Well, there's a headline for you. This post contains a quick update on the evolution of the intended 'microdocumentaries' about spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters.
Why microdocumentaries? Because even animations of a few minutes take a long time to make if every frame is raytraced. Why spidrids and the other mentioned clades? Because seeing these animals move definitely adds value, compared to a diagram or a still image. There won't be hexapod microdocumentaries because my animation skills do not include such soft-bodied animal shapes. Not yet, anyway.
The key elements of programming tetrapter movement are already there and I expanded the Matlab programmes that control cloakfish movement. I have almost completed work on programming spidrids, allowing visualisation of walking over uneven ground, separate movement of the abdomen and cephalothorax, slanted spidrid legs, and spidrid social signalling. I am considering having multiple spidrids walk about in a scene; that would be nice but is not essential.
There was a very major snag along the way. I had intended to use Zbrush for 3D modelling, and had thought that I could use ZBrush, Sculptris, Photoshop or even Window's 3DPaint to paint body parts and produce texture maps. Unfortunately, Sculptris and 3DPaint no longer work well, maybe because Windows changed too much. Adobe abolished 3D painting in Photoshop because they now have a separate program for that. A glance at internet sources convinced me that ZBrush made texture exporting extremely complex, in true ZBrush style (for some reason the people at ZBrush keep clinging on to a horribly unfriendly user interface). What now? Well, with trepidation I turned to Blender, which had scared me off years ago because it was equally unfriendly. But the Blender user interface was said to have become friendlier now, so I downloaded Blender and selected the subjects of sculpting and texture painting for study. About 9 days later, I had modelled and painted all body parts of a new species of spidrid and had exported them successfully along with roughness and colour maps. I think that is telling, as I started with zero Blender knowledge. Mind you, Blender is still complex, because it does complex things; but there is a solid logic behind it.
So here is a try-out of a new spidrid species, produced with Matlab, Blender and Vue. There is a version with better resolution on my YouTube channel. You may expect this species to feature in scenes of higher quality with sound, plants and more scenery.
By the way, I am trying my hand at Instagram too; you should be able to find me using 'J.Gert van Dijk'
I really like the display walk, and I'd love to see more interesting behaviors (e.g. threat displays).
ReplyDeleteA full Furaha documentary would be amazing.
Looking great, since you already started with blender, why not consider rendering it there? Raytracing in cycles has come a long way and it's quite fast, and real time renderers like EEVEE give results of similar quality if you for example have direct lighting from the sun. I understand you are already comfortable with Vue.
ReplyDeleteAs always thanks for sharing
Davide: thank you. I hadn't thought of threat displays yet, but now that you mention them, I already see (in my mind's eye), spidrids leaning towards an opponent, or perhaps back, showing the abdominal eating legs, the mouth trunk as well as shaking many legs.
ReplyDeleteAvardent: I started Blender by restricting myself to sculpting and texture painting, but I certainly noted that Blender is good at rendering too. I also noted that you can use Python with Blender. At present, my strategy involves Matlab to work out 3D positions of any body element at any time, writing a csv file per frame (in the case of cloakfish and tetrapter wings, this involves writing curved surfaces as obj files). The csv file is then read by python within Vue and used to position body elements in Vue and make a render.
It looks as if I only need Matlab and Blender. But I am as yet far from understanding how use python within Blender for such purposes. If you know how to do that, I would be most interested.