A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
I still don’t have any idea who this is. I can’t help but speculate, though.
I mean, I’ve been wondering a lot about what sort of character he(?) might be even as I cursed myself for working on him/her/it for most of the week when I should have been doing something else. Still – whatever it is – it’s about done, so I should be able to tone down the cursing for awhile.
Fun fact: I added a morph target that I call “Frog Throat”, in which the critter’s throat blows up big like a bullfrog’s. Why? It’s the same old question. I think the answer must be “because”.
I’m sure he/she/it will turn out to be important (maybe even essential!) someday. In the meantime I’ll just keep wondering.
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
It’s with no small amount of pride that I can now reveal my second, and most successful, human hybrid experiment. I wish I knew exactly what it was; but, as you can see, it’s keeping an eye on us until I figure that out.
Over the past year or so I’ve learned some new tricks with my morph-targeted character heads, and the most interesting tricks are the ones I can play on characters that are already done. Some of this is due to Collapse to Morpher, a very useful 3DS Max script.
Morphs are terrific, but they rely on the source object and its morph targets sharing the exact same topology. That means they need to have the same number of vertices, and (importantly!) those vertices have to be numbered in the same order. If you’re not careful you can end up with two objects that used to share those properties but which now are subtly and fatally different. You just can’t morph them any more.
You can change an object after applying the morpher, and that works because the morphing action takes place before all those changes. But when you do that you end up with a new stack of modifiers on top of the morpher that can’t be collapsed. Every time you make a change to a scene with the modified object present, and in particular every time you change its morph states, all of the post-morph modifiers have to be recalculated in the scene. That slows things down. Slowing things down makes me cranky.
Collapse to Morpher does this crazy, complicated thing in which the entire stack of modifiers is applied to an extracted version of each morph target. Then the morph targets are added to a collapsed version of the original object and then suddenly, or possibly not entirely suddenly, you have a new streamlined version of the object with its new, equally streamlined morph targets, and things are quick again and I’m less cranky.
That’s how I’ve worked out ways to blend between two finished character heads, to optimize existing characters, to save time on operations like calculating vertex colors and UV mapping, and – now – to turn a human being into something entirely different.
I did something like this once before. But at that time I didn’t have a practical way to salvage the original morph targets for the character’s facial expressions.
So here’s a little picture of my unwitting experimental subject, Dr. Lillian Krajnik. I started by cloning her (as one does) and then edited her head into the head you see at the top of this post. Once the clone was completely mutated I used Collapse to Morpher to turn it into a new, streamlined character – with all its original expression morphs updated as well. My weird fishy, lizardy human hybrid frowns and smiles and sneers and look surprised, on command, just like Lillian does. Almost automatically.
This stuff is just so cool when it actually works.
I have a little work to do on a few of the morph targets. The nostrils are so different now that any time they rise or expand they behave a little differently, and the eyes don’t close completely as they used to do. But editing that handful of morph targets is so much simpler than starting from scratch, every time.
So now I’m a human hybrid maker. In whatever odd moments I have over the next few months I think it’s going to get all Doctor Moreau in here.
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
This is Sugar Space, by Russian illustrator George Redreev, and it’s just one of a long series of illustrations he’s posted at CG Society and at Artstation.
The CG Society page has many more pictures, but at Artstation’s page for this image you can see a large animated GIF that chronicles the picture’s progress from a rough thumbnail sketch to the final, full color painting. So both are worth a look.
This picture has such a playful treatment that it’s possible to overlook the pretty obvious objectification that’s at work here. (Well, it was possible for me, anyhow; your mileage may vary.) I look at it in the same way that I delight in the joy and playfulness of Dave Stevens’ pin-ups. The takeaway seems to be affection, and that may be what makes the difference.
His entire galleries show a lot of other work, much of it aimed at childrens’ illustration; one of my favorites appears below. But of course it was Sugar Space’s cheerful retro-futurism that was pretty much up my street. Provided that my street is lost somewhere in an alien jungle, I mean.
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
Rory Björkman’s The Journey is a beautifully lit, modeled and textured image of a crusty old fellow on his crusty old three-wheeler. You can see the full image and loads of details, color tests, and other preliminary versions here.
It’s all worth looking at, from the many versions of the trike’s grille through the test renders of the helmet, the baggage, and many other elements from the picture. It’s really wonderful work, all of it.
In fact, you shouldn’t stop there: you can see a much larger gallery of Björkman’s work on this page, where I especially recommend Sky Machine No. 47. Nice!
A new page has been published in the story The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
I came for the chairs; I stayed for the scooters.
Almost everything is scooters at Barcelona’s Bel & Bel Studio where old body parts from Vespas, Volkswagens, and other vehicles are repurposed into furniture and other works. They even do full restorations on vintage Vespas… when they’re not looting them for their shiny bits.
It was the fanciful office chairs that drew me in. Mind you, I’m awfully fond of the tired old chair I use here in the Secret Laboratory. But I flirted briefly with these streamlined beauties before I assured my chair that no, no, I would be faithful.
You can see why I was tempted.
But then I scrolled down to the self-balancing scooters, which by any other trademark would be called Segways… and suddenly I had a vision of myself zipping down the street in the dorkiest way possible, goggled and scarved, and I figured I was home.
You get the idea. If you’re going to look ridiculous, do it with streamlined style. In a perfect world, which at the moment would be a world where I didn’t need any exercise, you’d find me rolling off on one of these to the library, or to the grocery store, or down to the harbor, pretty much any day at all. With a big stupid grin on my face and that mounting sense of guilt and dread I get when I’m not working.
Anyway, do yourself a favor by dropping by the Bel & Bel web site where you can dream a little, if only for a few minutes. They’ve got loads of interesting furniture conversions and gadgets, as well as making-of videos. There’s plenty to keep you occupied.
