For most of March, our Digital Design Foundations assignment was to create a room from an odd perspecitve using Illustrator and Photoshop. Here’s what I came up with:

Almost all of this is Illustrator, including the wood, which took ages to do. I loosely based this off of the foyer back at home. My intent with this piece was to practice doing lighting work, and I must say I’m rather happy with it.

I made a quick little video of all the stages this piece went through:

Just for fun, here are some color variations that I made by putting it through Lightroom:

I call this variant the “Coraline” version:

For Digital Design Foundations, our latest project was to do a portrait of a famous person with interesting looking hair. We were supposed to do these in Illustrator with black, white, and two colors of our choosing (the two colors allowed us to use as many opacity settings as we wanted for each color).

I decided to do George Harrison from the Beatles:

The background pattern is influenced by the psychedelic pattern on the inner sleeve of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Here are some studies that show the progression of the portrait and some of the variations his mustache went though:

Last week over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, I attended a workshop on effects animation at Penn’s School of Design. The workshop was run by Joseph Gilland, who ran effects animation at Walt Disney Feature Animation for a while and worked on films such as Lilo and Stitch and Mulan.

The workshop ran for three days and focused on Mr. Gilland’s “organic approach” to visual effects animation- basically, his idea is that effects animation should focus on more traditional, hand-animated techniques rather than the complex CGI simulation stuff that’s all the rage today. After his workshop, I think I agree with him- the stuff he showed us was simply breathtaking.

During the workshop, we did some studies and prototyping for various visual effects ideas we had. I chose to do an exploding aquarium (I think Mr. Gilland started referring me as “the crazy guy” after I chose that.). I had another idea: a hand reaching through smoke. I had the idea that the hand would be reaching through smoke into a bank vault or something. Here’s a sketch of the two initial ideas:

Mr. Gilland was kind enough to talk through the concept with me though. He sketched this initial concept for me (mad cool!):

After talking with Mr. Gilland and looking at some of his suggestions, I went about doing three separate studies of what the glass, water, and fireball might look like. Some pencil sketches:

Then I scanned the three studies and composited/colorized them together in Photoshop. The blue is water, the yellow/orange is the fireball, and the red represents the shattering glass:

I’m going to try to actually do some animation tests for this- although obviously the end result will have to be much simpler visually than the above sketches. I have a feeling I’m going to be consulting the effects library Mr. Gilland gave us a LOT.

Mr. Gilland has a book on visual effects animation titled Elemental Magic. I really recommend checking it out.

Only two days left until my last final for the semester, so what do I do? Not study! I SHOULD be studying, but then the entire Northeast coast got slammed with a snowstorm. The snow looked really cool outside my window, which meant… photography experiment time!

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. More on that later. I also recently got Nikon Camera Control Pro 2, which is Nikon’s tool for remote controlling their DSLRs from computers, which means I can now remote trigger my Nikon D60 over USB from my MacBook Pro. Awesomeness. Time for some snowstorm time lapse experimenting!

So on Friday night/Saturday morning, I pointed my D60 out the window and set Camera Control to take a picture every 40 seconds for 5 hours starting from 5 AM. Unfortunately, I forgot the charge the battery to the camera died 80 minutes into the experiment. Also, apparently the movement of the camera’s internal mirror is enough to cause the camera to shift a bit if not stabilized. As a result, the video is really short and not very stable. It’s not particularly good, but it’s a start:

This time lapse experiment also served a secondary purpose- to test out the planned workflow that we’re going to try using with the upcoming Omjii Show. I composited all of the video in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro and then used Apple Color to color grade the video. If you’re wondering why I’m using Apple Color but am using Premiere Pro instead of Final Cut Pro, it’s because I tend to favor things that plug into Adobe’s Creative Suite workflow but Adobe doesn’t have a color grader, whereas Apple has a really nice one.

Later in the afternoon, I decided to give the time lapse another shot. This time i remembered to charge the battery and stabilize the camera. The result:

The problem with attempting time-lapses with a DSLR is that the length of the time you can cover is limited by your battery, unless you have an extended battery or something. Another attempt, this time from Sunday:

I’m still working on getting the technique down, but I’ll post improved attempts and a detailed run-through of the process once I figure out how to stabilize better, among other things.

Welcome to Code and Visuals, my blog for tracking my exploration of the world of computer graphics!

This post says December 2009 on it, but it’s actually backdated. I’m adding this post backdated in order to serve as a bit of an introduction. This blog began elsewhere but eventually became my computer graphics blog. Upon moving the hosting of this blog to Github Pages, I’ve decided to clear out some older off-topic posts, although those posts will remain available on the old Blogger version of this blog.

I started this blog around the time I joined Penn’s Digital Media Design program in 2009. Most of the older posts on this blog are pretty silly, but hopefully they show that I’ve made progress since then!