Picture Perfect

The past week, I attended many social events, therefore, I took a lot of pictures.

I had a good camera but because I was using the built in flash and everyone was sweating I got a lot skin glare.

I found a good to tutorial to remove it so I tought I would share.

http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials/harris13.html

I am not to happy with their end result because they make the portrait look flat. But I found that you can change the opacity to 50 on the brush and make it look better. The idea is to leave a little highlight to keep the natural glow.

Before

After

I also played with the curves.

If you are going to do color correction, make sure you have a good CRT monitor, LCDS tend to be bad at color managing. But either way make sure you calibrate your monitor.

Drawings from the street

I have been stuck in my room for 90% of this week going over endless amounts of tutorials, and although I should be animating for the reel, I love the process of leaning something new.

Here are a few sketches from the free world.

I was grabbing lunch, and I had a pad.
Which was given to me by a friend. Thank you Melissa :)

The Illustration

I made this sketch about a year ago when I was working on the book.

Nature facinates me and a child dancing in the middle of a grassy field, enjoying the quite time, is as close to nature one can be.

This is what the first sketch looked like,

and it was about that size.

Then I scaned the drawing and put it into painter and re-sketched the layout.

After that, I made the character to model, and added foreground elements for Dynamics. Making sure not to lose the little girl as the main focus.

After that, I added the midground color.

Then Foreground

Lastly I painted the character and the foreground grass.

I always wanted it to be a peaceful moment but all the foreground leaves started to look menacing, so I removed the big right leaf and blurred the closest ones to us.

This is with what I ended.

Business Card

The end of my contract with the movie is coming and the idea of using the same old business card seems lame to me.

Especially since when I was in college I had four types of business cards.

With that in mind I set out to re_design my cards.

Ivaylo, my artsy friend, suggested for me to use one of the previous sketches as a card.

So I gave it a try.

I am not trying to sell myself as an artist who wants to show artwok at the Met so I felt it was not a good representation of me.

I am going for animation. So I gave it another go, using old art work.

As luck would have it, I ended up liking an unfinished pastel.

This is what it looks like done with printing bleed, I will make another blog for the illustration.

Sketches

Aww,

How I miss sketching.

There is nothing like putting markings on paper.

Here are a few more sketches I did on my breaks.

I love the mountains

I wanted to polish this, but liked the way it looked rough, it captured the mood.

Rough Sketching

Sketches

I have not been here for a while and I am sorry.

In the past month I have been busy, I took a trip to Mexico and been working a lot on my reel. 2 images ( the first 2) keep coming back to my head from the trip. So I sketched them. Each one has a great story.

Churh Hill

The PatchSleep Well

This is just something I drew after talking to a friend and stating how tired we both were.

Shadows Passes in XSI

Alright I promised One Blog a week, but a friend needed help and I decided that beause there are not many resources to show people how to make shadow passes I would just make a blog for him to look at and then if anyone else has the same issue they can look at this as an example.

Also for those of you who like to do shadow passes by overiding primary and secondary rays, I personally find that to be more time consuming, so I have chosen to make shadow passes using Simple Shadow and Shadow Illumination properties in the render tree applyed to an overide on the surface for the objects material. I find it easier and at work have writen a script with presets so now I only press a buttom to make shadows.

I am making the assuption that who ever read this knows how to use XSI and therefore has an idea of how to make passes, partitions and create primitive objest :)

My example is just a scene with two primitives. It does not matter what you use. Just know that you need three partitions.

1. Partition 1 contains Simple shadow objects (these are the objects that will cast shadow)
2. Partition 2 contains Shadow objects (these are the objects that recieve Shadow)
3. Partition 3 contains lights emiting shadow rays.

Lets start......

My scene contains two objects.

Cone will be the Simple Shadow (Shadow caster)

Grid will be Shadow (Shadow Reciever).

Simple Shadow contains Cone

Shadow contains Grid

Background Lights contains my light

Simple_Shadow

Add an overridre to the Simple Shadow partition.

Property>override

Add a material-suface parameter to the overide by selecting a surface node inside the shader.

Open the render tree by pressing 7.

Inside the render tree add a simple shadow node.

Nodes>illumination>Simple_shadow

Connect the node to the override Material-surface imput.

Shadow

Now for the shadow partition you are going to repeat the first few steps.

*Add an overridre to the Shadow partition.
Property>override

*Add a material-suface parameter to the overide by selecting a surface node inside the shader.

*Open the render tree by pressing 7.
Inside the render tree add a Shadow node and a constant node.

Nodes>illumination>shadow

Nodes>illumination>Constant

Connect the Shadow node to the color imput for Constant and the constanct to the override Material-surface imput.

Things to note... I added a constant inbetween the shadow and the materia overdide to give light a stop point for the shadow rays.

Light

I am adding an overide to the light, because I ussually have many lights in the scene and the lights affect the enviroment. It is easier to override a light than to hide it in every pass. So I can use a light as part as my rig and also as my shadow light for my shadow pass.

For the light partition in my shadow pass I add an intensity and shadow parameter.

When the dialog box comes up just say you want to add them as parameters.

Add your intencity value and check shadows.

That will tell XSI to turn the shawdow rays in the light on.
Things to be concern about before rendering Antialiasing and Optimisation.

Antialiasing changes on how close the objec is or if your production has presets to fallow. I did a test a moment ago and in you loca computer a min of 1 an max of 3 will be fine for a shadow pass.

For Optimization it is recommeded by the great render gods to Use a diagnostis mode and depth to determine the proper BSP settings nevertheless I have found that a min of 20 and a max of 60. Will work.

Also make sure that you have enable ray tracing on in order for shadows to render.

For reflaction and refletion for a regular shadow presets are fine.

Now render........

Change your region settings to show alpha and you should be able to see shadows.

Now if you show alpha and rgb on shaded mode. this is what you will get.

Have fun and I how this was helpful.

If you have any question email me or leave me a coment.

Artist Date !!

Alright, I know what you are thinking, but let me assure you that is not what you think.

My first day of college, my professor of figure drawing (Michael Jacques) assigned as homework to go on an artist date. What he meant was to designate, out of our busy schedule, atleast an hour to celebrate the beauty of creation. This is a broad idea, that can be interpreted in anyway posible, but for those of us who are busy it is a nice way to slow down and smell the roses if you will. Go to a museum, work in your shop, plant in your garden, play the guitar, be curious like a child, have the desire to learn. Draw, take pictures, read a book, sit at your porch and enjoy the breeze, do what ever you want to do. It is your hour, slow down and have some time with yourself.

It is about idea of exploring.

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing

which ones to keep." Scott Adams

Here are some example of my artist dates.

Drawing.

Always carry a sketchbook. Leonardo once wrote. "You truly don't understand anything until you have drawn it.

Also don't be afraid to make bad drawings. These are not great. Greatness takes years of practice.

Photos.

Taking pictures is both fun and relaxing. If you own a Digital camera. It is always easy to delete the pictures you don't like.

Click here Images these are pictures I took on a weekend.

Go to a Museum.

I love the Getty. I try to go there atleast once of month. My favorite piece is a dutch painting "Shipping in a Calm at Flushing with a States General Yacht Firing a Salute" by Jan van de Cappelle . I move throught the whole museum and this picture always makes me sit and stare. I love the dramatics and harsh angle of the painting, for it is like caos meeting order on a canvas.

Jan van de Cappelle Dutch, 1649 Oil on panel 27 7/16 x 36 5/16 in. 96.PB.7

The project that never was !!!

The project that never was !!!

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

is a proverbial statement that arose in the late sixteenth century. How Does this apply to this Sketch?

Last Year (2005) in my visit to Sundance, in Park City, Utah, I reconnected with a friend that has been a reporter for television for about 10 years. During the visit we both agreed to do a book, we had always wanted to do a project together and what better way for an artist and a writer to express they talents than a book. We both agreed on a contract, that stated that we would do this pro bono, on a lose timeline with a collections of earnings after the book was published.

Here is where timing is key. When I agreed to do the book the movie was only it was on the initial stages, where all is cool and the end seems far away, working at my own pace would have not presented a problem. Well because we are both busy people we kept things in the back burner and he wrote the script at his own time and I waited with no rush. Six months passed and I got the script. It was beautifully written and I in my naive ways agreed to have it done in a matter of two months. He obviously excited ran out and got a publisher. All the stars where aligned and I was set to do it. I went out and bought about $100 worth of art supplies for test. Well by this point the movie was moving at full speed and I started to feel like I was being pulled in two directions. By this time it was December and the publisher had only seen a few sketches. I cancelled a trip to Mexico and took my Christmas week off from work, to work on the book. By the third day I had only outlined half of the book and I wanted to finish that week. I was so exhausted from work that trying to finish this project was draining me. I realized very far into the venture that I had taken to much, I had never illustrated a book. I was not aware of all the work that took place.

I was talking to a friend of mine, and he expressed that there where professional illustrators that took 6 months for 30 pages. At this point, I realized that it was in the best interest of the project if I did not continued in it. So I made the hardest phone call I had to do as a professional and a friend, I called and cancelled my involvement with the project.

I am not writing this to illustrate that I am a quitter, I am writing this for all the young artist out there who in their journey to further their career will want to take as many projects as they get offered. I would like to caution that, for it is better to finish one right, than to not finish any at all. I have been in many situations where I say yes to projects because I want to further my knowlege, but sometimes it is draining. To quote everyone who knows me, " Don't bite more than you can crew."

Hola

Wow!! The wonderful world of Blog.

It is funny how HTML has now become now part of my vocabulary. Have you guys seen the shirt that says "/body" I find it to be funny.


Anyway a blog by definition is an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page. Well let’s just say this will not be a diary it will be more like an extension of my website http://www.antelmostudio.com/ I will post experiences in art, as well as work in progress nothing amazing. Also just to warn you I will probably only add an entry a week and this is why.


For the past few years I have been part of a crew for animated film set to be released this year. As of this month, The Barnyard has been pushed from a release date of Oct 6 to a summer release date of July 28. This means I am busy at work.




Anyway, Drop me a line sometime. It is always nice to hear the world respond back.