Random stuff

I have not revealed or summed up for a while what I am currently doing and I feel that it helps, and probably does not do anything else, even myself to organize my thoughts to write something down. Normally in my year cycle I am a bit depressed in the fall-time when there is a lot less sun and I actually see it like once in a two weeks… With a luck. So this year I have been concentrating to not start that many projects and slept a bit better. Although I have been buying new hardware and learning new things. Learning and fiddling around with new things always gives a small mood-boost. All together I have again noticed that I should always do one project at the time and remember to have some time off. Which I actually did by visiting Lithuania for couple of days.

But currently I’m actually on to these things:

Started an oil painting course. 1/2 of it behind and 3 practice paintings done. Mainly those concentrated only on mixing colors and the subjects were still life cups and bottles. It was good to concentrate on on simple things subject-wise first as the color mixing was the real concern. I do think this was the best thing this fall. Every session gave me really good feeling. Continues on January and possibly then we move further on from the color mixing practices. Really worth it. Probably helps in a lot of other areas of my jack-of-all-trades nature in arts.

Built a new computer. I already wrote about that. 10Gb RAM, Windows 7 etc. Really made my living easier after got it working.

Modeling 3d for a game. Modeling just real-time 3d objects might sound like eating porridge at this stage of my career but the modeling part is actually just the process of carving out an idea. Plus there is some special stuff that matters in this project. Same as in any job – there is always a lot of specifications that can not be seen by people not familiar with the particular subject. Which makes it interesting and dull at the same time. It is a paid job though so dull things goes fine in my radar. In scale from dull to misusing icicles I have been a lot to the icicle end lately and this is not so much of it really.

Creating a layout animation at work for a real-time short/demo. Really nice project otherwise but I do get stuck a lot – especially having creative locks. Layout animation is the first time in the project that I gather up the placeholder stuff on the table to a more whole set of things. That makes it possible to get stuck on anything in the process even that it sounds easy. Although I do like to go on with a process as that might make it a lot more progressive to work with in the future. The layout animation I try to go for is much like what Pixar is doing in their process. Everything is collected to be in placeholder stage together to get some kind of idea of the whole package. Then it is refined for over 3 years in different levels and pieces by hundredfold of people and the end result is the movie. The article I wrote about that creative work should be teamwork really, really, really underlines all the problems in this project. Yes I am doing it alone and no change to that in the radar. So if you are still with me – remember the talk about icicles in the last paragraph? I do not wonder at all why even this short took 8 years: The Passenger.

Learning lighting. The thing I would like to spend a lot more money and time on anyway. Loses for oil painting as for level of interest but a subject where I can be learning forehead-deep for infinity but it does not actually make it go further without the practice. I am now in the stage that I do have a light-scale set of Strobist stuff and played around a while with it but I would need to test things more in practice. Quite sure I have red enough of the theory-side for now. I am planning to take on a project later on to do portraits of some close relatives. Moving slowly with all the photography stuff anyway as I do not have the time to run for full-time photographer-job anyway. I hope this way could teach me a lot faster about 3d-lighting too – the same way as starting photography in the first place has gave me a nice boost in understanding a lot of different creative and technical things connected to composing, painting, 3d, physics, etc.

Rethinking my photo workflow (which is made possible by my new comp.) This kind of a backfired after I found out that my super-indestructible-workflow would not really manage to fly that well. I first planned to have a pipeline where all my .CR2-files would be converted to .DNG’s and after development opened as smart-layers in Photoshop and all the edits would be done non-destructively on top of the smart layer as smart filters and additional layers, saved as .PSD’s and then when needed flattened and resized according to needs in to different sizes and formats. Actually there was only one particularly weak part and it was the filesize and saving/opening-time of the .PSD. *flush* Not entirely though. I will probably move to use DNG’s as it is better and faster than my ancient way of using TIFF as an intermediate-format.

Bought some advanced texturing tutorials from Eat3D.com. Just to go it through and learn in practice. I really need some prep-up on that one. Might drop a word or two later on. Requires some undisturbed time.

Bought JoeyL Sessions Photography tutorial DVD. Already watched a bit from the start. This is totally more “serious” kind of a thing than the first one (which I did buy too and liked a lot.) Probably will drop line or two about it when I have more to say. Link

Bought 5 books on 3d, photography, drawing and animation. The Photographers survival guide almost done. I can recommend for anyone trying to push to advertisement and such business as a photographer. Written by two art-buyers so it is kind of a different perspective but a very valuable one for understanding the business. It does concentrate mainly stating couple of points: Get to know your style, be coherent with it when marketing yourself (using a outsourced designer mentioned at least 500 times), market a lot. In addition to that there is also very practical stuff and scenarios that might happen and everything. Bundled with the book is a bunch of forms to use in different stages. Very well laid out book so it really does not feel hard to carry on. Other ones bought: Ideas for the animated short, Dynamic figure drawing, Force – dynamic life drawing for animators, Digital Lighting and rendering.

Created a maxscript exporter. For a fileformat that started from Ambrose but got tweaked so far that it is not anywhere close to it anymore. Might give it out if I get it cleaned up and simplified a bit and someone is interested. Currently it pushes out a lot of raw data and is very vulnerable for nonspecific data. Got a big help from Phaser when doing it.

This is the second part of the BUGro making of. Part I – Part III

BUGro in Youtube (Watch it in HD if you can)

So after the first shooting day (actually an evening) we only had material shot with apertures somewhere around 2.8-5.0 and the focused part of the picture was around 1 mm by hunch. So it was actually quite hard to get anything on focus or keeping it in there. Especially without the focus rail. After all we got couple of good shots on that day well worth using. For example here’s a crop from a video of one of them (not full resolution):

We have no idea what it is but already the worm-kind of thing was so small that we didn’t notice it before we pointed the camera on the stump. I was actually trying to rig the camera to take a video of a nice mushroom when we spotted those from the camera screen.

After the first day we searched from the Internet about the 5D mark II manual settings problem. Solving it was simple and I’m quite sure I we were not the first ones struggling with the problem. A tutorial from the Canon digital learning center says: “This last point is vital: If your Screen Settings are anywhere but “Movie Display” you will not be able to manually adjust exposure.” Oh, ok. And that was it. Even though I suppose this was something that had to be there this way for some reason – it really wasn’t that obvious that you need to change that setting to get it working in the first place. Good that the tutorial was available and we found it though.

On the second day we got a bit more depth to the shots as we actually left only the ISO to auto and just checked that it wasn’t dropping down to 6400 for the shots. In theory we had a minimum limit of ISO3200 even though we do have some shots with 6400 but those didn’t leave any room for edit and was not perfect enough for us. We left the shutter time to 1/30 as we didn’t have any fast movement to stop and mainly just tweaked WB and aperture for the shoots. In the end of the second day the shooting started to go smoothly and after that we moved to the editing table.

Example from the second shooting-evening above. Even though the highly reflective bum of the fly reflects the camera and myself too – it was one of the most enjoyable shots we got from that day. One of my favorites from the day was a small fly that hid behind a grass straw and followed me long time from both sides of the straw. I suppose it was a shy case of a fly. The shot failed technically though but you can see it lurking right here:

We didn’t plan to shoot more material but on a break from the editing table we went outside and took camera with us and managed to grab one of the best shots I think we got in the whole process. I’ll write about it in the part III.

BUGro making of Part III

Having had enough of vacation time – I needed to get disconnected a bit and decided to film a short film with my friend Joona Poikonen. Lucky enough I got a possibility to work on it for couple of days and as most that we did was more of a learning based creative work I suppose I should write about it in here:

It all started from an idea to shoot some stuff with the 5D Mark 2 I currently use as it can shoot 1080p HD-video. Which is of course cool as there’s the magical two jargon-letters that can render everything better by just mentioning them. I had an idea of shooting some random macro-stuff and when we had an meeting with Joona we realized that the only macro objective we have is an EF-S objective. Which of course wouldn’t work with full-frame camera (and actually by searching from internet forums turns out to be one of those things that drags black holes towards them: “why would you even want to do that” – “There would be some much vignetting that there would be no point”). Yeah – if we would trust teh people of teh internets – the story would end here. With some searching we found out that there is a way to do it … by sawing off part attached to the connecting ring of the objective that I do not recommend for anyone and we didn’t do that either(!). We just bought some extension tubes that could connect both EF and EF-S objectives to it. As we were going to shoot macro footage the extension tubes were welcome anyway.

First impressions were that there was practically no added vignetting from the EF-S objective and that we needed a lot more light to get good takes with the macro lens. Also tripod is a must. One thing we never got that we should have had was a macro focusing rail. Focusing without it cumulated a lot of extra work in the shooting. Here is the first test with the setup:

(a Petanque ball rail)

The first shooting day we didn’t get the manual settings working in the 5D Mark 2 video mode despite the fact that I had the new firmware in it. The cure was simple and I will talk about it in the next part.

BUGro in Youtube (Watch it in HD if you can)
Making of Part II

Whoa. Time passes by with wings and turbines. We’re moving to Kirkkonummi. Or actually moved already. Have been temporarily living at my parents and at my sister & her family. Today we’re planning to finally move to live full-time in our new apartment(!). \o/

I’ve been photoing a lot, done mainly 3d graphics at job. Had one vacation week to renovate the house and handle all kinds of stuff connected to moving. And today I’m supposed to switch for a 3 week vacation. Hopefully I’m not renovating for most of the time. =) Would reeeeaaaaally like to get my workstation built up at the new house and some freetime-art done too as Assembly 2009 is closing in. I’ve been literally living on trash food and energy drinks for a while now as the moving and such get me stressed and busy so the vacation is very welcome.

Another topic I’d like to point out is that to my knowledge doing creative work mainly alone is not effective. Why? – Simply because doing things alone does not give you the opportunity really to mirror your thoughts and develop them. Designing and developing for example a 3d model or environment is a process where you take paths and choose one to go further, then towards the end the path gets more narrow and you need to find another paths or create new ones to continue. This is an iterative process where you eventually have to dismiss the path you started with when you find better ones and iterate back and forth with some of them. When you have a partner to work with, you get double or even more paths you found yourself in the first place. But in return you probably give more paths for the workmate too. That means loosely that there’s four times more design power instead of one. That of course means that you need to have communication going on non-formally about what you’re doing but I’ve experienced that million times. It could be tight working group or even just a lunchtime discussion that opens up the whole scenario again. As long as the team size is small and works well together – the add to workforce by person is exponential. Small team because the communication starts to lack when it grows bigger.

I’m talking this from my professional experience. I’ve been working now alone for one and a half years. It’s really no good. I start to remember why I really, really liked having a very talkative and creative workmates. At the moment I’m really stressed and tight on inspiration and ideas. When I get stuck on a problem, I really have no people to have a lunchtime-chat about it, or one that would say “have you tested X and Y?” and where I could say: “Yeah I’ve done X but Y might work if I add A and B” – “B? oh.. yeah. it could be done with Z”. And so on… It all comes down to a non-formal discussion of different approaches, iterating and the paths. There’s probably people that are good on iterating paths by themselves but I can’t determine if I’m one of them. All I know is that I really need some real artistic feedback on what I’m doing to keep the flow going. I really need the privacy and peace when I develop the thing I’m working for but for the design side I always need feedback to find paths. But when I get a even a single person to work with that syncs well – I’m on fire. I’ve been talking about the topic with several people from very different work environments and professions intensively for dozens of times and found out that most people I know are like that. People need other people to get the real drive.

In plans:

• Get out of here for a while
• Paint something else than walls
• Develop some photos from the past
• Build up some motivation and inspiration for daytime working
• Get someone to work with

I’m now officially familiar with Silo. Tenfold of low-poly objects behind, got familiar with basic + some tools and starting to get in to proper speed with the modelling. Actually… I’d be a lot faster if… Let’s step a bit back:

Before I started to work with the project and Silo. I had great problems concerning my OpenGL display drivers. With the most current display drivers from my Radeon X800 (Yep. I have a 5 year old graphics card…!) all the OGL-based software crashed on initialization of OGL. I rolled back couple of versions of display drivers and ended up in a situation where the programs started but they fell back to software rendering. So no OGL again and Silo didn’t work at all with that. Then I rolled a bunch back again and found a display drivers from last fall that worked. I got it working but the rendering is very… very slow. So after I got over the “toddling”-period with Silo my modelling speed exceeded what the frame rate of the viewport gave for me. So that’s capping my progression with the speed and actually cripples my working speed severely.

First of all I’d really like DirectX-rendering for Silo but according to the Silo3d-forums that’s probably not going to happen in the near future. That would of course raise the complexity as the OGL backend helps covering both Win and Mac-platforms so it’s quite understandable. And if you red the last paragraph you probably realised that the real problem is in the AMD/ATI Radeon’s display drivers plus the fact that my card is already wayyy… old. So this is really pushing me for an comp. update. =/ I’ll need an update in any case. I’m very bound to both my CPU and RAM with my photoediting-projects nowadays.

Probably I just have to go for even older display drivers and take the performance hit until I get financially stable enough (after buying this) to buy/setup new comp. =)  Now I’m just stuck with >half a year old drivers and can not update at all. =/

Got over the first phase and started to take steps a bit faster. Actually I ended up tweaking the controls a bit. I was so used to using ctrl for adding to selection and alt for substracting that I was starting to get a bit annodyden on it. So I changed those. And of course because I was now using the Alt-key for substracting from selection, the Maya viewport controls had to go. So I’m now using 3dsmax’ish view controls and ctrl for adding, alt for substracting. Also I changed shift-key for select through as the MMB selecting started to annoy too.

But the outcome of the tweaks were a huge improvement in working speed and now I even got couple of first Silo low-poly models ready. Whee haw!

One drawback is the amount and severity of bugs in the software. I’m using Silo 2.1, which is the latest one around, and I’ve stumbled on several quite annoying problems/bugs in the first 10 hours I’ve used it. I’ll post more about them later on.