PhotoFLY usage

Another photoFly project, on a smaller scale.
Rendered it out as a small movie.

Autodesk created an on-line prototype software that's capable of building a rough 3D mesh of any objects via photographs that the user takes. Using a shared photo compiling network, the software takes about 10-15 min to stitch the pictures together to make the final 3D render.
For more information and tutorials about photoFly: http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

Below, are a couple of pictures as an example to show what the actual building looked like.
However for the software to output 3D mesh, the more pictures you can take, the better the quality of the 3D model.

Preferably > 50 pics. If you could get a 360 degree of the whole object, as well as some low and high angle shots, you will get the Google map building look.

One thing to take note of: All pictures been shot at the location, should have same exposure (easy for software to stitch pics together), and high F-stop (for details all around).

After the software compiled all of my photograph's that I manually renamed them and saved as .Tif files.
The result of the low poly mesh model was quite good.

After a re-rendering process of maximizing the 3D mesh, the final rendered look, actually looks pretty decent as a whole. Makes me think how much interesting objects could be databased on-line, for schools, libraries or even museums to categorize species, anatomy and etc. It is also useful for quick renders for concept film sets, animation sets.

Autodesk has published the software in its testing phase, makes it cost efficient compared to hacking a Kinect to use it as a scanning device. Although it takes a long process to develop a 3D mesh compared to a Kinect, but it's easily accessible where ever you are where there's Internet access.

Assignment3: video tweaking

We were given the task of shooting something out in the open with the Canon 7D. (the setting of the camera should have been 60 fps, however mine was shot on 30, which might have caused some jittering in the film when it was brought into Nuke for further changes.

Need to add screen grab from NUKE

So in Nuke the mov. clip was color corrected via the color grading tool with the reference of a RAW still image relating to the clip. Then the file was exported/rendered out as sequence pics.

The sequence pics were brought into AE for further tweaking.

the above screen grab shot was an untreated piece.

For a cross processing look, I added an adjustment curve to the clip, and increased the contrast and reduced a little of the lighting. Added a mask and feathered the corners to make them darker to make the center jump out more. Changed the coloration to have a warmer glow as shown in the screen grab below.

Using the same original clip for a Bleach bypass treatment, an adjustment effect was added. This time exposure was lowered , increased contrast and lighting. Added a Hue/saturation curve where the blue/cyan saturation was reduced and increased yellow and red to the piece as shown in the third screen grab shot.

"Untreated version"


Untreated clip from Dave Huang on Vimeo.

"Cross processing version"




"Bleach bypass version"

Assignment 2: Concept art

Honestly speaking, this was my first ever take on creating a concept environment. It was quite tough in the beginning to kind of find a theme for what I wanted to create.

My concept image was formulated by introducing several pictures (Thailand and Taiwan trip:P) in Photoshop, and played around with overlapping some pictures, rotated a couple of pictures and started to stretch the boundaries of these pictures until I kind of saw or feel a type of environment was pieced up.

Once I was happy with the composition or the collage, I sketched a rough outline of the subject I wanted to show.

At this point I was still uncertain on what I wanted to show, Since I kind of developed a mech. like object that essentiates a feeling of the audience looking upwards at it.

It was after a couple of other additions of reference pictures from the web, of skyscrapers and bridge structures that I was able to fill large negative spaces around the subject matter.

A problem that I created for myself during these collage puzzles, was my perspective planning. The picture became chaotic and complicated with the newly drawn skyscrapers. There was no floor at first and later I thought the theme of this concept was moving towards a futuristic look. I added some green neon platforms, kind of cheating the floor.

Before color was added, I used different grey tones to establish shadows and light.

The difficulties again was not knowing where my light source was coming from, instead I made up the direction of the light source and tried to establish something that may fit to this piece. Later in the piece, I imported some textures of scratched metal for the side of the mech. head, and some rust texture applied to the lower part of the background which was set in"multiply" layer mode. And lastly I brought in a layer of stars that looked like shooting stars, to produce a kind of sketchy effect that sort of worked with the  perspective of my skyscrapers.

I was quite surprised to see how grandiose the object sort of looked when I pushed the skyscrapers even further to the top of my frame.

Life changing experience

Life changing experiences could start at any moment of our lives.

you could be sitting on the toilet and an idea may pop out (which often does, no pun intended :P), and it could be a life changing experience.

You could meet a stranger, and through their conversation an idea may pop out at you = could end up as a life changing experience or not.

With the constant technology updates and our usage on it, which leads to constant dependency on them.....we somehow become salves of technology. Well, not everyone on this planet, but almost everyone.

When my professor asked us to complete a simple task of writing down 100 questions of anything you can think of, just under 20min. At first I thought it would be a piece of cake, thinking bluntly of asking dumb ass questions such as: What is your phone number? What color is your car? and my favorite: How is cheese cake made?" and etc.
However after brainstorming things and trying to come up with better questions that may sound a bit more important than what color is your underwear. I concluded the fact that it is tough to come up with 100 questions that all for all are important in my life or anyone else's lives.

As the professor finally spit out his thought on why we had to do this little experiment of coming up with 100 questions. Out of the 100 questions only 20 may be filtered as been somewhat important, out of that 20, five may be filtered as important to your life or about others. He mentioned one thing that was very important to me at the time: 'You can't change everyone, only some or selective ones".

As he went on with his idea of how this class was about, he gave us an example of one of his idea of creating some sort of interactivity with a specific group of audience. His topic was on cancer. I was a little confused yet interested on this idea of his, as he continued with the details, my god I was completely sucked into this idea of creating a different imagery of how cancer can be used as an art form instead of been feared by many. This idea of his had made some kind of emotional impact on my thinking, how things such as rules/laws of nature, society, technology are capable to be bent into different forms, through your creativity and imagination.