A Technical Art Blog
Size Matters.
Theaters presenting Avatar in 2D and Real3D, show a cropped 2.35:1 version, while 3D IMAX shows the original work at 1.85:1. You might not think that this matters, but you are losing a lot of the image in the crop. If you want to see it as the artists/director intended it looks like IMAX 3D is your only option.
I haven’t posted in a while, lots of changes going on, I left ILM after Avatar, and have moved back to Germany where my girlfriend is finishing medical school. I promise a good tech art post soon (my pick for tech art game of the year!) I look to be rejoining Crytek next year, working on Crysis 2.
FAIL.
Being digital artists, photo frames might look like attractive ways to showcase art and content, these devices are being pushed more and more. I got HPs ‘flagship’ model as a present, it retails for $300! I was so excited, but not for long. Unable to find any info online especially reviews, I thought I would post this here.
Lets first just get some things out of the way before I talk about the quality of what the device DOES do lets talk about what it does not, yet claims to do.
The following quotes are from the HP site itself:
The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access
weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations.
This is just untrue. There is no integrated web browser. It has three web ‘apps’ on it: SnapFish, Pandora, Facebook. That’s it. It does not read RSS feeds, or do much of anything you probably want it to do, simple things like display news or recipes.
Stay current with social network sites like Facebook
‘Like’ facebook? There is only Facebook: nothing else.
Be organized with a built-in alarm clock & calendar.
This is laughable. Wondering how to sync the calendar with outlook or google or anything; maybe even just add appointments, I finally consulted their online documentation. Here, seriously, is the feature list for the calendar ‘app’:
View the current month, press right or left to view the next or previous month.
BWAH HA HA HA… *sigh*
Easy wireless access to your digital entertainment
It shows an icon for a video, but actually; it doesn’t stream video, it plays some videos, only at specific resolutions from specific codecs; off physical media.
Touch-enabled controls—Get fast, easy access to information and entertainment with simple touch controls embedded in the display
This is referring to some buttons around the bezel of the screen and is just so untrue they would have to change the marketing campaign in Europe or get sued. This does however remind me of the old In Living Color sketch where the handcapped superhero always says he is ‘not handicapped, but HANDY-CAPABLE!’.
Videos—Watch home movies and video clips in full screen – Its simple!
It’s as simple as taking your video, recompressing it to a supported video codec, resizing it to a specific resolution, and then physically transferring it ot the device –so simple grandma could do it! (with gordian knot, virtualdub, CCCP, and all those other video tools she has)
Resolution
The thing is a frickin’ 300 dollar photo frame, but it’s resolution is 800 x 480, this equates to 0.38 megapixels, at the time the frame came out, the average cheap point n shoot ranks 9 to 10 megapixels: this is well over twenty times the resolution of the screen!
Because of this, it can take 10 full seconds to load a photo and downsample it to 800 pixels from it’s original resolution. This makes browsing photos a pain, and loading photos from your camera cards nearly useless. Power users will use photoshop or xnView to batch all their content to 800 pixels.
There is aliasing galore, as 800 pixels is the resolution of many phones and handheld devices, not 13″ photo frames!
UPDATE: I have talked to HP and done some hunting, uncovering something that is just ridiculous: The DreamScreen 130 has a 1280×800 resolution. However, HPs software only works ar 800×480, the resolution of the cheapest screen, (the 100). To get around this, they upscale to 1280 pixels. This means they down sample your image to 800 pixels, then they upscale it with a software upscaler, so your pictures will ALWAYS LOOK LIKE JAGGY AND SOFT: NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. This is a joke, HP should be ashamed of themselves.
Notice the terrible artifacts from the 1280 image, which was downscaled by the frame software, then upscaled to fit the panel.
Color Reproduction
It is a cheap TN panel, the gamma of your images widely fluctuates depending on the angle they are viewed. I would be ok if they had a low resolution but used a nice IPS, SIPS, or OLED panel, but this is just unremarkable. The black point is a dark shade of grey, in all seriousness, the panel quality seems on par with something like the panels they use in the dashboard of a Prius, or other industrial UI readouts.
Pretty terrible banding
Pretty bad black point
Pretty bad white point
Pretty mediocre contrast
Streaming / Network
Streaming requires lots of Microsoft Windows Media software and services running on a PC server in your house that is always on, they relied on this instead of doing the footwork themselves. If you were under the impression from their marketing that it could read files off samba shares or work with Macintosh, you would be wrong.
Software / User Interface
The software is pretty terrible. It is very clunky and unresponsive. Many times it does not recognize that physical media has been inserted and must be rebooted. The UI graphics themselves show terrible compression artifacts.
When you bring up the on screen keyboard to type in, say, the name of the device, it clearly shows buttons like [HTTP://], [www.], [.com], and others to make it easier to browse the web, however there is no web browser! There are other places in the print ads and UI itself that refer to features the device just does not have!
“Touch Screen”
The device claims to have a ‘touch sensitive screen’, and IT DOES! A small area around the bezel of the screen has botons that can be pressed/touched! This product is in NO WAY a touch screen device, and has no touch sensitivity, other than the buttons on the bezel, the marketing is a lie.
Open Source?
On the CD that ships with it, they have a ton of readme files showing they used a lot of GPL’d code, however the source installer did not work on my windows 7, x64.
Pros:
Cons:
Many, many people are having weird, buggy camera issues where you rotate a view and it snaps back to the pre-tumbled state (view does not update properly). There are posts all over, and Autodesk’s official response is “Consumer gaming videocards are not supported”. Really? That’s basically saying: All consumer video cards, gaming or not, are unsupported. I have had this issue on my laptop, which is surely not a ‘gaming’ machine. Autodesk says the ‘fix’ is to upgrade to an expensive pro-level video card. But what they maybe would tell you if they weren’t partnered with nVidia is: It’s an easy fix!
Find your Maya ENV file:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\maya\2009-x64\Maya.env
And add this environment variable to it:
MAYA_GEFORCE_SKIP_OVERLAY=1
Autodesk buried this information in their Maya 2009 Late Breaking Release Notes, and it fixes the issue completely! However, even on their official forum, Autodesk employees and moderators reply to these draw errors as follows:
Maya 2009 was tested with a finite number of graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, with drivers from each vendor that provided the best performance, with the least amount of issues. (at the time of product launch). A list of officially qualified hardware can be found here: http://www.autodesk.com/maya-hardware. Maya is not qualified/supported on consumer gaming cards. Geforce card users can expect to have issues. This is clearly stated in the official qualification charts mentioned above.
Transformer’s 2 was rated by critics at around a 18% as shown on Rottentomatoes.com. This is possibly one of the lowest ratings for a hugely expensive summer blockbuster that I can remember. This makes the movie less well reviewed than Species III, Rambo IV, or even Rush Hour III.
But it has now shown to have had the second largest opening weekend of all time; raking in over 200 million dollars domestically and 390 million worldwide in it’s first 5 days. This is within 1% of the current reigning champion, Batman: The Dark Knight. Paramount’s national exit polling revealed that more than 90% of those surveyed said the new movie was as good as or better than the first film. About 67% of moviegoers polled said the film was “excellent,” an even better score than that generated by Paramount’s “Star Trek,” one of the year’s best-reviewed movies.
The critics unanimously told their readers this film was trash, and word of mouth brought the film to within one percent of the Dark Knight. Hell, Transformer’s 2 was shown on less screens and even grossed more dollars per screen than the Dark Knight.
As reviews started to roll in, I saw an interesting thing happen. Some reviews were posted before people had seen the film, trashing the Michael Bay, and not really referencing anything from the film itself. (These were not logged as ‘top critics’ on the site.) But it initiated a torrent of others jumping on the hatewagon; beating their chests and scampering in competition to come up with better, more scurrilous, insulting, and defamatory witticisms trashing the director and his film. It became what I termed a giant ’snoodBall’. Each critic seemed to feel that in order to stand out above the rest, he had to give an even worse, more scathing review. This led to professional critics actually printing things I just find ridiculous:
“I hated every one of the 149 minutes. This is so bad it’s immoral. Michael Bay is a time-sucking vampire who will feast off your lost time.”
- Victoria Alexander
“Michael Bay has once again transformed garbage into something resembling a film..”
- Jeffrey M. Anderson
“Transformers: The Revenge of The Fallen is beyond bad, it carves out its own category of godawfulness.”
- Peter Travers (Rolling Stone)
Who can say they actively *hated* every minute of a movie? I was so surprised. I had seen an advance screening of the film here at ILM, and I knew it was no Citizen Kane, but it surely isn’t an 18%! It seems the reviewers are so disjointed from the public they serve. Apparently there comes a certain time when you simply cannot write a decent review for a movie that all your peers said was garbage, and that is when you are just adding to this gigantic hate machine and not really reviewing anything.
If the film would have been reviewed even a little more realistically (I mean come on, Terminator IV even has a 33%!) it would have easily had the 1% more to topple the Dark Knight; possibly becoming the worst reviewed #1 box office hit of all time.
I love this picture. It illustrates a few large problems with video games. One of which I have wanted to talk about for a while: Attachments of course. I am talking about the sword (yes, there is a sword, follow her arm to the left side of the image..)
Attaching props to a character that has to dynamically be seen from every angle through thousands of animations can be difficult. So difficult that people often give up. This was a promotional image for an upcoming Soul Calibur title, this goes to show you how difficult the issue is. Or maybe no one even noticed she was holding a sword. So let’s look at a promotional image from another game:
Well, props are often interchangeable. Many different props are supposed to attach to the same location throughout the game. This is generally done by marking up the prop and the skeleton with two attachment points that snap to one another.
In this case you often have one guy modeling the prop, one guy placing the skeleton, and one guy creating the animation. All these people have to work together.
This problem is most noticeable at the end of the line: you would really only see it in the game. But this is one of the few times you will hear me say that checking it ‘in the engine’ is a bad idea. It’s hard enough to get animators to check their animation, much less test all the props in a ‘prop test level’ of sorts.
I feel problems like this mainly show up in magazines and final games because you are leaving it up to QA and other people who don’t know what to look for. There was a saying I developed while at Crytek when trying to impart some things on new tech art hires: “Does QA know what your alien should deform like? And should they?” The answer is no, and it also goes for the things above. Who knows how robotnik grips his bow.. you do, the guy rigging the character.
So in this case I am all for systems that allow animators to instantly load any common weapons and props from the game directly onto the character in the DCC app. You need a system that allows animators to be able to attach any commonly used prop at any time during any animation (especially movement anims)
Generally I would say:
I can remember many heated discussions about problems like this. The more people that really care about hte final product, and the more detailed or realistic games and characters get, the more things like this will be scrutinized.
This is more of a simple problem that just takes care and diligence, whereas things like multiple hand positions and hand poses are a little more difficult. Or attachments that attach via a physics constraint in the engine. There are also other, much more difficult issues in this realm, like exact positioning of AI characters for interacting with each other and the environment, which is another tough ’snap me into the right place’ problem dealing with marking up a character and an item in the world to interact with.
I ran out and got Street Fighter 4 (SF4) just like everyone else. Street Fighter was ‘the game’ you had to beat all the kids in the neighborhood at for an entire generation (sadly replaced by PES), and I have very fond memories of playing it.
SF4 is the first 3D game in the series created by Capcom, in the past, Street Fighter EX was developed by Arika, a company formed by one of the creators of the original game as well as many other Capcom employees. Even though porting the franchise to 3D was largely considered a complete and utter failure, they decided to give it another go, this time ‘officially’.
As artistic mediums, 2D and 3D are very different. 3D art is perspective correct, it is clean, sterile and perfect. It is much simpler to do rotations and transformations of rigid objects in 3D, this is why Disney started doing vehicles as cel shaded 3D objects in their later films. However, it is very difficult to add character to 3D geometry. As an example, think of Cruella Deville’s car from 101 Dalmatians, it has character. (When it’s not overly-rotoscoped from a real life model)
2D lends itself to organic shapes, which can be gestural, and are ‘rendered’ by a human being; so they’re never perfect. 3D is great for vehicles and space ships, anything that generally lacks character. 3D is also the only way you are going to get a photo-real gaming experience. For instance; when we were making Crysis, we knew this was the only way, there was never a question of which medium to use.
When I go on my ‘2D/3D rant’, I usually hearken back to something I love, so let’s take a look at the transition of an older game from 2D to 3D: the Monkey Island Series.
Many years ago developers felt that in order to compete, they had to ship games with the latest 3D technology. This is really unfortunate, and leads to them choosing to sometimes develop an ‘ok’ 3D game over a ‘beautiful’ 2D game. I believe in Curse of Monkey Island (last 2D title in the series (so far)), in the options menu there was an option to “Enable 3D acceleration”, upon clicking it, the words “We were only kidding” and other phrases pop up next to the radio button. The developers were already feeling the pressure to release a 3D game.
2D games are still profitable, just look at Xbox Live, where 2D games like Castle Crashers have been some of the top selling titles this year.
Lastly, lets not forget that 3D games are actually cheaper, or have been, historically. However, maybe not with some current-gen titles; where garbage cans have 4k texture maps and take two weeks to sculpt in Z Brush. But animation is definitely easier than it ever was. Of course the other side of that argument is that you can now have 6k animations in a game.
Before going on, it’s important to note that in SF4, the characters still move on a 2D plane as they always have. It’s actually nearly identical to all the other games in the series as far as design.
As always, you are pitting your guy up against someone else, and both of your characters are the focal point, they are the only interactive things in a game which centers around them. This is a series that has always been about character, and has always been 2D with great hand drawn art. Remember: Capcom offered fans a 3D game and they did not want it.
So, SF4 is a game that takes place in 2D space and focuses on only two characters at any given time. This is great news, it means you can really focus on the characters, moreso than almost any other game genre.
3D characters are driven by ‘joints’ or ‘bones’. Each joint has some 3D points rigidly ‘glued’ to it, because of this, 3D characters, especially in games, look rigid; like action figures. In my opinion SF4 characters feel like lifeless marionettes. In a 2D game, you can quickly and easily draw any form you want. The more you want to alter the ‘form’ a 3D character, the more joints it takes, and the more complex the ‘rig’ that drives the character. Also, on consoles, the number of joints you can use are limited. This is easily distinguished when comparing 2D and 3D art:
Notice how the 3D characters look lifeless? They don’t have to, it’s just more difficult. Whereas before, adding a cool facial expression meant simply drawing it by hand. Now it means sculpting a 3D shape: by hand. It’s tedious and difficult. Also, notice how in 3D Chun Li’s cloth is ‘clipping’ into her leg, or Cammy’s wrist guard is ‘clipping’ into her bicep. 3D is much more difficult to get right, because you are messing with sculptures, not drawings. You could also say the foreshortening on Chun Li’s arm in 2D looks weird; there are trade-offs, but in a 2D pipeline is also much easier to alter character proportions and fix things.
There are entire web pages dedicated to the weird faces of SF4 characters. It seems one of the easiest ways to make a character look in ‘pain’ was to translate the eyeballs out of the head: it looks ridiculous when compared to the hand-drawn hit reactions:
Whereas before you had one guy drawing pictures of a character in motion (maybe someone to color), now it takes a team to do the same job. You often have a modeler, technical artist, and animator, then hopefully a graphics engineer for rendering. That’s a lot of people to do something one person used to handle, and it introduces not only beaurocracy, but a complicated set of choreographed events that culminate in the final product.
This is a Capcom press image of Chun Li and it highlights my point exactly. It is harder and much more complicated to sculpt a form than draw it. Not to mention sculpt it over time, using complicated mathematical tools to manipulate geometry. However, it’s not an impossible task, and to think that this is ‘ok’ enough to release as a press image for an upcoming AAA game is crazy.
It’s not just deformation and posing, but animation in general. There is a lot of laziness associated with 3D animation. Let me be more precise: it is easier to ‘create’ animation because the computer interpolates between poses for you. As an animator, you have to work much harder to not fall into this ‘gap’ of letting the machine do the work for you. Playing SF4 you will see sweeps, hurricane kicks, and various other animations that just rotate the entire character as if on a pin. They also share and recycle the same animations on different characters, this was not possible in 2D.
One thing I find interesting is that, though the new game is 3D, it really has no motionblur. The 2D games had Chuck-Jonesesque motionblur drawn into the frames to add a quickness and ’snap’, but it also adds an organic quality that is lacking in SF4.
EDIT: Having now logged a lot more time playing, there is indeed a weird kind of motion blur, it’s barely noticeable at all and looks almost hand painted/added.
Another odd thing, I can spot mocap when I see it, and I think the technique was used on some of the background characters, like the children playing under the bridge. The motion is so stellar that it puts the main characters to shame. That’s kind of sad. Though, all new characters introduced on the console seem to have much better animation, so maybe this is something Capcom have worked on more.
If you aren’t going to make a game where characters can move through 3D space (no Z depth), why use a 3D art style, especially when it is harder to create expressive characters?
I will offer some reasons to ‘reboot’ the Street Fighter franchise as a 3D fighter:
Unfortunately: Capcom did none of these. Sure, a few of the above would have been somewhat revolutionary for the franchise, but as it stands, 3D characters add nothing to SF4, I believe they actually degrade the quality of the visuals.
EDIT: After playing more I have noticed that they are using IK (look IK) on just the head bone, shorter characters look up when a large character jumps in front of them.
It’s exciting that you can see some of our work already! Check out the teaser trailer, be sure to click [watch in high quality]
Ladislav Kavan is presenting a paper entitled ‘Automatic Linearization of Nonlinear Skinning‘ at the 2009 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games on skinning arbitrary deformations! Run over to his site and check it out. In my opinion, this is the holy grail of sorts. You rig any way you want, have complex deformation that can only solve at 1 frame an hour? No problem, bake a range of motion to pose-driven, procedurally placed, animated, and weighted joints. People, Kavan included, have been presenting papers in the past with systems somewhat like this, but nothing this polished and final. I have talked to him about this stuff in the past and it’s great to see the stuff he’s been working on and that it really is all I had hoped for!
This will change things.
No longer working for Crytek, maybe I can comment on some industry related things without worrying that my opinions could be misconstrewn as those of my former employer.
EuroGamer visited Quantic Dream this week, the studio working on the game ‘Heavy Rain’, who’s founder, de Fondaumière, arrogantly proclaimed that there was ‘no longer an uncanny valley‘, and that there are ‘very, very few‘ real artists in the video game industry. (A real class act, no?)
So their article starts with “We can’t tell you how Heavy Rain looks, sounds or plays…”, which I find kind of ridiculous seeing as how the studio’s only real claim to fame right now is the hype of it’s co-founder who casually claims they have accomplished one of the most amazing visual feats in the history of computer graphics (in real-time no less!).
Across the world there are thousands of outstanding artists chasing this same dream, from Final Fantasy, to Polar Express and Beowulf; people have tried to cross the ‘uncanny valley’ for years, and are getting closer every day. At Christmas you will be treated to what is probably one of the closest attempts yet. (Digital Domain’s work in Benjamin Button)
Not really having any videos to back up the hyperbole, they gave the EuroGamer staff a laundry list of statistics about their production.
I have yet to see anything stunning to back up the talk, 8 months after making his statement about crossing the uncanny valley, they released this video, which was just not even close, to be frank.
It looks like they aren’t using performance capture. Without markers on the face this means they have to solve the facial animation from elsewhere, usually a seated actress who pretends to be saying lines that were said in the other full body capture session. There’s a reason why studios like Imageworks don’t do this, it’s hard to sync the two performances together. If they have accomplished what other’s have not, with much less hardware/technology, it means they have some of the best artists/animators out there, and I say hats off to them.
But with every image they do release, and every arrogant statement, it is digging the hole deeper. The sad thing is they could release of of the greatest interactive experiences yet, but their main claim is the most realistic cg humans yet to be seen, and if they fail at this, it will overshadow everything.
At least they know how their fellow ps3 devs over at Guerilla must have been feeling for a few years now.
The market is flooded with cheap ‘TN’ TFT panels. TN (twisted nematic) panels are terrible when it comes to reproducing color and have a very limited viewing angle. I used to have one and if I just slouched in my chair (or sat up too straight) the black level would change drastically. These panels are much cheaper to manufacture, so vendors have been flocking to them for years.
As artists, we need at least _decent_ color, even on our home machines. Because it can sometimes be difficult to determine the actual panel used in a diaplay, and because I care, I have compiled a list of > 24″ monitors and their panel type. I really would have liked to have seen this last week.
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I really needed a stick of 800mhz DDR2. There’s a Best Buy somewhat close to here so I went over. When I get there, I see they have one stick of Kingston Value RAM, however it’s 145 DOLLARS. Thinking this was clearly a typo, I headed to the ‘Geek Squad’ guy at the register who scanned it and told me:
‘Nope, that’s how much this kind of RAM costs, it’s really a special kind‘. (yeah ‘value’)
I replied that it certainly was not. That is should be under 50 bucks ‘at any store’, he then laughed and told me that they match prices, but not ‘online only stores‘, to which I replied: ‘name a store, any store and that’s the price I will use‘. He said Fry’s (a popular brick and mortar store in Palo Alto) and we pulled up the website. The same RAM was 33 DOLLARS! Not on sale; nothing.
He called the manager, who came and said they couldn’t price match with a difference that large. I leveled with them… ‘Guys, look, it’s one stick of ‘value’ RAM. My PC is broken. I rode my bike here. Fry’s is in Palo Alto. I would pay double what it is at Frys, I am not tryin to rip you off, but I will not, on principle, bend over and take it like this; five times normal retail price is ridiculous!‘
The manager, seeing people behind me, started to talk down to me ‘We aren’t ripping you off, you are trying to price match to another store’s black friday ad! we only price match to real, non-sale prices!‘
I said ‘Look, it’s not a sale item, your own guy brought it up, name any store, where will you price match to?‘ He thought for a min ‘Central Computers, on Howard..‘ (they are not a chain and it would probably be more expensive..) ‘Ok, pull that up!’ We pulled the site up and the ram was 34 DOLLARS!
He turned to me quietly: ‘50 is as low as we can go.‘ ‘Sold!‘
I used to think Best Buy was decent, when you needed a component, if they had it, why go anywhere else? They are such a large chain that they can really discount items because they purchase in bulk. Like I said, this is what I used to think… While I have been in Germany the past 4 years apparently things have changed.
Have any of you seen anything this bad? Charging $145 for something all other retailers have for < $35 is just wrong. It irks me that they pay these ‘geeks’ in their ’squad’ to tell people lies from behind this knowledgeable facade.
I am now living in San Francisco! My last day at Crytek was October 31st, and it was pretty difficult for me as it is one of the best companies I have ever worked for. I have so much respect for all the guys that helped constantly push the envelope and make Crytek the renowned world player that it is today.
I started last week as a Creature TD at Industrial Light + Magic; about the only thing that could wrench me away from Frankfurt. I have always been so interested in creatures and anatomy, and, from a young age, considered ILM the best of the best when it came to these. I feel very lucky to be able to join another great team of people, and not only that, but learn so much from them on a daily basis.
I don’t know what effect that will have on this blog. I can continue to comment on games stuff, but, being a large company ILM is a lot more restrictive in what I can do (even in my spare time!) versus Crytek. Not to mention I will be very, very busy the next few months.
So, before we looked at just outputting a list of the files that were on device1 and not device2, now I will copy the files to a folder on the main device.
The tricky thing about this is I want the directory structure intact. After looking as os.path, and pywin32, I didn’t see anything like ‘mkdir’ where it would make all the folders deep needed to recreate the branch that a file was in. I did however find a function online:
def mkdir(newdir):
if os.path.isdir(newdir):
pass
elif os.path.isfile(newdir):
raise OSError("a file with the same name as the desired " \
"dir, '%s', already exists." % newdir)
else:
head, tail = os.path.split(newdir)
if head and not os.path.isdir(head):
mkdir(head)
if tail:
os.mkdir(newdir)
To copy the files and create the directories, I altered the previous script a bit:
for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk(path2):
for file in files:
if os.path.basename(file) not in filenames:
newPath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path,file)).replace(path2,(path1 + 'isItThere//'))
fileFull = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path,file))
print fileFull + " not found in " + path1 + " file cloud"
print "Copying " + fileFull + " >>> " + newPath
if os.path.isdir(os.path.dirname(newPath)) == False:
mkdir(os.path.dirname(newPath))
win32file.CopyFile (fileFull, newPath, 0))
The results printed should look like below, the files should have been copied accordingly and the directories created.
U:\photos\Crystal\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003270.jpg not found in D:\photos\Crystal\ file cloud
Copying U:\photos\Crystal\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003270.jpg >>> D:\photos\Crystal\isItThere\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003270.jpg
U:\photos\Crystal\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003271.jpg not found in D:\photos\Crystal\ file cloud
Copying U:\photos\Crystal\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003271.jpg >>> D:\photos\Crystal\isItThere\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003271.jpg
U:\photos\Crystal\Orlando - Lauras wedding\P0003272.jpg not found in D:\photos\Crystal\ file cloud
If I had time, or perhaps when I have time, I’ll add MD5 checks.
I am anal-retentive about data retention. There, I said it. There are many times when I find myself in the situation of having two storage devices, that may or may not have duplicate files. I then want to erase one, but do I have all those files backed up?
I use two existing programs to aid me in my anal-retentivity: TerraCopy and WinMerge. Terracopy replaces the windows default copy with something much better (can hash check files when they are copied, etc). With WinMerge, I can right click a folder and say ‘Compare To…’ then right click another and say ‘Compare’. This tells me any differences between the two file/folder trees.
However, here’s an example I have not yet found a good solution for:
I want to erase a camera card I have, I am pretty certain I copied the images off –but how can I be sure! I took those images and sorted them into folders by location or date taken.
So I wrote a small and I am sure inefficient python script to help:
import os
filenames = []
i = 1
path1 = 'D://photos//south america//'
path2 = 'N://DCIM//100ND300//'
if os.path.isdir(path1):
if os.path.isdir(path2):
print "creating index.."
for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk(path1):
for file in files:
filenames.append(os.path.basename(file))
for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk(path2):
for file in files:
if os.path.basename(file) not in filenames:
print os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path,file)) + ' not found in ' + path1 + ' file cloud'
This will print something like this:
N:/DCIM/100ND300/image.NEF not found in D:/photos/south america/ file cloud
I don’t use python that often at all, please lemme know if there’s a better way to be doing this.
Really? Wow, I mean this isn’t as surprising as when they bought Alias 3 years ago (182 Million), but still. And 35 million? That’s the price of a single movie or three year videogame production these days. I thought the ‘desk bought Maya to kill it, but it’s still around… Wonder how long XSI will be around now.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=12022457&siteID=123112
Maybe they will merge all three teams into one highly experienced, ‘all-star’ development team to make a new 3d app to end all 3d apps.
Aren’t there laws about these kinds of monopolies? Looks like the Lightwave and C43D guys are your only alternative..
One less booth at SIGGRAPH..
I saw this presentation about a year ago, talking about the pipeline Epic uses on their games. Maybe some interesting stuff for others here. The images are larger, you can right click -> view image to see a larger version.
45 days or more to create a single character… wow.
They don’t use polycruncher to generate LODs, they do this by hand. They just use it to import the mesh into max in a usable form from mudbox/zbrush.
They don’t care so much about intersecting meshes when making the high res, as it’s just used to derive the nMap, not RP a statue or anything.
They said they only use DeepUV for it’s ‘relax’ feature. They make extensive use of the 3DS Max ‘render to texture’ as well.
Their UT07 characters are highly customizable. Individual armor parts can be added or removed, or even modded. Their UV maps are broken down into set sections that can be generated on the fly. So there are still 2×2048 maps but all the maps can be very different. This is something I have also seen in WoW and other games.
They mentioned many times how they use COLLADA heavily to go between DCC apps.
They share a lot of common components accross characters
I have seen some of the other material in the SIGGRAPH Image Metrics presskit posted online [Emily Tech Demo] ['How To' video], but not the video that shows the making of the Emily tech demo. So here’s that as well:
At the end, there’s a quote from Peter Plantec about how Image Metrics has finally ‘crossed the uncanny valley’, but seriously, am I the only one who thinks the shading is a bit off, and besides that, what’s the point of laying a duplicate of face directly on top of one in a video? Shouldn’t they have shown her talking in a different setting? Maybe showed how they can remap the animation to a different face? There is no reason not to just use the original plate in this example.
Many of you might remember the fluoroscopic shoulder carriage videos I posted on my site about 4 years ago. I always wanted to do a sequence of MRI’s of the arm moving around. Thanks to Helena, an MRI tech that I met through someone, I did just that. I was able to get ~30 mins of idle time on the machine while on vacation.
The data that I got was basically image data. It’s slices along an axis, I wanted to visualize this data in 3D, but they did not have software to do this in the hospital. I really wanted to see the muscles and bones posed in three dimensional space as the arm went through different positions, so I decided to write some visualization tools myself in maxscript.
At left is a 512×512 MRI of my shoulder; arm raised (image downsampled to 256, animation on 5’s, ). The MRI data has some ‘wrap around’ artifacts because it was a somewhat small MRI (3 tesla) and I am a big guy, when things are close to the ‘wall’ they get these artifacts, and we wanted to see my arm. I am uploading the raw data for you to play with, you can download it from here: [data01] [data02]
Above is an example of 128×128 10 slice reconstruction with greyscale cubes.
I wrote a simple tool called ‘mriView’. I will explain how I created it below and you can download it and follow along if you want. [mriView]
The first thing I wanted to do was create ‘volumetric pixels’ or ‘voxels’ using the data. I decided to do this by going through all the images, culling what i didn’t want and creating grayscale cubes out of the rest. There was a great example in the maxscript docs called ‘How To … Access the Z-Depth channel’ which I picked some pieces from, it basically shows you how to efficiently read an image and generate 3d data from it.
But we first need to get the data into 3dsMax. I needed to load sequential images, and I decided the easiest way to do this was load AVI files. Here is an example of loading an AVI file, and treating it like a multi-part image (with comments):
on loadVideoBTN pressed do
(
--ask the user for an avi
f = getOpenFileName caption:"Open An MRI Slice File:" filename:"c:/" types:"AVI(*.avi)|*.avi|MOV(*.mov)|*.mov|All|*.*|"
mapLoc = f
if f == undefined then (return undefined)
else
(
map = openBitMap f
--get the width and height of the video
heightEDT2.text = map.height as string
widthEDT2.text = map.width as string
--gethow many frames the video has
vidLBL.text = (map.numFrames as string + " slices loaded.")
loadVideoBTN.text = getfilenamefile f
imageLBL.text = ("Full Image Yeild: " + (map.height*map.width) as string + " voxels")
slicesEDT2.text = map.numFrames as string
threshEDT.text = "90"
)
updateImgProps()
)
We now have the height in pixels, the width in pixels, and the number of slices. This is enough data to begin a simple reconstruction.
We will do so by visualizing the data with cubes, one cube per pixel that we want to display. However be careful, a simple 256×256 video is already possibly 65,536 cubes per slice! In the tool, you can see that I put in the original image values, but allow the user to crop out a specific area.
Below we go through each slice, then go row by row, looking pixel by pixel looking for ones that have a gray value above a threshold (what we want to see), when we find them, we make a box in 3d space:
height = 0.0
updateImgProps()
--this loop iterates through all slices (frames of video)
for frame = (slicesEDT1.text as integer) to (slicesEDT2.text as integer) do
(
--seek to the frame of video that corresponds to the current slice
map.frame = frame
--loop that traverses y, which corresponds to the image height
for y = mapHeight1 to mapHeight2 do
(
voxels = #()
currentSlicePROG.value = (100.0 * y / totalHeight)
--read a line of pixels
pixels = getPixels map [0,y-1] totalWidth
--loop that traverses x, the line of pixels across the width
for x = 1 to totalWidth do
(
if (greyscale pixels[x]) < threshold then
(
--if you are not a color we want to store: do nothing
)
--if you are a color we want, we will make a cube with your color in 3d space
else
(
b = box width:1 length:1 height:1 name:(uniqueName "voxel_")
b.pos = [x,-y,height]
b.wirecolor = color (greyscale pixels[x]) (greyscale pixels[x]) (greyscale pixels[x])
append voxels b
)
)
--grabage collection is important on large datasets
gc()
)
--increment the height to bump your cubes to the next slice
height+=1
progLBL.text = ("Slice " + (height as integer) as string + "/" + (totalSlices as integer) as string + " completed")
slicePROG.value = (100.0 * (height/totalSlices))
)
Things really start to choke when you are using cubes, mainly because you are generating so many entities in the world. I added the option to merge all the cubes row by row, which sped things up, and helped memory, but this was still not really the visual fidelity I was hoping for…
I primarily wanted to generate meshes from the data so the next thing I tried was making a point cloud, then using that to generate a ‘BlobMesh’ (metaball) compound geometry type. In the example above, you see the head of my humerus and the tissue connected to it. Below is the code, it is almost simpler than boxes, it just takes finessing edit poly, i have only commented changes:
I make a plane and then delete all the verts to give me a ‘clean canvas’ of sorts, if anyone knows a better way of doing this, let me know:
p = convertToPoly(Plane lengthsegs:1 widthsegs:1)
p.name = "VoxelPoint_dataSet"
polyop.deleteVerts $VoxelPoint_dataSet #(1,2,3,4)
That and when we created a box before, we now create a point:
polyop.createVert $VoxelPoint_dataSet [x,-y,height]
This can get really time and resource intensive. As a result, I would let some of these go overnight. This was pretty frustrating, because it slowed the iteration time down a lot. And the blobMesh modifier was very slow as well.
--here we set the number of sub-materials to the number of slices
meditMaterials[matNum].materialList.count = totalSlices
--you also have to properly set the materialIDList
for m=1 to meditMaterials[matNum].materialList.count do
(
meditMaterials[matNum].materialIDList[m] = m
)
Now we iterate through, generating the planes, assigning sub-materials to them with the correct frame of video for the corresponding slice:
p = plane name:("slice_" + frame as string) pos:[0,0,frame] width:totalWidth length:totalHeight
p.lengthsegs = 1
p.widthsegs = 1
p.material = meditMaterials[matNum][frame]
p.castShadows = off
p.receiveshadows = off
meditMaterials[matNum].materialList[frame].twoSided = on
meditMaterials[matNum].materialList[frame].selfIllumAmount = 100
meditMaterials[matNum].materialList[frame].diffuseMapEnable = on
newMap = meditMaterials[matNum].materialList[frame].diffuseMap = Bitmaptexture filename:mapLoc
newmap.starttime = frame
newmap.playBackRate = 1
newmap = meditMaterials[matNum].materialList[frame].opacityMap = Bitmaptexture fileName:mapLoc
newmap.starttime = frame
newmap.playBackRate = 1
showTextureMap p.material on
mat += 1
This was very surprising, it not only runs fast, but it looks great. Of course you are generating no geometry, but it is a great way to visualize the data. The below example is a 512×512 MRI of my shoulder (arm raised) rendered in realtime. The only problem I had was an alpha-test render error when viewed directly from the bottom, but this looks to bea 3dsMax issue.
[flv:http://www.ChrisEvans3D.com/video/mri_realtime.flv 640 480]
I rendered the slices cycling from bottom to top. In one MRI the arm is raised, in the other, the arm lowered. The results are surprisingly decent. You can check that video out here. [shoulder_carriage_mri_xvid.avi]
I can now easily load up any of the MRI data I have and view it in 3d, though I would like to be able to better create meshes from specific parts of the data, in order to isolate muscles or bones. To do this I need to allow the user to ‘pick’ a color from part of the image, and then use this to isolate just those pixels and remesh just that part. I would also like to add something that allows you to slice through the planes from any axis. That shouldn’t be difficult, just will take more time.
EDIT: I would like this to be a ‘living document’ of sorts, please send me terms and definitions and feel free to correct mine!
Whether you’re a technical artist in games or film, when trying to create realistic scenes and characters, the more you know about how light works and interacts with surfaces in the world, and the more reference of this you have, the better you can explain why you think an image looks ‘off’.
You are an technical artist. You need to be able to communicate with technical people using terminology they understand. We often act as bridges between artists and programmers, it is very important for us to be able to communicate with both appropriately.
Light transport is basically the big nerd word for how light gets from one place to another, and scattering is usually how surfaces interact with light.
You can see something in a rendered image and know it looks ‘wrong’, but it’s important to understand why it looks wrong, and be able to accurately explain to the programming team how it can be improved upon. To do this you should be able to:
1) present examples of photographic reference
2) communicate with general terms that others can understand
The following terms come from optics, photography and art, you should not only understand these, but use them when explaining why something does not look ‘right’. I will give both the technical term and my shortest approximation:
Specular Reflection – sharp reflection of light from a surface that somewhat retains an image (eg. glossy)
Diffuse Reflection – uneven reflection of light from a surface that does not retain the image (eg. matte)
Diffuse Interreflection – light reflected off other diffuse objects
Diffraction – what happens to a wave when it hits an obstacle, this could be an ocean wave hitting a jetty, or a light wave hitting a grate.
Depth od Field – the area in an image that is in focus
Bokeh – the blurry background in a photo that is not in focus
Chromatic Abberation – the colored fringes around an object or light refracted through an object, it’s because certain wavelengths of light get bent ‘out-of-sync’, i usually think of it as an old projector or monitor that is misaligned; that’s what this effect looks like.
Caustics – light rays shined through a refractive object onto another surface
Angle of Incidence – this is actually the angle something is off from ’straight on’, but we mainly use this when talking about shaders or things that are view-dependent. If you were to draw a line from your eyes to a surface, the angle between this and it’s ‘normal’ is the ‘angle of incidence’. Car paint whose color changes as you walk around it is a good example: it changes based on the angle you see it. Just remember, your head doesn’t have to move, the object can move, changing the angle between your sightline and the surface.
Refractive Index (Refraction) – how light’s direction changes when moving through an object. the refractive index of water is 1.3, glass has a higher refractive index at 1.4 to 1.6
Reflection – the changing of direction of light, usually casting light onto something, like the camera or our eyes
Glossiness – the ability of a surface to reflect specular light, the smaller amount of specular light reflected usually makes something look ‘glossier’
Ray – think of a ray as a single beam of light; a single particle. This particle moves in a ‘ray’, when we talk about ‘ray tracing’ we mean tracing the path of a ray from a light source through a scene.
Fresnel – pronounced ‘fre-nel’, it is the amount of view dependent reflectance on a surface. a great example is rim lighting, but fresnel effects are used to fake a fuzzy look, x-ray effects, light reflected off the ocean, etc.
Aerial Perspective – this is how things get lighter as they recede into the distance, the more air, or ‘atmosphere’ between you and the object (mountain, building, etc) the lighter it is visually. I grew up in Florida, we don’t have much of this effect at all due to elevation and clear skies.
High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR) – this just means you are dealing with more light data than a normal image. An HDR image has a larger range of light information stored in it. With today’s prosumer DSLR’s it is possible to capture 14bit images that theoretically contain ‘13-14 stops’ of linear data. A digital example could be the sky in the game Crysis, it was a dynamic HDR skydome, this meant that the game engine was computing more light than could be displayed on the monitor. In these situations, this data is tonemapped to create visually interesting lighting situations.
Tone Mapping – this is how you can ‘map’ one set of colors onto another, in games it generally means ‘mapping’ high dynamic range data into a limited dynamic range, like a tv set or monitor. This can be done by ‘blooming’ areas that are overbright and other various techniques.\
Bloom – ‘bloom’ is the gradient fringe you see around really brightly lit areas in an image, like a window to a bright sky seen from inside a dark room.
Albedo – the extent to which a surface diffusely reflects light from the sun.
Afterimage Effect – this belongs to a groups of effects I call ‘accumulation-buffer effects’. the after-image effect visually ‘burns-in’ the brightest parts of a previous image, simulating the effect our eyes have when adjusting to bright light.
Deferred Rendering – this is a type of rendering where you render parts of the image to framebuffer storage instead of rendering directly to the pixel-output. Deferred rendering generally allows you ot use many more light sources in real-time rendering. One problem deferred rendering has is that it cannot properly deal with transparent items.
Scanline Rendering – Scanline rendering is a very old technique where you render one line of pixels after another. Pixar’s Renderman is a scanline renderer, but also the NintendoDS uses scanline rendering.
Skylight (or Diffuse Sky Radiation) – this is the fancy term for light that comes not from the sun, but is reflected from the sky. It is what makes sunlight on earth inherently blue, or orange.
Scattering (including Sub-Surface Scattering) – this just means how particles are ’scattered’ or deviate from an original path. In sub-surface-scattering, light enters an object, and bounces around inside (sub-surface). This leads to things like the orange/red color of your ear when there it a light behind it.
Participating Media – the way a group of particles can effect light transport through their volume, not only reflect or refract light, but scatter it. Things like glass, water, fog and smoke are all participating media.
Ambient Occlusion – this is a shading effect where occluded areas are shaded, much like access maps of the old days, cracks and areas where light would have a hard time ‘getting into’ are shaded.
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion – a rendering technique that fakes ambient occlusion with some z-buffer trickery. By taking the distances between objects in a scene, the algorithm generates approximated occlusion data in real time. (first used on Crysis!)
Global Illumination – a way of rendering where you measure light bounces, as the light bounces around a scene, this generates indirect lighting. An example of this would be how a red ball next to a white wall will cast red light onto the wall.
Z-Buffer – is where 3d depth information is stored in a 2d image. A 16bit z-buffer has 65536 levels of depth, while an 8 bit has 256. Items on the same level cause flickering or ‘z-fighting’.
Z-Fighting – this occurs when polygons have similar z-buffer values, it is a term you should know when dealing with virtual cameras, not real ones. You can see this flickering when you create 2 co-planer planes on top of each other in a 3d app. To eliminate z-fighting you can use 24 or 32bit zbuffers.
Frustrum – everything in the camera’s field of view; generally the entire volume that the camera can see.
Environment Reflection – the way of faking a reflection by applying an image to a surface, this can be a spherical map, cube map, etc. Some environmental reflections (cubemaps) can be generated at rutime as you move an object around. (most notably in racing games)
Cubic Environment Mapping – a way of generating an environmental reflection map with six sides that are mapped onto a cube, recreating the reflection of the environment around an object.
SkyBox – creating a ’sky’ in a virtual scene by enclosing the entire scene in a large box with images on 5 sides.
Here are some example sentences:
Artist: This place here where the light shines on the surface is too small, it makes my object look too wet.
Technical Artist: The surface is too glossy, as a result, the area of specular reflection where you see the light is very small.
Artist: Like in the photos we took, things in the distance should be lighter, in the engine can we make things lighter as they get farther away?
Technical Artist: As things recede into the distance, aerial perspective causes them to become lighter, to acheive this we should increase the environment fog slightly.
I feel every technical artist who assesses visual output should own a proper Digital Single Lens Reflex camera (DSLR), no matter what quality or how old. This will force you to understand and work with many of the terms above. The artist in you will want to take good pictures, and this is much more than good composition, you are essentially recording light. You will need to learn a lot to be able to properly meter and record light in different situations. Because it’s digital, you will be able to iterate and learn fast, recognizing cause and effect relationships the same way we do with the realtime feedback of scripting languages in 3d apps.
I grew up in the US though I now live in Europe. This is just a short post about something that I find really unfair and frustrating: International Pricing of High End Tech Items. Let’s check out the new Nikon D700:
Nikon d700 United States: 2,999 usd – 1,825 eur
Nikon d200 Britain 1892 pounds – 2,383 eur
It certainly would seem that Germany is getting the short end of that stick. In many cases, people in Europe could fly to the US, buy electronics, and come back for the price of getting them here. And many people do.
Not to menaion many companies have better warranties in the US where the market is more competitive. (Example: Many Nikon cameras and lenses have a 5 year warranty in the US and 2 year here in Germany)
When the Wii came out int he US, it was 250usd, when it came out here, it was 250eur. The eur was riding high, in the US it was impossible to get a Wii, hwever, they were readily available in all stores here; leading many to speculate that it was because Nintendo was making 400usd per Wii (250eur) in Europe. This isn’t just about inflation, some items are priced 1:1 or a little over, 3dsMax below, but others are more ridiculous, Photoshop for example.
–
3dsMax 2009 Germany: 3,900 eur – (4,641 eur with mandatory tax)
3dsMax 2009 United States: 3,495 usd – 2,257 eur
Photoshop CS3 Germany: 1,027 eur
Photoshop CS3 United States: 607 usd – 390 eur
Photoshop CS3 Britain: 500 pounds – 629 eur
–
The above is just completely inane. Some companies will tell you they have to charge a premium on products in Europe because it costs extra to localize them. But come on.. Stuff like the above is ridiculous.
When you start looking at really high end tech, items that only have one distributor in Europe, but many in the US; like motion capture systems, the difference in pricing due to 1) inflation 2) companies just charging more in europe and 3) single distributors in a region having no competition, makes it inhibitively expensive (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars price difference). It would be cheaper to set up a company in the US just to make these purchases, and I am sure people do.
But seriously, Adobe, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Thanks to my brother, Mike, for translating this from the original japanese [here]
When asked about which features of XSI helped the most on this project, Hideki Sasaki (Facial Animation Set Up Lead) came back with the rather surprising answer, “There were many but in regards to facial animation, cluster constraints really saved us.” In our facial rig setups, every point-cluster of your target shape is tied to bones using cluster constraints. Cluster constraints also were extremely useful in the following situations:
Since in MGS4 we were really trying to lighten the processing, on the PS3 we employed a method where tangent colors change only with the rotation of bones. In other words, if simply constrained to coordinates, in animation it will behave correctly, but the tangent color will not change. Basically, you run into a dilemma where shading goes from its default state to a one where it will no longer change. However, by using cluster constraints to constrain both normal and tangent lines the correct rotation values will be input, and that’s how we accomplished the shading.
(this sounds really interesting, i guess they are talking about smoothing angle tangents? In many engines like the CryEngine, the smoothing angle is based on the character’s default pose at export and never changes. This makes it sound like that exported cluster data to ‘drive’ the smoothing angle in realtime)
Furthermore, nearly all fluctuating objects attached to the character’s clothing, in cutscenes and gameplay, are done by the PS3’s simulation engine. That being said, there are some cases in cutscenes with intense action where it’s difficult to simulate. In those cases we use animation simulated in XSI’s Syflex. The basic workflow in those situations is as follows:
1. To express fluctuations in the clothing, make a simulation in Syflex
2. Convert the cached simulation results into shape targets
3. Constrain bones to the points on your shape controlled object with cluster constraints
4. Bone envelope the final model to be used on the PS3 (Basically the same idea as a facial rig)
(Baking arbitrary data to bones ftw!)
The advantage of using this type of control is, even if you temporarily get a little caving in or some kind of flaw in the simulation result, you are able to apply corrections with “Secondary Shape Mode” at stage 2 of the workflow.
It’s possible to edit the shape’s geometry using vertex shift; you can also use smooth and push to fix little imperfections if needed. It goes without saying that the results of these intuitive adjustments will be reflected in the envelope control’s PS3 data as well.
Sasaki explains, “You can set cluster constraints for all components, vertex, polygon and edge. I believe XSI is the only one that comes standard with support for constraining both normals and tangents. Without the help of these cluster constraint functions we could have never accomplished techniques like cross-simulation transfer to bones, or our ideas concerning facial rig set up.”
(they export/sync cluster rig element data to engine)
Thanks to my brother, Mike, for translating this from the original japanese [here]
The hero, Snake, and nearly all other characters we animate on the PS3 and make an appearance in the game are restrained to the range of about 5 thousand to 1 million polygons (including the face). Also, in both gameplay and “cutscenes” the same resolution polygon characters are used. This allows for seamless transition between the gameplay and cutscenes and makes it easier for the player to get emotionally involved in the reality of the game.
Furthermore, for all other characters, except crowds, the same resolution of polygon characters are used in game as well as in cutscenes. Separate from the resolution models used on the PS3, high rez data is modeled at the same time to generate a normal map. Wrinkles in clothing and other details are expressed through this normal map, created from the high rez model.
Of all the bones within the character’s body, the number that contain and are driven by animation data is roughly around 21. But, in reality a number of helper (auxiliary) bones are used to supplement motions like twisting in the knees, elbows, arms and legs. These however are not driven by animation data. Instead, they reference values of the basic animation driven joints and move in like manner.
The same method is employed on the PS3, not just in XSI; all you have to do is extract the helper bones’ definition files from the XSI data and you can achieve the same kind of control on the PS3 as well. (Awesome! Rig syncing constraints and driven bones between DCC app and game engine)
Since there is no actual motion data stored inside the driven-bones, you are able to not only limit the data volume but even in the event that you need to add or delete helper bones, there’s no need to reconvert the motion data- you can just adjust the model data instead.
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