Possible Collab? Evolution!
polycounter lvl 12
Hey there, I don't know if I'm in the right place or not, or how I would go about this, but I had seen the Polycount fighting game contest and really like the level of skill and range of styles, and was wondering if I could suggest a contest/collab theme?
I guess I could introduce myself first; my name is Tyler Rhodes, and I'm an animator who decided one day to make an animation about evolution. What's special about the animation is it involves many people who 'evolved' their drawings over time, which I then animated. I wanted to stray from the typical depiction of evolution as a linear process and instead represent it as a branching structure. You can see the animation here [ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8X-j0dbZWs"]Evolution! version:Patrick Henry School of Science and Art - YouTube[/ame]
and more general info on my process etc. here http://evolutionanimation.wordpress.com/
Recently it was posted about on Scientific Americans website and made their video of the week, and has since bounced its way all over the internet garnering comments from Richard Dawkins all the way to Ken Ham, so I figured the time was right to finally ask you guys if you were interested.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/02/29/an-evolution-animation-unlike-any-youve-seen-before/
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/645147-an-evolution-animation-unlike-any-you-ve-seen-before
http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/technology-1/video-of-the-day-evolution.html
http://io9.com/5889824/the-most-adorable-video-about-evolution-ever-courtesy-of-elementary-schoolers
I was just l curious if you all would be willing to do some kind of collaborative something-or-other? Maybe not so much a contest, but just a fun exercise of using the kids drawings for inspiration to make some interesting 3-d art? I figured it would be the most fun to make low-poly models to keep it in the spirit of a limited crayon doodle, but anything is fine by me!
I'd love to hear your ideas, and thanks!
I guess I could introduce myself first; my name is Tyler Rhodes, and I'm an animator who decided one day to make an animation about evolution. What's special about the animation is it involves many people who 'evolved' their drawings over time, which I then animated. I wanted to stray from the typical depiction of evolution as a linear process and instead represent it as a branching structure. You can see the animation here [ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8X-j0dbZWs"]Evolution! version:Patrick Henry School of Science and Art - YouTube[/ame]and more general info on my process etc. here http://evolutionanimation.wordpress.com/
Recently it was posted about on Scientific Americans website and made their video of the week, and has since bounced its way all over the internet garnering comments from Richard Dawkins all the way to Ken Ham, so I figured the time was right to finally ask you guys if you were interested.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/02/29/an-evolution-animation-unlike-any-youve-seen-before/
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/645147-an-evolution-animation-unlike-any-you-ve-seen-before
http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/technology-1/video-of-the-day-evolution.html
http://io9.com/5889824/the-most-adorable-video-about-evolution-ever-courtesy-of-elementary-schoolers
I was just l curious if you all would be willing to do some kind of collaborative something-or-other? Maybe not so much a contest, but just a fun exercise of using the kids drawings for inspiration to make some interesting 3-d art? I figured it would be the most fun to make low-poly models to keep it in the spirit of a limited crayon doodle, but anything is fine by me!
I'd love to hear your ideas, and thanks!
Replies
This is really interesting, but im a little lost of what you are trying to do here.. So, you want to make a 3D animation based on the drawings you've collected so far?
These are all of the together, and I can get you bigger images of individual creatures if needed.
Nope, I just figured they would make fun 3-D models (I made a clay/foam model of at least one of the creatures, some are more challenging than others to think of three dimensionally, of course), so anything goes really. In the spirit of how I got the drawings, I was just curious in other peoples interpretations of the creatures in a different medium.
Is that the one you meant?
If you'd like to do any more just point them out to me; I'd like to have loads of them!
What was the resolution for your textures by the way?
And some toying around in gimp
Yeah, I guess I'd like to do some more, this one was fun. And it sounds like a good excercise. Could you upload this one?
It's like three or four creatures directly under my previous one
When everyone saw this creature we all agreed it looked like a penis climbing a tree.
Thanks!
This guy?
I'll get right on this guy first thing in the morning.
Warming up the concept in my mind before I dive into Maya with it.
This is going to be fun I can already tell.
That came out really cool!
I feel like if you had some kids draw out an entire world for them to live in they could all be rendered out like that and look awesome.
I've been trying to play around with toon outlines or some kind of crayon shader, but I haven't had a whole lot of luck.
Made another little guy, playing with different rendering techniques
Thanks! I've recently gotten more evolution drawings, starting this group where each other group left off, meaning the tree is now one 'tree' bigger! I also did some predator/prey specific evolutions, as well as getting them to evolve some plants. Here was the plant tree if anyone felt like doing something with plants.
In other news, I've nearly finished a second(alternate) evolution animation that I started alongside this one, so hopefully that'll be ready soon. I've also managed to get a few other artists to take their own spin at a creature in their own style, but I'm still looking for any polycounters to give it a go!
I did a new group of kids using one of the turtles at the bottom, and they didn't deviate much for a whole other 6 generations. It seems like once the 'turtle' showed up, it was so recognizable that no one strayed from it much. It is a nice parallel to creatures on Earth though that are 'living fossil' and even after millions of years change little. Again if you or anyone needs some closeups of a creature i can get you much bigger images.
Yeah unwrapping can be a bit of a pain, but nearly all the creatures I did myself (and almost all the drawings) are highly symmetrical, meaning you can overlap the UVs fairly easily. You chose one of drawings made by the college group so it has perspective and its a little more complex as far as unwrapping goes haha. You might want to try a more symmetrical creature at first if that proves too difficult. Here's a bigger picture of it, by the way.
Several unwraps later, think I've got the hang of it (including a transparency to
paint underneath, ie. guide lines). Realism keeps creeping in (more and more
loop cuts)... Not sure why symmetry would matter? Just paint, rig and pose?
Guess I'll find out shortly.
Hey, I made a thing, based off of one of the 'new' creatures.
Here ya go!
Unfortunately I can't figure out how to render images in blender of uv mapped models, and I can't find any tutorials at all on it after extensive searching, so this is the best I can get, although there is the annoying orange dot in the middle of the model and I can't turn off anti-aliasing:
Anyone know how to render properly in blender with a UV model?
@minorthreat
To render UV-mapped models, assign a material to the object, chose your texture in the "texture" tab, chose "UV" as the method to map your texture. You might also tick the "shadeless" option in the material settings.
To turn off anti-aliasing, go to render panel, there's an option there for that. You also want to turn off mip-maps in user preferences for that crisp pixelated look.
But although interpolation, mipmap, and anti-aliasing is disabled, the texture is still blurred. Here's the same general area before the render:
Also is there a way to do those awesome rotating gifs with blender as well?
Otherwise, though, I just rendered out the frames as .PNGs or something and made them a .gif in photoshop.