The Big 1 Million and the Bigger 4.9 Million

http://www.youtube.com/user/noggity

I very rarely pimp my youtube channel on my site or blog, in fact apart from the occasional video or time lapse I let people come across it themselves.  But as its my birthday on thursday (23rd May) it sort of hit me as I am at the time of typing only 73 views away from 1 million official views on my youtube channel, its sort of as good an excuse as any.

Now its probably unofficially way more than one million as about a year back I deleted about 300 videos that ironically were the ones with the most views as I thought they were not indicative of the current quality of my work.  And doubly ironically as there are still plenty I detest that are ancient that I never got around to....

So head on over and there is all sorts of sculpting stuff, time lapses the infamous 'Waynecasts' (best viewed with the reminder they are meant with tongue firmly in cheek).

For those of a curious nature theres been 495,000 views also on Vimeo on one account (I'm buggered if I can find the details to my alternate account at the moment....  And from the beginning on that account there has been 4.9 million views since back in March 2008.  on to of this there are bloody videos on all sorts of other places on the net that aren't counted.  So While its not exactly 'Gangnam Style' its not bad for some videos on Mudbox and of me rattling on like a senile old sod.

So I suppose nearly 6 million (that I can check on at the moment) is not bad really.

...and if your wondering I am 42 on thursday which according to douglas adams book 'The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy' is of course the meaning of life. ;)

End User Event Teaser

Digital Double of my Dad

A small teaser for one of my two lectures at the End User Event this year.    The full description can be read here: End User Event .   As a small part of one of my lectures I'll be covering using scan data (which usually I fgind is pretty crap).  Being sick to death of having to clean up dodgy scan data over the years here at my office at Academy FX I have been settings up a unique 3d scanning technique.  There is nothing like it anywhere as its a hybrid system of my own devising.  Click on the image above to see the full res image from one of my test runs.   One thing that makes this system so special is not only does it give good results... its very fast, provides a full map set and its portable.

I suppose I should mention that an animation freindly retopped model pops out the other end as well as the maps sets etc:)

This is a tiny part os what I will be covering at the end user event on digital doubles, with more on my unique facial mocap system (and how anyone can set up a very similar one...minus the 'secret' stuff of mine of course) and how to achive a likeness when having to sculpt a digital double by hand.

Now if I could just get my bloody website for Academy FX up and behaving itself I'd be far happier. (I did say I'd get more done once in the office... tip of the iceberg ;) )

Work in Progress

Work In Progress

Something I'm on noodling with at the moment.  Its a work in progress and as such unfinished..... I have pixelated out the hands as they aren't touched yet and if I dont you just know some bugger will say 'those hands look wrong' lol.  So best way is to pixelate them out ;)   Its unposed at the moment...and yes done in Mudbox and 3d max.

Videos

Sorry for sound quality on this video.... no idea why it crapped out.

Mudbox 45min warm up sculpt

Here's a couple of videos, the bottom one is my warm up from a couple of mornings ago, and the second is my warm down.   I thought for a change I would do my warm down in zbrush ...just for shits and giggles. 

Facial mocap and doodles

Another facial mocap test... eyes not part of tracking as working on code to do handle them better.


And a couple of doodles , the first as something more intersting for some facial mocap tests...the other a 30 min warm down doodle.

to make mocap a bit more intersting for me

warm down doodle...

Academy FX is Open for Business

'The'oh shit I dont have a logo', logo design done at 4am. So chances are in time this will change.

Monday 22nd April,(tomorrow at the time of writing) is the day I open Academy FX for business. The 1st week will of course be spent trying to get things such as machines, fittings and infrastructure up and running... (well ..I say a week, its actually 3 days tops as I have work in from wednesday).  Then it is all systems go....(ish) . There will probably be no proper website at the www.AcademyFX.com domain until the more important things are done. (There is no point having an awesome website but no chairs to sit on or desk to work at.) 

The reason I am opening Academy FX is that I got a little sick of trying to cram the 'career' side of my art into 3 or 4 hours a night. The idea of dedicated premises with plenty of space and no interruptions make this a very good idea. Also my name can be like a lead weight at times (in both good and bad ways), so this to a certain degree gives a fresh start. Although I would also be a number one mug if I did not capitalise on it as well. It gives me a permanent base of operations, even for times when I am working away as I recently did at Screen Scene in Dublin working as 3D Supervisor on the film Last Days On Mars.

One thing I am proud of, is that unlike many other businesses these days I didn't use a 'Kickstarter' campaign to fund it. I personally think it's a little cheeky to ask the same people to fund setting up your business that your going to later ask for more money to buy things or services from you. I know many disagree, but that's the way I have always seen it. This also means I have complete control and no one can come a knocking at a later date expecting a handout due to funding a Kickstarter campaign lol.

Academy FX will be based in a rather fitting location, it will be the art wing of a now closed old school I went to 24 years ago. (I also had more hell there than anywhere else... so there's more than a small degree of karma here coming and kicking the people who said I would never amount to anything in the guts I freely admit.) It's the place that I 1st learned to draw using perspective & proportions, paint in watercolours (badly) and the very 1st place I ever tried my hand at traditional sculpting (a bust of Julius Caesar just in case you're wondering..it was never finished), and 3 mins slow walk from my current home.

The school has been closed many years now..so when the opportunity came up, how could I say no? It was almost like it was written in the stars or something. Although I don't believe in such things, the omens seem good, even more so as my main work room (and my desk) will be exactly where I used to sit in my art classes aged 13 over 24 years ago. Which I find more than a tad ironic.

 Although I have always worked long hours as a freelancer, that also includes working from home, often with both kids running around so that isnt what I would call 'optimised' work time. So many things I haven't had time to do from a work perspective, I now will and resources to do it.

Academy FX its best thought of it as sort of a multi headed Hydra. Or to put it another way.... the way my brain works. It will act not only as a studio producing 3D concepts and assets (both digital and traditional), but also allow me to teach people one site in a proper working environment that I have control of. This was a working comprehensive school for many years so it is indeed (and probably rather uniquely in this field) a proper learning environment as well. It also gives me time to develop existing code / software of mine and push boundaries in that area to provide services not provided elsewhere at the same speed as well. It will not be a company releasing DVD's etc for sale because I already have existing agreements for that, plus that side of things takes a lot of man hours for less financial reward than is prudent for the time spent.

 The plan is to bring people on board as needed and use the network of people I have after many years in this industry. What you won't see is it on every site and forum on the internet constantly. (Although you may see a new series of free videos and a few DVD's etc to give me an excuse to test equipment and setup. Of course that also helps to raise its profile, that I freely admit.) 

There will also be some services and things I do there that are not things you usually see me doing or maybe even know about. It basically allows me to go pedal to the metal at my speed and work in the way I know works best. So think of it as extended freelance in an office, but with more resources, a chroma rig, area for Marquette development, tool creation and a few other things...and corridors, lots of corridors.

Messing around.....

Untextured raw model frame

I mess around with all sorts of shit that never ever sees the light of day for various reasons, sometimes I dont have time to finish  them, sometimes I get bored and move onto something else, sometimes work crops up and mess around time goes bye-byes.   So all sorts of model and coding  / 3d tech that I mess to fill some time in never gets seen.

But as a digital sculptor at heart, I always love to see my shit moving and animated, however there has always been el problemo... I suck at animating.   So as I had a spare night , while waiting for my kids to go to sleep next door to my work room (until they do nothing 'serious' can be done anyway) I thought I'd mess around with something I mothballed ages back due to lack of time.

So here's some very early dick arounds with something I've had in the pipe for ages that does markerless facial mocap.  However as its for 'me' I needed certain requirements that arent available off the shelf (or without costing the earth..I find its easier to write my own stuff than buy shit alot of times).  My main requirements is that the data integrity must be flawless (I have a bit thing about data integrity!) , must be able to be used on multiple meshes  with different topology and vastly different shapes.  It must get me at least 'ball park' before I do a shed load of blend shape tweaking (there are none on this at the moment).

But most of all and the biggest problem is that it must work while I am wearing glasses (no I cant wear contact lenses...very long and borring reason why).  So thats what I personally needed it to do.... this is just an early mess around so dont get too excited.... chances are it'll never see the light of day anyway like a lot of my stuff doesnt.

Now for the technical stuff for those who asked.... 

It was knocked together using the OpenNI SDK, a modded Kinect and plugged my nex 5's output in as extra data so  could pull more from the rgb than you can get with a kinect.  Then both the mesh thats generated and used as control for the main mesh and the resulting keyframes were ran through some code from ReDucto (remember the experiemental denoise function???)  At the moment I need to come up with a new way to handle the eyes as on this the eyes arent tracked as they crap out a little (not a tremendous ammount, but enough to be annoying).

One idea is a sort of subtractive function between the modded kinect data and the nex 5 output data...but nothng set in stone.  Also at some point I'm going to set things up for 'proper' multi camera mocap using syntheyes to generate the point cloud needed as it'll give far better results.  But like many things, that goes on the back burner for a while.