Children of the Kern

KERNING:

The art of creating an aesthetically pleasing space between letters in type; creating a balanced feel to fonts which feel squashed or too loose.

Some Examples of Kerning:

My Newfound Maya Toolset

I know you've seen some of my 3D creations on here,

But have any of you been wondering how it works?

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Autodesk Maya is a 3D animation program that is almost like a beefed up shiny kind of Google Sketchup, though it may almost be degrading to Maya to compare the two. Where Sketchup let you create things in a world of rather pointy polygons and an array of built in textures, Maya can take it to the next level: creating smooth shapes and  3D textures that would put many parts of Sketchup to shame. But then again, sketchup isn't an animation program as much as a technical modeling one, so that's where the comparisons stop.

Lets take a look at some of the basic tools Maya has to offer, shall we?

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Lessons From a Cup

One of the more interesting tools I got to discover in Maya was the revolve tool. The revolve takes a curve, and rotates it around the axis to create a full 3D object made from that curve.

The curve, however is a whole other tool on it's own. The curve tool in Maya is similar to the Pen tool in Illustrator or Photoshop. just in 3D. It consists of vectors and vertices that I can edit before or after I create the object. You can see these curves off to the left. (The fist one revolved to create the glass, the other the vase). 

When revolved, however, these curves make a NURBS surface instead of a polygon one. NURBS are created with curves and bends rather than flat polygons, and therefore had to be transformed into polygons in order to texture them as they appear below.

Using a light scorch called the Mental ray, I was able to achieve the reflective glass surface you see on the cup below. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get it to look just right.

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The Lofty Saltshaker

Now, when I say loft, I don't mean like a lofty height or a place to live,. What I'm referring to is the Loft tool. The loft tool's power is to lay a surface over a set of curves like a tent tarp or table cloth. As you can see in the saltshakers to the left and below, the shape it forms is not a natural one, but rather several deformed circles on top of each other (descending in size) lofted to make a surface. These circles were composed of the previously mentioned NURBS curves I talked about in the cups section.

A Dramatic Angle of the shiny Saltshaker

It took some tweaking,

 but I was able to duplicate 

the shape and put salt and a 

cap on the saltshaker to 

get the result seen here.

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The Shiniest Shape

Now, this shape here may seem to be complex and unusual, but that's not what I'm going to talk to you about right now. For now, I will talk to you about how it is lit.

In maya, there are several types of lights available to light your scene with, and they all have different uses. A few I will show you are the spotlight, directional, area, and point lights.

The light you can see on the left here is an example of how the directional light appears in maya. A directional light is a light scorch that comes from everywhere, but all pointing in the same direction. it is a lot like how the sun lights our front lawns, coming in a solid sheet of light form the sky hitting the ground. This is slightly similar to an area light. An area light lights an internal area from no discernible source. I have not yet used one, so I have no pictorial examples of it.

The spotlight is the most obviously named light in the set. It acts as a spotlight or flashlight in all aspects, shining down from a cone to light a specific area. The Point light, on the other hand, is more like a light bulb, radiating light out from a single point, as its name suggests.                                                

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Hammer Time

For a simple tool the hammer is not a simple shape. To get this specific shape to work, I had to take the faces of a rectangular prism and cut them in half in the back (using the cut face tool) and extrude them outwards to create the back wedge.

Extruding brings a face outwards from it's origin, allowing me to extend the front of the hammer face outward. To get the rounded octagon shape of the hammer face, I used the bevel tool to cut off the edges and create new, rounded faces out of them.

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I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Infinite Loops

Ice cream: fun to eat, a little less fun to model. (Not saying it isn't fun, just a tad less so) Creating ice-cream at first seems as simple as making a circle and a cone and putting them together but it's not that easy. No ice-cream scoop is a perfectly smooth sphere, so we had to compensate for reality. To do this we used bump maps, an effects that allows us to texture a surface without editing each point manually.

The slightly pre-deformed ice cream shapes

The Same Bowl with Bump Maps attached.

The final Animation ^

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A Slightly Simple Animation

A reoccurring project we've been working on is creating a bouncing animation with various balls. This time, we did it in Maya.

To create this animation we took videos of the various balls dropping to measure out the heights in the nifty graph editor you can see here to the left, which represents the various ranges of motion the object selected can go through, which is especially nice for visual people.

Then we took note of the frame number that the objects would hit the ground at, and marked them in the timeline you can see in the right image in the bottom bar. Keyframes are a marker in an animation timeline that defines an object to be in a certain place or position at that time. The program's job is to fill in the in-between frames. I especially like these kinds of programs since they can save you the time of drawing every frame, though sometimes I still feel that drawing frame by frame can be easier for some things. The finished animation is below, and you can see our tennis ball was rather deflated at the time of shooting, and doesn't have as much altitude as you might expect form one.

Postcards From Nowhere

Seasons greetings!

(Whatever season it may be)

At the time of posting, it's about that time of year that people go about sending cards to each other to let them know what they're missing out on. So, it only seemed fitting that I work on some postcards to get some new Photoshop skills under my belt! Granted, I didn't get too much into the Christmas spirit at the time, so I stated off with a postcard about my favorite season: Fall!

The skill I demonstrate with this simple card is the use of clipping masks!

As you can see, there a nice, autumn-themed images nestled in the text. Now, how does one do this? Clipping masks! A clipping mask is an effect that allows me to frame one image within the boundaries of another. For example: framing the image of the apples in the letter A. (because apples starts with A, ehehehehe)

I used some glow and stroke effects on the text to make them have more 'POP' in the image.


Next, there was a call to make a personal postcard for ourselves! I may not be a destination, but that didn't stop me from trying to represent myself as well as possible in the card! Now, image wise, I tried to incorporate as much of my original work as possible. So, the last four letters of my name have pictures I created all by myself. (The first I have incorporated my favorite bird, the potoo bird). For the main back image, I found a shining sky and clouds background, to represent my head being 'in the clouds', and reaching for 'sky high'. To contrast it, I placed a storm in the thought bubble of the majestic Jackalope. (Kind of like a brainstorm, right?)

So, To create a nice balance of bright, shining colors, I delayered the clouds on top of themselves, and applied a screen to the top layer. To add even more shine, I put a light yellow, transparent ray of light over the majority of the image These effects gave the whole image a surreal, dreamy feel to it. The Jackalope only seems to add to the fantastical feeling.

And for any who are curious as to what are in those letters, they are a variety of creatures that I have drawn within the last year. All of the full images can be found on my
Deviantart account, as linked above.

The pinnacle of this venture, the icing on the cake, perhaps, was an independent card, made with no tutorial (though, in the model of another) over a theme or topic of my choice. Since I was, again, not in a christmas mood at the time, I went with the theme of sugary sweets of the colorful, fruity kind. (Maybe I was just hungry) To start, I had to extract the two gummy bears, one having it's ear overlapped. To fix the chunk of ear missing, I made a bite out of it.

one difficulty I encountered was the picture of the candy (Clipping mask+stroke), as it looked too powdery and light. One way I fixed with was to do something similar to what I did to the sky background on my personal card: I made a duplicate of the layer, but instead of a lightening screen, I gave it an overlay filter t make the colors more vibrant and bring out the contrast to a higher degree. Now, doesn't that big lollipop in the back just make you hungry? The degree of quality gets me every time.

Lastly, to make things pop, everything has it's own little drop shadow: giving the picture a sense of depth and letting each element separate from being lost in all the details.

Shadow Time

Recently, we attempted a shadow tutorial for Photoshop. We were to extract an image, remove the pixel fringe, then create a shadow for it on a landscape that it was not originally matched to. So, I chose a chipmunk as my shadow model. With a mirrored and skewed image of the chipmunk overlaid behind, I tweaked it's shadow to match the background.

The trick? Gradient overlay! How did that work? We'll get there in a moment! If we take it one task at a time, then we truly start by removing the chipmunk from it's habitat. Using the refine radius tool (Which is good at selecting fur and thin parts of a selection) I got a relatively clean, transparent clip

 Now for that tricky overlay! If we take the chipmunk, copy him, and skew him off to the side, it looks more like a mirror than a shadow, doesn't it? But, here's where the gradient overlay come sin to play!

An overlay layers a color, gradient, or image over a layer. So, if the shadow chipmunk is a layer, I can layer a black to BG gradient over it, and the result is...

A Shadow!

Castle Building

 Recently, I have been given the privilege to work in Autodesk Maya (A program made by a company who also released my favorite drawing program) and dive into 3D animation! For the first task we undertook, a castle was our goal. Using primarily rectangular prisms, cylinders, and a few planes, we were able to construct our basic castle structure.

The stairs that accompanied it were made of a simple rectangular prism with parts dragged up.



The extrude tool was our new friend for this project, and allowed us to drag up the blocky chunks of wall on the side without warping the whole wall in a similar manner to the hills.

The door was actually one of the hardest parts to put together. Using a thin cylinder and rectangular prism, we fused them together using the Booleans. Using it once for combining the two into a door shape, and a second time to use that shape to cut the respective shape out of the wall. I used a duplicate of the cookie-cutter shape to make the wooden door.

Plain old shapes don't add much life to an image, so with the aid of tiled images and pre made Maya textures, I placed stone and sand images all over the image. The bumps just added extra shadows.


Polygons are a concept in 3D animation that let me create the hills. As you can see to the side, the smaller squares have been warped together to create the hilly surface the castle sits on. With a soft select that influences all faces around it (The opposite of the extras function) I slowly dragged up small parts of it careful to not make the hills too blocky or unnatural. The final touch was the water



The small pond was actually quite simple, as you can see it's only one plane. I gave it a water texture, lowered the opacity, and set it in a low area of the ground. And viola, we had a simple pond.

This castle demonstrated many basics of animation, and I have found Maya less and less intimidating as I go on.

How Plumtrr's Escape Came Together

It's Story Time:

And today we're going to see how much can go into a single story

(The original story is actually quite complex: involving arranged marriages
and daring escapes, but this is the summary version)

What is a story without a good character? Not much, I'd say. Meet Plumtrr: an avian alien on the run. He's a character I made a year ago, (And one of many, at that), and he will be the star of the short animation I'm exited to share with you today! Shortly, we will be able to see him make his escape! The Idea for this was to create a short, multi-scene animation with a basic plot, and I feel I navigated those parameters easily.

Now, The story may be the meat of any animation short, but there is a lot that goes into setting up that  storyline meat and cooking it in a presentation-ready fashion. For this story, I dived into AfterEffects once again. Now, I am steadily getting more and more comfortable with the tools provided to me in after effects, and adjusting to the timing of walk cycles and similar things, so this was destined to be a huge step up from my last animation posted here.

I started where I perform best: on standard paper. I used up many sheets to get all the necessary bits and pieces for my animation (Line wise) in order. To the right, we se only one of the total 3-4 sheets I used in this stage of the development.

I had to be careful, while drawing, to leave anything I wanted to move separate from it's related parts. On the picture to the right, you can see how disjointed everything looks: the Bridge is apart from the ship, and Plumtrr's limbs are all over the place. There were even parts I didm' end up using later, but it's better to be safe than sorry, I'd think.

The next step was to scan the images in and drop them into Photoshop for some color.

In Photoshop, I used multiply layers to give color (And some texture) to the various aspects of each scanned image. I didn't do much shading, for a lack of time, but that would be something I would do in the future. And perhaps I'd have to make several copies of shaded images for different light sources. But for now, I didn't focus on that so much.

After each part was colored and separated out in Photoshop (With the use of the quick select and magic wand), they were ready to be plopped right into AfterEffects to be set up.

In AfterEffects, I began by setting the central point for each layer and putting the isolated pieces together like they should be. I parented most layers: The head to the body, the eyes to the head, and so on. The before and after images can be seen below:

Maybe We CAN put Humpty back together again. We just need AfterEffects! 

Look how cute and pixel-y he can be!

Now that we had all the pictures and images together and colored, it was time to put them into action. How did I do that? With compositions! Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of compositions, think of them like those little Russian nesting dolls. If you make an image, like Plumtrr here, into a composition on it's own and make him walk, you can place that walking character composition as a layer in any other composition you want! You can even resize it as you please.

The two pictures to the right are images of the same composition in two different settings, set to two different sizes. If I edited the composition to dance, then in every scene containing that composition, he would dance rather than walk. (Which would be funny, but not quite what I was going for).

Using compositions, I was able to save time by not having to reanimate the walk cycle every time I needed him to go somewhere. This also works for backgrounds or environment objects, where it can be much easier to animate on their own, as not to be confused working on them in a more crowded and busy scene.

Now, I also used compositions to separate out individual scenes. For each separate scene I put together in a composition, I could edit how much of that scene or what order I wanted them in on the fly! It was very convenient and I will be happy to organize projects like this in the future.

But, to be more detailed, there was a lot more to it then just sticking everything in a composition and saying "That's good". This project tested my timing abilities and planning skills. If I didn't plan out the timing of a scene before hand, then one mistake meant I had to backtrack a lot to fix that mistake, which was never fun.

For example: the scene with the ships navigating the rocks took much longer then any other scene, because without a defined coordination to the ships, I was constantly redoing each collision to adjust.

And even when I did get a good deal of the timing down, I still feel that I needed more of a reaction when the ships hit the rocks. Everything moves a tad too smoothly and there needed to be more a jerk to each stop.

That scene had, by far, the most keyframes than any other, as seen on the left. it was the busiest scene in the short, and took the longest to produce in after effects.

(But even after all that, I regret nothing involving the attempt)

The last tool I revisited was the puppet pin tool, for a minor movement towards the middle. The puppet pin took is a good tool for living movements, but I had to use the opposing starch tool to hold the head in place.

With all these different tools set up to put my pieces into motion, I finished by placing the scenes together in a single composition, and exported it.

I and happy with the result, but I aspire to do better each time I attempt an animation. Soon I plan to incorporate shading and other physics aspects into my work.

The Intriguing Quandary of Photoshop

The Re-Greta-ble mountains

For this mini-project, we went through the process of extracting a mountain and placing it on a sky background, to make  surreal floating effect. Using a quick selection and duplicating certain parts of the mountain to give it a smooth bottom, I was able to make a solid, solitary rock out of a complete scene. The hardest and most intricate part of this was getting the mountain and the sky to match up enough in color so that they did not seem to clash or be out of place.

Using the color adjustments (Hue and saturation adjustment) and layer styles (Multiply, screen, soft light, etc.) I was able to match them. I used a similar technique on the other animals, but they do not quite match as well. For all objects in the scene, I used the quick select and refine edge/refine radius tool to get my selection. I used both a selection expansion and a manual eraser to eliminate my pixel fringe.

The result, clad with a pun-derful name, wasn't bad, but I probably could have feathered (aha) the bird a little bit to blend it better.

If anyone hasn't seen the spider yet, now may be time to look, ehe.

Here I learned about color and resolution blending, and how certain resolution images, like the bird, have a tendency to clash with the rest of a more blurred photo, unlike the fish or spider. The crisp details contrasted with other details of the image. I also messed with a soft layer mask to take the harsher bits of the fish out of the picture for a more seamless insertion.

Next time, I will be sure to find more complimentary images and extract them with more precision.