[Gecko]

Hey hey guys!


It really has been a while since I last felt that what I'm about to post just won't fit into speedpainting no matter how you look at it. Couple of years, maybe!

I put together 2 new parts on my portfolio, since my attempts at animating some paintings, shooting stop motion and learning 3d start to pile up too big and unorganized. If you have been checking out the speedpainting thread you might remember the 3d test of a forest troll a while back. Well, I tried something similar on another painting of mine but this time only using after effects since I wanted to push the limits of it's "semi-3d" features.

I haven't seen much of this in sijun, or anywhere else for that matter, except for maybe mattepainting.org where it seems to be quite common to project paintings on 3d geometry too see them with the illusion of depth. That has inspired me a lot to try similar things for slightly different purposes, be it faking huge amounts of effort or just for a nice depth/camera movement effect on something that appears to be created as a flat artwork.

The reason I list all the different experiments under "animation" is that I'm looking to build a varied set of skills to construct complex scenes or ideas in an effective way, using the different programs where they come in most handy.


Alright, onwards!


You might remember this painting of a fish from a loong time ago:



This is how it turned out with some repainting and replanning in layers, this is a still capture from the final animation:




The older example is the forest troll:






Well, both of these and some other test animations that I did lately and a while ago are now organized with some making of/sketch pictures here:


http://www.dlvisions.fi/~pveik/anim.html

or if you want to enter from the front page:

http://www.dlvisions.fi/~pveik/


This is the guy who has helped with some of the 3D and stop motion animation:

http://www.jkemppainen.com

Go check out his webpage for some more 3d/2d/animation/photos!



It would be interesting to see if any other sijuners have had their personal paintings evolve into something more complex, I can remember at least one quicktime panorama 360� image with a beach and an old ship from way back, that you could scroll around freely.

Or if you get inspired to create something, please post! It's a rewarding feeling to see your painting start to move!



P.S. I hope you can open the video files, they are .avi and compressed with mpeg-4, I don't know much about these things so don't shoot me if it doesn't work for everyone!

I also organized the life drawings from last fall semester, they can be found here:

http://www.dlvisions.fi/~pveik/life.html


Uh, I hope it's not too much rambling to read, but these are things that have occupied my mind a lot lately. Enjoy and hopefully get inspired![/url]
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[visual myriad]

hey Gecko,

that's really interesting -- i downloaded the trol avi but only got a black screen. what codec/compression are you using? like that painting btw. really interested to see it moving.

[DangerousLlama]

thats pretty hott, gecko!

yes!

would love to see more!

or try some myself even

and your drawings are pretty hott too! lol

[ax--hv]

Very cool idea :) It would be really hard to spot the flatness here and there If I didn't know that these are not real 3d (they are sort of real actually :). Perfect for short animations.
Dunno if this idea isn't obvious but you could also mix the fake with some real animated 3d objects like moving hand or something... Well, it's hard to imagine what is impossible to do :)
Looking forward to see more of your stuff!

[Nag]

Fantastic Gecko! Really like how these came out. I experimented with a similar camera mapping technique a few years ago and it really is amazing what you can get away with using just one picture and how far you can take it.

Really hoping to see more of these from you =)

edit: pselling disorder

[Tomasis]

gecko I really LOVE LOVE your works.. especially Life works.. you are DAMN the artist.. BEST wishes from tomasis sweden hehe finland ;)

Do you know what is Janne doing ? I also MISS his works.. ouch

[Mon]

Wow this is hot! great post, I'm duly inspired.
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[Sukhoi]

Hey Geck.

Yeah really cool. I had a go at this technique a couple of years ago when I experimented making moving mattes. It's really fun to do, and I love yours. I like the way in wich it's not an animated cartoon and not a painting. It fits somewhere inbetween.



Sukhoi

[gLitterbug]

Welcome Back Gecko, nice to see you're kickin serious buttocks here. I love those animations, you better go and make some short movie now. Or else I might have to send my killer squad.

P.S.: How was the stay in Prague back the time, been a while since we talked.

[watmough]

These are great,Gecko!...looks like they were alot of fun to make.

[Exclamation]

Ya, I can't view them either. Need to know what codec is used so I can install it!
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[B0b]

no trouble viewing the movies here, base install of XP on the Missus Laptop.

shame the creature doesn't move, get ur m8 to finish the animation!! would make an excellent scene

[Tzan]

For some reason Firefox starts Quicktime but it thinks it needs something additional so searches for stuff and doesnt find it. This seems to happen a lot and is very annoying.

I had to save them to my harddrive (save link as) then a double click starts up Window Media player which works.

Great stuff!

[Gecko]

hey!

update: it should be divx version 3, so i guess any new divx should do the trick.

visual myriad, exclamation - too bad they are not showing for you! i will figure out the codec and post it once i know. meanwhile you can check at least the forest troll as a quicktime version from here:

http://www.jkemppainen.com/up/sammalmies_2.mov

hope that helps!

hey dang.llama thanks a bunch! i hope you already started ripping down some of your work layer by layer for some animating!


ax--hv yeah this is definitely the plan. I'm interested in 3d animation also, but the damned thing is too clumsy to be making quick results. And anyhow I often (90% of the time) like things that were done in 2D over the generic 3-dimensional works that are everywhere... so kinda trying to build a bridge here to take advantage of both but not letting everything that is polygon run over precious and beautiful flatness :).

But you are right, in a way I've been completely crossin over to 3d, but in a reverse way, to build things in 2D and then touch only what is absolutely necessary, for example the roundness in the belly of the forest troll and a little bit to the head. It's easy to stop since you already got everything else covered with paint. The forest troll is not the perfect example of this kind of modeling since the camera angle changes so slowly it's almost not visible. But i guess the brain registers it anyway.

The positive thing is, even though the final thing is festered with masking problems etc. it took us about 5-6 hours to get the 3D side of things finished, and this was while we were drunk. Just to shatter any illusion that real work was involved :).

and hey, what happened after PtG? what are you up to?


naglfar: yeah man! it's incredible. I also love the idea that you can get a screenshot or a render of an untextured 3d scene, then just paint on top of the grey and project it down from the same angle, bake it (i believe this is the term) to the uv texture and then just fix any remaining problems in a normal texture-editing manner. It's pretty much this animating-speedies thing in reverse, but the beauty is you don't have to break up the scene in small blank texture patches and work them one by one.. instead you get a nice base of colors to start off the texturing. and this works great if you want to fake lighting straight into the texture, which of course depends on what you want to get done. The good thing is, it's really fast.

Tomasis. gracias!! I study in the same department of graphic design with janne, and we just had some beer last night with a few friends. He seems to be really busy with school work and paying work so yeah, didn't see any paintings in a long time but the guy is doing alright.

Mon, man, tack s� mycket! Var �r min ylletr�ja och strumpor??

Sukhoi, you don't happen to anything you can show? Seems like the matte thing is definitely the most widespread use, and yeah I guess that's why it seems to produce a strange hybrid when you start to mix things in an unexpected way. I remember seeing something like this in the Animatrix where the school kids find a "haunted house", everything is so nicely watercolorish and suddenly the camera starts to move around and you see there's complete geometry underneath.


glitterdude, no need for the squad, take it easy.. there will be some short animation! We actually have had a music video in the making for 1,5 years now with blue screened puppets, but this thing is not going anywhere right now. Anyway it's planned to include all of this trickery and different ways of combining live action to 2d and 3d.

Prague was very kind to me, I got lots of beer in my belly and lots of life drawing + animation studies. Anyone in the forums who has the possibility of doing an exchange year from their school: do it.

watmough, yeah its really fun as long as you dont get too carried away with it.. once you start adding stuff and rendering first animation tests and adding stuff and rendering and asdf... keep it simple, like a speed painting should be.

bob, great to hear that the basic settings work for some people, hopefully for most.
the test was simple so far, but the creature is not painted nor modeled to move so breathing would be possible quite easily but to model the arms and legs... oops. While it's possible and one approach could be to make it really in 3D, it really goes too far beyond the simple point of this test, to show depth in the painting. Other approaches could include live action arms to give some natural movement or just plain 2D animation in 3D environment on a flat plane.

The main question I'm trying to answer here is: "how to reach the solution in the fastest and easiest way?" if it's an animation it can be anykind of glue and bubble gum on the backside, as long as it works for the few seconds it's shown. Style is another issue here, naturally. There's something really appealing to me in this mixing.

I couldn't care less if chicken little had 250 000 feathers on him, i think he needed a couple hand drawn :).

Tzan
thanks man. and thanks for the advice, yeah for me it opens in windows media player so i guess quicktime doesn't know how to handle the files. or i could be wrong.



Well, thanks for the comments, and if anyone gets anything done, be it anything even remotely close to the techniques that have been mentioned, just post it here on the thread with a screenshot and a link for everyone to enjoy!
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[eyewoo]

The animations were cool... like the fish... but the life drawings are fabulous, not that they are better than the animations - different thing, right - but I really liked the life drawings. Wonderfully loose and absorbing style.

...and the perspective in the first pic above, the fish, just blows me away...
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[Petri.J]

Lookin very good, as expected from you.
I was hoping to see some movement in that troll animation, since the troll was projected on 3d surface.

[eyewoo]

[igino]

the fish is awesome! I also did your lifepaintings!

[Max]

Wonderful animations. I really love 'em!! I also made alot of experiments with this kind of 2d/3d animation. It's incredible how much you can fake this way. You really inspired me to get into this again. Keep up the great work!!!

[ax--hv]

5-6 hours, wow... You saved something like 30 hours on each piece and certainly a lot of nerves too :)
�Modeling� a texture (the way I see it) instead of texturing a model looks to be deadly effective. I believe this is a kind of techniques that were used for creation of the Ghost In The Shell 2 movie. And isn't that one of the most beautiful creations of a mankind?

[Gecko]

hey everyone! i really wanted to make a another fast sketch during the weekend, alas no time. damn you, lost season 1.

eyewoo! hey man.
glad you commented about the life drawings, i really went through some trouble to go back to czech republic and have a chance to practise in there in the life drawing courses.

i liked the fleabrain strangeness, although it was really really slow on my computer.


remember frost? the perspective playing is his fault.. he used to paint some really nice distorted perspectives so i had a go at it a couple of times myself.


Hey petrij! Good luck with that man, the blue forest is a perfect example of a fe hours worth of work turning into a nice complex 3d forest! You should post some example with movement!
i dont know if ever mentioned it, but the sketch of the girl is absolutely gorgeous. Be careful when u model her!!


thanks igino, but what the hell, you really did my lifepaintings? :)


max, let's see something! something old, or if you really started another one.


yeah ax--hv it can really be quick. have a good time with your studies!



well, before the thread succumbs to the graveyard that is sijun's archives, can we see someone else's testings?

anyway, thanks everybody!
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[octavian]

wow, really cool.
I wish I understood how you did this. I need a tutorial or something to familiarize myself with how to even begin. I've modeled things in maya, so I'm familiar with 3d apps, but I've never got into something like this. if you know of any links to tutorials for this, let us know.

very impressive.

[VelkroBoy]

Cool troll. You used Painter? Photoshop?