About three weeks ago, I started learning Houdini. Such a long time coming. I remember, back in 1997, just before I started learning LightWave, I saw Houdini included in some CD ‘collection’; I can’t remember the version back then. I fired it up, but my trusty Pentium 133 ‘workstation’ was not able to cope. I left it at that, and in retrospect, I suppose that I probably would not have picked up 3D had I persisted in Houdini. I wouldn’t have understood it.

Fourteen years down the line, more than ten years later working in the CG industry, I seem to have gone back to that period of re-discovering Houdini. In the course of my CG life, I have learned to fit in the role of TD, and through a vast amount of trial-and-error I have learned to think procedurally. I wanted to learn Houdini because it supposed to coincide with it.

However, I didn’t want to learn Houdini for the sake of its much-advertised effects features. I wanted to learn it like every other application I’ve learned: holistically. I wanted to model, shade/texture, light, rig, animate, sim, and render in it. I want to be confident in the whole spectrum in Houdini. As I was pondering this, I remembered my first ever LightWave short called Old Rocketship, which I did in 1999 for three months. I did it while I was working for a non-CG company; I was frustrated and wanted to leave to find work in CG field. So the story is just about a ‘rocketman’ riding his rocketship out to the moon, and on the moon, he opens up a mailbox (?) and there he pulls out a piece of paper with a writing saying, “Have you done tried to leave yet?”

Yeah, I know, it’s weird, and the original edit was over five minutes long. But this sparked in me some old love. I decided that I was going to learn Houdini by re-creating this short. It would be like when I first picked up LightWave; now it would be Houdini, and I’ll improve upon it. But I also decided, just like back in 1999, to work within some time constraints. I would have to haul ass, because I would only give myself a maximum of three months to do this, with or without other professional obligations.

As of this date, I’ve finalised most of the rocketship (which is posted below), except that it’s not rigged yet. The rocketman’s design is still a WIP (sketches), and there is still the launch platform, the environment, and the rocket blast effects that needs to be considered.

It’s been quiet here mainly because I’ve been busy with freelance work.

I recently concluded a gig as a rigging TD over at Huhu Studios; that was for about a couple of weeks. It was a good place, though a tad bit quiet and people generally keeping to themselves. It was good to see some familiar faces, however; there were a good number of folks there that were my former students, and they were always great to be around with. It’s good to see them working, too.

More recently, I’m working for a post-production outfit called Toybox working as a generalist on some commercials. Very cool and professional people; I like the atmosphere a lot and the pace is a bit more my liking: always on-the-go. But living up in Snells Beach is a bit of a bother; I get by car-pooling with a friend who actually works in another CG facility across the street. If my gigs get more regular in Auckland, it may be time to consider moving down, I suppose.

I’ve also been working on Janus ever since I managed to make it work for the Mac. Funny thing is, I’ve been trying to get Janus to play nicely with the Mac ever since I released the product. It was only because I had to optimise the Janus GUI recently that I had revived my hope for running on the Mac, having suspected a heavily-laden GUI to be the source of the trouble in the first place. But at that time, I couldn’t be bothered to revamp the GUI because Janus had other issues to contend with.

Just before I got busy with Janus, I completed development (for final release) a LightWave to After Effects utility, which was commissioned by a fellow professional LightWaver who is based in Malaysia. LW2AE, as it is called, is not yet released, but I’m hoping to suss that out when I release Janus for the Mac.

Despite being in the middle of all this, I hope to get one ongoing personal project out of standby-mode soon.

I seem to have a lot of WIPs and no final renders, eh? Hmm….

At any rate, this is the product of a ‘great’ idea to recreate something from a photograph which I took. I can’t show you the photograph in interest for national security (e.g. my wife will not stand for it). And sometimes, a pristine CG depiction is all people need to see. Needless to say, this WIP needs several more iterations. Due to the suckiness of mental ray render times, this project will be finalised in several stills (or maybe just one – heh).

(Everything I’ve been doing since DBX’s forest scene has been in linearised colourspace. I’ve been shooting pictures ever since I was a teenager, and now that FP has come around to CG, I’ve been able to relate exposures in photographic terms back into CG; gauging intensities in the real-world, I try to mimic those in the FP-world.)

So, I recently was working on indoor scene that wasn’t that much fun at all (will post it up later).

I got myself an itch, went under the open air, rubbed my chin about the corner, and took a picture there and there.

Took the original picture in RAW, colour-graded it in 16-bit, while taking off blocks of cement out. I knew I wanted to relight this scene, so I carefully modelled the lightcatchers: the two nearest trees and the ground.

Originally I wanted this for an integration piece, but now, as a re-lit the scene with a strong sunset light, I’m thinking that I can do a very fantastical scene with butterflies, flowers, and all that kind of crap. Ha!

One of the on-going projects I started late last year was to absorb as many photographs that I touched me and try to recreate those scenes in CG. I wanted to start with this photograph by Jem Southam (“Landscape Stories”). Southam’s photographs are sublime and my choosing of this particular one was more of restraining myself as to give justice to this effort of recreating a piece of art.

As you see above I did not do such a good job regardless. Good thing it’s still a work in progress.

The colour-corrected version is something I was just playing around with; the original was how it was initially graded in Nuke, since I was rendering everything in floating-point (FP).

The colour-corrected image explains that there’s always that bit that wants to exaggerate, to take things more dramatically. It is very easy to do that. I find that that image looks okay; it has drama, it has depth, it has a bit of the unevenness that makes it organic. But it’s not sublime. And I don’t nearly – not by breadth of the Tasman- capture the subtleties found in Southam’s picture.

Well, back to tweaking…

Finished the base model of the weapon that Mardonier is holding. This will be sculpted at a later time. This is closely based on the Croatian HS2000 (marketed in the U.S.A. as Springfield Armory XD).

I discovered this pistol through researching point-and-shoot methods, which originated from my reading of Ghost Force by Ken Connors, who briefly wrote about SAS shooting – how SAS men shot intuitively rather than using the sight. The HS2000 was purportedly a pistol designed with point-and-shoot in mind. And it looked cool.

It was also in that book that inspired the removal of front and rear sights (seen below); the reason for their removal, as explained by Connors, is to facilitate quick draw – by removing the sights the chance of snagging at the holster is reduced. (Clarification: Connors did not mention, let alone endorse the HS2000, in the book)

I removed some elements from the HS2000, such as the accessory rail, and trigger safeties, because I thought of making it more old-school.

So, what the hell have I been doing all this time?

For starters, I finally quit my teaching job – a risky move, which might be construed to be a bold decision, or if time convicts, a dumb play. There it is, I suppose.

Of course, the reason why I quit was simple: want to get back to working in CG. Whether I’m working for a company, or working on my own, I want to be working on it, not about it, if my drift is catching you.  I did enjoy teaching, for sure, but there comes a time, for a person with a disposition like myself, after looking at so many students advancing in their craft, and producing excellent work, that the inevitable envy questions me: “What about you?”

Indeed, what about me? What have I produced recently? What new things have I learned about my passion? I couldn’t write off teaching as a useless endeavour – far from it: I’ve learned what teaching was all about, and I was getting good at it, too; I learned that I could test logical workflow techniques, albeit untested, on students and they could be the guinea pigs that provide insight on how to revise such techniques or methods; I’ve met great students, who were also great and big-hearted people, who excelled and inspired me in the way that I hoped to have inspired them.

But still: I was getting really hungry for cutting it deep with my craft, and I knew that the longer I spent in teaching, the worst it’s going to get; the less time I’ll have, more frustration, and an ever-deepening situation between what I desire as an artist and what I’ll have at the end of the day.

This week is my first week off the job. The first order was a modelling reel (because it is the easiest to do), and I decided to do “Mardonier”, a character that has been in my chest for over a decade now. This character is full: I’m currently writing a small novel around him but, obviously, I can’t talk about that now.

Shown below is the final base mesh which was derived from another project I shelved for now. Face mesh was an old one I did; needed lots of topology reworking, and revised it to match Rainer Maria Rilke, which was the rough basis for the character. I’ll put this over to Mudbox to focus on Rilke’s likeness there.

Everything except the shoe was also a topology rework. The shoe was based off the Merrell World Rambler, World Compass (Traveller), and Downshift. Great-looking shoes; it wanted me to buy a pair (or two).

Beethoven, Mozart, Atticus Ross (Book of Eli), and Wallflowers have been my fickle friends, but Wallflowers the less fickle of them all.