Beans magic

It would be cool to get these guys involved - and "cast" one of their characters.

-r
sent from rony's blackberry

Using Bittorrent for NoName Studios

Posted From The U.S.

http://www.bittorrent.com/introduction.html

Bittorrent may be a great way to have the collaborative team exchange large files.

-R

Brazil Rendering System

Posted From The U.S.

An interesting rendering system - some decent photorealistic work done with it:

http://www.splutterfish.com/

-R

Laser Scanning and Surface Resources

Posted From The U.S.

http://www.geomagic.com/products/studio/

Laser scanning & surface building software.

-R

Endorphin Natural Motion

Posted From The U.S.

I came upon Natural Motion's Endorphin 2.5 product - its definitely not a freeware or opensource product (can blender do anything like this?) but it looks great and it seems like it could save a lot of animation production time. It would be cool to see some Beans Magic type characters animated in this way.

http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/products.htm

-R

Gen11 and The Green Mountain Girl

Posted From The U.S.

The gen11 band are an early experiment in digital actors - Gen & 11 are likely to star in The Hour Blue film : http://www.gen11band.com/index.html.

The image below is a test render of the Green Mountain girl.



-R

Amazing Digital Characters

Posted From The U.S.

I stumbled across this site http://www.beans-magic.com/home.html. The team/artist seem to be very far ahead of anyone else (Japan seems to be big on digital people).

Here are a few excellent samples (from their site, The Beans Magic Company):



They appear to be using the Brazil rendering system.

-R

Another Mood Image

Posted From The U.S.

Here is an image which is more of a mood thing - its has a character I'm calling "The Green Mountain Girl".



-R

Virtual Human Stuff 1.0

Posted From The U.S.

Some floating thoughts on virtual humans:

• A key project goal should be to cross the "Uncanny Valley"
• Poser 6.0 looks pretty nice - probably worth the upgrade from 5.0, although it's still in Mori's Valley (I have done a few things that may have crossed the line slightly)
• Someone academic with interest in virtual humans
• Softimage FaceRobot package (a bit creepy)
• An impressive 3d virtual human
• Blog of artist who made cool 3d human
• wierd virtual human art link
• Eyetronics - selling digital human data
• PBS article on virtual actors
• MSNBC article on virtual actors
• How to make virtual faces
• How to build a virtual human from Kurzweil.net
• Some criticism of Final Fantasy's virtual humans
• Human photo references for 3d animation
• BBC article on virtual humans
• 3d human character test - pretty nice
• Dawn, realistic 3d human/fairy animation test

-r

Creative Commons License

Posted From The U.S.

As a first starting point, I chose the following Creative Commons copyright license to cover all the creative work that goes into making this film. This may evolve and get refined over time. An open question is how to cover the collective cotributors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

-R

Meaning Of The Hour Blue

Posted From The U.S.

Why the name "The Hour Blue"?

I chose the name from the French, L'Heure bleue, which is a term to describe the hour after the sun sets, when everything around you gets a bluish cast. I read about the term in the book, Kayaking The Keys, by Kathleen Patton. I kayak relatively often, especially in th Florida Keys and she describes the Keys as the best place in the world to see L'Heure bleue, because the blue of the post-sunset blends with the blue of the calm waters, and the line between earth and sky is no longer clear.

I like that concept as a starting point for a film, and I also use it as a way to describe what Ray Kurzweil calls "the singularity".

The Hour Blue will deal with the moral and ethical confusions of the time in the near future when the line blurs between humans, their machines, software, and biology - and how this affects the spirit of the world and its inhabitants.

-R

Project Logistics

Posted From The U.S.

In addition to the blog & website (coming this week), here are some ideas on how to control and tag the development of content:

• wikki's
• CVS
• bugzilla
• open office (for things like excel)

any other ideas?

-r

A Model To Follow: Orange

Posted From The U.S.

I found this link on the web - it's called orange and they are working with the blender software as a starting point.

I guess the good news is that the the hour blue project is not so crazy after all :) - but we're not the first. Maybe we can be the best?

It may also be worth collaborating with these folks.

-r

Some 3D resources

Posted From The U.S.

A quick posting on some 3d animation links & resources:

• turbosquid (site to get free and commercial 3d models & textures)
• alias maya (commercial 3d animation software)
• softimage (commercial 3d animation software)
• blender (awesome, free 3d animation software)

-r

TheHourBlue.com

Posted From The U.S.

I've spent a good part of the last week working on TheHourBlue.com website. It should be ready to publish in a few days.

The website will be a permanent archive and what is going on, and I'll refer to it frequently from this blog.

-R

The Hour Blue Poster

Posted From The U.S.

Here is a small 16:9 screenshot of what could be a scene from the movie. The idea at this point is to try and establish the mood and feel of the film.














-r

Thehourblue.com

Website will soon be up.

-r
sent from rony's blackberry