MONSTRO!

Hey everyone! I've mentioned this before, and showed some in progress tests before. But now the full film is up and running online after making it's rounds in the festival circuit! Feel free to check it out below!

¡MONSTRO! from Chris Romano on Vimeo.

As I've said before, this was produced at Side Effects Software, and was done completely in Houdini. I was an animator on it, and designed the simple face rig system, as well as did a number of asset management things.

Here is the official description from vimeo:

¡MONSTRO!  

imdb.com/title/tt3733992 

The new film by Christopher Romano, with Executive Producer Kim Davidson.... A rickety scientific expedition ventures down the Amazon River to a dark lagoon, in search of a mythic Creature! But the Creature, it seems, has a less than mythic agenda! MONSTRO! is a horror story. A love story. A ribald comedy!MONSTRO! at facebook.com/monstro2014, twitter.com/toonlets, and instagram.com/toonlets. And check out sidefx.com to learn more about Houdini 3D animation tools!MONSTRO©2014 Christopher Romano and Side Effects Software. All Rights Reserved.version 1.2 

toonlets.tumblr.com

-Evan

2015 Demo Reel

Just put together a new reel since PDI imploded. I was long overdue anyway, and now you can see some of my more recent professional work. I now notice that half of it is cartoons, and half of it is more realistic scientific illustration. Kind of sums me up perfectly. Enjoy!





And for a bonus image, here's the lovely crew gift we got for Mr. Peabody and Sherman, which was my first feature film and a very rewarding experience:

 I'm still incredibly glad I got to be a part of a film for children that promotes intellectualism, problem solving, and STEM fields. You don't see that very often these days.

~Evan

DinosaurChannel.TV

Looks like it's Kickstarter season! Today, I'm here to talk to you about another project: DinosaurChannel.TV. It's the new project from multiple award winning paleoartists, Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger! Not only do Bob and Tess produce terrific work, and know their stuff, but they're great people, and have supported me immensely in the past. It's entirely possible, that without their initial guidance, and help in getting various people at Drexel University into one room, that my own paleoart restoration of Thoracosaurus neocesariensis would have never come to fruition.

I have really fond memories of them showing me their old studio, and I always try to catch up with them to see them at various paleo-events. They are, after all, the ones who really helped kickstart my own interest in paleoart as a serious subject. Next time you're at a museum, and looking at the amazing wall murals and illustrations, remember that there are talented people behind those  - people such as Bob and Tess. As an avid fan and supporter of paleoart, I can't NOT share this project with you all. I think there's a lot of potential for this, and look forward to seeing what they come up with!

(Bob and Tess's Hell Creek mural, one of many in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

What are you waiting for? Go donate! Even if it's just a few bucks, every little bit helps! There are plenty of great dino-art backer rewards too. And if you're feeling particularly generous, there is the possibility of being a part of some of their shows, and even going on a fossil hunting trip yourself!

All this is exciting stuff. You should definitely consider backing them! I know I did!

-Evan

Signers of the Constitution

My friends at Eastern National have started a Kickstarter campaign to redesign and republish an updated edition of The Signers of the Constitution, a 1976 National Park Service biographical publication. They are a nonprofit organization who support many of the National Parks in the Eastern US. So if you are interested in the national parks, or history in general, you should consider contributing! There are some really great backer gifts as well, that history fans are sure to enjoy.

Why am I writing about this here? I don't normally do much advertising. But my friends at this organization have helped me a lot in the past. I did some work for them a while back when they were developing their Passport to Your National Parks app, and it enabled me to have the little bit of pocket money that I did when I took the jump and moved to California. They've supported me a lot so I'd like to do the same for them.

Also, I did some talking-head animation of a few founding fathers for their Kickstarter video. It was fun to caricature known historical figures, especially since I don't do caricature very often. I would have liked to have more fluid expressive animation but for the timeline they were on I think it turned out fairly well.

The video is more an intro to the history behind the project, so head over to the Kickstarter page for more details on the project itself, and to see the list of rewards, including things like poster prints and hand-blown glass objects from the Jamestown Glasshouse in Jamestown, VA.

-Evan

Penguins of Madagascar First Look

Howdy folks! After finally posting things from my SideFX Internship that I did back in 2011, it got me thinking about how I don't really talk much on here about what I've been up to in my current job.

Well, now that some cool stuff has showed up online, it's time to post some cool things. Today we have some footage from 'Penguins of Madagascar.' It comes out this Thanksgiving. You should all totally go see it. Here's the first teaser that was released a while back:




And if that doesn't convince you, this scene was released yesterday at Comic-Con, and shows the tone of the film pretty well:




This scene is particularly exciting for me because it directly shows off a bunch of my work! I was primarily rigging faces on this movie, and set up the face of the baby seal, did some work on the wolf, and rigged all of the octopus faces, including the big baddie 'Dave' (John Malkovich). Dave's face rig is definitely one of the coolest things I've ever done, and I can't wait for everyone to see him this fall. That's all I'll say for now :)

And speaking of DreamWorks related things, I'll try to post some things I did for 'Mr. Peabody and Sherman' sometime in the near future. Stay tuned!

-Evan

MONSTRO! Early Tests

Last time, I mentioned I would try to dig up some of my animation tests from the upcoming short film 'MONSTRO!'which is directed by Christopher Romano.

Well I've went ahead and done exactly that! Below are some early and rough animation tests I did when exploring our Houdini pipeline. I was figuring out how to best set up shots, as well as doing some major rig-wrecking. None of these are particularly incredible, and as you will see I didn't even have clothed models or textures to work with yet, but it was a fun exploratory time. If nothing else, it will help give you an idea of how I spent most of my internship a number of years ago. Well...most of it, anyway.

First up, we have the first animation test done for 'MONSTRO!' I was exploring the process of animating characters in Houdini while also assessing the first pass of the body rig, which was based on the Houdini auto rigging tools. There wasn't a face system yet, which I ended up having to develop later. I was also making sure to test out ways of having characters interact with props and the environment in Houdini. This test was animated in 12 fps to test a stop-motion style look, which was being explored for the film:





Next, we have a lipsync test. This was done to test out the first pass of the face rig I developed. I was seeing how far I could get with extremely limited controls, and to get a better idea of what necessities were still needed in the system. The face rig was a limited blend-shape based rig, using CHOPs expressions to mimic a 'set-driven-key' type of behavior (for those familiar with Maya), and some fancy SHOP network magic to add in some asymmetry. The audio is Pappy O'Daniel from 'O Brother Where Art Thou?'





After that, I thought I'd post this weird cloth sim animation test. It was created to have something to test parameters on, for a first-pass DOPs/CHOPs based cloth rig system. Obviously these particular settings don't work very well, but I also should have expected that due to how pushed the animation was :) It was fun to go really goofy with it.





And finally, after getting a working body rig, and developing and improving the face rig system, I went ahead and did a full body dialogue test to see how well the character would hold up when acting.
The rig is pretty limited, so this test was more to see how far I could push it, and to explore ways to get some more traditional animation concepts in there. The goal was to make it convincing despite the limitations. The audio is Ray Stantz from 'Ghostbusters.'





Welp, I hope you've enjoyed these goofy little tests. For more, be sure to check out the MONSTRO! channel on vimeo. Also keep your eye open for when 'MONSTRO!' comes to a town near you! You can also keep up with the film on facebook and twitter, if you so desire.

This is probably it from me on this subject, at least until the final film appears online, which I will be sure to post when it is released publicly.

-Evan

MONSTRO!

Shameless plug time! Three years ago, when I first made the move across-country to California, it was to start an internship animating on a short film. That film is finally coming out! It starts the festival circuit this week, and you should check it out if you have the opportunity.

The film is called MONSTRO! and it's written and directed by Christopher Romano as a part of a joint project with Side Effects Software (PSSST! That's the HOUDINI guys!). In premise, it's a comedic animated spoof of the classic Universal Monster movie, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, but there are plenty of surprises. It's quite silly and fun.


MONSTRO! ... TRAILER 01 from Chris Romano on Vimeo.

This project means a lot to me because it is really the first time I was working on a CG project outside of school, and the first time I actually got paid to animate, and play around in CG. The people behind the film put a lot of faith in me by offering me an internship when I was some 2700 miles away, since I was willing to do character animation in Houdini (That's right, pretty much everything except for modeling was done in Houdini for this project). That internship was a HUGE step in launching me on my career path, and I couldn't thank my friends and former coworkers enough for helping me make that happen.

But enough sentiment - for the film, I was brought in essentially for character animation. I was given a lot of freedom to experiment with different animation styles before the production started. I spent a lot of time with the first few characters, particularly these two:

 

I did a number of animation tests helping to define and develop their movement styles and personalities (which I may post soon, if I can dig them up). I believe the final film only has one short series of shots that are my final animation, but I ultimately ended up setting up a lot of the pipeline, and designed the face rigs, since there wasn't really any out-of-the-box or established ways to work with faces in Houdini (Most if not all the rigging specific tools, including the auto rigs, are very body-centric). So I learned a heck of a lot and had a lot of fun working on this project.

Anyway, keep your eye out for it. You can find the festival schedule here, so if it's in your area, you should go see it. Also you should be sure to 'like' and 'follow' it to help get the word out there!

-Evan

Happy Friday

No Better way to end a week of debugging technical problems than with some good old-fashioned animating. Did this little test tonight in Pencil which surprisingly worked better than I expected. Might keep refining and completing it in my free time. We'll see. Click the image to play the GIF -- It also plays better if you  Right+Click and open the image in a new tab, opposed to the lightbox thing (less frame skipping). Enjoy!

-Evan

Tupandactylus VI: Final Product

Alas the time has arrived! Sorry it's been a while since I've posted on this guy. I think the difference between the last image posted and this finished animation will speak for itself!




I also decided to do this making-of video. Houdini's procedural nature allowed me to show off some of this process really easily, so I took the time to edit this together:



I hope you enjoy! I really had a lot of fun delving into Pterosaur anatomy. Unfortunately due to time and other obligations at work, I cut the shot in half. The second half would have showed some quadrupedal walking and launching. The motion is all blocked out, but that's where it must remain for now (sigh). I hope sometime in the future I get the chance to revisit it. I really want to play with such a bizarre animal walking. Despite the cut, I'm really excited about the project! Thanks for tuning in!

-Evan

Tupandactylus II

Continuing on my Tupandactylus, I fixed up the model, created some UV's, rigged, and skinned the critter. The key for the rig was making it so it would be able to work both in the air, and in the pterosaur quadrupedal stance. I think it works rather well.

Next I'm going to do some animation to test the rig further, and make any minor adjustments I may need in the skin weighting before I get to texturing and 'pycnofiber' generation (via the fur tools).

-Evan

Stock Rig Part 3

The Stock Rig I've been working on in my free time is "complete!" I got the motivation I needed this past weekend, and finished a full face/full body rig in much less time than I ever have before.

It required 30 blendshapes for the face and has IK/FK switching on all the limbs. Pretty basic stuff really...

I want to continually update this rig with more features as I go. I already know I'm going to add in a great deal of Squash and Stretch controls that I didn't get the chance to do just yet. If anyone has any suggestions for cool features they'd like to see, let me know.



I've also done some animation tests to see how it holds up. I want to keep doing short lip-sync/acting exercises like this regularly to help improve my animation skills.



And feel free to guess where the audio clip comes from.

-Evan

Spark of Inspiration

I've had a couple ideas in my head from watching various nature documentaries over the last couple months, and realized that concepts from some of them were similar enough to put together into a single story. This idea I have in mind continues the strategy of dramatizing a messed-up real world situation from nature, similar to what I did with First Step.

I would like to develop this idea into an animated short, hopefully when I have some better resources available, so it can be polished. Anyway, here's a concept sketch from it to keep you wondering. Some of you will probably see where this is going:

Inspiration:

Concept Sketch:

I have some great ideas in mind for this, and am excited to mold them into something great.

-Evan B.

A Note on Paleoart Compositing

This is something that has bugged me for a long time now, and only realized what the problem was in the last few years...so here we go. 

Over the past decade and a half there has been a major surge in paleo-themed educational programming on networks such as the Discovery Channel. Despite all of the advancements in the technology behind these sorts of programs, there is one aspect of them that never seemed to catch up... despite it being a simple fix that any trained compositor should know how to do.

Many of these programs like to simplify the production process, as well as enhance the believability of the images by filming background plates, and compositing the animated extinct beasties into the shots. This is a great technique, which provides photo-real environments (since, well, they are real) without requiring digital artists to recreate entire paleo-environments from scratch.

Putting aside any problems and inaccuracies in modeling, shading, or animation of the creatures, these programs almost never seem to be well composited into the environments. Sure lighting is taken into account, secondary effects like footprints, splashes, or rustling of plants are added, and everything is done correctly when rendering the images out of whatever package they may be using. But what needs to be realized, is that simply rendering the thing out and slapping it on a background isn't all it takes to sell these things. It is only the first step.

The images need to be tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, then watched, and re-tweaked until they are as integrated as they can be for the given production timeline and budget. Most of the time, the images are very close to being final, but there is always one part that the people working on these programs somehow always miss.

Film has artifacts. There is film grain, motion blur, depth of field, lens flares, noise, lens distortions and film scratches that happen as a result of shooting live plates. When images are rendered out of CG software, they have a tendency to look too clean. These clean, sharply high resolution images layered on top of filmed footage (with plenty of grime and artifacts) simply look wrong. It takes the viewer out of it. The fix to this is to dirty up the rendered frames in the composite. It is way easier to dirty up clean, sharp, unnaturally perfect renders than it is to clean up dirty film. I understand that a lot of time is put into the textures and shading of the animals, and one might not want to dirty up his or her images because of all that time put into making everything beautiful, but these renders are only one element of the final image. If the composites aren't convincing, the viewer will have a hard time believing they are looking into the  past, no matter how good everything else is.

It is a very simple fix that not enough people seem to take the time to do. Adding and adjusting grain, noise, and defocus nodes to a comp, as well as simply grading them properly, is a relatively simple final step to making these things feel fully integrated. 

Here's an example to help illustrate this from a personal school project of mine (click image for larger view):

This post was inspired by the fact that I just finished watching David Attenborough's  "First Life" on discovery channel in full HD. It was gorgeous, and the animation, and shading in particular, of the critters was truly top notch...possibly even the best I've seen on the Discovery Channel to date (the rendering of Opabinia was particularly inspiring). 

This being said, the final step in compositing mentioned above wasn't taken into account as much as it should have been. It was way better than a lot of these types of programs, but some things still seemed just too sharp. It took me out of the informative narrative and encouraged me to write this post. 

Sorry for the length...I really didn't mean for it to go this long. Moral of the story, we need better (or at least more attentive) compositors in the realm of paleoart programming. The end.

  -Evan B.

Some Recent Paleo Work

It's been a while since I've posted....and it's NOT because I haven't been drawing or creating. I've simply haven't had the chance to scan any of the plethora of sketches I've done since last post.

I have a couple things for you here. First off, is my completed Master's Thesis. I figured I'd share it on here for anyone who's yet to see it. The project was a heavily researched restoration of the extinct crocodylian, Thoracosaurus neocesariensis. The fossil source (NJSM NH 2005.2) was digitized in order to help the project stay authentic in its attempt at realism. For more about the process of the project, see here.

Also, just to keep me occupied I've been trying out my new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet as well as playing with Autodesk Maya 2011. Here are some work-in-progress images of a Camarasaurus I've been modeling. This differs from the above project in that I skipped building the skeleton and muscles and went right for the skin. I did, however, use skeletal photographs as image planes to get the correct proportions and make intelligent decisions while modeling, so its not like the result is completely invented. I also did some light background reading on the discovery, features, and phylogeny of Camarasaurus to keep this exercise somewhat informed. 

There are still teeth and toes to be modeled, and overall cleanup. I'll post the final images once this guy is completed. I definitely would like to take the time to sculpt and texture him.  Depending on how much time I have I may even rig him up and do some experiments with animation.

-Evan

Animal Rotoscope Motion Studies

I did a number of rotoscope tests last year in order to help me better understand animal locomotion. I drew on top of footage found at bbcmotiongallery.com of a number of different animals. I made sure to simplify the drawings down to simple stick-figures to really focus on pure movement. I find it interesting how much of the motion comes through with such simple drawings. This was done in Flash, and the 3D Rotos were done in Maya. The animals are in the following order: fish, secretary bird, crocodile, white rhinoceros, bald eagle, double-crested cormorant (not a rotoscope).