Iguana Model

I finally finished 2 models last month. I am posting the first one here. It is a small model of iguana head. I worked on it for a class on modeling using a software called Mudbox.

I must admit that I have not heard about Mudbox before the class. With Mudbox, we sculpt instead of model. At first I found the process awkward, but after a while I started to enjoy sculpting. For the purpose of this class, we were basically encouraged to go overboard with details on our model (with the hope that we learn more about sculpting that way), so small models were encouraged. The modeling process is more or less illustrated in the following image.

Basically we used Mudbox to sculpt details on our models and then create a displacement map. Next, we applied the displacement map to a base model using 3ds max and then (after setting up lights) rendered the output images.

I am quite happy with this model even though I am not fully satisfied with the diffuse map. However, with my current skills, I do not know what I can do to improve it :p Anyway, here are more renders.

Here is one thing I learned while working on this model. With Mudbox 2011, exporting a Mudbox model to an OBJ file behaves in a way I did not expect. It creates 1 OBJ file; however, the OBJ file has multiple models at the same position. (I have not yet tested if the multiple models are from sculpt layers in the Mudbox file or from the sculpt levels.) I expected that I would get 1 model that has merged details from all sculpt layers. Still, this unexpected behavior can be easily fixed by opening the resulting OBJ file and then deleting models that does not have the merged details.

On 3D Modeling

It has been a long time since my last post, so allow me a quick, unpolished post this time.

I have been learning how to create 3D models the last 10 months. Here are what I learned from my modeling lessons.

• Modeling is basically putting vertices on 3D space in such a manner (for example, 2 vertices are connected to form an edge, 3 or more edges form a polygon) that the computer can create an image that we can recognize as objects.
  
• Polygon modeling using 3ds Max, to me, means defining edge loops at points important to define a shape; then let the computer interpolate the area in-between (using the TurboSmooth modifier). As a computer science graduate, I see this style of modeling as a way to selectively add details.
  
• Modeling using Mudbox begins with defining a basic shape (called the base model). Vertices on the base model should be spread as uniformly as possible; equivalently, quads on the base model should be as close as possible to a square. Next, we sub-divide the base model and add details by pulling out or pushing in vertices. As a computer science graduate, I feel this style of modeling reminiscent to brute-force algorithms. We rely on the computer hardware to handle the large amount of data generated as we keep sub-dividing the base model in order to add finer and finer details.

I found myself agreeing a friend when he said that modeling using Mudbox is just using a fancy FFD (Free Form Deformation). However, further use convinces me that the tools provided by Mudbox are much more powerful than FFD. The difference among the tools are subtle enough to fool me into thinking that sticking to one tool is enough. They, however, serve different purposes and are useful on different scenarios/problems.

All in all, I find modeling using Mudbox much closer to drawing. I can concentrate on getting proportions right, enhancing shapes, and other high-level thinking instead of worrying about the topology of the model.

Comparing Stereotypes

I made an interesting observation recently. It is about Lyo and Merly, the mascots for the recent 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

The setting was a chaotic but warm family gathering, with many adults and 3 children. The TV was on, and Lyo and Merly made a brief appearance. Someone asked, "Which one is Lyo and which one is Merly?" Another replied, "Usually blue is boy, what. So blue should be Lyo and red should be Merly."

I instantaneously thought, "Hey, that's a wrong stereotype!" I was using the Power Rangers stereotype in colour scheme. Red is always the main guy; blue is one of the sidekicks, who is sometimes a girl (especially if the blue is close to cyan, like Merly's colour).

The next moment, I questioned my own thought, "Why is that wrong? After all, the boy is usually given the color blue and the girl pink, a shade of red."

I find it interesting that 2 stereotypes I take for granted clash each other in a manner I never expected.

Vague Art Discussion #1: Rhythm

Now that I will be able to focus on arts (drawing and 3D modeling), I decided to start a series of blog posts in which I write my thoughts about what I learn in drawing and modeling. I'll call this series "Vague Art Discussion" because art discussions feel vague to me most of the time.

Rhythm
Last year, while my sketch group was working on our doujin artbook, I tried reading the book Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael D. Mattesi, but I could not understand it at all. Recently, the book was recommended for reading by Dom, one of our life drawing instructors. So I am trying to read the book again now, with an additional motivation to make sense of what it says. I still don't understand most of what the book says; it uses many terms that I just cannot understand: "directional force", "applied force", and "rhythm".
(This only reinforces my opinion that art discussions are vague most of the time.)

I didn't pay much attention to the word "rhythm" when reading. It started to seem important in the next life drawing class, when Dom (casually) mentioned the word while demonstrating drawing a series of sketches to depict an action. It made me want to understand this concept.

Before proceeding, let me make it clear that what I write below are my attempt to understand what rhythm means in drawing. I could very well be completely wrong.

I personally interpret rhythm as the regular beat in music. It suggests the need for time. The best way I can define rhythm is "something similar that happens more-or-less regularly".

• "Something similar" because sometimes beat sound changes, yet I can still understand that rhythm continues.
• "Happens more-or-less regularly" because, again, sometimes the duration between 2 beats changes, yet I can still understand that the rhythm continues.

As I re-read the paragraphs about rhythm for the third time or so, suddenly it hit me that there is a time dimension in drawing.

• When drawing, I start from a position, go to another position, etc, with a pencil/charcoal. I know that I have a certain kind of speed when drawing a line; so I need a certain amount of time to draw a length of a line. Thus, drawing similar length of line takes me similar duration. This may explain the "more-or-less regular" part of rhythm description.
• Now I only need to draw something similar "more-or-less regularly" and perhaps I will have my rhythm!

The example given in the book is about drawing zigzag lines, with skiing downhill as analogy (on hindsight, perhaps my finding above should be straightforward after all), so it seems like I'm getting closer to understanding rhythm.

However, this is life; obviously the next wall comes hitting me in the face very soon after that: the moment I hold a pencil and tried to apply my understanding of rhythm when drawing. The examples given in the book were drawn by people who understand rhythm, so it is easy to see rhythm in these drawings. In life drawing class, however, I see a real life model. Suddenly I realize that I need to find rhythm as an imaginary overlay from a real model. Some poses make it easier to see rhythm than others; most of the time, though, I just cannot see a rhythm on a pose. So that's something I need to be working on, I guess.

NB: Anyone reading who understand rhythm, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

Hierarchy

Recently, I see the concept hierarchy everywhere. I am attending a 3D modeling class, which includes a life drawing class; and at work I am coding an editor for a web application.

In life drawing, Andrew, one of my instructors, says "Go for the large shape first". I think it's easy to imagine that the same advice applies in 3D modeling. After all, both drawing and modeling are about defining shapes.

In programming, it is more difficult to see how Andrew's advice applies. Perhaps it helps to put programming activity in the context of a development project. A project has goals and time limit. Thus, it is sensible to go for the large items first. "Large" in this case I interpret as "essential" or "must have". Then, I progressively go for smaller and smaller items to refine the system's behavior as close to the ideal behavior as possible. I interpret "smaller items" as "non-essential goals" or "nice-to-have items" and "non-essential bug fixing".

I was uncomfortable with "non-essential bug fixing" at first because, as item#5 in the Joel Test suggests, fixing bugs should have higher priority than writing new code. However, in the tight deadlines I was in, it simply felt right that non-essential bugs should wait. Re-reading what Joel wrote, I think what's important is not a rigid "fix bugs first then write new codes" rule; but finding a compromise between implementing new items and fixing bugs in items already implemented.

Anyway, I thought it's interesting to see a parallel between drawing and programming process. Perhaps I see it only now because the life drawing classes forces me to draw in a very limited time (3-minute poses, 1-minute hands, 10-minute faces, etc).

People List

On a whim, I decided to compile this list of people who change my life for the better but I never meet in person.

Reading

• Isaac Asimov: for writing I, Robot (my gateway drug to s.f.), The Bicentennial Man, The Gods Themselves, Nightfall.
• David Brin: for writing Kiln People (my other gateway drug to s.f.), Earth, Glory Season, Otherness, The River of Time, & for coming up with the awesome story title Thor Meets Captain America.
• Kurt Busiek: for writing Superman: Secret Identity
  
• Orson Scott Card: for writing Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead.
  
• Arthur C. Clarke: for writing Rendezvous with Rama, 3001, Childhood's End.
• Thomas L. Friedman: for writing The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
• Joe Haldeman: for writing The Forever War.
  
• Robert A. Heinlein: for writing Starship Troopers.
• Frank Herbert: for writing Dune (which got me interested in s.f.).
  
• Shimoku Kio: for writing & drawing Genshiken.
• Scott McCloud: for writing Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
• Frank Miller: for writing Batman: Year One.
• Terry Pratchett: for writing Discworld novels.

Programming

• Joel Spolsky: for writing Joel on Software (both the blog & the book, my gateway drug to self-improvement as a programmer).

Music

• Andrew Aversa (a.k.a. zircon): for hosting VGDJ; remixing Ragol Weather.
• Daniel Baranowsky: for remixing Knuckleduster.
  
• Patrick Burns: for remixing Revisiting The Ruins.
• Diggi Dis: for remixing And He Returned Home.
• David W. Lloyd (a.k.a. djpretzel): for starting OverClocked Remix, remixing Love Hurts & Twoson Hits the Road.
  
• wingless: for hosting VGDJ.
  

Anime fandom

• Zac Bertschy: for hosting ANNCast.
• Clarissa Graffeo: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.
• Gerald Rathkolb: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.
• Frederik Schodt: for writing The Astro Boy Essays (my gateway drug into reading about the anime/manga history in Japan & America), Dreamland Japan.
• Justin Sevakis: for hosting ANNCast & writing a travel blog when he visited Singapore for Anime Festival Asia 2009.
• Daryl Surat: for hosting Anime World Order podcast.

I will update this list from time to time.
(Last updated on 2 April 2011.)

Some Thoughts on Drawing

I like to look at drawings, paintings, and sketches. Then I found out that I seemed to be better than my peers in drawing things on paper and I became interested in drawing, painting, and sketching. Soon, this interest started to make me feel the need to learn from other people who I think are better than I am.

However, I often cannot understand what (people who call themselves or are called) artists mean when they describe their work and their working process. For example, it was only recently that I found out that "organic look" means something in the line of "non-geometric look". Before that, I never understood what "organic look" meant whenever I read or heard this term.

As I continue drawing, painting and sketching, I found a lot of fuzzy concepts that I learned from going back and forth between practice and reading books on drawing and painting. Examples of such concepts are (1) the reason behind squinting eyes when painting and (2) the difference between drawing lines and painting strokes. I realize I need labels/words/terms/vocabulary to describe these things and organize them in my mind (I personally believe that organizing what I know helps in learning things that I do not yet know). It is at this point that I started to understand why artists usually use words that I did/do not understand. They try to describe fuzzy concepts that they know exist (because they use these concepts when creating things) but people in general are not familiar with. (I wonder if this is a universal problem because of specialization.)

I felt the need to write this article because of my recent experience collaborating with a friend from my drawing group. She shares similar interests in drawing, painting, and sketching (let's put "visual arts" label to this set of things), but her background and experience are very different from mine. There were times that I realized we were having difficulty to communicate (to describe what look that we want to achieve, for example). I wondered why this difficulty was there at all. As I pondered on it, my train of thought helped me to formulate the cause as I wrote in previous paragraphs. We both tried to explain what we meant using inexact words either because there were no exact words or because we did not fully understand what we wanted to describe.
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Related to this experience, there is another fuzzy concept that I started to see. I'd like to attempt to describe it here.

I find myself often using the words "high level" and "low level" to categorize things. The things can be concepts related to visual arts, programming, or anything in general; but let's to stick to visual arts concepts. A high level concept is not necessarily better/greater/more advanced than low level ones. A high level concept is built on top of a number of low level concepts (perhaps the metaphorical "top" is the reason for the term "high level"?). For example, walking is a high level concept while swinging arms, shifting body weight, moving a leg forward, and so on are low level concepts needed for walking. Low level concepts are more concrete than high level concepts. The fuzzy concepts I mentioned earlier above are high level concepts I learned from practicing low level concepts many times.

Now, an artist has his own knowledge, which is a set of high level concepts. As he practices, he learns more concepts.

• On the one hand, people are naturally interested in new things, so usually they want to learn new things.
• On the other, learning is a personal experience; thus learning what you are interested in means that you are likely to care about the topic deeply. Most of the time your care is deep enough to make you tie your self-worth to what you know.

I think this is why people are likely to be defensive/argumentative when discussing the concept they are currently learning. At least I often catch myself being so.

Artists with less experience care more about low level concepts, such as drawing the correct proportions, smoothing line curves, tightening up & cleaning up sketches, or even minute details of character (e.g. exact number of spikes in the case of anime hair). At some point, all these would sink to the background. The artist still thinks about all these, but they are in a background process that do not need much attention. It is at this point that he can learn new concepts because his conscious mind is free from all these. It is at this point that he starts building high level concepts using the low level concepts that now runs in the background process.

I think it is also at this point that he starts to use words people don't understand :)

Reality is no doubt much more complex than this; but, hey, that's what I can formulate in words for now.