorf PaleoArt due date. I would like to have the Panel Evaluation sometime in Week 5. I would also like to schedule my defense for the week before memorial day weekend.  

April 10th - Research Day

April 21st (Week 4) - Have a submittable animation

April 22nd - Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize

April 30th (Week 5) - Panel Evaluation

May 15th - Siggraph International Student Poster Competition

May 21st (Week 8) - Defense

May 26th Memorial Day

June 15th - IEEE VIS 2014 Arts Program

July 24-26th AMI 2014
------------------------------------------------------

I also picked up this book from the library. It is an interesting collection of classic and contemporary paleoartists. There's a lot of interesting stories about their individual backgrounds and creative process. This might be a valuable source for my thesis.

Welcome Back

Hello everyone, I'd like to update you all on my progress over the past few weeks. I took last weekend off to see my folks in MA, but now I'm back to work. I spent a lot of time refining some of the environmental effects (ripples, god-ray, particles). Most of the following animations will require a second pass.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Growth Animation:
Responding to previous feedback, this was an attempt to both show the character's growth from different angles and to highlight specific changes (in the overhead shot, the orbit is highlighted with a texture). I still need to include a scale bar. 


Opening Animation:
This was an earlier attempt to work some god-rays into an environment.


Overwater Animation:
I spend time trying to get fake-water to fake-ripple believably. The solution was rather inelegant & round-about, but hey, I finally got some results.


Juvi_surface Animation:
(the particles will probably need to be rendered as a separate pass)


Flop Animation:
The unfortunate fate of the juveniles. (There's a weird thing going on with the ground texture: easy fix)


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Web Portal:
Parallel to developing this animation, I've been trying to come up with a way of presenting the final product. There is a lot of information that I'm trying to convey, and I run the risk of overwhelming the viewer. At the end of last term I found a Javascript framework, called Popcorn.js, for using an embedded web video to drive content on a webpage. With it I can sync up annotations, peripheral content, subtitles, and more to the video. In my latest build, I put toggle buttons so that the viewer can choose to hide that layer of content if he or she just wants to view the video.

Test site:http://www.danieljoelnewman.com/Popcorn/

The front page:

I can sync google maps to different parts of the video:

If the additional content is overwhelming, it can all be hidden:

 I can sync up manipulatable 3D models

 I can sync up text annotations (top):

Test site: http://www.danieljoelnewman.com/Popcorn/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Submissions:
I plan on submitting my project to a couple different venues. I just got word that I was accepted to give a talk at AMI 2014 (could have sworn I missed the submission deadline).

AMI 2014: 69th Annual Association of Medical Illustrators Meeting:
20 Minute talk
Rochester, MN
July 24-26

Lazendorf PaleoArt Prize:
Submit by April 22nd
Category: Digital Modeling and Animation

Siggraph International Student Poster Competition:
Deadline: May 15
Theme: “Naturally Digital”

CG Student Awards:
Category: VFX/Animation
Deadline: May 15

IEEE VIS 2014 Arts Program:
Submit by June 15th
Theme: “Art + Interpretation”

Fun with Popcorn.js

Annotation Test

Smithsonian X 3D - Fossil whales - A race against time

Week 9

Week 8

Week 7

Week 6

I've spent sometime creating a drying puddle scene (the final resting place of the juvenile Bothriolepis). It was an interesting challenge. Wet sand tends to be darker and also very glossy and then it fades off. To achieve that effect I projected a horizontal color ramp across the terrain, and then parented it to the waterline. As the waterline descends, the rim of wet sand seems to follow. It's still a work in progress. It would be great to get some cracking mud on the upper levels of the terrain.



More work on tweaking the overhead view. Starting to layer in some foam effects to make the water surface look more believable.



Here's a look at the current state of the rig. Rather than using only joints, I am incorporating a slightly different tool to achieve this deformation, something called a blendshape. It's a workflow I've used before. I had originally done it as a test, but I think it might save me some time in the end. I think it'll be more of a hybrid rig in the end (some things being controlled by joints and others by blendshapes). I am going to run it by Dave to see what he thinks.

Week 5

I have started working on my poster.

Rough Animatic


Render Tests:

Week 4

I spend time working on my animatic (will be posted shortly) and my character rig.

Here are some shots of my WIP Ontogenic character rig. Ontogenic joints are in red, normal character animation joins are in green. Most of these joints haven't been mirrored to the left side yet. I'm still in the process of naming and cleaning up the joint hierarchy. 

The tail has a sine-wave deformer to simulate the undulation of a tail. 

A bend deformer allows the tail to curve up and down. 

A second bend deformer allows the tail to curve laterally.

Here I am trying to make sense of the range of motion for Bothriolepis' pectoral appendage. Translating it into Maya will be a challenge. 

Here is a fossil of Bothriolepis from the Escuminac Formation in Canada. Dr. Daeschler brought these guys into our Vertebrate Paleontology class for the lecture on placoderms. 

Phyllolepis: Another weird placoderm from the Red Hill Site in Pennsylvania. 

Nice 3D model of Turrisaspis.

Week 3

Here is my current progress on the Bothriolepis model.



Here is test video of a particle effect I would like to incorporate into the animation. Getting Maya to render transparent sprites is proving to be a challenge.

This is a chart describing the sort of shader I will be setting up for my ontogenic character. Vray has a blend material that accepts several separate materials and overlaps them. I'll have two separate textures for the adult and juvenile form, which will fade into one another under the control of the growth slider.

I figured out the positional specular highlight shader. I placed a conditional node between the samplerInfo node and the Vray material. The samplerInfo node sends the Y position of each rendered pixel to the conditional node. If the Y position is greater than 0: the specular amount of the Vray material is set to 5. If the Y position is 0 or below: the specular amount is set to 0.

Here is render test. Notice the faked Caustic lighting on the sand. Also notice the environmental fog that causes objects in the distance to assume the color of the water.

Week 2

Here is my progress on the Bothriolepis base model

Here's a render test of (faked) caustic lighting

Here are some renders of an attempted position-dependent specular shader.

Winter 2014 - Week 1 - Review

This week I returned to work on my thesis project. There are several administrative-type things going on behind the scenes (drafting requests for my expert panel, formatting my manuscript (thank you stefan), searching through spreadsheets of measurements, brushing up on allometric formulas, etc.).

I have been brushing up on how scientists study and quantify morphological change with the help of the book On Size and Life (1983). The most useful technique for assessing change is with an allometric formula. One chooses two measurable parts of an organism (x, y). These two measurements are then plots against one another. The following formula is used:

 y = bx^a

The exponent a reveals the type of growth occurring. If a=1, then one is observing isometric growth, two measurements changing at the same rate. If a < 1, then one is observing negative allometric growth (slower growth) and a > 1 is positive allometric growth (faster growth). 

---

Related but unrelated to the thesis project, I have put together an animation demo reel. It highlights some of the characters I have animated over the last few years. 

---

I have spent sometime working in Maya and Vray to simulate an underwater environment. Adding an environmental fog helps a great deal. Getting the surface to look convincingly reflective is still a struggle.

I've begun to model my character. Bothriolepis is encased in series of armor plates. Here I've been trying to add enough topology to allow these normally immobile plates to deform during 'development'. 

Source:

MacMahon, Thomas A., and John Tyler Bonner. On size and life. Scientific American Books, 1983.