Andron.CA

Testing Artwork Styles

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Astronaut Test 002 PaintedAs I mentioned in an earlier post on Animation, I do work with computer graphics and artwork. While I mainly focus on animation, I do sometimes dabble with still images and trying to reproduce a certain look and feel through programs like Adobe’s Photoshop. One of my particular challenges has been trying to reproduce the look of traditional hand-painted artwork from a 3D render.

As you can see from the image at the left, I’ve made a bit of progress in that regard. There’s still more progress that can be done on this image, but it has to my eye managed to capture the feel of a hand-painted image.

I spent a lot of time looking at paintings and trying to understand how the colors shifted and blended together to replicate the look of a painted work. A photograph or digital render will have smooth gradations in color from light to dark, while a painting will have distinct islands of colors blended together at the edges by smearing. Too much blending, and you start to approach the look of a photograph. Too little, and it looks computer generated or computer processed. Just like in the story of Goldilocks, a lot depends on getting things “just right.”

I’m looking at using techniques like this for, among other things, book covers – to get the look and feel of classic pulp and paperback covers.

Why not just hire an artist to paint something for me? Because then I wouldn’t have the fun of doing it myself. And a large part of writing, telling stories, and creating heroic worlds is having fun. It’s way too easy to lose sight of that when you get into production mode and just want to treat books and media as simply products. You’re allowed to have fun doing what you do – and solving challenges with how to get artwork to look a certain way is where I get to have a lot of fun.

Let me know what you think below.

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Prelude to Axanar Reviewed – You’re Doing It Right!

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Prelude to Axanar premiered at San Diego Comic-Con, and for its Kickstarter backers, the premiere was well worth the wait. This short fanfilm really sets the new standard in fan filmmaking with a slick production filled with CG and excellent performances from well-known science-fiction actors.  As far as the idea of building heroic worlds goes, these filmmakers are definitely doing it right!

View the trailer here:

Or, go to their website at www.startrekaxanar.com to see the entire film.

(Yes, you can find it on Youtube, but I’d rather see their website get the traffic, and there’s a lot of other cool stuff there for fans to see. Anyhow, on with the review.)

[Read more…]

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Some of the other things I do…Animation

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When I’m not writing about superheroes, or pulp vigilantes, or other bits of pulp-and-thriller-inspired make-believe, I create computer animation. I’ve been creating computer generated clips since the mid-1990s – and even longer if you count the stuff I was doing in the mid-80s in computer classes. Now, with the advent of GPU-based unbiased renderers like Octane, real-time renderers like Unreal, and motion capture hardware and software, people have the  horsepower to create computer animated films on their desktop that can rival the best of the Hollywood.

 

Given the type of fiction that I’m drawn to, it’s no surprise that my particular holy grail of animation has been action and adventure-pulp, and I have plans for an web-series that I’ll be teasing on this site as time goes on. However, one does not simply create an animated film at a high-level of quality overnight. It takes time to render out each frame, and to compile all of the frames into a single clip, with one second of film time taking an hour of computer time or more.

In the case of the clip above, the render time was 19 hours for the raw Octane render, and then another few hours for the special effects to be applied. Actually, because I wasn’t happy with the first few attempts, I re-rendered the clip three times into the version you see here. The muzzle flash effects were actually the easiest part of the animation, and now that I have the workflow solved, future clips of this type should be able to be done even faster.

Still, there’s a lot of research and problem-solving that needs to be done before we can get into actual production at the quality level I want. At the end of the day, though, it will be well worth it.

Are we going to see more of the clip? It is an interesting side project to do in animation, and we will just have to wait and see.

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My Path to Pulp Fiction – the Call to Adventure

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How did I get interested in pulp fiction? What was the original spark that fired my imagination to chase down stories of fearless heroes, hard-boiled detectives, and daring archaeologists hacking their way through the jungle to find a lost temple?

For me, my passion for pulp fiction came fairly late in life. When I was much younger, I certainly did enjoy the adventure stories of child detectives such as the Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, and just about every other junior mystery that my municipal and school libraries had in their possession. These books certainly fed my interest in adventure stories.

At the same time, I was a very avid comic book reader and I was fortunate enough to catch the run of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams – and later Jim Aparo in the 1970s Batman comic books, and I still remember buying the 1st issue of the 1973 shadow comic book drawn by Mike Kaluta. Let’s just say that the 1970s and early 1980s were very good to someone who had an interest in action/adventure stories.

For somebody who was growing up in small-town Alberta, adventure seemed like a pretty good way to escape the prairies.

Then, in the 1980s, a lot of things started to change. The release of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and the rise of the X-Men in comic books marked a couple of changes in how comic book stories were being told and how characters were being portrayed. Whereas Batman originally was a detective who had profound martial arts and athletic abilities and who dressed up in costume to fight crime, after Frank Miller’s seminal work, Batman became more and more of an unhappy and unlikable character. Some writers chose to portray him as on the verge of being a psychopath.

With the X-Men, everything at Marvel became about the mutants. Now, I can’t blame Marvel for wanting to capitalize on a trend that would only gather steam in the 90s. After all, the X-Men were some of their biggest titles and Marvel certainly wanted to make the most of a good thing.

However, with Batman becoming crazier and darker by the issue, and with Marvel’s entire line of superheroes becoming increasingly infected by the mutant virus, there wasn’t an awful lot out there to provide characters that were relatable to ordinary people.

Those were the characters that I always found most interesting. I always wanted to see how ordinary people could become extraordinary – how someone could rise well above their origins to challenge the unknown, and to do good simply because it’s the right thing to do. And in comic books, those characters went away.

Sure, there were a few characters who were holdouts against the trend towards the un-relatable. We had John Sable Freelance written and drawn by Mike Grell, we had Moon Knight in his first independent run written by Doug Moench and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, and we had the famous G.I. Joe comic line written by Larry Hama. But, more and more, comics were moving over to portraying characters that offered no inspiration to ordinary people.

So, I had to find inspiration – elsewhere. My Path to pulp fiction will be continued.

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Dark designs, dangerous schemes…

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I want to give people a little peek behind the scenes and update them on some of the writing projects I’m currently working on.

Writing Projects – The Black Skull

Earlier this year, I had released my first short novel, The Black Skull: Accused. This was a lot of fun to write, letting me combine 1930s era masked vigilantes with some high octane run and gun type action. The Black Skull has been a character that’s been with me for years, and I’m really happy to be able to share him with readers.

I’ve been busy writing a follow-up novel to accused. This one, called Madman, takes the Black Skull and puts him up against a terrifying serial killer hell-bent on turning New York City into his own personal slaughterhouse. I’ve completed the outline on the book, and currently have the first couple of chapters complete. It’s going to take a bit more time to get it done, but speaking for myself, it’s going to be well worth the wait. Madman isn’t going to be your typical superhero/pulp hero book. Instead, expect elements of horror mixed in with the same action that is in Accused. Expect this book out in the early part of next year. Based on the outline, Madman is going to be several times longer than Accused and is currently budgeted at 90,000 words.

Writing for an Animated Webseries

Side-by-side with Madman, I’m developing a pilot for a web series that blends modern espionage, counter-terrorism, and superheroes in some rather…unusual…ways. I’m about halfway done the initial script, and expect to have it completed by Halloween. Production is going to start in December, with the pilot being released by late spring.

The rise in computer power and GPU-based renderers, such as Otoy’s Octane, make it very possible to do Pixar level animation on your home computer. I want to make this particular episode look as good as some of the highest quality animation that we’ve seen in television or film. Keep watching for still images and animations as we start getting closer to production and you can judge for yourselves.

National Novel Writing Month

Finally, I decided to take my first swing at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). As if I didn’t have enough stuff on my plate already, I’m going to turn myself into a cyber-hermit for the next month as I try to hit the target of 50,000 words in the first draft of a brand-new project. For those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it’s a form of self-challenge writing competition where there participants all try to writing 50,000 words in a single month.

I’ve talked in the past about trying to manage the flow of ideas. For some people, myself especially, we are cursed with an abundance of ideas and a sheer lack of time to deal with them. In order to help filter out some of the ideas that flow towards me like water from a fire hose, I’ve taken to simply outlining ideas and then putting them away into an archive to let them gel. The ones that still compel me after a year or so are the ones that have that X factor that can give me the momentum to take them from raw concept to finished story in the hundreds of hours it takes to refine and finalize them. Sometimes though, ideas hit you with the force of a tidal wave and they knock you over. That’s what happened to me with the idea for national novel writing month. I’m currently working on the outline for this and racing the clock to get the outline done by the end of this month. Wish me luck.

If I manage to hit my 50,000 word target for November, I expect it’s still going to take at least another 30,000 words to complete, and several months to refine and make it ready for publication. Expect to have this book released this coming summer.

Keep checking back for more information.

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