| <<Ben Page |
04/25/07
It is DONE! Too tired for words. Here it is. 32.19MB. Happy downloading.
FINAL MFA COMPUTER ART THESIS ANIMATION: PYGMALION & GALATEA
Ben---
04/14/07
04/13/07
I LOVE MY WORK!!! I learned how to make PIXIE DUST tonight in class. It's SO BEAUTIFUL! I'm just amazed. I love this class, I love this teacher! Just had to try it out before getting some sleep. In the middle of animating my next scene, and I may have solved my "flying paper" problem so you might see that when he's cutting and not little particle dots.
And here's a gold version for a new friend, Lauren. Lauren's Gold
Long day animating tomorrow. More updates then, and I heard from Van Dyke (my uncle and composer) that he has finished the music and should be sending it to me soon via FTP. I LOVE MY LIFE!!!!
Ben---
THE MUSIC IS IN! This is so friggin' fun! Here's a lo-res updated animatic with music. This one's big, 38.5 MB, so I apologize for that, but the more actual animation I do, the larger the file. HOORAY FOR VAN DYKE PARKS!!! I'll get your name up in peuce, just like you asked.
04/12/07
Just getting to sleep. It's 12:30 pm. Big night for animation. Thesis postcards came out. I didn't make the cut. Understandable. I didn't have any work done at the time and I was trying to pass off that I had. Oh well. My name's on the bill. Now all I have to do is live up to its promise.
Here's the latest. - 16.20MB
It's getting hard to keep the file size down. I apologize for that. I'll start leaving out the beginning section next time.
I get to learn how to make Pixie Dust tonight in class! WOOHOO!
Ben---
Oh. Here's a pretty picture. The hands weren't placed correctly, but it was just a test of the "collage" I pieced together of Galatea. The proportions are purposely off in the collage, since he's taped it together. I still haven't made a tape dispenser. Who knows. Maybe I'll leave that as one of the "great unknown's" in my piece. "Where the hell did he get the tape from?" "I don't know. Maybe he has a secret compartment in his belly or something. He is made of wood, you know."
You can tell I haven't slept.
04/11/07
The last week. This is it. It's due on Monday. GACK! Had an incredibly difficult night last night trying to make a printer print, off all the craziness. I'm finally happy with the result. Haven't updated in a bit so there are a few updates in the latest animatic clip. I started this clip from the beginning, so if you're tired of watching the beginning, just skip toward the end. I stopped it a few scenes after the animation ends, to spare you all my drawings. You can look at the previous entry animatic link if you want to see all that.
Latest Animation - 8.31MB
I found out I present on Friday, April 27 at 7pm (the last presentation day, thank God). The address is 209 E 23rd Street, NY, NY 10010 (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues). The closest subway is the 6 train, which will take you to Park Ave and 23rd. Head East on 23rd, past the 7-11 and Gramercy Theatre until you see the SVA flower logo flags flying. The amphitheatre is on the 3rd floor to the left of the top of the stairs.
So there you have it. This is it. Do or die. I hope I make it. God, I have so much work to do.
Ben---
04/08/07
Happy Easter. Just watched my daughter go through her basket, tell the story of how she saw the Easter Bunny last night and she showed us how he hopped around and hid eggs, and watched her do her Easter Egg Hunt,... all through video chat. Yes, I'm still at work, going on my 7th day away from home sleeping under my desk. A lot of work done, though. Here is what may be the final animatic, with the final scene "storyboarded" in 3D (I'll go back over them after my thesis is over in pencil for my storyboarding class before the end of the semester). So, Van Dyke, other than closing credits, this is the final animatic as I see it. Again, I'm sorry for the delays, but I've been cramming to get this done. Hope it's enough time.
So, here it is. -- 11.16MB
Again, let me know if you can't see it and I'll see if I can get it in a different compression.
Going to bed at 10:13am, hoping to wake up before dark so I can get some work done,... again.
Ben---
04/06/07
http://www.cafepress.com/mousemanimation
Products related to my thesis animation. Go buy a few hundred! I already had the store, saw the pics I was using for my aphroditematch.com site and thought how cool it would be to have some product! Who knows? Maybe I'll make a buck or two from some family members!
I have gotten more work done, but I'm too tired to post. Sleep. Big day tomorrow.
Ben---
04/05/07
Hap-py Birth-a-day-a to you,... Hap-py Birth-a-day-a to you,... Happy BIRTH-A-DAY dear the-love-of-my-life-Cyn-thi-ahhhhhhh! Happy Birth-day tooo-ooooOOOO-OOoooOOOOOOOO.........yoOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! (Sung like the Stork in Dumbo.)
It's 5:30am on your birthday. Do you know where your husband is? He ain't sleeping beside you and he ain't making you your well-deserved breakfast in bed. (Can you say raincheck?) Well,.... after saying MANY times how tired he was, the Diet Lime Pepsi kicked in and he got a second wind. So,... the fruits of tonight's labor:
Animatic Scene 1 Shots 1-7 - 5.72MB
See how the file size is getting bigger? That means I'm gettin' work done! 8=-) And as much of a roll that I'm on, if I don't get some sleep, I'm gonna be rocked tomorrow. I need to get OUT of this animation groove and finish my storyboard! Perhaps tomorrow I'll get on that. I was just kind of in the middle of a section and wanted to see it done.
04/04/07
Tomorrow's my wife's birthday. Will I see her? Not likely. The best present I can give her is to finish this on time and graduate. I know her blog says "IMO it does not even matter at all if he graduates this year or next" but I still feel I have to try. Our life will be so much easier in many ways if I just get this done. So, again I'm up 'til quarter of 6, and here's the next update on the animatic. I've spared you the rest of the animatic until I get it done, for both repetition's sake and hard drive space.
Animatic Scene 1 Shots 1-6 - 3.42MB
It's been an interesting exercise this time. I had everything animated, had been previewing it the whole time to make sure my timing was good, and even though I'd been checking it, when I watched this scene in its entirety, I felt like I was watching a late 1800's flick where everything was on fast forward. And, as nice as "scaling keyframes" is, it kinda sucks when you have to do it for every little thing you control. Although, I just remembered a "keyframe lattice" tool that might have made things easier. Always the case, huh? Oh well.
Going to Curious Pictures AGAIN for class tomorrow (tonight). Maybe I'll take some blank discs and force them to burn a copy of the motion capture data from my last visit since they have still failed to send it to me. After all, I was the one in the funny suit, making the dinosaur riverdance (you didn't see me do it. haha. (inside joke)). I've been wanting to use it to play with MotionBuilder. If you can do that software, you can write your own ticket AND salary! Here's hopin'.
04/03/07
I've had more to show, I just haven't had time to put it up, and now I don't
know what I forgot to put up. In the meantime, I have started taking time off
of work to work on my animation. It's been quite a fruitful evening. First of
all, an image to show the completed, unrendered version of the Cafe exterior.
The green is where the windows are. That type of glass texture (dielectric,
the mental ray glass texture) doesn't show clear until it renders, but it's
what created the "all-glass" cafe from below's entry, so I trust the
outcome of that. Blah blah blah here's the image:
The bushes, trees and buildings (other than the cafe) were created using Maya's
Paint Effects. All the little dots on the ground are representative of actual
grass that will render out in the final image. For workability's sake, I've
reduced the grass down to show only 1% of what will be rendered, otherwise the
scene gets extremely slow to work with. But what would all this grandness be
without problems? Well, here it is. I started rendering this, 1 frame only,
using the Maya terminal's render command. It told me it found 8 CPUs on the
network to work with, which is great cause I didn't think I'd figured out how
to do that, but I have installed Maya on some of the machines at work for that
purpose, so hooray. The problem is I started that single frame render at like
midnight. It's now 5:40am and it hasn't budged since then. I don't know if it's
actually rendering or what, but I don't want to stop it cause if it looks great,
that's really the only image I need for that establishing shot and I'll be done
with that and be able to move on. So I'll wait a bit more.
Now for the GOOD stuff! I've finished another scene! Yes, folks, that's right! He DOES actually animate!
Updated Animatic with new animation (not much different, but hey). - 3.65MB
And here's a few pics from recent:
So that's it for now. Realized through this that I copied over my animatic After Effects folder with an older version so all I have of the second half of my animatic images is a low-res movie. All my scans are gone. Thank God I have the actual storyboard! Gonna be a bitch to re-do all that so I'll just have to go with the low-res movie for my remaining animatic, which I WILL have done soon. I have to. Van Dyke's waiting on me.
Love you all.
Ben---
04/01/07
April Fools. Maya 7 for Mac and Mental Ray don't like Paint Effects. Rendered this in version 8.0 when the same file would error out in 7.0.
Paint Effects made
the bushes, in case you were wondering.
Exhausted. going to sleep for a bit.
Ben---
03/29/07
Ok. So major problems with this cafe. I created the windows by using polygon
cubes and intersecting the cube of the "store," thus cutting out "holes"
in the geometry rather than cut the polygons up into divisions and deleting
the faces where the windows go. BIG DIFFERENCE!!! It has caused major issues
with mapping my textures on. Example:
All that really small brick is where the window should be. And believe me, there
is no geometry there. Why does it render you ask? Ask Mental Images, creators
of Mental Ray. Cause it doesn't render that way in Maya Software Render. So
I delete the whole wall and, since the windows are already placed, I recreate
the polygons from scratch. Quite a pain, let me assure you, cause I have inner
and outer walls, plus ledges to deal with.
<backStory>So, I had previously had an issue with a texture just propagating
itself among whatever geometry it wanted; i.e. the pediment frieze decided it
wanted to be all over the front and side walls. I fixed that problem and ended
up not using the pediment frieze image up there anyway because it just didn't
look clean enough with the logo up there. </backStory>
So I'm finished recreating the front and side walls. All seems well. I've redone the UV mapping for inside and outside walls so that the brick looks remotely continuous and I'm applying a glass texture for my windows. So I do a final test render before I go to bed (er... sleeping bag) and out comes a strange resemblance to the 58th Street NYC Apple Store Entrance:
Now here's the thing. I'm really peeved! I've worked hard on it, dangit! GAWD THAT LOOKS COOL! And I can JUSTIFY IT by saying, well hey! It's modeled after the Sanctuary of Aphrodite. It is an open-air temple. DO I KEEP IT???? Good goddess, I'm tired. No more dealy. It's quarter to 7am.
I sure hope I figure this out soon.
Ben---
03/27/07
Been working a lot on finalizing details and missing pieces. Going through my animatic and seeing what's in there that I haven't modeled yet so that I can animate without having to stop mid-flow to model something I forgot or left out. Also trying to finish my StarBacchus Internet Cafe so that he can have somewhere to go to at the end, and also so I can finish my storyboard and animatic since I use the 3D models as guides for camera angles, etc. My latest quick render test for the external shot:
As you can see, there are render glitches that I haven't yet tried to figure out what they are (the black boxes along the edges of the windows). Most likely just need more Final Gather rays or something. The model is based on the remains of the Sanctuary of Aphrodite in Kouklia, Cyprus. (See? All that research WASN'T for nothing!) By the way, you can't really tell from here, but the frieze above the windows is an actual frieze that was done over with "wooden character detail" so that there aren't suddenly humans up on the side of the building. Notice the jointed elbows and carved faces. Hard to tell, but it's there.
I already have tables and lighting fixture made, though they're not in this render. I'll be making a counter and perhaps a menu sign for over the counter just to give it that "I really am a cafe, not just a model that was done at the last minute" look. I'll probably have a duplicate of one of my wooden people behind the counter leaning on her hand asleep or something just to add realism that this is, in fact, a business, maybe one more person sitting in the background reading a newspaper or something. Depends on time, since I'm running severely short. AND, of course, I'll need some environment so that this cafe doesn't look like it's in the Matrix or something.
Anywho, gotta go to class.
Love and luck,
Ben---
03/21/07
I LOVE MY WORK!!! God, I'm having so much FUN! And my wife is SO friggin' helpful. Here's the deal. There's little loose ends in my animation that need to be tied up,... a texture here, a website graphic there, etc. So I'm going through my animatic as it stands and using it as a checklist to get things taken care of. So I get the book texture done and the book animatable, and I get to the point where my character goes to the AskPlato.net and AphroditeMatch.com websites. So, I gotta build websites, something I was trying to get out of so I could focus on 3D. The cool part is, using Snapz Pro X, I can record my actions on the computer screen so all I have to do is make a faux website or 3 and make it so they act like I'm searching for the perfect girl. No biggie. Buttons only have to look like buttons and they go from one site to the next. I already have the domains so it'll be perfect! Well, today I made AskPlato.net and the logo for AphroditeMatch.com (look at http://www.match.com and Google image search for AskJeeves (since Jeeves was sued out of the logo for unlawful usage) for the reference material I'm using). So, here it is: http://www.askplato.net . Ask your question, submit or "Get Lucky," and go to the future site for AphroditeMatch.com . All logos wouldn't be NEAR where they are if it weren't for my wife, Cynthia. Thank God I married someone smart, beautiful AND creative! You really are the best. I owe you my life.
Ben---
03/19/07
Ok. So another night I'm up 'til 6:30am working. Finishing up my storyboard and animatic for timing. I haven't yet modeled the StarBacchus cafe yet so I'm going to wait to finish the animatic until after I have the models done. It's just the easiest way for me to come up with interesting camera angles and I can do a quick render and practically trace the storyboard on my flatscreen. Plus, I'm saving the files out from each shot so that the pose is saved, and I'm really liking the poses I'm coming up with, as hopefully you'll see on the updated animatic. PLEASE email me with comments on timing, if you think things are too fast or too slow at points. I have to have the timing done correctly so that Van Dyke, who's doing my music, can get everything done and I don't have to worry about the music being too short.
So, here's the updated animatic. It's 4.5MB.
03/15/07
The ides of March. Beware! (Ceasar. Go do some homework.)
A couple quicktimes of rendering exercises for my Production Issues: Animation class. The assignment was to render an indoor scene with 1 or more windows, lighting coming in from outside. Had to be rendered using anything BUT Global Illumination (I used Final Gather and Ambient Occlusion) and then one WITH Global Illumination. (GI is physics based lighting with actual photons bouncing around your scene. Final Gather is more complicated to explain. Don't have time to write about it here just now.) This has been incredibly helpful in helping me come up with how my scene is going to render. So. 2 movies, 2 images. And one additional I did just to show where my windows were since they weren't in the rendered scene.
Final Gather - 140KB
Global Illumination - 141KB
Interesting enough, I actually found a higher quality setting in the lights, setting their sampling from 6 to 8 (since 7 has no affect), but the rendering went from 15min/frame to 50! Starting rendering yesterday afternoon, I wouldn't have been done rendering in time for class tonight so I had to bring the sampling back down and adjust a couple other settings too.
Anyway, I know I haven't updated my animation vids lately, but with my artist's statement, bio and short artist's statement due, I've been doing a lot of writing. Plus, having to redo my storyboard and animatic has been very time consuming and exhausting. I'll have updates on that soon enough. This has been quite an experience so far, I can tell you that much.
Ben---
03/07/07
FINALLY! I'm animating! First scene is done. Not much, but I'm happy with the
outcome.
Here's a playblast for Scene 1.
(about 128KB. Not too big.)
And, just finished (430am), another playblast
for Scene 2. (280KB) And no, you're not seeing things. The piece of paper (in
bright pink, since it was selected at the time of playblast) does do an additional
little move toward the end as the character "sits down" at the desk
off-screen. Just a little extra touch. =-) I'll get a better playblast up later.
Like after I wake up.
PLEASE feel free to email me feedback
on timing, acting, etc. I need every bit of it.
And here's keyboard I created in a couple hours. Chose white as another obvious homage to Apple. And it WORKS, TOO! Every key is set so that it can only move -.01 and back. Now, if I can only get it to work dynamically and respond to the touch of my character,... ideas in mind, but we'll see if it works. Not there yet. Soon, though!
03/02/07 (6:36 AM)
Been a long night. Getting my new animatic in order, well... at least the first part of it, anyway. Gonna get a couple Zzzz's. Work 8am-11pm tomorrow. Gonna work work work.
Here's the animatic so far.
Ben---
02/25/07
AskPlato.net lives as well. Very exciting times, these.
02/25/07
StarBacchus.com lives.
(Just says "Coming Soon..." but it lives just the same.)
I have a logo for the faux internet cafe up online. The domain has resolved.
Ben---
02/21/07
More images. Just testing renders as I continue modeling.
Did I mention the scissors CUT? Hooray for Set Driven Key and an invisible Locator!
02/15/07
WORKING WORKING WORKING!!!
Last semester! Updates will come more slowly now. Here's a pic I submitted for the Thesis Postcard collage created by the MFA Computer Art Department.
Ben---
UPDATING AT THE TOP NOW. - January 2007
I figured noone wants to scroll through 2 years worth of old news so I'll be updating up here from now on.... for all you faithful readers.
The shocker: I've reworked my story. All my hullabaloo (props to Dad and Mom) about telling the original story and keeping it in ancient times has gone by the wayside. Realism is out. Why? Story, my friend. Story. Ovid had a great idea. But he told it in a dull way. My teacher Kevin Brownie (storyboard artist for the Beavis and Butthead movie, among many others) grilled it into my head last semester what I already knew. Without a good story, you have nothing. So I'm bringing everything up to modern times (something I thought I'd never do), kept references to ancient times, threw in a computer and the internet (with props to the way I met my wife), and Voilá. A modern story so captivating it'll make you want at least another 27 seconds more. So I've been modeling like crazy, after a Christmas break that had me doing nothing but website stuff so that I could focus on my animation during the semester. Needless to say, I have alot of work to do, but I think my new story will shorten things a bit and allow me to not go crazy on details, which realism will make you do.
So,... here are a couple renders of what I've been working on. Been trying to get some good lighting and work with Mental Ray, Global Illumination and Final Gather, to see what I could come up with while I'm working. These are large renders so you may have to scroll to see them. They're rendered in the render window of Maya and then saved as files so there are sometimes glitches when done that way. Anyway, here they are.
Whole room with dramatic lighting
And now, for the piéce de résistence,... (sp?) - November 2006
Pygmalion and Galatea - 7.35 MB - My thesis. This is the animatic (animated storyboard). Incredible thanks to my incredibly supportive wife, Cynthia. I could not have gotten so far without her.
Final Research Paper - 3.34 MB - My final research paper turned in Nov 22, 2006. 26 pages (including Bibliography, Title Page, etc.) Biggest paper I've ever written. You know, I've never written a paper in 3 stages. It's kinda hard to continue writing on a subject when you've already felt like you wrote yourself out on the previous iteration. Thank GOD this part is over with! Now ON TO THE ANIMATION! (Right click to download or just click if you have a built-in PDF reader in your web browser.)
INTERNSHIP TIME! - Summer 2006
I spent my summer taking an internship for credit at Tiny
Mantis game design
company working as the Lead Animator for 3D. My main goal was to complete an
opening animation for a web-based video game. The video game, Slo-bot, is
a medieval fighting game where two giant robots, designed like suits of armor,
fight each other. What's so great about that? Well, you don't play the robot,
you play the engineer that built it. Your job is to run around inside this
behemoth pulling levers and shoveling coal (since it's run off of steam)
making the robot do your bidding. If you get hit, you lose pieces of the
walkway so you have to jump across, slide down poles, etc, to make sure you
don't get destroyed first. It's a fun, 2D flash-based game that will be free
and open to the public as soon as all of us interns get our act together
and finish the darn thing (as it's made COMPLETELY by interns).
My responsibilities were optimizing the main robot in Flash, storyboarding the
opening animation, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, smoke effects, paint
effects for grass and trees, .... pretty much everything having to do with the
creation of an animation. So,... here are a couple of pics from the production
of this endeavor.
News Flash:
For all you people out there having "codec" issues, I have recompressed
all files using
the H.264 compression that is included in the latest Quicktime version. You
can get that
here: (MAC) (PC)
GEOMETRIX! - 105KB - April 2006 - Flash animation set to music for my Animation Culture class.
Used Soundtrack to create the music about a year ago.
Ben carries box up STAIRS! - 486KB - April 2006 - Wow. Now we're talking REAL adventure! You wouldn't believe what this
guy can do! Pretty soon he'll be able to SLICE, DICE and make JULIAN FRIES! (animation's not what I'd like it to
be on this one. I ran out of time on the deadline.)
The further adventures of Ben (from the first exercise) - 473KB - March 2006 - This exercise is currently rendered
with some glitches. It is composed of 2 seperate renderings, which had different lighting, and has
some duplicate frames. This will be dealt with soon. Just wanted to post it, cause it's fun.
Vertigo LipSync using Magpie Pro - 1.54MB - March 2006
My first Stop Motion - 4.51 MB- February 2006
My first Masters animation exercise blooper - 1.3MB - February 2006
My first Masters animation exercise - 1.46MB - January 2006