Animation Concept and Visual Effects

Great little watch to geek out.

Today I woke up and checked twitter to find not 1, but 2 game announcements that have made me revert from my casual, suave, coolguy persona to a bumbling idiot who's prancing around my apartment much to the enjoyment of my new puppy.

More on the puppy here, here and here.

But now onto the news!

Mechwarrior is making another comeback and the teaser trailer looks so damn pretty. I'm not 100% sure it's ingame footage, but it could be. Here's the trailer followed by the explanation for you non-mechwarrior fanatics.

Following that, my other favorite videogame franchise Command and Conquer and C&C Red Alert, is getting it's final installment. It promises to wrap up the tiberium story and answer all questions in an epic finale.

More on that here.

I love this post by Dreamwa1ker. http://dreamwa1ker.deviantart.com/ It's singing the same tune I usually hit when I'm ranting about vehicle/ship/military design. Unfortunately, none of my friends are into mecha/scifi/future technology design so I get rolled eyes a lot. It doesn't help that I'm showing a talent for drawing cute characters and not badass ships/vehicles.

I will have sketches and concept art to elaborate on these theories if I have free time tomorrow.

Basing future systems on archaic concepts.
1. Projectile Weapons in space.
2. Turrets
3. Giant Robots with hands? (see robot deviation I posted)
4. Up and Down
5. Naval similarities
6. Wings
7. Windows
8. Aerodynamics
9. Human Crew/Pilots
10. Armor Plating


1. Projectile Weapons in space.

Newton's 3rd law + microgravity + shooting a big cannon = no

Also, theoretically a ship with laser themed weapons could theoretically shoot at something for as far as the laser reaches: Which travels at the speed of light. So if it had a powerful enough targeting computer it could shoot at something from Earth and hit something near the sun in 8 minutes if it doesn't change trajectory.

A simpler one would be the range between two planets or between earth and our moon. That way, targeting has increased accuracy the sooner light/laser can reach it's destination without the target changing course.

2. Turrets

Though I think turrets will always have a place, or at least the concept of a smaller, independent targeting systems, the idea of needing your weapon to turn in order to hit anything within 180 degrees seems inefficient. Which is why I love my sphere turret designs. Barrel (or laser or missiles) are housed internally in a sphere which can be rotated with gyroscopes and/or magnetic attraction. I have it all planned out in my sketchbook. (see Ortho Cruiser Design but take spheres and stick the guns inside the shpere so there are only 4 holes in the ball.)

3. Giant Robots with hands?

(see robot deviation I posted)

4. Up and Down

In space Up and Down have no meaning. Why must ships all have a specific up?

5. Naval similarities

Naval movements are based off a 2d plane, Space is nothing but 3d...space. Having a ship that only has big cannons on the top of it's deck means they'll just come from below.

6. Wings

Looks cool don't it? Also makes you a bigger target. And most spacecraft won't be entering any atmosphere.

7. Windows

The camera was first invented in about 1000AD, granted it was a pinhole camera, the theory remains the same. You don't need to have your bridge visible outside with a window view of your enemies guns. You have cameras and large screen TVs.

8. Aerodynamics

So, you having trouble with wind resistance in space? Didn't think so.

9. Human Crew/Pilots

Granted many space ship games wouldn't be half as fun if there were no humans on board running things, but everything from reloading ammunition, firing weapons, navigation, etc could be done autonomically.

Namely the turrets in Star Wars. Both in classic ep.6 and Ep.1,2,3. The Imps had troopers using the cannons. The Trade Federation used robots. (why not take out the robots and make the GUN an robot)

Also, why the heck did the robots start having emotions...but I digress.

10. Armor Plating

In an environment where momentum and inertia synonyms for death, adding a 60% increase to mass sounds like a bad idea.

Some armor may be necessary though. In space there are debris and particles traveling and thousands of miles per hour. Our current space stations and satellites have trouble dealing with these deadly debris, most less than a millimeter in diameter.

TLDR - I need to decide what I want to do so I can focus what little free time I have toward that singular goal. You can't be 10 things and expect to be good at all of them. Also, getting off my ass and teaching myself the boring basic skills instead of making a long post about it would be nice.


Long version-

The University of Hawaii is good for many, many things. Digital art and lifedrawing are not among these, yet.

In addition, The Academy for Creative Media is a very good program for what it aims to do: create Film and Animation talent locally in Hawaii. It doesn't yet have a section for production art, concept art, matte painting and other related fields and I don't really see that happening with the huge budget cut. Then again, it's not like we were getting any funding prior to the state government realizing that they have no money.


Now here is my predicament. I'm not getting good fast enough and part of the reason why is that I want to do too many things. Just off the top of my head, I could easily see myself in any of the follow professions.

ART:
Pre-production visualization.
Storyboard Artist
Animatics
Matte Painter
Mechanical Design
Cute-Cuddly Design (I may not feel manly about it, but I'm better at cute than badass right now and it's kinda sad)
Motion GFX

3D Art:
generalist
VFX Artists
Lighting/Compositing Artist
Modeler/texturer
3D animator

Managerial/Production/other
Producer (heavily favored in light of recent projects)
Pipeline development
Pitching
Education

And that's just the ones that come to mind this instant. I've met people doing jobs I didn't even know existed and loved them.

Now for most of these there are some skills I really need.

1. Ability to teach myself new media fast.

*a good example of this was seen at the most recent wedding Expo I attended. You didn't have to look hard to know which businesses were new and thriving. The new ones were very in tune with digital photography, photoshop and digital distribution.

Then there were a few older Japanese men who have been in the business for 20-30+ years but their portfolios looked much worse after their switch to digital because they could now learn the new media. The new companies were the ones people were looking at because they were offering DVDs, video, slide shows. Myspace and FB and other services as well.


2. 1337 Skillz.
*For this I references some artists I follow out of sheer "Holy crap they taught themselves THAT?"
:iconukitakumuki: :iconleventep: :iconandreeWallin: :iconastrokevin: :iconOmeN2501:
If, after my 4 years of college, I'm *half* as good as these guys at painting, I'd be more than happy.

*This also goes into basic skills such as color theory, life drawing, drawing in anatomy, composition and basic drawing skills that I just don't see available as a form of rigorous study. There are maybe 1 or 2 classes related to this which have unrelated prerequisites and teachers who's main talent is in another field.

*For Example I took the only 2 lifedrawing classes my college offers. Both of which had no instruction in anatomy and were taught by an abstract installation art teacher and an animation teacher.

*In the first class we learned about perspective, 1 and 2 point. (not even 3 point) Seriously, wtf, I taught myself that shit in 8th grade when I was into drawing architecture and designing houses. And that not even really for life drawing.

*The second class was pretty good as the teacher was a CalArts grad and successful career artist, but because classes are limited in time we didn't get to draw much. (3 hour classes 2x a week instead of 6 hour drawing sessions with actual lighting equipment offered at CalArts.) We were also given nothing but a room and a chair and easels. No lighting equipment, no props, no funding. We had to provide all that ourselves.


3. The Ability to network.
*I have come to the understanding that no matter how good you are, unless you're like a God, other artists will get the job instead of you if that artist has better connections and personal references.

I haven't been to Jib Jab since pre-election and for some reason I pop'd in today and found 2 new videos! The most recent one is pretty freaking good. It's even got some swanky animation and what I can only assume is the best editing I know of. I didn't read their production blog yet, but it *looks like* they either somehow got obama to do a bit for them, or have a very, very good editor who was able to pull that from a speech.

Now that song's stuck in my head...

This is amazing. I was using myuh portal when it became non responsive, a few seconds later a shiny new UI was loaded! Release 7.1.0.1:1 has gone live.

I know a lot of the tech-savvy students and we always complain about STAR and myuh and I guess some of those comments made it up the chain. That or they knew the current system was archaic and they needed to add search functions and clean up the "mytools" page. And that's exactly what they did!

Take a look here!



I've very, very excited about the time allotment search parameters. No more searching for which class will fit in that last slot!

My favorite Manga series, Priest, is being made into a film!

Here are preview pages. I love the art! http://www.tokyopop.com/product/1045
http://tinyurl.com/mwju9z
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_(manhwa)

Initial excitement aside, I read more into the series and imbd quotes the plot as being "A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece."
Aside from the fact that this tid-bit, however short, rebuts any sort of resemblance to the plot of Priest, it has vampires.

I would watch this movie if Min-Woo Hyung get paid bank. Why?

Because manwha artists (manga artists in korea) get paid *beep* If getting this movie deal, however skewed the plot is, gets him a nice fat paycheck to live off of as he works, they by all means I'll watch the film.

Honestly the plot of priest is way to complicated for a 2 hour film anyway.

As a fan, I am sad that the movie will have no resemblance plot wise to the books, but I accept the fact that there's no way to fix that.

The best direction for fans like me is to contact Min-Woo Hyung and show him our support for continuing the series. The worst case scenario is that Min-Woo Hyung stops doing priest comics, so it's imperative that we let him know that we want it continued, despite the film.

I'd like to get to know a lot more of you Priest fans, post a link to your blog or anything on mine. http://gabrielyanagihara.blogspot.com/2009/06/priest-2010.html