Mike King

Mistborn fan art

I just finished reading the last book in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson and got inspired to do a quick painting of Vin, one of the main characters. I can see so many things I’d like to fix with this painting, but I’ve got to get back to writing Lirielle. Still, I guess it’s not too bad for just a few hours of work.

Into the Black update

Click here to read about how Nathan Fillion happened to meet the guys making Into the Black, a Firefly fan-film. Nathan sounds like a very cool guy.

Into the black

Some Canadian fans of Firefly are making their own show. Original characters in the same universe as Serenity. Check out their website and follow their progress here.

Which sci-fi crew do you belong to?

Happily, my top match is with the crew of Serenity.

The Millenium Falcon and Cowboy Bebop aren’t too far behind though. Woo hoo.

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

SW: Revelations update. Cargo ship model.

229kb

Spent my scheduled time yesterday and today working on the fan film shots. I updated animation on the first two shots and am now letting them render over night. I also built a cargo ship to use in the shots because the original cargo ship I found had too much geometry. It barely loaded into my animation program and it still tended to crash a lot.

So I built my own original cargo ship. It turned out a little more detailed than I’d planned, but that’s okay because now I can get close up and the model will still look fine. (I haven’t textured the thing yet, it’s just geometry with a temporary texture map.) I sent this image to the director, hopefully he’ll approve the design. I just kind of slapped it together in 3ds max without doing any preliminary sketches. I looked at some pictures of Star Wars ships like the medical frigate, rebel cargo ship, and star destroyer and tried to keep my ship in that style.

The back end is still a little plain, but for what I need it should be fine.

This is the first spaceship model I’ve built from scratch and I’m pretty happy with it, especially considering how little time (relatively speaking) I’ve spent on it.

I’m also very happy with the lighting rig I came up with for these renders. It looks kind of similar to global illumination, but only required 4 lights (1 key, 2 fill, and 1 bounce). No raytracing, just a couple of shadow maps. It renders at 1k resolution in less than 10 seconds. Global illumination would look better, of course, but I thought I got a neat look with a simple set up.

If you look really closely at the renders, you might spot a little greenish-blue speck. That’s actually a 2 meter tall box I put in there for myself as scale reference — it’s about the height of a really tall person.

screening 2 unaired Wonderfalls episodes in L.A.

From savewonderfalls.com:
We just got word that Todd Holland will be screening two unaired episodes and doing a Q&A at The Knitting Factory in LA on Friday, June 18. It’s part of The Other Network Festival. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and admission is $10. Call 323-993-3305 to reserve tickets, or visit uncabaret.com.

star wars revelations update

Yesterday I finished animating the opening shot. Complete with “A long time ago…,” the opening crawl, and a spaceship flying by. Awaiting director’s comments. Setup a scene file for the next shot, but didn’t get much else done. Tomorrow through the weekend I won’t have time to work on it. So I’ll pick it up again next Monday.

Three more shots to animate, then I’ll have lighting and compositing to do. The next shot is mostly done, actually, since the animation is similar to the first shot before I addressed the director’s comments.

The big shot of the group includes a ton of other ships, which I’m a little worried about rendering, since my machine is already choking on just one ship. That’s what I get for having an ancient PC. I haven’t ever really needed anything bigger. So it’s a little slow and I put up with crashes. But I think I’ll survive until the shots are done. If anything it’ll force me to be efficient in putting these shots together.

Wonderfalls cancelled

Just when I was starting to make viewing Wonderfalls a regular habit, Fox decided to cancel it. Grrr.

Some thoughts on the cancellation from Tim Minear, one of the exec. producers and Buffy alumnus can be found on the buffistas.org boards here and here and here. A sample:

I think it was USA Today that said this may be “the wrong show, in the wrong season, on the wrong night, on the wrong network.” Just so. I do think market forces were at work here, too. Not just incompetence.

Actor William Sadler also had this comment on his message board:

…I guess I agree though, it seems such a foolish and wasteful thing to create such a cool show, shoot 13 episodes (at maybe two million dollars each), air four and throw the rest away. When I heard that there had been a shakeup among the FOX execs just before Christmas, I immediately got a bad feeling about the fate of our show. I have been involved in projects before that were orphaned and left to die by a change in network or studio management. The first time was a film entitled “Project X”, but there have been others. Apparently, it’s never in the new guys ‘best interest’ to have the old guys pet projects succeed.