Posts Tagged ‘AAM’

Went to see Walk the Plank’s The Emperor and the Tiger in Newsham park in Liverpool tonight. It seemed to have drawn a reasonable crowd. I’d thought it might not because I’d only seen the poster at the start of the week but coverage on the front page of the local papers and the regional TV seems to have worked.

I was interested to see how the show was put together. I tend to find that in the last ten years firework displays try to cram more and more wows in to less and less time. While I like a big finale I also like a chance to enjoy some of the individual fireworks so the idea of adding dance, lighting and story telling to fireworks appeals to me.

The first problem with the show was that the very long stage wasn’t high enough. I’m quite tall so I could see some of what was going on but anyone shorter than me was struggling. The length of the stage also created problems because there were times when everything was happening at the far end of the stage and so it was hard to see what was going on. This ment that the opening was underwhelming and so the crowd thinned a bit making seeing what was happening later easier.

Then the story proper began. The two biggest sculptural elements of the show, the Tiger and the Emperor from the title were dramatic and large enough to be easily seen. The story itself could do with a little expansion as an editor for a ladybird early learning version would have sent it back as too short but the basic idea wasn’t bad.

As the production went on the quality of the effects improved. The floodlighting of the trees behind the stage to create different looks with simple colour changes created effective backdrops. Using skytracker/searchlight effects combined with the smoke from fireworks worked well and the later firework effects were effective (including the big finale).

So it turned out to be not a bad show after all. With a bit of work to liven up the opening, a bit of expansion on the story and more thought about sightlines for the audience I’d say it could become an excellent production.

… my paper copy of Astonishing Adventures Magazine Issue 3.

It will be joining my growing pile of summer reading including Pulp Fiction The Villains,June’s BBC History Magazine (for the articles on revolution and Chamberlain’s place in history being unfair), July’s BBC Focus (for the articles on what Britain would be like if all the humans vanished and not for the one about having sex in space), a heap of New Scientists, the current .Net and 3D World Magazines.

Top that off with enjoying a few blogs including one new addition: Earl Pomerantz: Just Thinking…

Astonishing Adventures Magazine Issue 3 is now available in print on Amazon for $9.

I’ve sent Dirk Dangerous and the Giant Balls of Doom off to Astonishing Adventures Magazine last night. Glad I gave it one last proof read because some little graphics had crept in to the file. I think they were Word 2007 editing markup converted to graphics by switching to old style doc format but I could be completely wrong.

Issue 3 of AAM has been out for a little while now and features another of my stories in this somewhat erratically focused series: Mrs H’s Knitting Circle. There is a small mistake in the issue: Mrs H’s begins with "The sap felt good in my hand." not the sentence before that which is from the end of the previous story so don’t get confused by the opening.

I’ve been putting some more work in on the Dirk Dangerous web site. It won’t be ready for at least a geological era but it is at least moving someway towards launch even if its at the speed of tectonic plate movement.

I’ve also got a structure for the next story in the series. Story five, tentativelly titled Meanwhile… will jump around between the various ongoing threads of the plots revealed so far tangling them up and bringing the various elements of the story together.

I’ve spent the day finishing the first draft of Dirk Dangerous and the Giant Balls of Doom – as usual the stories over the 3500 word limit for AAM. So I’ll have to slim it down in draft 2.

This weeks follows on from last weeks four light rig. This week the lights are again at ninety degrees to each other. The lights have been rotated so we now have a light pointing straight in from the front, one from behind and one from each side.

This rig gives us a lot of control over the amount of light provided for visibility (now all from the light from the front) and modelling (from the lights to either side. With the side lights roll now purely one of modelling they can be brought in to light the actor at quite steep angles thus reducing the amount of light spilled to the sides.

The light from behind adds highlights, reduces the lighting’s flatness and separates the actor from the scenery and backdrop.

Many of this rig’s real world disadvantages are the same as last weeks rig. It uses four lights in the rig and four dimmers if each light is controlled separately. In a small theatre may be hard to justify over a three light rig.

Although this rig has better control of spill there are still four shadows cast in different directions with the danger of them falling on scenery, props or other actors.

From a rendering perspective a four light rig is only a fraction slower to render than a one light rig so this has little effect on the decision of what kind of rig to use in an illustration intended to simulate stage lighting.

All of the above images were made using Poser 7 and Vue 6 Infinite.

[I've posted an updated version of this tutorial to my site as: Cloud Layer Sculpting in Vue ]

I’ve been playing with reversing the idea I used for punching holes in a spectral cloud layer in Vue 6 to create God Rays. Instead of making holes I’ve been cutting out clouds in shapes of my own design from cloud layers. Here are two ways you can do this yourself.

Method 1 for any version of Vue (requires a modelling package)

Create a mesh of a cuboid solid with the shape of the cloud you want to create in your modelling package of choice.

Open Vue and load the sample scene I’ve created. This scene saves a lot of work fiddling round with the atmosphere and cloud settings.

Import your mesh and place it so that it cuts through the cloud layer in the scene and so that the hole in the mesh will be inside the render area. You can use the Guide Cube in my scene as a guide to where to put your mesh.

In Vue Infinite and xStream select your mesh and use hide from render to conceal it. In other versions of Vue use the transparent material on the Guide Cube to hide it.

Delete the Guide Cube and the Terrain Object.

Now render the scene.

Method 2 for Vue 6 Infinite and xStream

First prepare the image you want to appear as a cloud. Produce a black and white image in the shape of the cloud and save it as a jpeg or other format that Vue can import. You may need to mirror the image so it will face in the correct direction once imported.

Open Vue and load the sample scene I’ve created. This scene saves a lot of work fiddling round with the atmosphere and cloud settings.

Now select the Terrain and open it in the terrain editor. Select the picture option and load up the picture you made. If the shape is black on a white background you’ll need to invert the terrain. Use the Clip Min setting for the terrain to remove the lower lying altitudes to leave just your shape.

Close the terrain editor and check that the Terrain object is taller than the Guide Cube. Make sure the Terrain object has the same material applied to it as the Guide Cube. This material is 100% transparent so it won’t show up in the scene. Create a Boolean difference of the Guide Cube and the terrain with the Terrain object as the second object selected for the difference so it is cut out of the Guide Cube.

Make sure the Boolean object overlaps the cloud layer and that the hole in it falls inside the camera’s view. Bake the Boolean object to Polygons.

Now render the scene.

Resources

• Example Train Cloud Scene (335KB Vue Scene)
• Base Scene for creating your own (78KB Vue Scene)
• The train image I used for the second method:

It’s been twelve years since we last saw John McClane. Now thanks to an interesting new application of the delete key by a group of bad guys who don’t seem to do things the simple way when there is a complicated way to do it, he’s back in action. This is the kind of popcorn logic film that Hot Fuzz sent up so well earlier this year. The original Die Hard has its moments of action silliness but this one went sillier several times. Thanks to great acting and the fact that even when its being silly it stays, somehow, inside its own logic it holds together and I easily forgave the silliness. As with the earlier films there is a strong techno thriller element to the story which again holds up despite a few floors in the underlying logic.

CSI and other films and TV shows have created a world in which many things that take time can be done instantly and many bits of information that are not available on a computer or if they are will not accessible over the Internet are. This film lives in that universe. It has to for the plot to work. I’m sure there is a story out there that could build tension by having DNA tests take time and having someone have to go to a building to get the plans of something but I doubt I have the wit to write it and make it as good as Die Hard 4.0.

I’d also like to congratulate them on having the good sense to avoid trying to shoe horn characters from earlier in the franchise in for no other reason than they were in the earlier films. The new characters were all worth watching. They kept their powder dry on McClaneisms and didn’t over use references to the earlier films. As a result when they did get used they had an impact.

Overall an excellent addition to the earlier Die Hard films well worth a watch if you enjoyed them.

A little later than normal this week – An experiment with computer simulated clouds to pursade Vue 6 Infinite into making them match a shape I wanted.