The new book cover

I mentioned several posts back I had put out an Arabian Nights novel several years ago and was planning to redo the cover. Well, I did it faster than I expected. I released the book in a new revised (and cheaper) edition as well as electronic versions. Will I sell any? I dont know but I do think the cover is a vast improvement over the original. Ironically I simply went back to the source models (although two are badly smashed up I still had photos of them) and used them as the main subjects in the cover and abandoned the painting style. The printed version has excellent sharpness-I was really impressed how well it looked in the proof. I hope to get a second book ready soon as it was rather satisfying working on this.

We're back

It has been a busy summer and fall. I am in the middle of rendering an animation which is taking weeks (for something that is approx a minute in length it is taking me 2 months--I need a second computer for rendering if I keep this up). My last post mentioned I was hoping to be done with it by the end of april. It was not to be! Far from it. In fact I was close to shelving it entirely. 2 years wasted. I ended up needing to upgrade my computer and discovering that much of the computer crashing I had encountered with the project may have been due to my system not being 64 bit, so I was able to resume working on the animation. It has been very slow getting it to the final stage as I added a few extra things (such as the spaceship above) but I have been able to work on other things as it has been rendering.

Animation doldrums

I could have missed an entry this month but eh--here is one anyway.
I have overshot my self-imposed schedule but as the shot I am doing is three times as long as the first it is taking a while longer.
If i cant get it all finished and rendered by the end of this coming month then I will..
I will consider giving myself some kind of suspenseful ultimatum to supercharge my motivation.

Second animation project in progress

Decided to go back and continue an animation that I started in 2009 but shelved due to a software glitch. Since it seems to be corrected I am continuing with it. *Hopefully* I can get it completed within the month.

Fiery Demon Animation

Here's the updated version of my first cg animation. I added fire to the figure and smoke to the background.
I used entirely computer generated fire--next time I will use real fire footage as the results will likely be much better.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u43jvSzJXs

More Fire Work

I have the fire layer completed. Worked well enough using entirely computer generated fire although next time I would probably use filmed fire elements as well to add variety-but manipulating real flame footage to match the movement of walking figures is tedious.

I also added a fire light layer--at first I wasnt going to worry about shadows as I assumed that the light from one fire would obscure the shadows generated by another fire source as there are several on the figure but after running a test it looks better with some shadow.
I didnt bother animating the lights so they would not only flicker but move as well.

Getting close so I hope to have this finished by the end of the year.

Return to the Firing Line

I started to experiment with computer generated fire again. This was the first thing I tried out when I was introduced to computer graphics some years back.
At the time I was amazed by the default fire-but assumed it wouldnt look so good when rendered as an animation-especially on fast moving objects.

While looking at using real fire and filming it for another animation project, I revisited my Lava Demon test animation from early 2009 and started to add fluid fire to it.
The results havent been bad so I am working on that, and hopefully will have it finished by new year or earlier.

Here is a photo of the fire (building it flame by flame) on the figure(with it rendered invisible).

You can just see the outline of the mouth and eyes and fingers.




It will be layered onto the animation of the figure I did almost 2 years ago.