Merry Christmas!

I've been playing around with iClone and PDPro Howler lately.  This scene originally started out as a kind of scary and ominous animation created in iClone.  With some animated filters and lots of color correction using PDPro Howler, a lovely winter scene was achieved.  Merry Christmas everyone!

From another point of view

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece of concept art showing a ship blasting off from a fortress.  As much as I liked that image, I wanted to try it again but from a closer and more dynamic point of view.  The elements were created in Carrara then brought into Photoshop where I composited everything the way I wanted.  Finally, I used an app on my iPad to give my Photoshop image a more painterly look.

Concept Art

This concept image was done for a friend who's written a really lovely sci-fi, musical along the lines of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.  It's full of really ingenious song lyrics and the plot is lots of fun too.

I'm in the process (slow as it is) of creating some conceptual images and character designs for this project.  This image represents a crucial point in the story when the heroine escapes the villain's fortress and flies off to adventures someplace new and exciting.

Korg Experiment.m4a

Having recently acquired some Korg equipment, I thought I would try to create a new piece of music with it all. This piece was recorded to my iPad2 using the Multitrack Recorder app. A Korg Monotribe supplied the initial groove and drone, while most of the other instruments came from a Korg MicroStation. Finally, I used a Korg Monotron Delay synth to add some cool spacey effects into the mix. The whole project took a couple of hours to do!

Samuel Slater Video

Here's a video about Samuel Slater and the American Industrial Revolution that my daughter and I made.  She did a lot of the research and we co-wrote it together.  We shot most of the video during a recent trip to Rhode Island and we filled in the missing pieces from images found on the internet.

The goal was to share with her classmates a personal connection to some piece of American history.  My hometown of Woonsocket, Rhode Island is not too far away from Pawtucket where Slater built his first textile mill.  This allowed us to make this film and share it with her classmates who would probably never have the opportunity to visit this historical area.

PD Pro Lens Flare animation

Lens flares are terribly overused and cliched but I always loved the look and PDPro has some great animated lens flare effects.  This image started out as some random sketches that I did to test out some built in brushes.  I then took that image and manipulated it, then did some simple animations that eventually became this nebulous space effect.

This piece of software continues to amaze me, though I continue to wish that it had opaque layers rather than the clunky default multiply mode.  You can get opaque layers but you've really got to work at it and it really slows down any creative workflow.

Having said this, I still find PDPro to be an incredible bargain and it's paint and animation functions are pretty remarkable.

Desert Ship

Well, it seems like I'm doing a lot of these renders.  Here's yet another image that started as a Curvy3D model.  All the modeling and textures were laid out in Curvy3D.  The textures were then refined in Photoshop and the model was exported as on .OBJ file.  The file was then opened in Carrara 6 Pro, where it was placed onto one of Carrara's standard environments, lit and rendered.  The finished render was manipulated a bit in Photoshop, where I also added the camel for scale.  This was all done in an afternoon's time!

Curvy Car

This car was created with Curvy3D and was originally intended to be a spaceship.  I started out with some jet engine shapes.  Once I had placed the cab on top of the engines, it looked too much like a car.  So, I turned the engines around to make them into wheels.  The shapes, deformation maps and textures were all worked out in Curvy3D, though I eventually reworked the textures in Photoshop to clean them up.

I exported the model from Curvy as an .OBJ file and opened it in Carrara.  The reworked textures were reapplied to the model in Carrara.  The completed model was placed onto one of Carrara's stock landscapes, where I lit it and created the rendered image.

All told, this image took about 4-5 hours over a couple of days to do.

Cityscape

This image was created using Curvy 3D, Carrara and Photoshop.  The basic model and texturing started in Curvy3D.  The basic textures were then reworked in Photoshop.  The Curvy model was exported as an .obj file and brought into Carrara where it was lit, retextured with the Photoshop textures and rendered.  The rendered image was then opened in Photoshop where the levels were tweaked and some effects were added, such as the little pin points of light.

All in all, the image took about 3-4 hours to put together.

Another Howler Landscape

This is another image created with PD Pro Howler 7. I've been experimenting with different brushes and landscapes just seem like a natural subject. A number of post-effects were added after the original painting to accentuate the brush strokes.

Planet Skimming with PD Pro Howler

This animation was done with PD Pro Howler and shows off some of its built-in effects.  Using PD Pro's built in 3D engine, I was able to animate a height map so as to create the illusion of flying over a landscape.   Some stars and a planet were then added using the swap buffer (shades of DPaint on the Amiga), and then some animated lens flares were added on top of that.  Finally, a zoom effect was added to the entire animation to give it more of a sense of forward motion.

Hamster run cycle

This animation was created with PD Pro Howler.  As a digital pencil test system, it works great though it lacks some features that would make it a more professional tool.  On the plus side, it offers tons of special effects for stills and animations.

This run cycle is for an animation I'm doing with my daughter for a song we co-wrote about her pet hamster.

Curvy 3D spaceship

I did this image using three programs. The basic model and texturing were done in Curvy3D, which is available at Curvy3D.com. Curvy probably predates programs like ZBrush but works in the same way by using displacement maps to alter the geometry of your model. This model started as a very basic lathed model but the displacement image really gave it some very cool detail.

I exported the Curvy model as an .obj file and brought it into Carrara 6 Pro to light and render. I also added a bump map to accentuate the details and give the ship a greater sense of scale.

After I rendered the model, I brought the image into Photoshop where I added the background, lens flares and engine exhaust.

From beginning to end, this image took between 2-3 hours.

Another Howler image

A quick followup to my earlier post about PD Pro Howler, I put this image together in about a half-hour's time using some additional tools that come with Howler.

This image started as some fractal noise that was then extruded using the built-in 3D engine. Throw in some lens flares and a few adjustments and you've got an instant prog-rock album cover. Cool!

Howling with PD Pro

I've been a long-time fan of a paint program that used to go by the name of Project Dogwaffle. Dogwaffle offered all sorts of fascinating brushes and effects, along with animation as well.

I left Dogwaffle aside quite a few years ago but recently picked up the most recent version, which is now called "PD Pro Howler", available at TheBest3D.com. The basic program is still there but it's been augmented with all sorts of new tricks, including new animated brushes called Orbicles.

Essentially, Orbicles are clusters of animated dots that move and swirl as you paint, creating a very nice paint brush bristle effect. I started fooling around with this feature tonight and quickly came up with this imaginary landscape.

I think PD Pro Howler and I will be spending a lot more time together over the next few weeks.

Jeanne d'Arc Fontaine 1924-2011

My mother died early this morning. She was the most wonderful mother anyone could ever want and the kindest soul I've even known. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone and she was perpetually optimistic. She always saw the glass as half full, never half empty.

Thankfully, she never regained consiousness after her stoke yesterday morning and she died very peacefully around 12:20 am early today. She was well loved and lived a happy, blessed life. She will be sorely missed but we know that we will all someday be reunited in heaven.

24 @ MobileArtCon

During the Mobile Art Conference the 24 Frames 24 Hours mobile filmmaking workshop took place at the ITP Tisch School of the Arts at NYU (New York University). The mobile video was produced in 24 hrs collaboratively by the workshop participants under the guidance of Max Schleser. All material was filmed and post-produced on mobile devices and tablets.

While I didn't contribute any video, I was asked to contribute some music. Max and I went over some music I've created on my iPod Touch and he picked a piece of music he liked which plays throughout the last two-thirds of the short film.

24 @ Mobile Art Conference from 24Frames24Hours on Vimeo.

Xewton's Bass

I finally purchased an iPad 2 a couple of weeks ago. The first thing I wanted to do was try out some of my favorite music-making apps, so I installed Music Studio. I was happy to see that Music Studio is a universal app, which means that it's exactly the same on all iOS devices.

The biggest difference however is that the iPad 2 is obviously much faster than my old iPod Touch 2G. Instruments load up instantaneously and editing a composition is a breeze without the slight lag encountered on older hardware.

So, I managed to create this piece of music over a couple of evenings, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out!

Paper Furniture

I did some paper furniture designs for FiddlersGreen.net recently and wanted to share some of the final designs.

Danny and The Dinosaur

I did quite a bit of layout work on this film which was animated at DMI Productions in the late 1980's or early 1990's for Weston Woods.

DMI was a very small studio owned by Daniel Ivanick and was located in Nyack, NY. I worked there in a variety of positions for about a year and a half and had an absolutely wonderful time and a very fruitful learning experience!