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SIGGRAPH 08
So I think I've finally recovered from the craziness that was Siggraph 08! Being my second Siggraph, I felt much more comfortable with how the conference worked, and what I wanted to see. The one downside of this year was I wasn't able to get the pricey full-conference pass that included the entire animation festival and extra screenings. However, there was still plenty to see and do. Two RIT teams were represented in the "Iron Animator" Competition called Fjorg! so there was plenty of cheering and Viking-helmet-wearing (the theme is vikings, if you couldn't tell). Also the first day, I got to be in the very first row for Ed Catmull's keynote speech that carried a theme of trust in the creative environment. Ed Catmull is the president if Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and he emphasized how the trusting and risk-taking environment at Pixar is the key to its' success, and how he's trying to bring that energy to Disney. And one of my favorite quotes from his talk was actually regarding Pixar's failures, which the audience has never seen as they had the sense to pull the plug or alter course before these "failures" hit screens. He stated "We keep our failures in house, we call them education."

I was able to get my character animation reel graciously reviewed by 2 Disney animators, which was really nice, and I got a lot of great advice.

Another highlight of Siggraph this year was seeing a few more minutes of raw footage of Laika's new feature Coraline. It looks incredible, I'm so excited!!



After the conference, I was able to visit Disneyland for the first time, which was a BIG deal for me, being such a Disney World fan for my entire life. People told me it's "the same" as the Magic Kingdom in Florida, but it was so different! Space Mountain in Disneyland almost had me sick all over the universe by the end of it.

Then even after that, we had some friends from school come to visit San Francisco with us so we did the whole riding-the-trolley, Fisherman's Warf, thing. A marathon 2 weeks, but so much fun.

My pics are up on Flickr
Topic(s): Siggraph
By Starfish on August 23, 2008 at 2:13am EDT Add Comment


First Totem
My vision of the totems has shifted a bit from my original concepts. As I started to model the first totem I realized that doing seven of them from scratch was going to take a looooong time. So decided to experiment with the idea of making heads from the same character creator I'm using in Poser, and exporting the geometry to Maya. Then in Maya I could carefully combine them (being careful to preserve the UV maps) and use the Sculpt Polys tool to create a sort of organic look.


As it turns out, I actually like the look of the totems this way a lot better than my original design. The originals were very traditional, based on real world references. This method keeps the look much more in line with the rest of Tuuqayi's world. It also makes them more unique. As I go on to create the remaining six totems, I'm still going to make an effort to have each face represent a particular animal spirit, it will just retain certain human characteristics.


And by the way, comic 10 is up. Ended up taking two weeks. So I'll see if I can improve on that pace for #11.

Topic(s): maya poser
By fruehdom on August 18, 2008 at 10:13pm EDT Add Comment


Michael Phelps – Greatest Athlete or Greatest Swimmer
Much has been made of Michael Phelps' record setting eighth gold medal from last night. Obviously, this is an amazing feat, but how much of the actual numbers depend on his sport of choice? I would never sit here and deny the fact that he is the greatest swimmer of all time, but calling him the greatest athlete of all time may be taking it too far.

The fact is, there are very few other olympic sports that would even make it possible for a single athlete to win eight gold medals in a single games. Taking a quick look at the event list, swimming tops out at a massive 17 medal opportunities. Besides that, there are only four other categories that feature eight or more possibilities.

  • Running There are 14 different medal races in the olympic games. This is the next best opportunity for a non-swimmer to even come close to Phelps' record this year. The problem here is that runners rarely ever even think about competing in that many events, as distances vary greatly and the difference between sprinting and running hurdles is significant.

  • Shooting I'm not going to pretend to know much about shooting, but there are nine medal opportunities in this sport. It doesn't seem too out there to think that a single person could compete in all nine, but even if they won them they would never be considered in the same breath as Phelps, given the difference in physical stamina required between the sports.

  • Gymnastics There are eight medal opportunities here, but the actual skills required to win them all vary massively, from floor exercise to rings. The only reason it's in consideration is because one of them is the all-around. Has a sweep ever been done before? Obviously not. My question is, has one ever been attempted?

  • Rowing The final opportunity based on pure medal counts is Rowing. There are eight different events here, which would require a perfect run. Again, I doubt this has even ever been attempted.

So you have to wonder, what if more medal opportunities were added to other sports? Being a huge basketball fan, I can't help but wonder how well Lebron or Kobe would do if given more medal opportunities. What would it take to give these basketball legends a chance at eclipsing Phelps' record? Well going by the numbers, they would need 17 different medal opportunities. So what would those be?

Let's start out with the obvious; varying the number of players. 5 on 5, 4 on 4, 3 on 3, 2 on 2, and 1 on 1 would all have to be included. This jumps us right up to five medal opportunities. I think both 5 on 5 and 4 on 4 could be played full court, but the rest should go to a half court rule set. How sweet would it be to see Kobe and Lebron compete for the 1 on 1 gold medal?

Next, let's jump right into what is already done in the All Star game. If they can judge a gymnastics floor competition, they sure as heck can judge a Dunk Contest. A Skills Course would be entertaining to watch, with the person who finishes in the fastest time getting the gold medal. 3-Point Shooting is another obvious one. While we are here, we might as well extend the thought a little big and throw in Foul Shooting. Heck, if they can judge a dunk contest, they surely could figure out a way to also judge a nice Dribbling Floor Exercise. Lastly, I guess we should include that weird 3-Ball thing. We are trying to get to 17 after all.

That brings us up to 11. Man, it's starting to sound kind of cool isn't it? We are going to have to pull out all of the stops to get to 17. Let's hit the playgrounds. Might as well throw Horse in here. Remember Knockout? That'd be pretty entertaining too. I used to play Twenty-One as a kid. That every man for themselves mentality would surely make for good TV. What are we up to now? 14?

Alright, let's regroup. If they are shooting free throws and three pointers, let's see how people can handle a Half Court Shootout... I'm running out of steam here, so bear with me for these final two. I think there should be both an Offense Medal and Defense Medal awarded. My idea here is to hand them out after a series of 1 on 1 opportunities. Once all of the entrants have been sorted out, they will take turns going at each other player five times. Every score gives the offensive player a point. Every stop gives the defensive player a point. At the end, the offensive guy with the most points gets a gold and the defensive guy with the most points gets a gold.

I know the second half of these event ideas are an exercise in silliness, but I still think some really cool things could be done to give all athletes more medal opportunities. I can tell you right now that I would love watching every single one of those basketball events. How cool would it be to see a 40-something guy come in and beat out Lebron for the free throw shooting gold? Hey, at least I didn't take the stroke mentality when coming up with this list and include things like 5 on 5 while only skipping.

Photo came from Reuters.
Topic(s): Olympics Michael Phelps Swimming Medals Basketball Sports
By Pale on August 17, 2008 at 2:33pm EDT Add/View Comments (2)


My Pokemon Ranch - Play It?
This will be another shorter Play It? post, as my review is up over at NWR. I played (and I use that term loosely) My Pokemon Ranch quite a bit since it was released as a WiiWare title on June 9. I picked it up for two reasons; I'm a Pokemon nut and I like keeping my guys nice and organized.

Overall, I was relatively underwhelmed at first, but the feature set of this tool really started to grow on me. It managed to get me back into my copy of Pokemon Pearl for a good 2-3 weeks, until it was recently taken out of my DS in favor of the new Final Fantasy IV remake. Please check out the review I linked to in the first paragraph for all of the details.

It is not hard to decide for yourself if you should play this game. If you have a ton of Pokemon in Diamond or Pearl, and want a nice way of organizing and comparing them, pick this up. If you don't play those games, but would still enjoy a Pokemon based screensaver-like application that let's you take pictures of your Miis interacting with a variety of monsters, consider this.

All of the screenshots included in this post were taken in my ranch using the in-game option.
Topic(s): Play It? Games My Pokemon Ranch Wii WiiWare
By Pale on August 16, 2008 at 2:23pm EDT Add Comment


Totems
The animal spirits exist in the world of Tuuqayi as totems until they are called to act as guides. I hadn't previously planned on including the totems in the first episode, but I've been moving pieces of the story around a bit lately, and I've decided that the totem grove will actually be the first place we see. So that means I have to make the totems. First step has been to roughly sketch out some concepts for them. Now I can start on the modeling in Maya.
Topic(s): characters concepts
By fruehdom on August 15, 2008 at 7:58pm EDT Add Comment
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