Joe Rule

Well, the first semester of my junior year is over. This is my final project for my 3D modeling and animation class. Character animation and rigging was a subject that we did not cover in depth in class, but I decided to extend the curriculum on my own and dive into it.

I started off by sketching character design and drawing. Cinema 4D has issues when it comes to symmetry modeling, so I decided to go the open-source route and fired up Blender for that portion of the project. After exporting the model to Cinema 4D I spent about a week scouring the internet for training on rigging and weight painting. For those that aren’t familiar with 3D character animation techniques, a character must have a skeleton of digital bones that define how the limbs move and where the joints are. Each bone can be attached to vertices on the mesh based on a weight value of 0-100%. Cinema 4D is probably the worst possible program to use for weighting next to Microsoft Word. Each vertex on the character must have a weight value of exactly 100% otherwise the mesh will shift and blob when moving the character long distances. Unfortunately this meant that I had to go through a table of numbers that contained the weight value for each vertex for each of the 13 bones in the character and make sure that each row added up to 100%. One would think that Cinema 4D would have tools to do this automatically, but I couldn’t find any.

So, after cursing the rigging tools for about 1.5 weeks of the 3 weeks I had to work on the project, I finally was able to get into the animation. It actually went fairly well. The training I found online helped a lot because it told me how to set up convenient inverse kinematics chains for the legs and nice animation controls for all the bones. In my case using an IK chain meant that I could grab the ankle of my character, move it around and the entire leg would follow it with the hip and knee bending realistically. Forward kinematics would have required manually rotating the hip and knee to achieve the same result.

I finished up the last bits of animation over this past weekend and moved on to studying other subjects, planning to work on sound a day or 2 before the project was due (Thursday). Unfortunately the other subjects took up more time than I thought and I found myself still working on other subjects Wednesday afternoon. I was writing the statement for my Self-Gaze project when an email came in from my professor: “Joe – 334 final Wed at 10…did something happen?” All the blood drained from my face. The class website specifies explicitly, “Failure to attend the final results in failure of the course.” In a couple seconds the blood returned to my face accompanied by a string of profanity that would have made a marine sergeant blush. I immediately ran to Larson’s office and explained that I thought the final critique was on Thursday morning as the university exam schedule specified—9am Monday classes have an exam at 8am Thursday. He explained that because the class is 1 hour 40 minutes long instead of 50 min, the exam could be held at either the 9am or 10am Monday time. Fortunately he allowed me to finish the project in time for the exam time I was expecting.

As they say, every cloud has a silver lining. The whole situation gave me the motivation to fix some little problems in the animation that I was originally going to let go. I figured if I was getting an extra day to work on it, it had better be the best I can possibly make it. Also, no one was using the render farm so I was able to re-render the entire animation.

EDIT:
Here's what my professor had to say about my project.

"Simply put, your animation is insanely good for the scope of the class project. Taking on articulated character animation is a pretty significant task and you not only created articulated character animation, you created a lively character animation (he falls, jumps, flips over, and has relatively emotional expressions). Technically, there are very few issues and the issues that are present are relatively small (a bit of squash when he falls would help, the force of him coming to a stand seems off - slow, there is some sliding in the last scene as he looks around). The lighting is solid and the textures are appropriate, though consider more gloss (specular or reflection) to on eyeballs to give them a wet shine. In terms of concept, the ending does not seem like a complete conclusion, we understand the ending (absolutely) but it could be refined further. Perhaps he jumps once or twice in an attempt to get back to the ball?"

The concept of the gaze is examined for the psychological effects it has on individuals and likewise the cultures and societies they create. The gaze transcends a mere “look”. It is an examination and a judgment of another person, thing or idea. Whether we like it or not these gazes affect us and how we think and act. For example: think of all the judgments, expectations, thoughts, reactions and emotions that a man gazing upon a woman carries. As stated above, gazes can be upon objects as well. Think about the effects that gazing upon an artwork has on the artist and how these gazes change the interpretation of the artwork across a culture.

I’ve found that the gaze is rooted in an awareness of self. Whether you are the gazer or the gazed, it requires an awareness of self to be affected by it. Some claim that the gaze of a one person objectifies others and exercises power over them. This cannot occur until the gazed becomes aware of him or herself. The actual intentions of the gazer have little to no influence on what the gazed feels. The ultimate tragedy of all this is that the gaze is carried to the depths of every person’s heart and mind. We are poignantly aware of ourselves as objects that other people can gaze upon and judge. Perhaps the most damaging, yet unseen and unexamined gaze is the gaze turned inward. We all live with ourselves, critique ourselves and act and relate to other people according to these inward gazes. They affect everything we do. I’ve found that the harshest judgment is often found in them and not in the gazes of others. So, I pose the question: what if we were able to step away from the gazes of others and ourselves and away from self-awareness? How would this affect our lives? How would we relate to other people and ourselves? How would the arts and our perception of the arts change?

This piece has two strong influences. The first is Laurie Anderson. I pay tribute to her through the soundtrack and the visual style and movement of the piece. Her “music videos” are often compilations of strange images and visual tricks that show the essence of the music and not the literal interpretation. The result is a very surreal and dreamlike piece, which brings me to my second influence for this piece. I had a nightmare a few months ago where I was looking out a window at night and suddenly my reflection in the glass broke free from my steady movement and started out on its own. It darted away from the window and out of sight. I had the strong sense that it was going to sneak into the house and attack me. I needed to be ready to fight for my life.

I wanted this piece to have a very ethereal and dreamlike quality to it. This was partly because of the inspiration for it but also because the concepts and ideas I examine are sometimes difficult to grasp. The reflection in the window plays on the fact that gazing upon ourselves is obvious, yet invisible. It’s not obvious we do it until we stop. The poor video quality, monochromatic tone and strongly contrasting figure/ground relationships were all chosen to enhance the dream-like quality of the piece and to provoke interest from viewers. However, my intention is not to present a point or find some end or great truth. Although the piece has served as a place for me to examine the self-gaze, I wanted it to be completely open to different interpretations. This, frankly, was quite risky. I have absolutely no idea if this piece will have any impact on viewers, but if they stop and think for a minute then I’ve succeeded in jarring them from their subconscious, everyday existence and perhaps pushed them toward something better.

Soundtrack by Laurie Anderson. "Walking and Falling" from the album "Big Science" 1982

I had to create 10 small pieces of saleable art for one of my classes. Instead of actually selling them I decided to share them with you guys! All the elements consist of Adobe After Effects .aep files. Some were created in CS4 for PC and some were created in CS5.5 for Mac. I decided to host them this way because of bandwidth and space restrictions. If you would like them in a more user-friendly format, such as pre-keyed Quicktime files, let me know and we will work something out.

http://joerule.com/share/10_Elements.zip

I'm going to skip the long narrative for this post. The object of the first animation was to represent physical forces in motion as realistically as possible using just key frames. (no simulations) It was the best in the class by popular vote. The second animation had to be the exact same scene, except with exaggerated or comedic effect.

This object of this third animation was to interpret two opposing concepts. (I chose evolution and degeneration) It could not use text or any recognizable forms.

Leave any questions or comments in the comments below or you can email me joe (at) joerule.com

Claude Monet is known for the unique impressionist style of his paintings. This is comprised of using bright, saturated, contrasting colors,(depending on the subject) large brush strokes and focusing on the movement of light in a scene. He also tries to capture a moment in time. It's like seeing what someone else is feeling if that person were standing inside the painting. His paintings also somehow evoke emotion in the viewer. It is usually a bittersweet sense—sad, yet wonderful. Some describe it as nostalgia.

I chose to explore his particular style and technique in my piece in the hopes that I could understand a little better what made him the artist that he was and how he observed the world around him. After all, where the brush meets the canvas is where it really happens. (In my case where the pen meets the tablet.) I knew when I started the project that it was going to be difficult, maybe impossible. After all, I was trying to learn something in five or ten hours that Monet perfected over his entire eighty-six years of life. I also knew my medium was going to hurt me. There is inherently more potential for expression in oil paint than there is in pixels. I also ran into problems when I realized that an internet connection is needed to use Adobe Photoshop on the NMU laptops. This made working en plein air impossible. However, after being sufficiently pessimistic, I found to my surprise that I could achieve a certain amount of expression—or rather impression—in my digital painting using focused observation, memory and photographic reference.

Monet uses smaller brush strokes than I originally thought. I started with a large brush, but soon ended up with a blobby mess. Switching to a smaller brush and executing (many) more controlled strokes produced a better result. Different subjects require different types of strokes depending on their mass. I found that when I was painting the rock face, a small, almost point-like stroke was needed to achieve solidity and permanence. When painting the wave troughs, heavier, longer strokes were needed to show fluidity. The white wave crests and the spray from the waves breaking on the rocks were painted with longer, thin brush strokes.

Color is equally, if not more important than brushwork in Monet's paintings. At first glance, they appear as beautiful gradients much like those seen in nature. Once I started trying to duplicate those gradients, I realized that they are actually made of strokes of color wildly different in hue and brightness. I couldn't believe the contrast between each color on the palette. I believe this was the true gift of Monet. Somehow he had the ability to see those individual colors in nature and put then down on the canvas.

I hope to explore Monet's brushwork and color more in the future, both digitally and in oil. My schedule for the winter 2012 semester includes a drawing and painting class. I hope that will afford me the opportunity to continue learning and exploring.