I’ve been out of it for the last couple weeks, immersed into Visa paperwork, trying to figure out the best way for me to stay in Canada, well I took some time and sent a t-shirt design that was sitting on my computer for months to Threadless.
For the few of you who might not know what Threadless is, it’s a t-shirt company that prints limited versions of designs created by different designers & artists. There’s an initial period when you send it and they can either take it or reject it, and then it goes public for people to vote and comment on it.
At the beginning of the day we got a brief: to create a motion piece showing a different version of the famous case of the hatchet murders that occurred in New England in the late 1920’s. Everything from concept to delivery had to be done in under eight hours.
Leading my team to find less obvious solutions, we focused on giving the message the time it needed to be compelling; when we got out of our initial pitch meeting we convinced the panel that we got the most compelling story. When we presented our piece, we won both the audience and the judge’s choice awards.
Here’s my first tackle at the Xpresso node-based editor of Cinema 4d, I’m connecting the Sound Effector to control the birth rate, size and rotation of the particle system I created with Thinking Particles.
Today while I was doing research for my Final Project, I stumbled upon this unusual yet amazing website. The address http://laptop.org belongs to a non-profit organization called One Laptop Per Child, program initiated by the MIT and designed by renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar. It’s mission, to develop low-cost ($100) laptops for children in developing countries.
A slideshow of how the program got started can be viewed here www.dcontinuum.com
The thing that amazed me the most is the great design of the laptop itself, it looks nicer than a lot of high-end computers in the market, showing us that you don’t need a lot of money to generate great design, sometimes all you need is a cause.
By the way, you can emulate their OS by going to this link: Emulating the XO I haven’t tried it yet, but I will when I have some free time.
While I was reading some articles a couple hours ago, I stumbled upon a quite promising website, Christmas greetings from Wieden + Kennedy London. This website’s reason to be is to express your Christmas spirit to friends and family, without killing trees.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that I haven’t slept since Thursday night, but I found the application pretty hard to use, first of all It took me three tries to figure out how to change the color of the tree. The color engine features an eyedropper tool, which by the way selects random colors sometimes and then when you select a color your tree doesn’t change; It was after the third time I tried to change it that I tried to click on the tree and it indeed changed, but the tool never changed to a paint bucket, or any other icon for me to know I needed to do that second action.
Another thing that struck a nerve was the scale feature of the tree ornaments, I was excited when I realized you could do it, simple yet effective; then again when you reach a certain size it gets really difficult to move or scale up or down your ornament.
Even after those little details, I still enjoyed the website and find the concept really interesting, plus, this evokes creativity from users; I’ve seen some quite interesting little trees on it.
This is my first experiment using the dynamics module of Cinema 4d. dynamics is a module that recreates real life physics, such as gravity and wind. In this experiment I have two cubes at a certain height, that I then drop by the magic of gravity and a little bit of wind.
The trickiest part was to merge all of the elements of each cube into one single object. This is because dynamics only work with single editable objects. So I modeled everything separate, then merge everything in steps, starting with the extruded type, and then the same type with the cube.
Mograph is, in the words of one of my instructors, Cinema4d’s “Do Cool Shit Button”. Because with the minimum knowledge of Mograph you can do some crazy cool stuff with it. This experiment features Mograph’s most basic object; the Cloner Object, which as you might’ve imagined it creates copies of an instance.
Using the Cloner Object and the Random Effector, which scatters all of the clones randomly according to the values that you input. I created a small animation of letters that cluster around typography.
The bar is rising, now I am using all of the above plus the Sound Effector, which means that the animation parameters that I input will be in sync with the music that you load on the application. Giving you something worth watching almost instantaneously.
Nesting, that’s the important term here, I placed two Cloner Objects that each animate a wheel, inside of a Cloner Object that animates the whole bike. Then I exported everything to After Effects and added the little tittle on the far lower right corner.
The brief for this project was quite simple, to create a t-shirt design. The fact that the brief was so open, made it a little tricky to decide on what to do. Because, from my point of view, t-shirt design is one of the areas, where experimentation can easily take place.
After some brainstorming with my roommate, I got it, a play on words.
Cloth, it took me a couple days to figure it out, and for the most part it was quite easy. The big problem was, there’s almost no documentation online; all they have is “throw a cloth on a cube” Which is kinda cool when you are starting out, but not enough when you are actually trying to accomplish something.
So I started fooling around with Clothilde, the Cloth Engine of Cinema4d, and as I mentioned before, the only tutorial online was the let’s throw a cloth on a cube.
Then I started to fool around with the physics of the engine, wind, resistance, flexibility, you name it. As a side-note, it took me almost a day to figure out how to wrap something with the cloth before the animation started, in other words, the initial position. If you ever encounter the same problem, all you have to do is go to the Dresser tab and click the “Relax” button, after that click “Set” on the Init Position Area.
And later on, I worked on an animation that featured everything that I learned on the Cloth engine.
Here is some of my experimentation with cameras in 3d. Nothing too crazy yet. I haven’t been experimented enough on this area, but I think it’s worth showing.
My first attempt to cameras was a target camera on a freehand spline, which means that I drew a line by hand and then attached a camera to it, what target camera means, is that no matter what the focus point of the camera will always be the water bottle.
Continuing the idea of cameras on splines, I created this quick logo bumper. Although instead of a freehand line, this is a circle, which gives it a more controlled and smooth movement.
A couple weeks ago I volunteered at the Vidfest, Vancouver International Design FESTival, and was able to attend a workshop given by Joshua Davis. In this seminar one of the things he talked about was a process he had to extract colours from photographs, and I was quite amazed because when you extract colour from nature photography all the colors blend beautifully. And I started doing it getting great results.
Well, a couple weeks after I was looking into the Automator Application and how it can help you do stuff like resizing images and what not, and I started looking for Adobe Automator scripts, see what people have done with this application. After looking for a while I found a post called “AI CS3 + Flickr + In The Mod mashup.” So I started reading it, and It was quite amazing.
What it was, was a flash application that gets images from Flickr depending on what you are looking for, and then you can extract the colours from these images, real-time from Illustrator. All you have to do is run the Script look for images and copy the colour palette to your swatches. It doesn’t get easier than that, so if you are looking for fast good colours in seconds, this is a must have for you.
Here’s a video on how the application works, enjoy
Here’s my Motion Graphics II final project piece, it revolved around the whole blue-screen concept as I talked about a while ago, but I’ve been crazy busy and I just found some time to update the blog.
This movie’s concept revolves around an abstract version of creative thinking, from the overused yet effective gear moving representing thinking, to a quite abstract journey of a guy trying to come out with an idea, and the final idea was the concept of what an idea is.
The major challenge was the time factor, I had my storyboards ready to go but some areas of the movie took much longer than I expected, and after a few sleepless nights I finished something that kinda made sense, if explained, which wasn’t the intention, but by the end of term due to a not well organized self-schedule I ended up trying to make major fixes a couple days before it was due, sound being one of them. I’m quite happy with the output though, and this term I organized myself better in order to give each one of the projects the time they deserve.
Today’s Siggraph’s “Computer Animation Festival” had a little surprise for the attendees. It was a simple yet amazingly innovative product.
“ZYGOTE is a lightweight inflated ball, illuminated from within, that responds to pressure applied to its surface. Interacting with the ball is simple: punch it, bounce it, squeeze it, or tap it and the ball’s internal LEDs react instantaneously.”
The first time I saw the ball in action was a couple weeks ago, he was a guest at the latest VFS Digital Design Assembly, and I was amazed with the simplicity of it, and at the same time the complex programming that goes on behind the scenes, I love that, when something looks so simple and has a quite complex system running to make it look simple.I was excited of being a part of this event. I was assigned to record this event, there were two of them, and even though the second screening of the Festival had more people, the fewer people in it actually got more involved in this experience, so much that the lights on the ceiling received some impacts, but nothing to worry about.After I finish the edit of the footage, I’ll post it here, this would be probably at the beginning of next week.
