Blargglesplorgglenarf

It seems like the Word Smith's sparse and/or erratic update schedule will be continuing for the foreseeable future  (note:  I do not claim to be able to foresee the future.)  This is due to a paper submission deadline coming up in a little over a couple of months so I may need to sacrifice some comic time for actual work work time.  Shock!  I know.

The past few days have also been a tad work-heavy as I was crunching for a presentation this morning - just a lab-specific thing, nothing particularly special, but treating it as a personal deadline, nonetheless.  Went reasonably well:  well enough that I will consider my goals to have been met.  However, the crunching left me feeling a bit, well blarg, so I spent this afternoon working on a sprite animation that has nothing whatsoever to do with work.  And here it is:

(Because the internet doesn't have enough animated gifs.)

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Lectures and Things

I was at a computer graphics conference last week (which is what the poster was for) which was... well, a bit boring, in all honesty.  While there were some interesting papers presented, the conference itself was a lot like sitting in a lecture all day and lectures can often be a bit dull, even when the subject matter itself is interesting.  This also wasn't helped by the fact that some of the speakers weren't really all that good at giving talks.  But I went prepared and had my trusty sketchbook with me to keep me entertained.

This was the view looking up from the registration desk, as I spent one uneventful afternoon helping out with registration.

And this was drawn after spending a bit of time watching the trees blowing in the wind outside of the building that the conference was being held in.

Anyway, that is all for the moment.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Poster Time

I have managed to get around to finishing off that poster for the conference that I'm attending in a little over a week's time.

This is the final version.  It was inked and lettered digitally in photoshop using a Wacom Cintiq 24HD, which is a fun toy to play with - I'm going to have to set aside some time to do more with it at some point.

Anyway, that's all for today.  Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Post-It Post

I thought I'd take a bit of time to talk a little bit about my PhD research. I'm currently preparing a poster to submit to an upcoming computer graphics conference (being held in Toronto this year) and, since my research relates to comics, I figure doing a comic-style poster would be fitting. Here is one of my drafts:I've done a few different drafts so far, but I think this is probably the layout that I'm going to go with. Take a look at it, hopefully it's relatively self-explanatory.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Earthquake!!

I knew I felt some odd rumbling in the lab earlier this afternoon. Turns out I was right.

And just so this isn't just a one-liner, here's a screen shot of my current research-in-progress:

It's the most recent version of my panel layout algorithm. Things are progressing fairly smoothly, at least when I'm not procrastinating or whatever.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Under My Thumb

I just noticed that I forgot to commemorate my 111th post. Fortunately, since it was my previous post, it served to point out something suitably bizarre for such an auspicious occasion.

The point of this post, however, is not to dwell on interesting numbers. As I have mentioned previously, my PhD research is related to comics and, as such, it seems that trying my hand at making a comic would be a useful experience. I wrote up a short script back over reading week and this week I have undertaken the first step on that journey - namely, creating the layout thumbnails. Here are the results:

Basically, thumbnails are meant to be rough sketches showing the layout of the panels and also of what will go into said panels. The level of detail in the thumbnails seems to vary widely from artist to artist. The above page of thumbnails shows four comic pages. I hope the division between pages is relatively clear, otherwise the image might seem a bit confusing. (Top left is page 1, top right is page 2, bottom left is page 3 and bottom right is page 4.)

The thumbnails don't include (much) dialogue, so it probably won't be immediately obvious exactly what's going on, though I have sketched in where I think the speech balloons will go. Each page took about an hour to create the thumbnails.

As might be obvious from the thumbnails, the characters look a bit generic at the moment. That is by intent since I haven't actually gone and done any character design yet. I didn't want to be tempted to put too much detail into the thumbnails. So my next step will be coming up with some actual character designs, which I'll post about when they're done (hopefully in a week or so).

So far I'm enjoying this little project. I haven't really done much drawing since when I was doing my Master's degree and it's nice to have something to motivate me to do some drawing again.

Until next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Grab Bag

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrr!

Today I actually started doing some programming related to my research. Nothing exciting yet, just laying down some groundwork. And, of course, since it's just getting started, it may all end up getting discarded before the end anyway. Who knows! I sure don't!

In much less exciting news, I will be going off to proctor in about ten minutes or so. I've probably said it before and shall no doubt say it again, but I - hate - proctoring.

Well, that is all for the present.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Drawring Time

This is about a week and a half or so after the fact, but I sat down and did some drawing recently, which is something I'd not done in a while but had been meaning to do. There was a reason for this, beyond just wanting to draw. I've been reading "Understanding Comics" and "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud, recommended by my supervisor as part of background reading for my research. (Incidentally, I think it's incredibly cool to be in a field where I can read about comics and call it "research".) Anywho, I decided I wanted to try to make some observations on how I drew stuff, so I sat down to draw something:


I decided to deliberately leave the drawing unfinished as I think it gets the point across. The notes on the image are more or less legible (should be able to click on it for the full size) so I won't reiterate them here, except for the one marked with a star.

Star: this arrow is pointing at the fold in the sleeve. I had considerable difficulty figuring out how the sleeve should fold and, I'm quite sure, got it completely wrong. This did, however, make me wonder how good people are at recognizing when something like this isn't correct. How much, if any, innate understanding of how fabrics behave to people have? In other words, how many corners could you cut in simulating, rendering or animating fabric before people noticed that something was off?

Also, there's something called the "uncanny valley" when referring to near-photorealistic renderings of human faces. The basic idea is that there is a point where a computer generated image is very close to being realistic, but not quite fully realistic, and it starts looking creepy because humans are very good at recognizing faces so we start picking up on all the things that aren't quite right, but when things are a bit less realistic our brains are more willing to tolerate the imperfectoins, presumably because it's working at a more abstract level at that point. Do similar things exist with other things, like the folds in cloth?

I don't know the answers to any of this, but it was interesting to think about nonetheless.

Freak Out,
-TFitC