Tim's Animated Life

Animation Mentor 302 - Chillin' at the bus stop - Blocking

2009-10-11T20:30:00.000-05:00

AM 302 - Bus Stop Blocking from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

Why am I still awake?

2009-10-01T03:38:00.006-05:00

http://vimeo.com/6846844

In celebration of Reedy actually updating his stupid blog, I decided to do the same with my stupid blog except at 4am. Here is a short movie I did at DePaul for Dana's graduate DC460 class, one of the first times I ever picked up a camera and edited. How did I become a digital cinema graduate student without ever filming something? Who the hell knows. Enjoy my crap! :D

SIGGRAPH Day -1

2009-08-01T07:51:00.001-05:00

Chillen on the plane, stewardess is pretty cute.
Exit row for the win.

-- Post From My Apple ||GS phone

New Orleans, gumbo, and SIGGRAPH 2009 - It's coming!

2009-07-30T12:58:00.009-05:00

The annual animation, game, and visual effects conference, SIGGRAPH, is happening next week in New Orleans. This was the same gathering where Pixar, still part of Lucasfilm CG at the time, showed their first animated short, The Adventures of Andre and Wally B in 1984. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a student volunteer. I didn't, however, rewrite song lyrics to get in. I guess that only works for GDC.

Just as the hurricane season starts, I'll be whirl winding my way around the job fair, technical paper presentations, Animation Mentor parties, networking shindigs, Cajun restaurants, and the really cool SV-only sessions they have lined up for us (small group talks with TDs from Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, R+H, EA on how to get hired at their respective studios) not to mention loads of portfolio reviews and interview booths. In addition, I'll also be working as a production assistant on the video podcast for the event. Not sure what to expect, but, if it's anything like GDC, I should be pretty comfortable. As my old phone died, I picked up a shiny new 3GS so I'm planning on updating this blog daily with pictures and videos from the event as well as notes from the various speakers and techs presented.

AM 201 & 202

2009-07-14T14:02:00.002-05:00

Heeeeeeey class 2 of AM has started and this quarter I'll be learning directly under Jason Martinsen of Illion Animation Studios located in Madrid.

They are finishing up work on Planet 51, which, to be honest, looks pretty sweet! The trailer doesn't really have any cliche jokes, reliance on pop culture references, or fart jokes, so this might shape up to be a pretty good movie (just hope the soundtrack isn't like the trailer).

PLANET 51 TRAILER from Daniel Arnal Lacalle on Vimeo.

So during class 2, we are given 3 assignments for the quarter. First will be using the ballie rig (a ball with legs), second assignment will be using a biped (full guy, no face except eyes, no arms), and third will be the same guy only with arms. The last 2 assignments we can choose just about anything that shows some cool body mechanics going on. The popular thing has been dancing, opening doors, or parkour. I decided to wrap all 3 assignments together where the biped guy will be doing parkour for both shots. It will be a mini 007-style scene where the hero will do parkour while chasing after the CEO of Evil Corp. Here is a rough storyboard from the second shot where the hero breaks into the CEO's office:

Finally, did a rough blocking test this week of Ballie's motion:

AM 202 - Blocking from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

I'd like to go at it again and put in some more menacing poses as well as add his cat in. My goal, when all the animation is solid, is to create an environment, add some fx, shading, lighting, camera movements, and turn this into something I can put on my lighting/shading reel that demonstrates my ability to do production quality animation work. Overall, everything should be done by October. If I still don't have a job by then... which would horribly suck... this should be a great addition to my new reel finally showing some current non-student work.

One week break :D

2009-06-22T18:04:00.002-05:00

First quarter of AM is over and I'm looking forward to taking a nice break, send out oodles of *new resumes, and get ready for Class 2. Good news, I'm ready to go get a job and relocate already. Bad news, I'll be looking from the house my parents built for the foreseeable future >_< Only temporary, though, it's good not having to worry about bills in the meantime.

AM 112 - Progress Reel for Class 1 - Tim Lobes from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 109 - 110 - Class 1 nears the end...

2009-06-08T19:07:00.003-05:00

April showers brought... May showers. Even in June, there are no flowers, only showers. Thanks Dr. Seuss.

It's finally getting warm out, thank god. Chicago is probably one of the best places to be in the summer, however, thanks to job market, I'm only downtown for a couple more weeks!

Two more weeks of AM and freaking loving it. Couple weeks ago we worked on revising our basic walk. I would of liked to have spent more time on it, but, I'll revise it before the progress reel when I've gotten a little more practice working with splines. Finally, this last week, we started blocking a personality walk from the side view. This coming week is refining the curves with perspective. This adds a new dimension to our work from here on out and puts a close to 2D only shots. The pose this week was exhaustion, kind of what I'll look like after rendering out all my work for Week 12, but antsy and ready for Class 2.

AM 109 - Basic Walk from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 110 - Personality Walk - Sneakie Sneak from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 108

2009-05-24T19:44:00.002-05:00

Week 8 has passed.
AM is going fast.
Time to get off my ass,
and speak with a little class.

A ballie walk was done,
a strength pose came out, too.
Prize for the guess:
in the pose, who is who?

Finally, here is the blocking stage of my vanilla walk cycle for the ballin' character... Ballie!

AM 108 - Vanilla Walk Blocking from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 107 - Tailor & Overlapping Action

2009-05-19T19:27:00.004-05:00

This was a tough week in AM with Tailor, the bouncy ball with a tail. It seems easy... it really does.. but once you start animating it this thing gets hard and that's exactly what she said. I had to scale back my idea to get it done this week. Animating a tail in motion is a lot easier than animating one standing still. In motion, you can allow the tail to follow the path of the body and the arc you make through the air. Motion also gives you a little leeway on not having something react perfectly. At rest, making the tail react in a way that gives it overlapping action WHILE letting the audience know that the fox still has control of it's own tail, is a whole other beast altogether.

AM 107 - Tailor! from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 106 & DreamWorks

2009-05-11T14:24:00.002-05:00

Last week, I got out of the shower, saw my phone on the floor (which means someone had called), and listened to the voicemail. An HR girl from DreamWorks Animation wondered if I'd be interested in interviewing for a lighting TA position :O I ran around the apartment all giddy and called her back... leaving the most awkward nervous voicemail EVER. She called back a couple min later laughing about it, all was good. Great icebreaker :P

Magoo, probably the toughest interview on the planet, helped me prepare for what was going to be a phone screen with the one of the CG supervisors. I got the call, interview lasted about 30 or so minutes, and done. The supervisor gave me a better idea of exactly what the position entailed and it turned out to be a C++ tools writing position. I haven't really worked with C++ since I was working on the game dev degree, so sadly I couldn't offer up any examples of current programs I may have been writing. Working with XNA for the 360 was all that I had to show as of late, but I didn't really mention it. While the interview was actually quite easy, I didn't get the job. I could tell during the interview he was looking for me to bring up experience in solving some lighting or other CG problem using a non-scripting language. Overall, good experience for future interviews.

Animation Mentor - Class 1 Week 6

This week we looked at overlapping action. I didn't really judge correctly how much time it would of taken to finish this one. Really would of loved to do a clip with personality, but, I assumed it would of taken a lot longer than it turned out to be. Once you have the first link in the FK chain done, the rest are easy.... at least.. just for this type of rig. If I get some time, I'll definately be replacing this with the idea I had in mind for the progress reel.

AM 106 - Overlapping Action Pendulum! from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

AM 105

2009-05-03T14:51:00.002-05:00

Week 5 is here and we have moved onto squash/stretch/anticipation with a ball in an obstacle course! I've been really looking to this week as this marks the start of a lot more interesting animation assignments for us. I had a weird quicktime issue where it was cutting off the last frame before the logo, so I'll fix that before the reel. In other news, I'm excited and nervous as hell.

AM 105 - Obstacle Course from Tim Lobes on Vimeo.

Eye Seek You

2009-04-30T02:35:00.004-05:00

Remember ICQ? I still remember by user number. However, this post is about an eye. As I'm learning the actual art of bringing a character to life, I'm still keeping up with lighting and shading and all that technical fun stuff as that will always be a love of mine. Here is an eye I did for Jeremy Birn's latest retro lighting challenge. Looking forward to the next one after he gets back from his much needed Up vacation.

Animation Mentor - Weeks 1 to 4

2009-04-29T12:36:00.005-05:00

This March, I started an online school called Animation Mentor in order to learn a strong foundation about the medium from the people that have the experience and resources to really teach it well. Every week, I'll be doing my best to post updates with my progress. I'll be taking this for the next two years (graduation date expected in Sept '10 or Jan '11). I was selected as an alternate for the JET Program (dwindling job rates due to the economy). I should find out in the next couple weeks if I'm getting upgraded or not. Of course, I'll continue and try to find a real job in the meantime assuming someone just gives me a shot at an interview :P

Here is AM's Student Summer Reel from 2008, shows a little bit of the students I am learning with and what I'm striving for. My goal is to get some work shown in one of these reels before I graduate. Oh, and if anyone is ever interested in this school, let me know before you apply so I get referral bling :P

Class 1 is going great so far. Some very cool and talented people in my mentor group. Believe it or not, there is a retired Mexican astronomer in my class who is considered one of the fathers of Pixar's RenderMan. There are a few from Australia, tons from Canada, and oddly enough only a few from the US. My mentor, Paul Allen, is a really cool fellow from Texas who is working as the lead animator on the new Ghostbusters game. We are assigned new mentors and classmates each quarter (12-week class) for a total of 6 classes with a week or two break in between. Every student and mentor from all classes can critique each other on every assignment each week. In addition, there is a forum which I consider a treasure trove of information, resources, and people. I really can't begin to tell you how valuable AM is and will be and just how deep it all is. The networking potential is through the roof. Want to make an animated short? You could probably assemble a talented team in a matter of days.

I think one of the most valuable things about AM is that they teach in a way that allows you to do your best on your work and learn all you can... without the class being sped up or slowed down based on the performance of your classmates. This is something that is really hard for the brick and mortar schools to avoid. Anyway, 'nuff bragging about how sexy AM is. Here is a recap of my first 4 weeks.

Week 1 - Intro
Meet and greet, fill out profile, and webcam Q&A with the mentor and class. I got introduced to the vastness of the AM intranet site and forums. Wow.

Week 2 - Natural Pose
Got our first rig, Stu. AM's mantra seems to be to provide only what you need at the beginning and slowly advance the tools as you need them. Baby steps for learning. This week, we have a rig with basic body controls, no face. We're to use Stu throughout the quarter to pose him just like one of those miniature wooden posing manikins. Our job was to take a sketchbook to a coffee shop, park, or wherever and draw stick figures of people in natural poses.

Week 3 - Simple Ball Bounce & Excitement Pose
Take a ball, animate a realistic bounce. Sketch some exciting poses, pick one and Stu-ify it. I decided to take the pose of Hiro from Heroes going Yatta! Didn't really convey "excitement" as well as I wanted, so I'll definately be making a revision to that before my progress reel in week 12.

Week 4 - Multi Ball Bounce
Show two different weighted balls bouncing. Sadly, no pose this week. They are so freaking fun to do.

Post GDC, the highs, the lows, and the inspirational moments dreams were made for

2009-04-16T22:31:00.006-05:00

A couple weeks ago I got back from my trip to San Francisco. Stayed at Magoo's for a few, found out the hard way how much we suck at video games, and worked as a CA for the GDC. Here is my story 8]

The economy really reared it's ugly head. A lot less people hiring, a lot less networking parties, and a whole lot less people than last year. This was the first time I've had a ton of reels, breakdown sheets, and resume packets ready to go and hand out. This was also one of the first years that recruiters at the event didn't really want em. A lot of the big companies like Valve took them and even gave on spot pre-interviews. On the other hand, nearly all of the others were just there to take business cards. You really had to find employees of those companies, talk to the right person, and exchange contact info that way.

This was also a weird year in that the majority of the people looking for jobs were 10+ year industry vets who were recently laid off. I was able to catch up a bit with my old teacher, Jim Gentile. He was laid off from Midway Chicago after running their motion capture & animation dept for almost 20 years. Jim is one of the coolest people I know. He'll have no trouble getting past any interview. It's tough to see him get screwed in the butt by Midway, but at least he was able to see it coming and put in a plug. As for me, sadly, I got a rejection from Pixar once again. I know my reel needs to be 10x better than what it is now. Lots of ground to make up to compete against the graduating Ringling and SCAD students. I know I can get there, but man, not enough money sucks! I haven't gotten any replies whatsoever on my job apps. Not even emailed rejections :D Suffice to say, frustration. I'm literally at a point where I can't afford to take the bus to do the only thing that keeps me sane, dodgeball. Knowing that I'm unemployed also keeps me from being able to hang out with the coolest group of friends one could ever have. The dreaded moving back in with the parents will happen in 2 months if nothing happens, effectively cutting off any social activities.

On a brighter note, I got to visit the studios of PDI DreamWorks and Pixar. Both amazing in their own respect. PDI (as many of the employees there still liked to be called) is located in Redwood City. It's a really damn cool place, kinda similar to Palo Alto where Facebook is. It's like a big city suburb (Lincoln Park or Lakeview) but shoved together in walking distance and located right along the CAL train. It was a huge contrast to Emeryville, which is a little bit ghetto :D

Oddly enough, Redwood City is located next to an endless sea of wrecked cars and clawbots. If you look one way you see beautiful scenery and hills. If you look the other way... you see Wall-E's depiction of a ravaged Earth. At PDI, they told us that some cars will have gasoline still in the tank, so when the clawbots go to crush them, they explode. In fact, it once got so bad, they had to evacuate everyone from the campus due to the smoke. Speaking of which, what a badass campus. It's shared by about 20 other companies, including the Tomb Raider people, and its just a set of buildings that circle an inner courtyard the size of 8 football fields. In it you'll find a large running track, Olympic sized pool, tennis courts, baseball diamond, soccer field, and a big modern workout facility free to all employees. If you get hungry, a cafe that has any kind of meal you want, meat, vegetarian, vegan, ice cream, with cooks staffed daily at all hours. Mini kitchens everywhere with cereal, drinks, and candy stocked free for all. DreamWorks employees got it good.

The next day I was able to visit Pixar. WOW. The setup was a beautiful sunny day, no clouds, just pristine blue shining down. Go through the gate, got my nametag, parked. Walk to the doors to see a giant Luxo Jr. lamp and a 5 foot tall bouncy "one star" ball. Opened the huge vault doors of the main floor, and walked in. Wow, just like I imagined. It was pretty awe-inspiring. All my doubts and frustrations of being penniless and my reel getting ignored don't matter. The inspiration I got from just being in this place is enough to literally get me through anything. Everyone was incredibly nice, everyone talking, everyone smiling, people eating at the cafe on the left, people looking at the walls of storyboards on the right. The cereal lounge was not as epic as I was thought it would be, though. Lots of variety of cereal, I guess that is what matters.

I was lucky enough to be able to eat lunch with Jeremy Birn, a lighting TD at Pixar and hopefully one day my boss. Who knows. He's the author of the book Lighting and Rendering which has become the bible of this field. He was also my teacher for a CGSociety course I took. Really nice and amazingly talented guy. It was a little funny meeting him in that he was about to go take a group photo outside with the cast and crew of Up... so he was dressed up as the kid from Up. In fact, there were random trees and branches walking around. I was told those were interns.... lucky lucky interns :D

The ultimate moment was walking back outside to do a round of the Pixar campus, and there was Ed Catmull (CEO of Pixar, creator of RenderMan, and one of the founders of Pixar which included him, John Lasseter, and Steve Jobs) and his family in the balcony waving to the 3 of us from across the lawn. Sun shining perfectly down to create an inspirational image in my mind that will never fade from my mind. A huge thanks to Alice, Fran, and Cara for making those studio trips possible.

Will post pictures soon.

GDC & Reel 2.0

2009-03-16T23:01:00.003-05:00

Reel 2.0

Rigging Reel for Track and Failed

In other news, I'm heading off to San Francisco this Wednesday for the Game Developers Conference. Going a bit early since I'm jobless :D Once again, I was chosen as a conference associate who is going to be wearing a bright neon shirt and making sure people don't get into things they aren't supposed to without the right badges. On the up side, free $2000 pass, backstage access to keynote speakers, amazing parties, access to any lecture I want, super discounted fancy suite at the hotel, awesome people, etc.

I've decided to join up Animation Mentor and will be starting that at the end of March. It's great because I can have a full time studio job in the industry (hopefully) while working on this at home at night. I've always loved animation and wanted to learn it as thoroughly as the AM students do, but, never really had the environment to do so. AM is simply the best there is. Nothing compares. All the teachers are industry heavyweights from Pixar, ILM, Dreamworks, Blur, Rhythm and Hues, etc and the students come from all over the world, many already professionals in the industry itself. I'm glad to have been accepted and can't wait to start.

Sundance/Slamdance 2009

2009-01-28T18:13:00.002-06:00

For the last two weeks, I've been in Park City, Utah. Generally, people go to Utah for snowboarding, skiing, and Joe Smith. However, I went to act as a motion graphics artist for a short documentary being made and cut all during Sundance. I was accepted into a program sponsored by Adobe, Dell, and Intel through Real Ideas Studio which takes a bunch of grads from around the world and throws us into teams of four. With the help of mentors doing various stuff in the industry, we make a movie and show it at Slamdance.

When walking to our first meeting, our team saw a bunch of stray dogs, particularly, a confident one named Max owned by Peter Roberts, a really cool guy who lived just down the hill from our studio. We met em, got his permission and enthusiasm, and got to work. One of our mentors mentioned through a video chat that each team would go through 4 stages. Stage 2, storming, would be the stage that causes teams to second guess and finally criticize the idea. As much as every team didn't think this would happen, it did happen, and everyone got through it. It was pretty amazing how right he was about these phases. All in all, thanks to Phase 2, the idea was refined and crunch time came.

Final product is here

During this time, I got to go out to different parties and network. Saw some good movies, too. One of the first movies I saw was called Zombie Girl. It was a documentary about a 12 year old girl who set out to make a full length Zombie movie using actors local to her Texas town. The documentary was great, and afterward, we were able to meet the girl and her mom. Amazingly nice people. Emily Hagins, the zombie girl who was now 16 and working on post of her new ghost movie, was probably the nicest most humble film maker I have ever met. That is saying a lot considering I was in Utah, where taxi drivers are so nice they will actually stop for you in both directions as you walk across the street.... without cursing you out. I really hope she goes on to become a famous director because she deserves every bit of success life has to offer her. Check her out at http://www.cheesynuggets.com

As expected, met a bunch of stars, big whoop. I got Malcolm Kelley (Walt) from Lost to do an ActionBooth jump.

The whole experience was pretty tight. Working with a people from the other side of the world was quite an experience. It's really interesting to see what styles, speech, and ideas people bring from their locales. I recommend anyone who wants to work under pressure in a team of unique people (aka what companies look for), I recommend applying to Real Ideas Studio for the Cannes Film Festival this summer.

Finished Student Reel & GDC 2009

2008-11-12T14:43:00.005-06:00

My Student Reel

This is what I uploaded to Pixar. I sent this and a re-edited version of Track and Failed on DVD to them along with breakdown sheet, cover letter, and resume. Time to start work on March 2008 reel and keep on learning because I am scratching just the surface of all of this. :)

Mr. Derek Katzer applied as well for the production internship. He has the most experience I know of for a college student... and he's good people. I'm pretty confident he'll get the interview, I hope :D If he can get that, he'll easily seal the deal.

Also, GDC CA signups just opened for March 23-27, 2009. It's a great opportunity to meet people and students not only in the game industry but those in the animation and post production world as well. I went to a great talk about lighting last year from a Pixar lighting TD and was amazed to find out about how they setup the lighting in their scenes. No global stuff, just 100s of linked lights.

If you work as a student volunteer "CA" (Conference Associate), you get the $2000 GigaPass for free (in addition to food and rate reduced 5 star hotel). You are really only playing for airfare and $50 a night for hotel. It's a great way to get behind the scenes and opportunities you couldn't get without the right hookups.

http://www.gdconf.com/volunteers/caregistration.php

Also, the SIGGRAPH 2009 student volunteer apps have opened up as well. This year it will be in New Orleans aka awesome parties :D

Obama, reel & HDR stuff

2008-11-07T15:17:00.011-06:00

Chicago was nuts on Tuesday. I work right around Grant Park. After getting off at 6, I was able to drive around with Joe for a bit and see what the city would look like if it were under martial law. I didn't know the CPD had that many squad cars. Homeland security everywhere, it was kinda cool knowing that Obama was about to kick some ass. Sadly I didn't get a ticket to grant park, and I needed to finish rendering my reel.

After a frustrating week of codecs and bad dvd burners, I finally got my student reel burnt and overnighted to Emeryville. I'll get it uploaded in a bit. I'm glad to finally have it done so I can start focusing on reel 2.0, the Kermit T Frog short, and graduating. :D

HDRI - High Dynamic Range Imaging
---------------------------
Anyway, a couple months ago I first played around with High Dynamic Range lighting. HDR is one of the new toys low end users are playing with and is popping up in real time media such as video games. It's seen in the Half Life 2 expansion pack "Lost Coast" as well as newer racing titles. It first was used to present film pictures with a wider dynamic range of exposure, similar to over saturating a digital image. Current use dictates that by taking pictures of the same thing at multiple exposures, it allows additional color information to be stored in a single 32-bit image which can then be composited together in one image. So where as a longer exposure maybe gets you saturated blues, shorter exposures could get you saturated reds or greens. This is great for using a 360° image to act as the indirect and specular light for a 3d scene.

The idea is pretty old. Charles Wyckoff first used it in the 1940s to document nuclear testing. Try taking a picture of a nuke as it goes off.... I'm betting it might be a bit bright without an ND filter, except, it would turn out dark and bland. Paul Debevec took the idea further when he presented a method at SIGGRAPH '97 to take the color information and apply it to 3D environment by allowing the extra color info from multiple exposures to be stored in one 32-bit image file and used by the renderer as needed. A popular utility today called HDR Shop can take those multiple exposures from one camera, compile it into one image, and save that as an .hdr image. In addition, multiple shots can be taken and sewed together to produce a 360° image for use as a giant sky drop for your 3d scene.

Once you put the HDR image into your scene, as let's say, a giant sphere surround your scene, rays of light are cast towards you scene from multiple points on the sphere. The rays take the color information from each point as well as the intensity of the color (thanks to the exposure settings). This is represented as Hue, Saturation, and Value. A "Value" above 1.0 will give you that over exposed light. The more rays cast, the more accurate (but slower). With a few tweaks, this gives you a very nice scene where the lighting and color is pretty damn accurate. This is a great way to composite a 3d model into a real scene.

On the downside, while HDR can be used quickly for reflections, using it as a source of light to "color" your scene is pretty slow. When one of the lighting guys from Pixar spoke last year at GDC, he said they still go into every scene and dish out 100s of lights to make each scene perfect and avoid the all in one lighting solutions. Jeremy Birn, lead lighting TD at Pixar, mentioned in his sweet book " Digital Lighting & Rendering that attempting to light a scene based on the properties of reality (one sun light, light sources at each light bulb) will usually not give you the results you are looking for. You have to go in and fake it with multiple lights that serve different purposes for each area.

HDR is still a good solution if you are doing still imagery, match moving 3d assets in live footage (CG characters in live action movies), or baking the resulting color information down for a non moving objects. The gap is closing, though, in terms of render time. More innovative ways are being presented that allow teams to make use of this realistic lighting option in less time.

Creating an HDR
------------------
Making an HDR image is simple after you do it once. There are two routes to go with this. With and without a gazing ball.

Setup)
Sturdy tripod, still image camera that allows you to set the exposures and turn off auto, optional 30-100mm lens, and an optional gazing ball/chrome ball with no color tint (cheap plastic lawn thing if you want).

For Gazing Ball) Whatever side you want the color information of, go take the picture FROM that side. Aim the camera at the mirror ball so it's centered and takes up as much of the frame as possible without cutting anything off. It's best to get far away, maybe using a telephoto lens, as to hide yourself from the shot. If not, you can clone tool it out if need be later.

For No Ball) Put the tripod at the middle of the shooting area.

Process) Make sure all the automatic settings as well as flash are off. Set your zoom, focus, ISO, aperture, and lock down your tripod so nothing moves. Find the shortest exposure you can find that gives you barely any visibility of the scene. Do the same for a long exposure. Those will be your min and mix. Get a good 3-4 spread between. Even two will be fine as long as they have a good visibility of the scene. What you are looking for is an underexposed, overexposed, and a few variations on normal exposed shots. Don't go too far on each extreme though as pure black or white images are useless. Think of how life look when you open your eyes in the morning and you need to let your eyes adjust to the sunlight. That is the conservative extremes we are looking for.

If you are using a mirror ball, one set of exposed shots is fine. If you want, you can go to the opposite side of the ball and take another set. If you did not use a ball, you can swivel your camera around on the tripod to get all the shots. Make sure you do not change any of the settings and use the same exposure intervals for every set. You can stitch together these shots in photoshop.

After you get the shots.... well, I'm not gonna put a tutorial here right now, but, you can use Photoshop and HDR Shop to get it into an HDR file format from here.

http://www.debevec.org/hdrshop/

Your completed image will eventually look like this - http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/HighResProbes/vr/uffizi.html - If you notice, the tops and bottoms are distorted since this is where the edges of the gazing ball's reflectivity range was... or... where your tripod was situated and what the shot's field of view was if you did not use a ball. However, realize the image you are looking at is only one exposure of the final image. You can increase or decrease the exposure to reveal new details about the image (whats in the dark shadows for instance).

Finally, you can set up a 3d scene using the HDR image as your primary light source, and see what happens.

Guitar update

2008-10-23T06:14:00.003-05:00

Here is what I've been working on lately with RenderMan.

Once I figure out the render pass system I'll throw up a high res version of the full guitar.

Cool SageThumbs Utility as well as RenderMan

2008-10-23T04:23:00.006-05:00

There is a free utility called SageThumbs that allows you to preview images in the windows explorer that otherwise it can't do. I'm talking about everything from .iff to .hdr to .tga to .exr and so on. Only downside is if you have a folder filled with these, it will take a while as it makes a bunch of thumbnails. On the upside, it's better then opening Photoshop and it also acts as an image converter. Install it for the parents so they can open those HDR Christmas pictures and internet jokes from 4 years ago. It's only a matter of time until hamster dance makes a comeback.

I've given myself 12 more days to edit and burn my reel so I can finally get that off to the greatest place on Earth. Nov 7th is Pixar's TD residency deadline but I need to give it some time for the pony to gallop across the great plains. There are a couple shots from awhile back I'd like to tweak and put on there. I'm going to re-edit Track and Failed as well as put in a composting pass piece from it.

** Boring Rendering Tech Talk **

I'm taking my first plunge into Pixar's RenderMan & Artist Tools for Maya (PRMan, Alfred, Slim) and so far so good. Over the last couple weeks, I've been really impressed at the REYES algorithm which, thanks to the genius Ed Catmull and his friend Clark (sure, he can be superman), they came up with a way, decades ago, to literally Render Everything You Ever Saw. What it does is simply takes two faces in space, finds their normal, and creates a new face with the average of that normal. Now, in maya, if you do a smooth mesh, this is what it does. However, with REYES, it does this as many times as needed until each face occupies one pixel. These are called micro polygons. The reason it doesn't slow down is because the entire renderer is based off of this principle. Now of course, this is just the simple answer. Far more goes on that I have no idea about but hopefully will learn someday.

Why does this matter? In real life, everything is smooth. There are no sharp corners like in game engines that render only polygons. The reason edges have highlights to them is because, close up, there are faces making up that corner that will be facing you at some point and will act like a mirror to reflect that light back at you. The wonderful thing about REYES it that it creates such smooth edges in 3D. Everything looks a lot more real and defined. Not everything has to be smooth either. You can still apply REYES and have your cake, too.

To top it off, you can also do rendertime CSG booleans, which can also be smoothed. Say I have a big round atlas stone. Atlas stones have a lot of wear and tear to them since they keep falling off pedestals. Set up some intersecting geomtry and you will get a bunch of perfectly cut chips with a material of your choice applied to them. MUCH easier than trying to model or texture it.

RenderMan handles all the Maya shaders and utilities as well. So it's not required to know how to write a shader in order to make a great shot or animation. However, if you want the full power of it, the shader system is what really makes it shine. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't know how simple it was to use before we decided to go with mental ray last year for the Track & Failed project. However, I'm thankful for the challenges mental ray gave me. It really forced me to learn the ins and outs of how each shader and mental ray interacts rather then just having blind faith in the process. It was hard, but fun :)

** No more boring rendering tech talk **

Ready to roll

2008-09-01T13:03:00.004-05:00

School is nearing an end and graduation is in November so it's time to start pushing this portfolio thing through :) I'm happy with what I've achieved and learned up to this point but I know there is a long way I have to go to match and beat the talent that companies such as Pixar hire. There are a lot of workflow things I need to learn in order to match the material coming out of Ringling, UC, and such. Did you know Nick Pitera, the guy who can sing Disney songs, most notably A Whole New World and Part of your World from both the male and female role, works at Pixar? He just graduated from Ringling down in Florida with a BFA in animation and his senior thesis was amazing! He made everything from the concept art to the character/rig, animation, environments, and rendering it all together. Not to mention he voiced it :P He really is a huge inspiration to me and I'm confident I'll reach that ultimate goal. I wish him success at Pixar and hope to work with him one day :)

At this point, its a matter of showing them what I'm capable of and what I can bring to the team. This fall I'll be taking an indy study with Noah Hornberger, a shading TD who worked on Wall*E. In the spring he really was a lifesaver as far as Track & Failed went. We were able to resolve a lot of problems on the spot regarding rendering. As I put together my portfolio for November, he'll be helping me figure out the best way to present it as well as teach me more about what he knows. He is a really cool guy. DePaul is pretty damn lucky to have gotten him. I'll post my work as it's done and welcome any crits and comments!

rawr

2007-01-29T14:59:00.000-06:00

Cinderella Ottoman :O

2007-01-29T03:33:00.000-06:00

Here are the 3 finished characters (Cindy, the God Father, and the Prince)

Chracter Concepts - preproduction

2007-01-26T04:55:00.000-06:00

Fairy Godmother/father

Prince

Cinderella

Stuff I drew for Ottoman Empire idea

2007-01-15T01:19:00.000-06:00

Inspirations :O

2007-01-07T23:05:00.000-06:00

It's very hard to choose three things that I feel inspire me. My interests in animation have been primarily sound and environment. As far as art and animation goes; I love complex architecture, nature, music, and original storytelling. Mixing these all together I have tons of inspirations, but why is it so hard? It's because I want them to be the right three. Here is my best attempt to do so starting from my early years.

Snoopy was probably the earliest animation I ever saw, even before Disney, when I was still sleeping in a crib. Watching this in my mom's arms on TV for the first time is one of my earliest memories that I can still remember when I was around 1, and while its not apparent on youtube, the lights changing to the beat and rhythm of the music was so amazing to me. As I grew up, I was all about Snoopy. One of my favorites, Bon Voyage Charlie Brown, was the story about how Snoopy and the gang travels to France. It combined great music and sound production with beautiful backgrounds and immersive storytelling.

Besides school, friends, and sports, computer and video games were a huge part of my life growing up. Besides the Apple IIGS or IBM PCs, my first game console was a Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the game that I played religiously. The music was great, animation was spot on, level design was fast and flowing, and the game just made me smile whenever I played it. I remember one night when my parents had the neighbors over for the annual New Year's Party and I was in the basement spending hours on Casino Zone trying to get as many rings as possible by jumping into the slot machine. Damn, gambling IS addictive.

I became serious about wanting to go into the game development industry every since I played Quake for the first time. Realizing the stories you could tell in any atmospheres you dream up could now be done made me want to know everything I could about how it was done. Quake was amazing because it was so easy to make a little modification to the game to make it something so different. Nearly every server had a different unique mod never played before. It was fun to see what new game you were going to play with other people. It's as if you're a player for a team and each stadium you go to has a different modification of baseball, basketball, football, or whatever you play. Too bad those days don't exist anymore (originality and ease of modification has long since been thrown out the window). Anyways, each mod or map added a new atmosphere, art, sound, and music to the mix. Most of the originally shipped Quake levels was based off of Gothic architecture. It was all set in a dark atmosphere. As time went on, people began putting up levels that challenged this norm, were unique, creative, and edgy. It was very reminiscent of progressive film and animation, Norman Mclaren type of stuff. I'm ranting...

Hi, I'm Tim. Welcome to my blog. 8]

2007-01-05T14:49:00.000-06:00

My name is Tim Lobes, I'm currently a senior in the game development program at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. My focus is modeling & animation with a minor in digital cinema. So I've decided to make a blog about my works in game development, level design, animation, and other related items. Who knows, maybe I can get a job from it. I'll be honest, though, the real reason behind starting this blog is thanks to Aussie ninja Scott Roberts who is teaching Pre-production Art (ANI 220) . Thanks mate. Enjoy ;)