All Aboard For British Colonialism!

So you're standing on a train platform in Cairo in 1903, bags packed, and you absolutely, positively have to get to Cape Town, South Africa - 8,000 miles away. You're out of luck. The British Empire never bothered to finish it. Granted, it was a big, expensive hobby project that kept getting interrupted by World Wars and oppressive, native-exploiting regimes falling out of fashion, but it sure would have been convenient. These are the thoughts rolling through my head while watching the pristine blu-ray release of Walt Disney's Dumbo - who's with me?

Dumbo has a great animated circus steam train running through the movie - and if you're like me, everywhere you look you proclaim, "I want to model that!". Preferably not out loud. The old steam trains of the past have such great personality and character with random pipes and bells and horns sticking out in all directions. The new bullet trains are all streamline and business. No contest which is more fun to play with.

So what's a train without a station to pull up to? Keeping with the Disney/British Empire theme, an obvious choice was the beautifully eclectic entrance structure of Disney World's The Jungle Cruise attraction (check out the reference plate below). It's a beautiful open-air safari outpost building with savannah shutters, ticket counters and period luggage ready for the ride. Nobody does detail like Disney. Next up was adding a few local touches like the tiny station name Ntungamo (an actual stop on the uncompleted rail line in Western Uganda), and local Acacia and Baobab trees native to the area.

Trees and bushes were all hand-modeled in SpeedTree (used in Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) and grass patches loaded into Maya with V-Ray proxies kept my computer from smoking and passing out. Some might ask, "Hey! Where's all the textures and lights?" Sometimes it's fun just to model - on to the next project!

Viva le bistro!

I was walking down a Brooklyn street one day and came across this amazing little bistro called Moutarde. I have no idea what that means. I don't even remember the food, but the facade struck me as just beautiful. Like most artists with their heads in the clouds, I didn't see a Brooklyn cafe in front of me- I saw a sleepy and quaint town in the Parisian countryside where everyone knows each other and nobody moves away. So naturally I went home and gave it a shot.

I don't recommend modeling every brick in the road.

This was my first attempt at creating something in 3D, many a year ago. What I like best about this isn't the models or the textures or even the subject matter - it's the renderer. There's a little known renderer out there called Brazil, now owned by Sputterfish. It's been marginally used on SinCity and some Star Wars films, and it doesn't have much of a foothold in the CG industry, but there's just something about the results that I really like and find it hard to duplicate exactly in Vray. Maybe the secret is in the GI saturation - I can't tell. It just looks Brazil-y to me.

As always, lots of little nuggets abound. If I'm making an environment scene, there's always a movie poster somewhere. Right next to the Le Bonaparte Cafe (even Napolean loved espresso!) is the obligatory theater advertising the French poster of Casablanca. The window paint hopefully says something that makes sense in French. I'm not sure - I don't speak French. I just noticed the trees are bare but there's no leaves on the ground. Whoops. If you look through the back tree, you'll see a hint of a Coca-Cola billboard. Vintage Coca-Cola signs are a caliber of advertising art that is rarely seen today. They all had that wonderful Frank Capra/Norman Rockwell quality that helped define turn-of-the-century Americana.

Since this was made so long ago, I would change a zillion things in here. Add some leaves, forgotten bottles on tables, perhaps a gaunt french waiter smoking a cigarette in the doorway. If you look closely at the car, it looks like the front axle isn't even connected to the rest of the car! No wonder it hasn't moved all this time. Here's some more reference I used while making it.

I love HUDs!

I wonder if he's on Adobe CS5 or 6?

Funny things about HUDs (Heads Up Displays) - the coolest ones are always found in movies and video games. A closeup view of Robert Downy Jr's IronMan helmet with a contemporary F-15 Falcon HUD is going to look pretty silly - especially considering he's a technological genius. What they failed to mention is that he must be a graphic and motion design genius as well in order to put all those toys together in such a slick package. I wonder if a shot of him sitting in front of the Adobe suite creating layer blends and glows is in the director's cut?

While working at Digital Domain, our crack VFX team put together some special venue projects based on a futuristic game of baseball. All the players were decked out with helmets, armor, lit tattoos and of course computerized feedback systems - like the one pictured at the top. This is looking through the catcher helmet, zoomed in on a wily base-stealer.

Since the design is so heavy, you have to find a balance between what elements to bring forward in opacity and what can be pushed back to almost invisible. Priority hierarchy is paramount. Basically, dozens of elements were created as separate black and white mattes and given their look and animation in Nuke. This way we can lookdev and change whole color schemes with the flip of a node.
 

The original HUD I designed had a lot less going on in it. I like to make sure all graphical elements have purpose and context and were applicable to the user, and we didn't want it too obtrusive to the core  "message" of the shot (focus on the base stealer). As we kept piling on the scifi fun through the project, it became clear the HUD needed a boost too. Time was running out. In three days time, we designed, implemented and animated all the parts of the new "SuperHUD", seen left.

Working with that crew was an amazing experience - if you want to see the whole shebang in action, here it is: https://vimeo.com/44039267

The Mummy Escapes

Without a doubt, if I wasn't an artist and had a time machine, I would be digging up artifacts with a torch and a bullwhip. The sights! The smells! The curses!

This piece most likely came about after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the nine hundredth time. In all my projects, I like to try and tell a story... I'm not a fan of merging some verts, throwing a lambert on it and spinning the turntable. Where's the emotion in a picture-perfect render of some sports car or fancy cell phone? Enter the Mummy!

Picture it: the setting sun in the outskirts of Cairo. The dusty and intrepid archeologists are off enjoying a well deserved pint of the local poisons after stacking all their stolen loot in the back, ready for shipment back to King and Country. Seeing his chance, the mummy flips the inside latch and prepares his headlong flight into the desert, bandages waving in the wind!

Since Indy Jones was such a big inspiration for this, there all kinds of little nods to the films scattered about. You might notice the BMW-style German trucks, Henry Jone's Grail Diary on the crate, and the Holy Grail itself half-buried in the dirt below. The map is era-authentic of Cairo, and the jugs and vases are textured directly from existing artifacts. I'm a big fan of accurate, time-specific detail. Even the model of the lantern does not violate the decade. I usually pick a year in the design process and try my best never to violate it.

In most of the projects I'm usually including a reference contact sheet, like the one on the right. These aren't necessarily objects to be modeled directly, but usually serve as a visual inspiration for the look and feel of a piece. It's also tons of fun to do research! Yes, I'm really that nerdy.

The Steampunk TinMan

Granted it was 1939, but the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz never really looked to me like he could actually work. The Scarecrow could BE a scarecrow if he had to... and the Lion... well, never mind the lion. But what a waste of design potential for that Tin Man! It makes me wonder of the studio artists had ever seen Metropolis a decade earlier.

Ignoring the eyebrow-raising notion that a man of tin can rust himself immobile in mere seconds of precipitation, I decided to make my own! Enter our hero, taking a well-deserved break when he feels (hears?) a raindrop.... reaching up instinctively like we all do... maybe a few drops more... and BAM! The workday ends abruptly.

I threw some little details in here taken from both the book and thin air. Obviously the trees have sleepy faces as in the film, and apples are scattered about for a singing Kansas schoolgirl to find later. I kept the funnel hat and placed a birds nest on his shoulder with some eggs to denote a stillness quality of the scene. The woodcutters wagon advertises a barely legible "Emerald City Lumber Company" logo.

I suppose Warner Brothers thought the origin of the Tin Man too gruesome to talk about in the film - apparently the Witch enchanted the man's axe to slowly chop off his limbs, which he replaced over time with metal appendages. Sounds like a solid Workers Comp case to me.

It Came From Outer Space! ...or my mouse.

I love old movies - Frank Capras, Jimmy Stewarts, Ingrid Bergmans, Cary Grants, Humphrey Bogarts, Bing Crosbys - so basically every CG project I undertake is a period piece. Why make something contemporary when you could just look out the window? 

 

This is a throwback to those great pulpy invasion movies of the 40s and 50s when the world was was looking up (in books, no doubt!) cryptic new words like "Radioactive" and "Mutation". There's zillions of little details in this and future postings that are chock full or contextual nuggets - most of which never see the pixel resolution to be recognized! Hence, this handy blog where I can expound to the random, sleepless populace clicking randomly and dangerously enough to stumble upon my little art corner of the web. 

 

So what's in here? Besides the stainless steel robotic hero tearing down the main boulevard of Anytown, there's the Beacon Theater. I used to live right around the corner of the famous Upper West Side venue in Manhattan - so what better name? On the marquee is advertised You Can't Take It With You with Jean Arthur and Lionel Barrymore, doubled with Angles With Dirty Faces with the incomparable Cagney and Bogey. I thought those two cinematic choices seemed apt for tonight's events. 

 

Reference Contact Sheet

On the side of the Bijou across the street is an old torn poster of King Kong. Now, that hairy movie premiered some twenty years prior to the scene - but as some may not realize, the studios used to re-release the moneymaker movies theatrically every decade or so (now we just stream it to our phones. Ugh.) Not to verge off track, but if you see someone watching Lawrence of Arabia for the first time on a 3" screen, please commence unimaginable violence upon them.