Silicon Valley 2010

Parallel Developments

Color study shot for Rift: Planes of Telara

Earlier this week we were privileged to have painter & storyteller James Gurney visit the art department at Trion, both to have him speak with us and also for us to get a chance to show him our game. He's best-know to the public for the Dinotopia books (favorites at our house for many years -- See See & I were also lucky enough to see the Dinotopia show at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach a few months back), and known to a lot of artists for his blog and several art technique books, including the new Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.

We got the chance to look at some advance copies of the book and also hear him talk a little bit about (among many other things!) how the brain processes color and luminance separately -- which of course reminded me of this old post on the Black and White Brain. It's exciting to me to see someone as accomplished as Gurney coming at the same ideas from a different direction and for different purpose.

It's been several years now where I find that some of the biggest sources of information for my work in computer-graphic coloring and shading come not from computer scientists or even other people doing similar work -- instead, they come from painters. Not just realist painters, either. Gradations, highlighting, punctuation, contrast, shape -- increasingly I think of shading as a sort of painting-without-drawing.

San Francisco, 2010

Focused

Been busy, sorry.

Hitched, Watsonville

Palo Alto, 2009

P1050253, Brooklyn

For the streetphoto salon....

P1020640, Los Gatos

P1060030, NYC

P1020045, Redwood City

P1050733, NYC

P1000748, Miami

P1000264, Tulips @ Home

P1010938

Junkpiles

What a difference a day makes as I start assembling all the real components and trying to sort them out -- even doubling the size of the chassis the whole thing seems... smaller. And it's definitely slower. And I still haven't added the USB router or the second power supply for the linux portion. Or the lasers.

But really, I don't want to make Wall-E or Huey/Dewey/Louie or K-9 or Johnny-5. All those designs have a similar feel, I think, because they are dominated by components. This seems like a dead-end for the physical design, I'm moving back to my "expressive tentacle-like eyestalk" plan.

Imagine if animals were designed this way. Ugh. They all have similar components, but how different are even the various vertebrates and chordates, much less the wide variety of other creatures...

Did some computer vision tests this evening and it was taking eight seconds a pop to analyze images. Realtime, yay.