“If I Only Had Wings, I’d Fly” – a new Retropolis Poster

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

These don’t happen too often – they’re fairly complex undertakings – but I’ve just added a new Retropolis poster to my Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design site.

This scene – a sort of car show of the Future That Never Was – showcases one of the rockets I modeled for my Empire State Patrol project. Here I changed its color and dropped it into a variation on the scene I built for my “Skin A Scion” contest entry at Deviant Art.

The poster (18 by 24 inches at 300 DPI) mixes some older and newer characters together, and its title – “If I Only Had Wings, I’d Fly” – marks the second time I’ve named a picture with a quote from Nat Gonella’s “It’s a Pair of Wings for Me”, which still swings after about 66 years. Love that song – and in fact, though I’ve never known how many people noticed, almost all my Retropolis pictures use titles or quotes from popular music of the twenties through the forties. If you figure out why, you can explain that to me.

The poster is available now. An archival print should be available in a few days.

“A Summoner” by Aasa Ooraikul

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

“A Summoner” is really just a brief scene, followed by clips that show off the modeling work that lies behind it. There’s a lovely storybook mood and style here and it feels quite painterly. It’s worlds away from the harder edged photorealistic work we generally expect from 3D rendering applications (here, Maya).

Warning: it loaded excruciatingly slowly for me. Go make some coffee or catch up on your email, have patience, and enjoy.

Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part Two

Filed under Computer Graphics

The second article in Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga is now online; if you missed it, I mentioned Part 1 earlier.

This installment lays out the important groundwork for what became the Amiga computer and – notably – its custom chipset, which used coprocessors to handle graphics and sound in ways that were several years ahead of its time. In fact, the Amiga included some features that have yet to be duplicated. We see the addition of R. J. Mical to the Amiga team (though not yet, by name, other engineeers like Dale Luck and Carl Sassenrath) and we see how a timely slump in game console sales revealed the engineers’ hidden agenda: to create something that could be a game machine, but which was also the foundation of an advanced personal computer with groundbreaking multimedia capabilities. For once, their agenda and that of their backers converged.

This is probably not as fascinating as the last installment – or, I expect, the next – but if you’re not familiar with the background of the machine you’ll learn a good deal here that will be important in the next chapter. What we see is how the team transmogrified their project, kept it under wraps, and did the fundamental work that they still needed to implement in hardware.

Steampunk Extravaganza: “A Gentleman’s Duel” from Blur Studio

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

Blur Studio continues its progress from an in-game animation house through short films and, ultimately, to features with “A Gentleman’s Duel” – an eight minute 3D animated short in which a Frenchman and an Englishman vie for the superbly endowed favors of a noblewoman and, one assumes, her equally well endowed estate. It’s built like a brick mansion.

Matters quickly get out of control as they begin a duel in their Steampunk robotic combat suits. Mayhem ensues.

This short also marks Blur’s transition to Softimage software – they’ve long been a 3DS Max house – and the film became a testbed for their work with that software. It’s not 100% Softimage, but they’ve obviously done a fine job integrating Softimage into their pipeline.

This is Blur Studio‘s fifth ambitious short film. They’ve already collected one Oscar nomination for their earlier works.

Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga, Part One

Filed under Computer Graphics

The Latin-literate technophiles at Ars Technica have posted the first installment in what looks to be a very complete history of the Amiga, which in 1985 was the most advanced graphics and sound computer on the market. The engineers who designed it and the software developers who supported it made the machine an ideal entry point into computer graphics for artists and animators.

Anything I’ve managed to do with computer graphics is owed to those days and to those developers.

From the very outset the article concentrates on that central conflict between creative people and businessmen which was eventually to kill both the Amiga and the company that had purchased it, only to run it into the ground. It makes good reading.

“Space Cadet” Scion XA

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Heres‘ my entry – possibly my first entry – in the “Skin a Scion” contest at Deviant Art.

True to form, I ended up skinning the world around the car, too. Win or lose, I think I’ll end up retooling the scene after the contest, with one of my own vehicles. Something you’d expect to see coming out of the Retropolis Rocket Works.

“Stilt Walkers” by Alexis van der Haeghe

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

“Stilt Walkers” is a beautiful, four minute student film by Alexis van der Haeghe of Belgium. It reminds me of those old days when I’d zoom across California in my art nouveau airship, investigating the clouds and having adventures. Except that I didn’t do that, of course. But watching this boy have his own adventures sure makes me wish I had, and I almost feel like I did.

Clad in an aviator’s helmet and plus-fours, the boy is clearly having the time of his life until he encounters a pair of comedia-del-arte style giants on towering stilts. Complications ensue, all in fine style. Highly recommended.

The artist has since done some work on a movie trailer and a CD, but seems to be working away, at the moment, on a children’s book. A personal project – glad to see that. I’m always interested in what we can do when we’re not bound by what someone else thinks they can profit from.

Tutorial: Making Displacement Mapped Terrain with World Machine and 3DS Max

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

This is a test rendering of a natural landscape which I rendered in 3DS Max 8. The terrain’s from a height map I generated with the free version of World Machine. This height map became a Displacement map in 3DS Max.

I’ve written up a tutorial on how I created the height map (in World Machine) and turned it into a textured 3D landscape using 3DS Max. You can read the whole review/tutorial here.

“Solar”, by Ian Wharton and Edward Shires

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

“Solar“, by Ian Wharton and Edward Shires, is a short animated film that shows us just how badly things may go wrong even in a universe that runs on sustainable, low technology mechanics. Well. That’s sort of what it shows us.

Fortunately even low tech cosmology has some built in safeguards.

The two artists behind the film recently graduated from the Cumbria Institute of the Arts, where their film took a best-of-show award. It’s got a lovely paynes’ grey and sepia palette for its steampunkish clockwork universe, and it’s easy to see why it won in competition.

Homeless, by Eduardo Suazo

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

“Homeless” is an interesting animated short film by Eduardo Suazo; if you’re used to brief, frenetically paced animations you’ll probably hate it, but it’s well worth your time.

It’s technically proficient but it does raise the question of why, if this were the film you wanted to make, you’d animate it rather than shooting it in live action. The few (though important) effects in the film could as easily be done in either case. I guess when it comes down to it, the answer is that if you’re an animator, you use the tools you have. Anyhow, those musings aside, an interesting piece.

Swept up from 3D Total.