Ron Paul

A while back I cleaned up this attempt at a blog, and resolved to make it professional, with graphics and animation related content alone. But an event has occurred that means it is time to put aside polite neutrality on political issues and do what is right. I therefore will be using this space to announce to the web that I am supporting Dr. Ron Paul for president, and to try to persuade you do join me in doing the same.

I have many reasons of my own for supporting Ron Paul. Mostly because my primary concern about government has always been for the freedom I've been taught in school that we Americans are supposed to have. That freedom is something that has always been sold as something that makes our country special and which makes participating in and supporting our government worthwhile. It seems evident to me, however, that this is one of the darkest times for freedom in our country. I think Ron Paul is the one who can and will do the most to correct this situation because of his writings that I have read for the past several years, which seem to more closely mirror my own concerns than the writings of anyone else in politics. And also because whenever I hear of any attempt to repeal a bad law, or of any member of congress who voted against a bill that worried me, I find the name Ron Paul consistently coming up on the side of what I believe in.

Ron Paul's campaign this year has been very exciting to watch and participate in. It has been very heartening to see how a true grassroots fund-raising effort can be so successful and beat the efforts of candidates who have help from corporations, special interests or their own personal fortunes. It has been heartening to see people passionately support a candidate who is honest, and who cares about the future of our country even if some of his solutions and concerns are not popular with the mainstream media. And it has been heartwarming to see how the message of peace and liberty can bring people together.

I hope that you will also give your support to Ron Paul in this year's bid for the presidency. You should support him because there are several very serious problems facing this country today that most of the other candidates have shown little or no interest in addressing.

These are:

1. The country is nearly bankrupt.

Because of the mounting national debt and federal deficit, out of control spending and the coming demands for social security and medicare payments to the aging baby-boomers. The money they've been paying into these programs just isn't there because the government has just been spending it all along. There will be no such safety-net for the next generation and without major changes benefits will be cut even as taxes rise. Recent spending binges, such as the funding of the Iraq war, has been financed by huge loans from China. This is an undisputed fact that the non-partisan Government Accountability Office under Comptroller General David Walker has been trying to warn people about.

2. We are mired in foreign wars that we cannot pay for and which are creating resentment for America around the world.

Most of the candidates favor continuing this unpopular war even though there is no way the government can pay for it without going in debt to China. No-one still in the running for president wants to bring home the troops sooner than 5 years from now, except Ron Paul who will bring them home immediately. Saddam Hussein has been executed. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there never were. There is no head of government to topple, and nothing in Iraq worth controlling. Why not end the senseless violence before it becomes necessary to begin drafting people and the government runs out of money?

3. The economy - recession, inflation and the falling value of the dollar.

The Federal Reserve is flooding the economy with money, diluting the purchasing power of the dollar to the point where it buys less than almost every other currency in the world. Our dollar is worth less than the Canadian dollar, the Austrailian dollar and the Euro. Most asian countries would now prefer their own currencies over ours. This problem could wipe out everyone's savings, it is making it harder for the elderly, on fixed incomes to make it, and could cause a stock-market crash. Dr. Paul wants to begin fixing this problem by letting people choose to keep their money in other currencies, like a savings account in euros. He wants to enable buying and selling using other currencies by making it easier to pay sales taxes on those transactions and removing capital gains taxes imposed on people who want to hold gold or silver coins. In the long-term he also wants to abolish the Federal Reserve which mismanages our money, funds the government on the basis of debt, and causes an effective tax on all Americans by inflating the money supply.

4. Repeal the Patriot Act.

Ron Paul is one of the few who voted against the Patriot Act when it was first introduced. He has also introduced a bill to compel congress to refrain from voting on any other legislation introduced before they have an opportunity to read it.

Dr. Ron Paul is an Ob/Gyn from Texas who has been in congress for a total of 10 terms. 5 terms before 1988 and five from 1996 on. Between periods in congress he returned to his medical practice in Lake Jackson, Texas. He was originally born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And decided to go into medicine as a result of thinking the if he were called to go to war for his country he would rather help people than kill them. He was drafted during Vietnam, and served as a flight surgeon. He continued his medical studies afterwards, specializing in Ob/Gyn, and worked in a charity hospital in San Antonio. He has since delivered more than 4,000 babies. He married his highschool sweetheart, and they have been married now for 50 years.

on becoming more animated

I've Been Accepted!
Originally uploaded by Electric-Eye

I have applied and been accepted into the Animation Mentor online animation school. I am working on my admissions paperwork and trying to arrange my schedules and my finances to prepare for the program.

I have some small worries that I may not be able to begin right away due to financial and scheduling difficulties but I am proceeding as though I will be able to overcome these problems.

If I can get all of this straightened out I will be beginning in October. If things go less well then I'll start a quarter later.

I've noticed that Animation Mentor students are encoraged to keep a blog. It is my intention to use this blog as a place to showcase my student work and to present my own ideas about animation, storytelling and art. I have other places for expressing my other interests.

I have also noticed that Animation Mentor students typically have a really hard time keeping up with their blogs. I shall try not to let that be the case with me.

! Update August 23 2007, To my disappointment I have had to postpone beginning the program until the Winter Quarter. I look forward to seeing you then.

High Dynamic Range Movies

In discussions of rendering and photography we have been talking about High Dynamic Range Images (usually abbreviated to HDRI) for some time, but as I think about what makes some movies great and others bland I find myself drawn back to the concept of dynamic range as an explanation for many factors.

Perhaps a better point of departure for my analogy would be dynamic range in audio, as we read in the article, "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" by Joe Gross at Austin360.com here:
http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html

In which he talks about a trend in audio mastering that pushes the waveforms nearly flat against the top of the range, making music sound subjectively loud, but eliminating enough variation in the process that the music becomes physically exhausting to listen to. The brain tries to shut out a stimulus like this, which is repetitive and narrow. Its not something its possible to focus on for very long.

In my opinion the same thing is happening in a lot of movies. Action movies more than any other. They are all pounding the audience with a constant fast rythm, and are all chase and being barely ahead of the explosion, constant sexiness too. I heard it in a review of the "Charlie's Angels" movie, and I expressed the same feelings about part 2 of "The Matrix." It was too much, and while I was sitting there in the theater I kind-of didn't want to watch it.

My good examples on the other hand include "The Incredibles," "The Iron Giant," also directed by Brad Bird, and "Spirited Away." These movies all had a great dynamic range of pacing, emotion and subject matter. They focused on the mundane alongside the fantastic and took time to leave you in suspense and reveal the next step in the story somewhat slowly.

I noted that in the commentary to "The Incredibles" Brad Bird talks about how a lot of today's movies don't have a lot of sneaking around in them, as he does with first Bob, then Helen infiltrating Syndorme's base. Those sequences particularly reminded me of a James Bond movie. I'm not sure if I'm thinking of "The Moonraker" or "Diamonds are Forever" If you know bond movies though, I'm sure you'll see the similarities.

I believe that these slow scenes where you are rooting for the heroes not to get caught help to add disappointment when they do end up getting caught, and help you come to feelings of exhilaration when they end up regaining their freedom.

Contrast and variation are probably key principles here too. Just as simultaneous contrast helps to make edges look sharper, darks darker and brights brighter and complementary colors make each other look more vibrant so does an aimless period of rest or a sneaky spying and infiltration sequence pump up the action.

This operates at all levels in a complex art form like cinema. As we learn from listening to Spline Doctor's podcasts, where they muse about the question of "pushing" their animation, by making their character's expressions and movements more extreme versus raising an eyebrow to direct the eye, or in Jason Osipa's critique of the facial animation of Gollum from "Lord of the Rings" we learn that moving from an extreme expression to a neutral one can also be a dramatic change. That's dynamic range. You have it in your use of lighting, color, pacing, the acting or animation of your characters.

As is true of so many things in art this proposed guideline can be applied at your discretion. You may choose to stay within a narrow range of some element of your design, but even if you do, it can probably help to keep in mind what a high dynamic range can do for you. If you give it up, know what you are giving up.

I have graduated.

IMG_0551,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

I have now graduated from the Art Institute of Houston's BFA program.

MR displacement plus cavity map

MR displacement plus cavity map,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

I have had a great deal of difficulty getting displacement maps to render and look good in Mental Ray. Here is one of my better results.

The final animation does have a displaced log bridge.

normal and cavity maps

normal and cavity maps,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

Here is one of my early tests for fog and displacement on my forrest objects.

bigforrest

bigforrest,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

This image is a less formal perspective which, I hope, helps the forrest to look so much larger. This also helps you get a better idea of the background gradient that the fog is mapped with and its effects.

gentle gradient fog

gentle gradient fog,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

here is the fog effect and the colors that I decided on as an atmospheric that helps to give the feeling of being in the deep forrest.

mood test 1

65000x2translucent leaves,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

This is my mood test for a forrest scene with particle leaves for a canopy. In this test I found that the blue sky seen through the canopy doesn't help. I then switched to a green and gray gradient and a fog to hide the most distant elements.

The box in this render is 6' tall, for judging scale.

translucent leaves

backlight tree06,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

this test rendering makes use of the footools backlight plug-in. My lighting solution is e-light.

To get a very large number of leaves I used mesher on particle system. In subsequent tests I use only the particle system.

translucent leaves

treebacklight02,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

working again on my forrest project, I have been modeling trees and testing material and light settings for translucent leaves.

When it comes to modeling trees ZBrush taught me a lesson in straightforward extrusion modeling. I don't even attempt to make it look rounded before applying the meshsmooth modifier, I just allow all cross-sections to remain square, I let the subdivision algorithm round it, and I add the gnarls and high-res details in ZBrush. That's the workflow when using ZSpheres, they are basically subdivided cubes and quads once the polygon skin has been added.

Dark Hollow

gforrestas,
originally uploaded by Electric-Eye.

another lighting test with global illumination shaded with ambient occlusion in the material and a distant spotlight with subtle area shadows to add sunlight.