visiblog

A really excellent interview with several of the concept designers for James Cameron’s new Avatar. Super cool to see that Wayne Barlowe was on the team!

There’s a need in my life for more complexity. So I’m starting a second blog.
VISICHUNK

Lot’s of talk back and forth about building planets and good ways of rendering them in the past few days.  Here’s the latest Earth render:

We got the maps from the Blue Marble site over at NASA but the shaders are still not right in my opinion.  Take a look at an actual shot of our [...]

We’ve been working on a lot of new stuff – totally unable to find time to upload.  Here’s a sample of some of the science-focused work we’ll  be doing in the next year:
Electron Micrograph look and feel.  This is spectacularly difficult to tune.
DNA Strand.

Mother Earth.  May she continue to bear our weight.

This is the Kuroshio Sea, an exhibit at the Okinawa Chiraumi Aquarium in Japan.  John Rawlinson shot a few minutes of HD and put it to music.  You really should watch it.  I’m torn between beautiful and sad.  The animals are gorgeous and really well displayed but most of them travel hundreds of miles a [...]

We’re building four short films for the Census of Marine Life (have I mentioned this?).  The stories are coming along nicely and it’s time for me to start building images for it.
Here’s the first rev of a small ROV for the logo build:

Andrew Kramer over at VideoCopilot.net has a cool new tutorial on using normal maps to get realtime lighting effects in after effects.  Export an unlit image sequence from your 3D package and then apply all the lighting and reflections in AE.  Pretty cool.  Here’s my version of his test:

We’ve begun pre-production on a series of short films for the Census of Marine Life.  The researchers have sent us tons of video and stills but most of the video is relatively low-res or highly compressed.  In order to get around the lack of video footage, I’ve been experimenting with cutting 2D images into planes [...]

Update Aug 15 2009:
Here’s a quick edit of some of the timelapse I took with the new Flip HD camera:
Small Version
HD Version
I took a few minutes on the beach last night after trying to drive up to Santa Cruz through six kinds of nasty traffic.  The pano didn’t stitch up perfectly, but you get the [...]