My attempts to add “fuzz” to the bees haven’t gone very well…

I wanted to add the fuzz as lots and lots of individual hair-like elements to the bees’ bodies, figuring that your modern-day computers have the horsepower to render such things. Well, that didn’t work out so well. Make the hairs too big, and the bee looks like he’s got warts. A little smaller, and the bee resembles a hedgehog or sea urchin. Smaller still, and we descend into the Hell of Infinite Parse Times, where simple 320 x 240 images take a half hour or longer to render, and that’s without calculating motion blur or the filtering of light passing through many layers of bee wings (semi-transparent objects which POV has to take extra time to calculate). So, individual hairs are right out…

The poor man’s method is to use a bump pattern for the surface normals. Normals give the illusion of a rough or perturbed texture without the computing overhead of lots of extra individual objects. However, as you can see in the image above, the moment I add a back light or fill light, the surface normals vanish in places, and the bee just ends up looking like he needs a bath. Unimpressive…

So… where does that leave us? To give the bee convincing fuzz, I would really need to re-engineer the model from scratch, striving for more realism. As you well know, I’m not a fan of that approach. At all. The bees worked fine the way they are for four movies, so apart from the antennae modifications, I’m gonna say they’re done. Now, in future episodes I’ll need to construct some variations of the bees including — gasp — female bees, but that comes later…

I say it’s time we get ready to start blocking. WooHOO!!

Okay, we’re finally getting to the good stuff now — bees!

First order of business was to give everybody’s favorite joke-telling honey producers the ability to move their antennae up and down. The test video demonstrates the full range of motion I’m giving the little boogers. I expect the actual usage will be far more subtle, more like eyebrows…

More to come…

• Facebook
• Twitter
• deviantArt

If one of these sites is your prefered hangout, by all means follow Goofy Graffix from there — it’s the same Goofy Graffix goodness. Bonus points for deviantArt watchers: all the good DanBee’s Doodles artwork can be found there, too. Mmm, mmm, now that’s good eating…

Am I trying to get rid of you? Heck, no!! You can always hang around here if you want — even better, you can subscribe via RSS and have Goofy Graffix brought right to your favorite newsreader (Google Reader, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc). Easy as pie!

As always, thank you for your support

The image above links to our last test video showcasing the landscape. POV-Ray successfully generated a field of flowers that sits perfectly on the ground surface we worked on a couple of weeks ago. That’s good! As you watch the video, however, you’ll notice many of the flowers have leaves or petals slicing through their neighbors. That’s not so good. While it wasn’t unexpected, questions remain: how do we fix it, and do we care?

One thought is to create subroutines that generate flowers in clusters. Each cluster would have its member flowers oriented in a direction that doesn’t cause conflicts with one another. There would be an exclusion zone, for lack of a better term, around each cluster that no other cluster or individual flower could encroach upon. Taking it another step, grass would be included in each cluster and individual flower subroutine so the blades don’t go thru any part of the parent flower(s). After those clusters and flowers get put on the field, individual blades of grass will fill up the rest of the empty space. Or something like that.

The hard part is not figuring out how to do it; it’s knowing when to say enough is enough. Of the four acts, the first one is really the only one where we have to worry about having camera shots with flower parts colliding with each other. In those shots, the camera is usually zipping along pretty quickly, so you may or may not notice anything funky. I don’t want to fritter away hundreds of hours of production time trying to solve what may turn out to be a minor problem. If Peter Jackson can get away with hobbits comfortably leaning on handrails in a city built for tall elves without audiences leaving the theater in a huff, I’m pretty sure I can have a few happy accidents with my grassy meadow

I’ll revisit this issue once blocking and the first edits are done. In the meantime, I want to spend all of next week getting our principals and extras modeled and ready for their closeups…

I’ve attached some different flower faces on our stems and leaves. This should provide enough variety for our meadow. What do you think? Yes? No? Maybe?

Grass is proving slightly more problematic — not so much creating the individual blades, but mixing them in with the flowers to create a convincing meadow. Fortunately, focal blur will obscure the meadow for a majority of the scenes, as was the case for the first four bee movies. I’ll worry about those other scenes when I get to them…

The image above links to a video showcasing each flower, so go check it out. I think I have one more test video to put together, and then I need to get to work on making fuzzy bees and the odd butterfly or two.

I’m getting anxious to start staging and blocking. Won’t be long now!

Sorry I didn’t get this out sooner — Real Life decided to be a complete jerk and threw a heaping pile of chaos and uncertainty my way. Unfortunately, the source of the disruption promises to cause further upheaval for the foreseeable future, so please bear with me if updates stop for extended periods of time

Anyway, the flower image above links to another test video.  This one has our camera orbiting five copies of the same basic flower model. For this I wanted to test out the code that makes each flower slightly different from its neighbor. So far, so good. All flowers will share the same code for creating stems and leaves, so the next step for me is to create a few more different flower faces. The colors and textures seen here are not what you’ll see in the finished film — all that gets done after blocking and first edits…

More to come…

In case you’re wondering what this is, this is a simple fly-by over the ground I want to use for the bees’ grassy meadow. I don’t want a table-top-flat landscape for those shots where the camera is zipping along behind our bees, so I’m using what is known as a height field object in POV-Ray. Height fields are commonly used to generate landscapes — they make excellent mountain ranges, alien planets, and, in this instance, slightly-irregular surfaces to populate with lots of flowers and grass. It’s a bit spartan right now, but once I get it covered with the appropriate vegetation, it’ll look snacky-good…

Speaking of plant life, my next task is to hammer out some basic flower models, and then create some code that makes each flower a little different from his brother. I hope to have another test video by the end of the week. Stay tuned…

1. How detailed do I make it? During my vacation, we stopped into the Des Moines Botanical Gardens to peruse the flora. On one wall they have a display of all the different types of wildflowers and prairie grass that can be found in the Great Plains — plant life I saw in abundance along the highway between Omaha and Des Moines. Thing is, do I really want to go to that sort of Pixar extreme to create my meadow? Is the level of detail I used in the previous bee jokes films sufficient? Is there a happy medium?

2. Do I want to make my meadow sway in the breeze? Do I want the flowers to sway whenever a bee flies by? The mathematics involved in calculating the way the plants sway in a realistic fashion are quite daunting for a simpleton like me, as is gracefully handling any collisions between plants so they don’t go through each other.

3. How hilly do I make the terrain? It would be unrealistic to see a spread of flowers on a pancake-flat landscape, despite what you make think the Plains actually look like

While I’m chewing on all that, I’ve been doing some rough sketches. Landscape drawing is not my strength, unless there’s a large monster stomping through it. My meager skills should get me through the first two acts okay — I’ll worry about the last two later…

Phase 1 — Slug through the bee joke movie one act at a time. When we get done with the last act, put all four of them together into one film. Meanwhile, we continue to color Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog on Saturdays, as well as hammer on the other three 2-D projects, trying our best to keep the production cycles close together when we do model sheets, set designs, rough keys, and animatics reels, then work on them one scene at a time for penciling, inking, and coloring.

Phase 2 — After the bee joke movie is complete, we examine our four 2-D films and move the one furthest along into the Monday-thru-Friday spot, continuing with the other three on Saturdays. When done, we move the next film closest to completion up to Monday-Friday, and so on, until all four films are done.

Clarity recognizes my attempts to evenly subdivide my time amongst multiple film projects usually end in complete disaster. At the same time, she’s not a huge fan of working exclusively on one movie at a time — it tends to cause rapid burnout, and my other projects suffer a load of atrophy. Somewhere in-between lies the truth! The way she sees it, the computer-generated stuff is where it’s at, and that should get my full attention five days a week. Saturdays should be reserved for the 2-D traditional films, DanBee’s Doodles, and whatever else that’s left…

The logic makes sense, actually. I’ll be able to concentrate on the bee movie most of my free time, getting it worked on in fairly short order. All the while, I’m not killing myself to work those hand-drawn films in any particular hurry; instead, I’m just stirring the pot, keep those films in motion so they don’t grow stale from lack of attention. When you figure I’ll be working on the bee joke movie for at least another year, I still have more than fifty-two Saturdays to nibble away on those other films so, when their turn comes up, there’s that much less to do. Or something like that.

After Phase 2? I have no idea. I think she scribbled something else but I was in a particularly drooly mood that night, and my slobber made her notes somewhat, um, illegible. But that’s cool with me — anytime you start thinking more than a year out, you’re asking for all sorts of trouble…

So, that’s the plan and I’m sticking to it. I won’t be blurbing about any 2-D progress here; I prefer to keep it all on the down-low until I have a finished film in my sweaty little hands. I will continue with the bee joke movie updates, hopefully a little more frequently than the past couple of months. Stay tuned…

First thing I’ve done is hammer out a schedule to take us through the first few stages of production:

• 6/22 – 6/28 — Set Design
• 6/29 – 7/5 — Set construction
• 7/6 – 7/12 — Modeling

I’m going to operate under the assumption that I’m going to be enhancing existing sets rather than coming up with totally new ultra-detailed landscapes, so three weeks should be enough time to get all our movie pieces designed and modeled. I’d like to create some grass, different flowers, and maybe even a tree or two, so that schedule might end up going straight down the drain. I’m going to try my hardest to stick to the deadlines, lest two months go sailing by and I’m left with nary a single shot filmed…