Pistol Shrimp

Today one of my students introduced me to the Pistol Shrimp.  These guys have a big claw that builds up pressure and then snaps shut so fast that they blast water at a victim fast enough to atomize the water and create a bubble as hot as the surface as the sun that shoots out at 60 mph!  Apparently Mantis Shrimp do something similar.  I wouldn't have believed it if you described it to me, so check out the video below.

This first video has some wonderful dramatized sound effects.




Thanks, Pat, you can bet there will be one of these babies in the show.  Amazing!

Desktop Bkg - Tanked

Desktop Background  -  1920 x 1080 .jpg

For those of you eagerly awaiting, here's an image for your desktop, in full HD!!!  Show your support and download away.

Chugging along...

The trailer is in a great place now.  We're pretty much done with all animation, and it came out great!  Lighting and compositing is our main focus now, and we're making steady progress in all areas.

Above is an in-progress preview of one shot, animated by Elissa Peterson, lit and comped by Christopher Tichenor, crab rigging by David Suroviec, crab textures by Janine LaBar, particulate matter by Christopher Lee.

I can't wait to share all we've been working on.  Stay tuned!

Progress Update!

So after a couple years of focusing my energy on my family and paid work (with little to no progress on this project) I'm happy to say that in a couple months all visual elements should be finished for the teaser trailer!

 

(color key from teaser trailer)

I will be directing the Group Project class at Ex'pression College in the coming term where the students will focus on building assets, shading, animating, lighting, and compositing the final piece.  This should mean great things for the quality of the project overall and I'm excited to get started.  I'll post the highlights on this blog once the class is under way.  As soon as I find a composer and get this thing all edited together, look for the trailer here on this blog in the coming months.

So to the exactly six people who follow this blog, stay tuned.  It's gonna happen.  It's gonna be awesome.

Progress Update

Here's a screencap of a compositing test from the other day to prove that I'm still working on the trailer.
This month I have a good bit more time than usual to focus on this project, which is enjoyable. I've just about finished the first shot's animation (several schools of fish) and am doing a few test renders of the ocean surface and lightning flashes to find my workflow for this project. I have animation done for a few other shots, and a whole lot of in-progress ones, so I look forward to it all coming together a bit more this month. Anyway, let's hope for more regular updates in the coming weeks!

Starfish Ninja spotted in Golden Gate Park

A week or so ago, my wife and I took our son to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, where I was secretly doing research for this project. Underneath the rain forest is the aquarium where I snapped the below photos. They have a tank where you can reach in and "pet" the starfish and sea urchins. Little Joe didn't have any interest in reaching into the tank. When I took a look at what was just beneath the surface, I understood why.

Aaaaand we're back.

Hey, sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've been busy with a couple of other projects, one of which is a video game I worked on...College Lacrosse 2010 for X-Box. But that project has wrapped, so I'm back to working on this trailer, and excited to be back.

To give you something more to look at, I present you...the Giant Squid. Pretty much every underwater action flick needs a huge, bad-ass giant squid. And given that our hero starfish is about 1/10 the size of the squid's eye, should make for an interesting match.

P.S. This isn't an actual render, just a screencap of the model from Maya with a quick paint-over in photoshop. It'll look much nicer in the trailer.

That's all for today, I'm getting another post ready which I'll fire out in a few days. Until then...wha-cha!

Fishies!

And even more proof that I'm working on this thing! Here are some fish I just finished. I'll be throwing them in the background of a few shots so they don't need much detail. Fun little guys. I enjoy imagining what voices they'd have. What do you hear?

Anemenemeny

early anenome test

I've been hesitating to rig these anenomies, due to all the joints needed for the tendrils. And then yesterday the new Blender release candidate went online, which presented a solution.

Etch-A-Ton: Blender's armature sketching feature

There's a fantastic new feature called Etch-a-Ton that allows the user to draw joints onto a model, and it places the joints correctly inside the volume of the mesh. Since I'm animating this project in Maya, I laid out the joints and exported the models and bones as a .fbx, which I could bring into Maya, ready for rigging. Check out these videos to see some of the other neat uses for this feature such as rig retargeting.

Auto Fish Rig test

A while back I was experimenting on setting up simple fish rigs to put in the background of a few shots in the trailer. I was looking for a setup where I would only have to pull a single control around to animate the whole fish. This would make them very fast to animate to an acceptable level so I can spend my time polishing the character animation. The preliminary results do leave something to desired, but I thought I'd share my first proof of concept.

For the more technical readers, the fish's deformation is driven by sets of dynamic hair curves generated in maya. Those curves drive spline IKs on the joints to which the meshes are skinned. Once the trailer is released, I'll take some time to go more into a few of the interesting rigs that Dave Suroviec and I designed for this project.

And lastly, I added a little widget on the right side of this blog for those of you who actually follow this thing. So I can get a better idea of how many of you are out there, take your clicking finger over to the FOLLOW THIS BLOG link and show your ninja spirit.

The starfish thanks you. And then disappears in a poof of shimmering smoke.