“Two of my favo…

“Two of my favourite subjects – art and biology – shared a common and important feature. They both involved a fundamental emphasis on observation and drawing.”

– Dr. Paul Liam Harrison

Drew Berry

An incredibly inspiring talk by biomedical animator Drew Berry on why scientific visualisation is so important in helping us see the unseen, and how in many cases it can be much more useful than textbooks or journals.

“This field of view is about… a semester’s worth of biology.”

New Animatic – Part One

Thought I would send the animatic off in small chunks to get the seal of approval from Angus, so as to arrest any small scientific discrepancies before they grow into malignancies of artistic licence…

More Boards

Some more storyboard panels.

Maya Goals Experiment

Remember that terrible Goals test I did last December?  Well I was convinced that I could do more with this feature than I had so far – it’s just that I hadn’t been using it in the correct context. So I did an experiment to teach myself more about it, using the Gnomon Dynamics DVD and a horse run cycle from the Digital Tutors Asset Library. I animated the Goal Weight value and Shader Transparency to make the particles form then disperse, and also applied Turbulence and Vortex fields to make it look less uniform.  I learned that when you’re using goals to make a character out of Particles, it’s best to break up the geometry into lots of different sections to give full control over not only how the character forms but also the size and goal weight of the particles forming different body parts.

In my own film, I will be able to use Goals to control the movement of swarms of particles – probably using a locator.

This is not just storyboarding…

…this is CONCEPTUAL storyboarding (Gnomon style)!  I have been watching the Gnomon Conceptual Storyboarding series narrated by Derek Thompson, a storyboard artist at Pixar.  It’s totally changed my mind aboyut storyboarding – I hated doing it before, but I love it now!

I had previously assumed that storyboard artists only started work once the designs for the characters and environment had been fully finalised, but I know now that this is not the case. Storyboarding is a much more organic process than I had originally thought, with the look of a film developing as the artist works – killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. As I’m working to a rather limited time frame, this suits me perfectly as I can develop the look of the piece while designing shots.  It also means that I can work out whether the environment will actually co-operate with the shots I have in mind.  Technically speaking, I also now know how to use Layer Comps in Photoshop, and now sorely wish I’d known about them before.

Progress has been slow – I was bedridden most of yesterday and today with a bout of food poisoning – but here’s one I was working on today.

It’s quite a departure from the way I had previously staged this shot.  The reason for changing it is that Angus said that the nucleus was much more densely packed than I had represented it in my pre-viz shot.  This presented quite a challenge, as filling the nucleus up with stuff could potentially distract the  viewer’s eye from the action.  We noticed that in Hidden Life of the Cell, the BBC had avoided this particular scientific truth and built quite a sparse nucleus.  Wanting to stay as accurate as possible, Angus said, “I am sure you can do better!”

Better than the Beeb? Hmm… big ask.

So after spending a little while moving things around and playing with colour values and shapes, I hit on a possible solution…LOADS of depth of field!  Focusing only on where the action was happening and blurring the rest would still keep the impression of a densely packed nucleus, but not distract the eye. At least, I hope that it will work. And now, armed with my new conceptual storyboards, I’m fairly confident that it will.

Jiggle Deformer Test

Just a quick test to see how this works (and that it works with the displacement maps). Jiggle deformers were one of the stars of the show in my graduate film when I used them to create cartoony hair. They’ll be featured extensively in this film too, for a bit of dynamic squash, stretch and follow-through.

p53 Shader Development

Did some more look development on my p53 sculpt last night, with the help of two Digital Tutors courses: Creative Development: Subsurface Scattering Shaders in Maya and mental ray with Jon Tojek and Mastering Displacement Maps in Maya.

I used the misss_fast_skin_maya shader, which utilises Subsurface Scattering.  You can see the scatter on the edges of the model – it’s more red where the light shines through. I decided to leave the scatter on its default skin colours – it seems to follow aesthetically that skin cell molecules should have a skin-like tone to them (though in real life they would be colourless). I’m really pleased with the effect it gives the model, and I think I shall be using it extensively in my film.  I’m pleased that the look’s finally starting to come together!

Mudbox Sculpt of p53

This is a Mudbox sculpt made from a sphere. It’s still a little too “ball-like” for my liking, but the more subtle vein-y textures seem to distance it from the classic tacky “sci-viz” look. I may just have found a way forward…

Sketching

I got my feedback for Semester One’s work at the end of last week, and I was extremely pleased with my grades.  There is always room for improvement however, and John’s primary suggestion was that – having already demonstrated that I can learn and use the technology well – I spend more time focusing on the artistic side of things.  So I’ve bought a new sketchbook and I’m now trying to articulate what are – frankly – some pretty crude-looking scientific diagrams in my own style.

Yes. Exactly.

I’ve also been watching the BBC’s “Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell” again armed with greater scientific knowledge than I had last time I watched it, and it’s interesting to see how they have interpreted the different organelles, many of which I can now identify by name.  For example, the cytoskeleton (top image) appears in microscope slides much as I have drawn it there – organic and sort of cotton-like – however the creative brains at Intelligent Creatures have represented it here as a sort of geometric cellular scaffolding.

The real question is – how much can I get away with? Granted, scientists’ ribbon diagrams can tell you how something is stuctured – but knowing the chemical structure of something is very different to knowing what something looks like (much as if one were trying to draw La Sagrada Familia based on the shape of the scaffolding alone).  The news that – only six weeks ago – DNA was photographed for the first time ever reminded me that we really know nothing at all.

My conclusion is that p53 probably looks a lot more interesting than the lump of balls I’ve drawn it as, and even if it doesn’t… for storytelling purposes, it’s important to me that my story’s hero look more momentous than a lump of balls. So it’s back to the drawing board (book?) tomorrow for another attempt.