Beauty Approximations

Something that will flash by

Added info labels to the city. They're animated but I won't render anything out yet.

Background element for the intro.

3d version of the concept from last post. I'll guess I'll stick with still frames until I get back to work to render it all out.

It's a bit too much right now but it's working as a pointer to where I'm pushing the city scene.

Car morph element final. Starting to remove some old stuff as I'm hitting disk quota. "But Bjorn, what are the cultural historians gonna say? Nothing I would guess."

As my vacation start I'm leaving my monster machine at work behind. Therefore I'm trying to wrap up the heavy computer load before I'm off. Early city render. Procedural modeling behind this- I paint on a plane where factories, residential and office buildings should be and then the rest goes automaticly. Also a worked on the transition between "worldmap" and "the deal". One exciting second clip . I from now on will keep the latest cut here , but I reckon I won't update it until January.

Summed up it all for my music guy to have something to work with. All the stuff tighed together . Looks like shite but from now on it's a matter of fixing rather then building. "The artist know he reached perfection, not when there's nothing left to add but when there's nothing left to take away" - another one of the piece of golden quotes stuck on your mind after spending 100h's of hours of playing civilisation IV. Here's some other ones, "If you chase two rabbits, you loose them both", "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" and also a modern one "compound interests is the strongest force in the universe". If you can't find it in a quote, it ain't worth knowing and you can quote me on that. And THERE my workdaty ended...

Timing and some elements done for the world map diagram. Next I'll fix the labels that respectively will say something like "Green -> Non Peaked, Red -> Peaked", "Fuel consumption" and "Fuel export". I will also replace the boats, I had them placed after the normal world map and not my distorted one.

Polish

Collecting some peices.

Some 2d work for the deal. Camera goes from top right->top left-> bottom left. It will be interesting to see how these quite different styles will work together. But now it's starting to be late to change such choices.

Cheesed the look up on the oil segment for "the deal". Rounded of the geo a bit. Compressed the colours for the oil to have a more cartoony look- this also made the errors look more on purpose. The purple in the midrange added a oily look to it. Thinking of adding two smooking chimneys to the box on the right side and painting in some brick texture to the surface. Plus I need a cheat to get away from my missing frames. Gonna try to put in some BG later today.

Some 2d stuff. Old car concept. Deal background and one after the guy has shown his gun.

Fast comp of the oil with some obvious mesh problems . I don't know what reflect more in my art this weekend, the fact that I'll be sober or that I bought a watercolour beginners kit.

Suggestion of the world map timing. Preview of oil pooring out.

Ein oilbarrel, going for a watercoloured look to celebrate my wacom board.

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/10/24/oil.decline/ I have a new deadline, last year.

Probably final.

After my webpage been down for a while I can now star updating my progress again. The ending of "the deal" w some dodgy animation. Btw, stardust rocks. Well pleased over that and the only problem I have is that it may be the peak of my carier. Proffesionally...

Did a freaky test for the shoppingcart shot.

Slap comped the cloud. Had to render another pass with three more lights to get a smoothly lit shape which is what gives the fluffyness. I could, and probably will, make this a bit better but I want to see this together with the rest before taking any decisions. Edit: After seeing this a couple of time I think I should scale down the air plane and let it come out of the cloud together with that streak, rather then zooming out and revealing it gradually.

Maby final version of animation . Haven't found anyone to comment but I can live with it as it is. Just have to make the gun extension now and I can drop this into the cut. Also made a cloud . It's for the car -> plane transition. I had to run around the whole building to see if all volumetric render guys had gone home so I didn't took someones spot on the renderfarm. The weird colors are there because I render one light using one color channel so I can seperate them in comp. Here's green rim ligt, blue's back light and red the main light.

Improved animation. Gonna find a coworker to get some comments. Then I'm gonna put in some randomization and render a couple of these with procedurally slightly offseted animation.

You gotta make deals!! That's pretty off topic but he's a character and this is the deal Rize is trying to cover while getting around in that plane. Gotta polish the animation and make a quicker version but then I'll loop that a couple of times and call it a sequence.

In a misdirected coffee rush I collected the loose pieces I've been throwing around in my head on a short project. "Visualisation of activation"- I guess you could call it. A person get some information on something, if you manage to wake him off he get's pissed off, he maby pass on the info, thus increasing the total activation sum but with time the interest is sinking and without renewed source of activation the person becomes passive again. Imagine a nodal network of these persons, each visualised as a light. When they get activated by input signals they switch on and then fade off. When they're switch off they are hard to awake but once they're switched on they pass on energy to neighbours. Pretty basic stuff really, it's gonna be like a flashing grid but I believe that if you gradually increase the input signals there is a value where enough nodes has become active and the system is capable of sustaining it's energy. The inputed energy will then ...

The shopping cart sequence is followed by the camera flying out of a city. I've cleared this part up a bit. The look will be stereoptyped a'la sim city where I put out arrows and facts on the different elements that literally points out how much oil they need. For instance, farmland->food production 60%, residential buildings ->electricity 20%(?), a road with cars->transport (80%) and ending with airplane-> flight 100% which then will trigger the final. Maby that doesn't make any sense but here's the previz .

Another article on Stardust that mentions my stuff. Kinda the same words as the other one, intresting because it's not true. There's no "target driven" stuff in Stardust, I only put a lot of effort in making it look like that. The first film that will have a proper target driven fluid simulation of this type will be out in a film next year, that stuff will kick my effect in the behind pretty hard so I enjoy this while it last. I wrote a piece here about the technology behind this development but I don't know what's legal and what's not so I leave that for now.

Updated look on the world map. Just gonna introduce some hand made work in it and then I call it done. More then half way though and yes it's smaller then the real thing.

For the second time I gave Johnny Hellquist, aka DJ Tubkatt, some visual suport for his Umea based club "Daliga Gatan". Link to video .

Green is before peak oil red is after. I think this tells the story well and it will substitute my plan for export/import switch. I will put a gradient color on the one who's about to change as I am to stop the time at 2007. I will write some stuff on data certainty but only post it on a webpage as I generally don't prioritize the academic details here. I also got a nasty deadline taking shape. What's coming after this clip is a boat from west to middle east to get oil. In the real world the US navy is getting closer a strike on Iran by each day -a to good paralell to miss for a director.

Me and my effect in Stardust was mentioned in a magazine the other week. Link. I didn't feel like posting it here as this blogg is about my art which I try to clear from narcissism. I do however feel that these stuff belongs to my artistic history and so I will keep it here anyway.

World map with the year of national peak oil.

Beppe Grillo's red horizon Fuel of War! I've encountered these two links within two days time and got inspired to give put down my projects background view. Every scenario I imagine that will bring meaningful change is broken in the link of informing the masses. Every major player in mass media is a branch that grows from the same root as the problems that worries people today. As 90% of the newspapers is paid by addvertisers, news becomes framing for adverts. Media is then given the right to censor in the name of profit. Not just it's own profit but it's clients profits- every profit. Media becomes the glass wall between us and from what I guess, it's now acting as a pretty big dam . Climate change is all ready the new Holocaust . Not in body counts but it's the extreme you use to prove your point. But that's because it's simply stupid. Climate change was always stupid, already in the early 90's the scientific elite said what it's saying now....

Worked on the bike>car transition. Composition test. I'm getting doubtful about the purpose of the oilsplashes between the two transitions. I'm probably just going to use the thin ones for the cool effect they gives. BUT! As my chair neighbour just passed by and after a quick chat I think it may be better to screw them completely and let the car rip up streaks as it it goes. They are very timeconsuming to create but it's my own fault for bad previz so let's backup. Also, the head is going to be synced to the music.

I'm loosing my head for some reason. Gah! It's pain behind this post baby, maby that's what's made the difference in the end? Here we go anyway. Oil element splash for transition. and second a new test of elements together .

A part of me is analouge. That part comes out everytime I work with water simulations. Scanning doesn't do it justice but there it is anyway. Couldn't find the original image I used.

Oil towers in the beginning is final. then it's just a test of some generic splashes that will eventually form a more constant flow once the simulations gone through. Watch me. I'll drop in more stuff as soon as the window is open to parasite on the company's renderfarm. Which means sunday morning or something.

Accidently overwrote last days test of the biking guy with the final version (ahhh, smell that word- almost worth the saturday night), pick it up here .

Did the main setup for the biking dude. Animation example here, sorry about the weak lines. Everything is automaticly controled from his forward movement, so no hand animation in there (I said before I planed to not do animation as that's my week point). Still some dodgy things to tweak and then I will put some more flow and weight in his motion but I'm fairly happy with the style of the animation and I think it's just a matter of a few hours more until I call it final.

It wasn't a problem , first one without, second with and third with half the shutter time (.1) question is how I want it to be used and calculated. The first one actually has some nice motion due to it defined shape but as I'm going to mix this together with motion blurred objects (the oil fluid will for example not look good without motion blur (water dots- not streaks- feels wrong) so I will proably go with one of the later, maby less apparent though.

Just using the stuff that's allready in the 3dBrush: test clip. It might be a problem with getting motion blur in there but we'll see.

Big step today, started to fill up the 3d scene. Composition test of 2d elements . Without any 2d brush elements. I'm now very much in the production phase, a nice place where visible results are more frequent. My idea is to finish the intro while I search for the data I need for the next part, if I still haven't got it I do the ending before, if I STILL can't find it I'll change/cut the story.

In the frustration from the absence of a single creative thought on my day job I put some extra energy to my night job. I'm close to sleep on the keyboard tonight. Still from test composition of the hubberts curve segment.

Starting to work on the splashing oil for a while ago and I decided to use that in a style test, check me . Needs to test collision for it. On side note, I hate my job but loves the proffesion. There.

Fast check to see the curve ontop of the oil elements. It seemed to work so I will place the elements as flat planes in 3d and then tie them together with these curve elements.

Been working on elements to fill out the background with- empty spaces kills the viewers interest. I'm thinking of using an animated 3d brush to tie these together as the animation goes on.

Developed the look of the vehicles. Bike, Car and Plane. Hopefully I'll get some animation into the filters that been applied in the process.

Previz for intro here .

Man's cycling, oilsplash turns bike to car, car picks up speed and going upphill while morphing to a modern car. Oilsplash and car turns to airplane, passanger sleeping, airplane straighten out curve and going allmost flat, audio implicates slowdown, image freezes and zooms out. Hubberts curve, pointer towards the peak and sign screams "You are here". Transition to spinning earth, map unfolds pangea which unfolds to world map. Time counter shows 1850(?) when oil burst out somewhere and that region turns green, bottom screen shows graphically "red = importer , green = exporter" time goes on and oil pops up around the world and those regions all turn green, countries start to turn red and at 2007 the map is allmost half red half green, time stops and the geographical regions are scaled after their fuel export, Middle East is a big blob, then regions are scaled after fuel consuming and we see three eyes popping up at the three regions that are superior in size/fuel...

In the mental mist of mondays when nothing but the autonomous parts goes through inspection- it's time for some leftover repetative tasks. Here we go, the whole car morph , only minor settings changes will differ from final as I am pretty satisfied how this behaves, very continual and I feel that the some middle stages actually recognise some older car models. The time spent in developing the 3d brush payed off.

Here's a basic test of the car morph. The model is incomplete and I need to tweak the setting for the lines but the look of the morph feels good. Maby I need to put some work into some intermediate transition effects as the final blend sequence will be a lot longer in time and may then feel to linear. Any how, one less problem.

I've decided that the car/airplane will ride on a oil wave while going up for the curve in the intro. Here's a test of a small peace from this. It would be very cool to put in a few graphs with arrows in the middle of that.

introduction->short history of oil-> focus on middle east-> boat aproaching middle east then come this: 1. Hand reach out money. 2. Hand gives the finger 3. Hand reach out gun 4. Hand push over oil 5. Oil rins into machine 6. Div products goes out on a line 7. And out on a shelf and into a shopping car Next follows a zoom-out in a urban environment with cars and machines creating a chaos driven by non human energy. The zoomout ends in the same airplane that we saw in the introduction where chaos brakes loose as the plane has ran out of gas. I'll close the gaps in the storyboard when I've worked theme out.

Is it an orange on a stick?

Made a logo for the environmental group in my company. Here's the original dneg logo, and here's mine .

Skinned the character and did a short test for him (bte, why not a her? Well I'm sorry but the gender is not the issue here and a man is the passive choice). Here it is. Obviously the animation is a bit shit at the minute but it raises an important question which I nedd to clear out, it's time to decide a style to the movements. I've decided to go for a overly caracitured look, partly because I'm going for a handmade look and the Disney style is a big reference for people when spotting hand made animation. Second, stylised choices takes away pressure from the quality as noise is less distrubing in an unrealistic environments and I'm not an animator.

Made the dude unsymetrical. Previously today I had some private coffee time and I think I've found a punchline for the story. The dude is going to take different paths after been hit by peak oil- desperate, passive or active. The head is made out of animated strokes and is going to show the mood of the character with color and motion. I will come back to develop these scenarios but now it's way to late for such intelectuall tasks. I need the simple logics of Jack Bauer's belief system.

After some repetetive work of putting out curves I now have the first test look of the character. Here's a short camera movement to see how it works in 3d. After some tweaking on this I will make the other side nonsymetrical and then skin the curves. Hopefully I'll get out an animation test until tomorrow. I also did this version with motion blur turned on, it is quite interesting in how much better it looks, the hard lines doesn't do well without it.

Fiddling around with the rendering and colorisation of the "3d brush" from yesterday and here's the result.

To keep the painted look from the concept work from previous post I needed to setup a "3d brush". Here's an animation where i animate some of the settings. A bit annoying movements when the stroke's curve is animated that needs a fix. It will be interesting to see a couple of these animated to create mioving shapes.

In about a year I have tried to find ways of putting issues of the world in the form of animation. My first attempt in this series, which I have named "Things we know", will be peak oil. A lot of things in this world can be simplified by using graphs. The pendulums velocity and the seasons both looks like a wave when drawn against time in a graph. The entropy in the universe and the posts frequency on this blogg probably follow the same curve- they start high and then as time goes to infinit it aproaches zero. Hubberts peak is the theory that oil production will follow the curve like this and unlike my previous examples this is something that will have consequences for the human race. BIG consequence. Because we may be on the top. Maby we got ten more years but the oil production is going to sink and with that our economy. I will not go further into the politics or physiqs behind this but if you're not aware of the situation it is about time you pick up one of the many b...

Experimented a bit with Houdini and bumped into a cool way for deforming objects. Basicly you use one object mesh to define a new coordinate system. I have animated another object in that space and this is what you get. The "space object" got a heart's shape and the deformed object is a circle with ripples growing towards the center.

I got confirmed about my move to the feature " 10000BC" were I as I mentioned will be simulating crowds using massive/houdini. I am eager to learn and develop the tools available for this but at the same time a bit frightened of losing touch with easthetics as this will mean deal with mostly technicall stuff for what might turn out to be a long time. It will be a bit like the guy in Matrix who watch the monitors when all his friends is running around and jumpkick people. Hopefully this will mean that I will compensate by emphasizing my personal projects more and express myself more freely in it. Writing this post at work is a start I think.

As I got offered a one year contract at DNeg there was the following question in what I was to work with. The company hasn't defined a plan for me but it seems like there is an invisible game in who get to do what. It's partly the law of the jungle but I've put this as my first priority in my negotiations and it seems to give results. To my surprise I might end up doing crowd simulations. More precisely -I might help designing a pipeline mainly using CHOPs in Houdini. This is very interesting as this is the tools by which you connect music and graphics. When this is 100% certain I will probably decrease the focus on colour and environment in my animation and emphazise the musical and motion aspects. Also, the other two guys involved in this seems to have a lot of experience from this and it will be a great oportunity to learn from them.

Doing the background fully 3d and proceduraly was rather pointless so I simply drawn one in Photoshop instead. That together with some fiddling with the settings in the comp gave me this new test . I've got two things left to do with this, insert small lights on the spheres when they fall off the tree. Reanimate them and give them their individual colour. Yes- it will be red, green and blue. Perhaps I'll also do a new round on the backgound, as the painting proved to work so well it might be worth it. Might need to introduce some clouds int the background. But I need to move on pretty soon. Tomorrow I have a new contract renevalmeeting with my company, that's probably where I need to take a stand to get the chance to work with a big growing plant. Knowing that kind of stuff would be very interesting. VJ Krute got a post about it here . When thinking in a longer perspective in how I through work slowly build up a library of artistic techniques I feel that there's a huge ...

Just after a brilliant and funny concert by Chow Chow I got an decent idea for musicvideo. Two persons in a typical slacker room, each with laptop, slighty sped up playback. They're communicating but you don't hear what they say. When one does something with the computer a sound appears, when the other does something with his computer a visual event spawns in the room in respons to a sound in the music- the light switch, the fireplace burst out a flame or the wall vibrates. The music, video and conversation evolves into some connected story, maby the characters start to disagree and start fighting with the music/video, maby the surrounding world is trying to annoy them and they find ways of overcome the problems, maby the song is taking over and they try to protect themselfs from it. Speeking of film ideas. Here's one from the pub yesterday. A drunk farmer puts a dynamite into the behind of a pig or another funny animal, whatch it run away on a open field in the silent lan...

The current state of the intro shot. I will make the background appear with the same technique I draw out the curves with. I've decided that that this flowing look will hold the overall feeling of the animation. I like that these ribbons have an absolute form but in groups they create a loosely defined shape. This together create a sense of abstraction. I use the sense of recognition within the work to give a sense of alternative reality, that there are physical laws in this world but not the same as in ours. Travel and a friggin good concert by Dave Matthews got in the way for any progress the latest time. Also got back to work were I'll do some "white wizard" shots for the Potter film. Weird to do exactly the same thing as in Stardust- transforming people to fog and back. I felt a lot more free when I approach it this time which feels good but it got me thinking that maby the effect lies very well with the time/technology right now and that we will see a number ...

The computer graphics community has gone through periods of artistic revolution when it comes to both motion and form. It is widely known that if you want to be able to model on a screen you should first go through a lot of time with pen or clay. For the animators the 2d cartoons with Disney's "wise men" in the front has worked as an authority. While this kind of influence has imensly sped up the evolution for the pioneering practicians there is still genres in the cg proffesion who doesn't have any clear paths to follow and therefor still handles the new tools rather clumsy. An example of this is my own area, visual effects. In my short experience, the people in it clearly percepts it as a form of art or craftsmanship and not science. This is very important as the opposite would be a hopeless ground for art to grow. However, we may be the first group of people that looks for beuty in explosions, plasma or other phenomenons and we have no maps over this new terrain. ...

Feeling what's "free" in "free art". Working without deadline or target groups is like standing up after a long car ride. As the board is set I am now playing out the pieces against each other. The curves for the chaossphere in movement is shown here. What you see is curves being drawn from points flowing around on a animated object. As if a dozen pencils ran around on it and drew a line in thin air. I like the way the object's shape gets more definied when it's resting and then turns undefined and flowing when it starts to move. (Like the dude in "Riddick", but better;). The idea is now that I will use the lSystem I previosly done and animate this along it's developing branches and then form a shape in the end of a tip of a branch. This shape then be the "seed"/chaossphere/blimp. Test of the flowing here . This test confirmed what progress should do, state more questions. I need to think about timing, this mostly comes down to m...

Trains must be the best cubicles ever, and no fancy london office can beat that view. Got the hang of the shell to the chaossphere. Only got this short and generall test. The setup gives some interesting looks when you alter the directions and noise in the movement which gives me exactly what I need- a design which can be reacurrent without become boring. So I need to make a longer test where I go through some of it styles. Found this old curve test, I liked the rythm in it's movement so I post it here as a note to self.

Did some schematic sketches on how those " chaospheres " can be constructed. Some kind of complex animatable shape in the center will be generated from a single surface or curve. This will then be covered by a turbulent shell of wires. Like a mechanical crystal ball. Obviously I need to explain this through some images ASAP. Before going deeper in the design issues I wanted to test the connection between complex lines in closeup and full framed. Check the result here. I feel that the complexity disappears when zooming out so if one want to feel the turbulence in such design you would have to put some extreme closeups to it. When looking from further away it should probably be more turbulent to hide the structure thus making it more mysterious. In larger contexts I thought of making my work shorter but more intensive. Close to the style in a commercial then a short film. As I've previously said in the post "The lie about Metaphors" I do not pretend this is abou...

Computers is a couple of times faster then a man when it comes to adding millions of numbers together. To bad we have to have someone sitting and waiting for the computer to finish. To bad that someone is me. To defend my position in the hierarchy I set my other work-computer on render some of my tests. I've messed around with shapes described from mathematicall expressions and here's an example. Here's the same thing with some animated parameters. Source of inspiration: Jos Leys knots and dynamic gallery. I am now pretty sattisfied with the tools and knowledge I got from "Houdini". I need some basic shading test done and then I'm ready to deal with actual work. Feels like I've got a decent flow going as I'm off to Sweden tomorrow and transportation time usually means time to think freely so I'm hoping for some new concepts to emerge then. Speeking of such, I've been thinking of creating some kind of ball of knots driven by inner turbulence. Th...

Short basic thoughts about music and video. A direct conversion between sound and video is pointless. Ears deals with kHz, for an eye a signal at that frequency would be blurred out to white or at best case, noise. Paradoxical, in competition, the vision is what brings the exformation (tried to find a better word, the word itself gets a little paradoxical when nobody knows what it means). Only under visual pauses or by viewers resistance can the music play the lead role. This is just one example that put them in two separate spaces. But the matchstick that creates both a sound and light are one and the same thing, and with the sound and the light rejoined in our brains they blend together to the feeling of that object. As our brain is one of the last mysteries- somewhere to send confused young men with flags into- we seem to have encountered a interesting border of our understanding of stuff and I say it's worth exploring. I thought of a small experiment related to this. Make a ni...

Practiced myself in visualising a single beat. Check animation here. It's all generated by a 1 or 0 from a MIDI code, so if the music was going for 476 minutes it wouldn't be hard to do. I felt that I would like to get my thoughts started on how to visualize the different elements in music and this was an obvious starting point. If you have any interesting tips in any related matter I'm allways very interested in learning more. And yes I am beyond tired right now.

The metaphor is something I find using addictively . The very first element of work seems to be spawned by patternless inspiration. A line, a technology, a movie, anything I want to interpret. But after this step I constantly feel forced by my European heritage to give this an illusion of "purpose". Everything starts as chaos but ends up in a single idea which can tell us all a lesson. There are many sides to this. For one I wonder why we use art to lie for our self in this culture. Why do we suddenly identify with thoughts that we usually see as naive or just wrong when they're brought in the world of art? Are we really just so plain stupid that we can't separate the message from the messenger? Is left side of our brains, the rational, so dominant that only when we are exposed for explosions and noise the right side is invited for its opinion. And then we start see patterns, a whole. PURPOSE *judgement quire voice*. So I start to make up a story, how the red spots I ...

Spent the day on trying to find seeds to concepts. Here's some base thoughts: Side of a high, narrow mountain (like a infinite version of that sharp mountain in Lord of the rings) breakes up to a mouth and a gap with extremely long teeths is opening. The mouth is slashing it's teeths together until they start to brake to pieces, finaly leaving a more normal mouth. Last week I went to a club were the building (a church) created a really weird resonanse, the effect on the pee in the urinals was really interesting. It would be nice to put that into a different context, maby black liquid with some oily specularity? Maby even film a bucket of water with a subwoofer attached on the bottom. Talked to a friend, Camilo , if he was keen to make some beats with accompanying MIDI code to control the pattern making. Luckily he was with me at the club and seen "the toilet effect" live so the idea didn't sound to weird to him. So test coming up next week. Also got some old ideas...

Every movement starts with a founding statement. This is not a movement. Starting to get some results from Houdini. Discovered VOP:s today wich greatly enhance the mathematical side of the software. Also, the possibility to construct you're own nodes from VOPs is amazing for optimizing evaluation. I've fianally got my curves generation to work as flexible as I wanted. Check animation. More tech shite, they're all generated by a ordinary particle system, the mesh is then created procedurally by trails and vops. Scene file here . My point with these are to get the possibility to draw curves with a undefined volume. I guess I need to enhance the look of them to show this effect though. I'm guessing the inspiration for these came from the magic my coworker, Pawel Grochola , designed for Stardust (if you see the film, check out the green stuff). This is just a vague reflection of his results which are truly magical. Inspiration, yeah. Visited the future in Apple store which...