Ocean Quigley's Projects:

The Shadowed Path

2012-01-29T14:51:00.000-08:00

This is a new painting (still wet on the easel), titled The Shadowed Path. It's pretty big, 60" across by 36" high, and painted with oils on stretched linen.

In the painting -

A path leads from open landscape into darkening woods. A girl is entering them, lighting her way with a glowing lantern.

(click to enlarge)

Here's a detail of the background landscape:

And a detail of the girl with her lantern.

Slopes of Mt. Diablo

2012-01-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

Mt. Diablo isn't a particularly tall mountain. Its main claim to fame is that (more or less out to the horizon) there's nothing taller than it.
So, when you're up on it, you can see for a long, long ways. For a short mountain, its got great views.

Here's a painting of one of those views, looking off into the hazy distance, where ranges of hills fade into the sky.

It's done with oils on linen, and is 36" by 36".

(click for large view)

Life Drawing (of Merav)

2012-01-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a drawing of Merav, an excellent Bay-Area model, holding a particularly painful pose for perhaps 3 hours, (and managing to look elegant while doing it!)
I tell you, I don't envy life-drawing models one little bit.

It's done in conte pencil, and is about 18" by 24".

Fight American Censorship

2012-01-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

Normally, I just use this blog to talk about my various art & design projects.

But the SOPA and PIPA bills passing through the U.S. Congress are such blatant attacks on the web, and on American civil liberties, that they can't be ignored.

If you're an American - cynicism about congressional corruption gets us nowhere. Call your representatives and voice your opposition.

Find your member of congress here:
http://americancensorship.org/

SimCity 4 poster (city at night)

2012-01-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

Here's another SimCity 4 poster, this one rendered by Shannon Galvin, using a bunch of the buildings that we modeled for the game.

We did lots of marketing renders for SimCity 4, and with its dramatic lighting and perspective, I think that this one was the best.

(click to see a full resolution version)

All of the SimCity 4 vehicles

2012-01-13T21:07:00.000-08:00

Kevin Byall modeled most of SimCity 4's vehicles (although I did make a few, myself).
Towards the end of the project, Michael Long gathered them all together here for this group shot.

Man, we made so much stuff for that game!

(Click for high-resolution version)

Model on a box (chalk & charcoal)

2012-01-13T08:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a drawing (in chalk and charcoal on toned paper) of a model posing on a big boxy stand.

She's resting her arm on the donkey that's propped up behind her, and has draped a cloth over the (dirty!) model stand.

I didn't have time to finish it up, so the loose sketchy lines left over from the drawing's initial construction are still visible (which I rather like).

Drawing of the Marin Headlands

2012-01-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

A little field-sketch done up on the Marin coast, on a damp, windy day. That big white patch on the left is the Pacific Ocean, vanishing into the fog.

Fat model (reclining)

2012-01-07T17:11:00.000-08:00

Sure, it's always great to get beautiful young women to pose naked - but sometimes more interesting drawings come from less attractive models.

The drawing of this fat model is an example. She's made up of all of these masses and forms that fold and compress against each other. All of those shapes are really fun to draw.

Lizard and leaves

2012-01-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

A scanner-photograph - A toy lizard, and leaves from a Japanese maple.

Self-Portrait in multiple

2011-12-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a cascade of selfs, all piled up on the floor.

It's 24" by 36", and done with oils on linen. I really wish that I still had it, but I sold it years ago and only this snapshot remains.

Drawing of a model on a couch

2011-12-28T21:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a drawing (done in conte) of a model reclining on a busted, beat-up old couch in the drawing studio (which she's partially covered with a blanket, for obvious reasons).

I'm quite happy with the sketchy fold-up chair in the background.

Snake and Flowers, drawing study

2011-11-18T22:45:00.000-08:00

A pregnant woman lifts a snake-encoiled bouquet of flowers, in this pen-and-inkwash drawing out of my sketchbook.

(click to enlarge)

Charcoal drawing of woman

2011-11-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

This is a drawing (done in charcoal) of a serious, severe looking model. She has that intense, almost monumental quality that I never know quite what to do with.

Self portrait with strapped-on wings

2011-11-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

Here's another little thumbnail-sized self-portrait (with strapped on angel wings?). Inspired, I guess, by George Herbert Draper's painting "Lament for Icarus", minus the god-like physique and adoring nymphs.

Its a pencil drawing from one of my early 90's sketchbooks.

(click to enlarge)

Self portrait drawing, hands & face

2011-11-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

A self-portrait drawing, scanned from one of my sketchbooks.
It's maybe 5" by 4", more or less - tiny! And drawn in pencil.

I'm pretty sure that this dates from my early 20's, when I was studying painting at CCAC in Oakland.

(click to enlarge)

At sea in a tub

2011-11-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a little pen-and-inkwash drawing of a fellow floating away in a tub. I kind of like the hat.

(click to enlarge)

Lighting 3D trees, take 2

2011-11-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

Here's another iteration on my technique for lighting 3D (fairly low-polygon count) trees. You can see the first version here.

Start with the trunk geometry and a spew of quads for the boughs that make up the canopy. The trunk and canopy together are about 2500 triangles.

Put them together, and you get this. Pretty basic.

For now, let’s just concentrate on the canopy.

First, take a look at the normals. Initially, they’re all face normals, and look like a jumble of confetti.
We’re going to update the normals so that they relate to the overall shape of the canopy.

Sculpt out a simple shell for the overall canopy shape. Like this:

Its normals all point outward, as you’d expect. We’re going to transfer the normals from this shape onto the canopy.

First, make a backup copy of your canopy and hide it. We’re going to use it to blend a little bit of those face normals back in later…

Here’s the shell over the canopy.
Make sure that all transforms are frozen, and all history is deleted.

Then transfer attributes to apply the shell normals to the canopy:

Now delete history (which will break the live connection between the shell and the canopy).
Your canopy normals will now look like this. Which is good, but a little too smooth.

So we’ll mix in those previously saved face normals at 25%.
Make a copy of the newly smoothed canopy and hide it.
Then unhide your face normal version of the canopy, overlay it on your smoothed canopy and average normals between them.

Delete your face normal canopy. The canopy will look like this.

This is too faceted (it’s a 50/50 mix of face normals and smooth normals) so we’re going to repeat that process, averaging in the backup copy of the smoothed normals canopy.

Which gives us normals that look like this. A little local variation in the context of an overall smooth shape.
If your tree is made up of several distinct clumps, do this per-clump.

Here's a set of bough textures that we randomly apply to each canopy quad, like this:

So the canopy winds up looking kind of like this (in the Maya viewport – where the lighting is annoyingly clamped to 1)

Each bough also gets a normal map to light it as if it were rounded. I know that the tangents are whacked at this point, but hey, it works.

Here’s what the canopy looks like with normal maps & opacity (but no diffuse). It’s getting there, with an overall lighting shape perturbed by a weak normal map.

The next thing we want to do is to darken the interior of the tree, to make it look volumetric. The outside of the tree is fully lit, as you go deeper into the canopy it gets murkier.
First, assign an additional non-overlapping UV set to the canopy:

Then bake out a volumetric, noisy gradient, centered on the canopy’s origin. This works better than straight up AO, because AO reveals all of the card intersections.
Here’s the material – all three projections are using the same texture, and are all going into a layered texture node with all blend modes set to add.

Here are the projections:

And it when baked out, it looks like this:

Here’s the interior darkening, along with the normals and normal map.

And here’s the diffuse texture multiplied in:

And here it is with the trunk. You should bake the same volumetric gradient into the trunk as well, so that it looks integrated with the canopy.

Make sure that you're backface culling. The lighting on the backfaces will be completely wrong!

Let me know if you come up with any clever variations on the technique!

Last light on the summit of Mt. Diablo

2011-10-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a new landscape painting. It's the view towards Mt. Diablo (seen from Las Trampas) in the last few minutes of the day. A winter storm is clearing, having left patches of snow on the summit.
The hills and valley in the foreground are already in deepening twilight, only the mountain-top and distant ridges are still illuminated.

It's 60" by 36", and done in oils on linen.

(click to enlarge)

Dawn on the Rio Chama

2011-10-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Here's the finished landscape painting, titled "Dawn on the Rio Chama". It's 96" by 60", and painted in oils (on linen).

Its an early-winter dawn, and the light is just breaking through an overcast sky. That distant cliff is beginning to catch the light, but the rest of landscape is still under cloud shadow.

This landscape isn't far from Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O'Keeffe lived for the last part of her life, and there's a monastery (Christ in the Desert) just up the river. You can see why they'd build it there, this place is equal parts solitude and exaltation.

(click to enlarge)

Essay from Walter Menrath

2011-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

The critic and philosopher Walter Menrath (1921-2003) wrote this essay about me back in 2000. It's insightful, so I thought it proper to post it here (partially so that I know where to find it!)

Ocean Quigley paints every day. Every day, much as a painter a century before him – Paul Cezanne, for example –– would go out to confront the solid and permanent, yet surprising aspects of nature. One could almost call it a classical revival “en miniature”, after a still ongoing crisis of late modernism and its consequences. The comparison with Cezanne is admittedly a stretch, but fits if we limit it to a rare singlemindedness of bringing us the traces of a steady imaginative experience. There is, however, one aspect of Ocean’s way of art that invites some reflection: one could call it the return to honest content and the absence of calculation.

After centuries of depending on patronage and publicly established standards, artists in modern times have been placed in the position of obligatory innovators. Moreover, avant garde art, although less accessible and more in need of critical explanation, has become a necessary partner in the bourgeois culture of conspicuous consumption.

Midway through this century, and as a consequence of European immigration, economic boom and the GI bill, something had happened to the American art scene. New York had become the new world center of Western high art, as Paris had been before. Fired by inspiration and economic incentive, new collectors, new galleries, and Greenwich Village as the new Montparnasse, had made the scene complete. Art and artistic experimentation had become a growing American activity. The new American art was ready for the critical theory it deserved.

By 1950 a group of painters, sometimes called the New York School, had developed a style of painting stressing the sensuous, thick, “gestural” application of paint with no particular content in evidence – soon to be named Abstract Expressionism. Without a coherent critical defense, however, this new style seemed to slip into decorative boredom.
The rescue arrived in 1955 in the person of Clement Greenberg. Armed with a set of hard and simple rules, this new critic provided a theoretic code for the art of the decades to come. The new Formalism, Greenberg explained, represented a process of self-purification or self-criticism of art itself –– much resembling a definition of philosophy –– leading to absolute and exclusive self-reference. All content, narrative, and figuration were strictly proscribed. Prescribed, on the other hand, was an identification of color with surface and picture plane (in the case of painting) in order to render the work pure and independent. Moreover, this view was presented by Greenberg and his following of young critics as the essence of Modernism.

Some painters followed the rules, some did not. Masterpieces of this period are well known. Soon, however, one difficulty arose from the necessary dissolution of content into form. Art may be about thoughts and feelings, but thoughts and feelings had to be about something –– a reference to the world outside. Consequently, as some painters painted thoughts and feelings, the critical discourse turned to spiritual content and the perception of art with one’s inner eye or soul. At this point, the idea of art as spiritual search easily connected with the New Age’s psycho-religious fashions and runaway abstract kitsch was born.

By the late Sixties formalist theology had lost most of its conviction, as Pop Art and Minimalism became the new flavors, with new movements following regularly. At the same time the commodification of art appeared complete, the demand had to be satisfied and the art world returned to the material concerns of consumerism to soon face the economic miracles of the Eighties art market.

To be an artist in America was now a matter of choice, less so of vision and skill. Formalist art and its successive movements had produced a number of serious masters, and had made some of them very rich. Much of it, however, needed explanations and promotion lest the public would not understand and become annoyed or indifferent. Works of art had to be joined by verbal supplements, artists’ statements and intensive marketing. By now the open secret was that abstract art and most art that followed was easily imitated, and the explanatory language was now as free form as the art itself. Feelings may be facts, but they could also be faked. The connection between content and form became the connection between intent and form. Artmaking became calculated construction; it became DESIGN, its function, entertainment and decoration. The art market now processed almost anything if presented in an art context. Art schools taught almost anything in the name of creative freedom and political correctness. Everyone was an artist.

Meanwhile, Ocean Quigley paints every day, unburdened by the need for calculation and supplementary explanations. I paint, he says, and here are my recent paintings. He paints people and things, but it is the magic of landscape that attracts him over and over. Driven by an unblurred vision and the sheer joy of skilled craftsmanship, Ocean keeps giving us straightforward evidence of his encounter with the world around him. His work sends out immensely satisfying impulses.

Post-modern in its disregard of chronological ancestry, this painting recalls but does not quote, past centuries and past masters. Knowing them, however, is not necessary for a sweet encounter. There is no extreme technique, no photo-realistic precision, and no heavy impasto. In a time of decorative overkill such as ours, this pure brush-to-the-canvas painting is a welcome alternative, indeed an antidote. We feel good facing it, we want to get closer, look longer.

That the vocabulary of contemporary criticism seems to be wrong for it, may be the best that can be said about this unselfconscious art. If one of the difficulties in responding to art today is to avoid the modernist habit of intellectual experiencing, Quigley’s work makes this freedom easy. His paintings present something so basic, so old fashioned and so radical; an invitation to look for a moment at our visible world in an entirely unthinking way. No painting can aspire to more.

But then the thinking begins. Feeling good is not enough. We must be critical in the original sense of the world. Only the full participation of the other, the recipient, makes a work of art complete. Post-modern pluralism, with its lack of critical consensus, considers appreciation and enjoyment sufficient. If, however, we refuse this absolution, one new and very old function of art becomes again available to us; one way of knowing about our life-world, our relationships, and our limits that only art can make possible, as reward for the aesthetic effort. One could begin by looking at Ocean Quigley’s paintings.

Walter Menrath
September 1, 2000.

More work on the Rio Chama landscape

2011-09-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here's another week's worth of progress (more or less) on this great big painting of the Rio Chama in New Mexico. Still a long ways to go!

Here it is in an earlier state, with more of the underpainting visible...

Work-in-progress, Rio Chama landscape painting

2011-09-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a work-in-progress snapshot of my current painting - it's a big landscape! 8 feet by 5, and still has weeks to go.

It's a lot of ground to cover, and at the moment I'm preoccupied with just getting things roughly into place and fixing problems with lighting and composition.

It's a painting of the dawn light on the Rio Chama, an hour or two to the west of Santa Fe in New Mexico. It's just a few miles (down a rough, bouncy, dirt road) from Ghost Ranch where Georgia O'Keeffe lived for the last part of her life. I can see why she settled there, the landscape is profound.

(click to enlarge)

Landscape painting: Oak Trees and Afternoon Light

2011-09-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Just finished up this landscape painting - titled Oak Trees and Afternoon Light.
It took longer than I thought! Lots of reworking to get everything balanced and in its proper depth.

In the painting, it's a bright California day. The afternoon light streams through the oaks and reflects off of the yellow and golden grass. Distant hills recede into the blue atmosphere behind the water of the lake. It's a good place.

It's big! 5 feet across and is done in oils on linen.

(click to enlarge)

Here's a version cropped to just the painting...

(click to enlarge)

Update on landscape - Oak trees & afternoon light

2011-08-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

Almost done with this landscape painting -just coming into the final day or so. It's a view through oak trees to the water, in the wash of warm afternoon light.

The basic bones of it are in place, and now its a matter of simplifying areas, deepening the space and adding the last bits of detail.

(click to enlarge)

Finishing up Pt. Bonita landscape painting

2011-08-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

Here's another landscape painting (of the California coastline, looking north from Pt. Bonita) that I recently finished.

Now I thought I was done with it about a year ago, but brought it back into the studio for some major work over the weekend. Sometimes it takes a year or so of looking at a painting to see where it needs to go.

(click to enlarge)

Finished landscape painting

2011-08-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Here's the finished version of a landscape painting that I started a year or two ago, thought I'd completed, then completely reworked! I'm pretty sure that it's done now.

In this painting the light is breaking through the clouds after a spring storm clears. The world is kind of a silvery green except where the vivid sunlight cuts across, making a splash of warmth and light.

I usually paint these California hills in the warm tones of summer and autumn, but the dramatic skies and lighting of spring and late winter make for some very satisfying vistas, that I feel compelled to describe in painting.

It's a big painting! 5 feet across, and done in oils on linen.

(click to enlarge)

New landscape painting (Oak trees in afternoon light)

2011-08-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a snapshot of a current landscape painting. It's still pretty rough! A work-in-progress that probably needs another week or two's worth of work to really come together.

It's a classic California landscape - water, framed by oak trees and golden grass, with more distant hills receding into the deeper space.

This is one of my favorite places and moods, and the painting is big enough (at 5 feet across) to evoke the sense of actually standing there.

I'll post an update in a week or two, so you can see its progress.

Road drawing in SimCity 4

2011-08-04T23:44:00.000-07:00

Here's another artifact from SimCity 4's development.
These are a batch of animated GIF's I made to describe how the player would draw roads, have them automatically smooth and level terrain, and where necessary put in bridges, tunnels and retaining walls.

When I started working on SimCity, Will told me "Roads are hard!" It was droll understatement. These little mockups, with all of their hidden complications turned into a year or so's worth of work for the brilliant and long suffering Venkat Ajjanagadde.

This first one shows a road-draw that has to be done in parts, to switchback up a steep hill.

This one shows automatic bridge and tunnel placement.

This one added cost feedback and bridge construction over time (something that we didn't actually get around to, as I recall)

This one showed which buildings would demolish, and how a road draw could fail initially (because the grade was too steep), then succeed when the grade constraint was satisfied (by a tunnel).

And this one simply showed how the player could upgrade bridges.

For systems-based games like SimCity 4, simple little mockups like these really are the design.

Big Sur landscape painting (oil on paper)

2011-05-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a little oil-sketch of the Big Sur coastline, done on sized paper.

Big Sur is so dramatic, but I find it really hard to paint. Part of what makes it awesome is its scale, which just doesn't come across in little oil sketches.

Fun to try, though!

Ink landscape drawings

2011-03-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

Here are some landscape drawing thumbnails out of my sketchbook - they're done in ink, and are mostly from around here (in the hills above Berkeley and out towards Mt. Diablo).

They're shown about actual size (maybe even a little bit bigger than that, depending on your monitor)

Portrait of Alexandria in red coat

2011-03-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

So here's a portrait of Alexandria that I painted a year or so ago as a style experiment. It's done in oils on paper, with a somewhat minimalist palette that's then deepened with glazes.

It's pretty small, maybe 10" by 14" or so.

I'm not entirely sure what's up with her gesture, but I liked it.

Tiny little self portrait in oils

2011-03-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a little (8" by 10") self portrait - done over the course of an hour or so with a limited palette (black, white and burnt umber). It's in oils, on a linen covered panel.

In fact, you can see the back side of this painting on the easel in front of me!

These are wonderful exercises - I should do them more often.

River through an empty landscape

2011-02-26T17:06:00.000-08:00

In this painting (done in oils on paper), a boat carrying a standing woman floats down a river in a barren rocky landscape.

The best paintings embed meaning. They are about something - they evoke something beyond themselves. Failing that, paintings can at least be sensual. But absent meaning or sensuality, there's not much point to painting.

Meaning is tricky - it can't be imposed on a painting from the onset. If it is, the painting is reduced to concept illustration.

Meaning has to be discovered in the process of working. It has to organically emerge from the relationship between the painter and the painting (and later, if the work is any good, between the painting and the viewer).

To have any depth, it has to bubble up from below - a mingled process of discovery and creation.

Orchid still life 2

2011-02-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

And here's the other Orchid painting - the companion to this one:
It's 24" by 30", and is painted with oils on linen.

It's a sort of a still life, framed by the larger jungle environment.

Orchid still life

2011-02-07T19:48:00.000-08:00

When I was about 5, my parents decided to move my sister and I down to South America.

We lived in the jungle (in Costa Rica, I think) for about a year. Dad built an A-frame house, and while we were waiting for materials, he sided it with big leaves which our horse ate one morning.

That 1970's childhood in South America (monkeys, big snakes, guava trees, bathing in waterfalls) is still pretty vivid to me - I remember flying in old WW2 era DC-3's packed with locals and their animals on trips through the Andes, clouds overhead and mountains on either side.

So here's one of two oil paintings that's inspired by that time and place (and by Martin Johnson Heade) - it's painted on linen and is 24" by 30".

On the sensuality of oil paint

2011-02-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

I love the physical sensuality of oil paint -

It's what's wonderful about the art; that at bottom, you can create beauty with nothing more than brush-marks, pigments and oil. The sheer physicality of the paint gives it a richness that's very hard to replicate in computer graphics.

Depth, illusion and meaning all come after the play of paint on a surface, like the words that describe an emotion.

Twilight in Las Trampas

2011-02-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

For years I've been curious about this dramatic ridge-line that you can see from the hills above my house. It's off in the hazy distance towards Mt. Diablo, and I've always wanted to go there and paint.

So I poked around in Google Earth, and figured out that the ridges are the western edge of Las Trampas regional park. Even though it's a bit of a pain to get there (all the routes are circuitous) I finally went this winter and did this little twilight oil painting (on a linen panel).

It's a great spot - very much the romantic California landscape, and I'm sure that more paintings will come out of it.

Drawing of a reclining woman

2011-01-23T12:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a life drawing of a reclining model, done in sanguine and burnt umber.

Sanguine and burnt umber - what evocative names! There's a poetry in color names, I think.
Take sanguine, with it's double meanings of blood and good cheer. I'm guessing the origins of the word go back to the medieval humors. Or burnt umber with it's evocations of shadow and Umbria and fire.

I like to think that the model expresses some of the qualities of the pigments that went into rendering her...

(click to enlarge)

Portrait study, Nicole

2011-01-20T22:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a little portrait study (done with oils on canvas) of Nicole wrapped in a blanket with a blue T-shirt. The cool colors of the fabric balance the ochres of the rest of the painting in a way I find quite satisfying.

Still life in graphite - jars and fruit and canisters

2011-01-17T22:45:00.000-08:00

Here's one of the many, many still life studies I did back in the early '90s.
I was in love with textures and surfaces in those years, and this is, I guess, a love-letter to the way that a metal canister reflects it's environment.

Unrolling - Spectators

2010-12-02T16:01:00.000-08:00

Another pen and ink-wash drawing - the companion to this one:

Maybe they're having some sort of picnic?

A detail of the fellow with the horns and the fellow with the bouffant.

Quail Man

2010-11-29T10:21:00.000-08:00

Here's another character from my sketchbook - Quail man. Possessed (of some sort of) amazing powers .

Unrolling

2010-11-27T16:01:00.000-08:00

A pen and ink-wash drawing from my sketchbook. It's one of those free-associative drawings that sort of burbles up from the subconscious, and I'm sure would be very interesting to my therapist (should I ever get a therapist).

And a detail...

It's part of a ongoing series, which includes this one and that one.

Lighting 3D trees

2010-11-09T23:24:00.000-08:00

So here's a handy technique for improving the lighting of your 3D trees. It's particularly useful for lighting realtime trees, but can improve the lighting of trees rendered offline too.

If you look at a real tree, you'll notice that it has an overall lighting shape. This is particularly apparent with broadleaved trees, like oaks and maples.

Take a look at this photo:

The tree has a clear lit side, and a clear dark side, with a core shadow and some reflected fill light. The lighting strongly contributes to it's perceived volume.

Here by contrast is a simple, relatively low polygon 3D tree. It's a barely tweaked variation on a generic Maya paint-effects tree, converted into polygons.

It's probably too heavy for a realtime renderer, but is still fairly lightweight.

Compare the lighting structure of this 3D tree to the real tree in the photo. The 3d tree looks noisy and unstructured, more like a jumble of cards than a real canopy of leaves.

And if you look at the normals, you'll see that they're pointing every which way:

What we want is a more structured orientation to the normals, so that they're making an overall shape rather than being all mixed up.

So what you do is make a "lumpy bowl" that has the overall lighting shape that you want for your tree:

And transfer the normals from that bowl to your leaves:

So that all of your leaf normals point outwards:

And the tree has an overall lighting shape:

Here's a video showing what it looks like:

You can see that it has an overall form now, but is a little bit flat. Real trees are more varied.

That can be fixed by blending back in the original face normals (in Maya, use Normals/Average Normals).
Here's a video showing a 50 percent mix of the face normals and the "overall" normals:

So there you go. Hope it comes in handy for you!
And thanks to Matt Small who first showed me this technique.

(note)

You can find an updated version here, with some additional techniques.

Model, seated with drapery

2010-09-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

This woman had the longest, most amazing hair. A waterfall of glossy black running all of the way down her back.
Her profile was striking, with an almost Pre-Raphaelite quality. She looked as if she really belonged in a Waterhouse painting, or floating in a stream as Ophelia.

(click to enlarge)

Stern model with a scarf on her head

2010-09-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

This model gave us a contemptuous look and settled down into a three hour pose.

It is, admittedly, hard to look stern when you're naked and have an orange scarf wrapped around your head, but she managed it.

Foreshortened figure study, reclining nude

2010-09-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

When I was Tyler School of Art, a teacher of mine insisted that I paint a life sized figure (now what was his name? - Early '90's, painting department, John something? )

For some reason I was only interested in making small scale paintings- miniatures practically.

My obnoxious solution was to choose a dramatically foreshortened pose like this one, so that the entire life sized figure fit on an 18"x24" panel. Hah! That showed him.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
This study was done long after, and the pose stems from being late to a figure drawing session rather than an ideology.

Hunting tadpoles at Dennis's pond

2010-09-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Dennis has a place up in Mendocino with a pond, and on the pond is a floating platform and in the pond are innumerable tadpoles.

Over Labor Day he had a bunch of us over. While the grown-ups lounged about, the kids were in and on the water pursuing frogs and catching tadpoles.
(don't worry, it was strictly catch-and-release)

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Andrea in the woods

2010-09-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

Here's another little ink-wash painting, from the same sketchbook as this one and this one.

Don't you think that this would be a nice style for children's book illustration?
It would be interesting to cut out the elements and put them on 3d cards in Maya; you could make a shadowbox with them, and play with illusionistic depth and lighting, maybe even animation...

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Claiming the high ground

2010-09-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Another ink-wash painting from my sketchbook, this one of Giacomo claiming the local high ground (such as it is) and the view to the horizon.

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Kids in a tree

2010-09-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

This is a little painting of my sister's boys (and their friend, who's name escapes me at the moment) sitting on the limbs of a great spreading tree.

It's painted in walnut ink, and scanned from one of the sketchbooks that are piled in stacks on my drawing table.

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Winter storm on the California coast

2010-09-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here's another in my series of big California landscapes paintings. Like the others, it's 4 feet by 5, and painted in oils on linen.

I started it last winter, when we had an intense series of winter storms blow through.

I'd keep an eye on the weather, and when it looked like there would be dramatic light and clouds, I'd head up to Mt. Tamalpais, or in this case, to the Marin headlands (just up the coast from San Francisco) to draw and take notes.

It's hard to paint at this scale on location (the painting acts like a giant sail! You have to tie it down with ropes and tent pegs, and even then it tries to fly away!) so it was completed in the relative calm of the studio.

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Here's a version on the easel, so you can see its scale:

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And a detail:

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Foreshortened model in red

2010-09-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

This model was in a lovely reclining pose, but I got to the drawing session late. All that was left was this annoyingly foreshortened view.

It makes her look all knotted up, when in fact she was long and graceful.

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Long legged lady

2010-09-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

I didn't quite finish this drawing, you can see where the leg and foot are just sketched in.

There's a fashion in academic figure drawing for not fully rendering the legs (maybe to emphasize the process? Or to differentiate the drawing from a photograph? I don't really approve, as it seems like a mannerism.)

But in my case here, I honestly just ran out of time!

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Exiting Eden

2010-09-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a painting titled "Exiting Eden". It's part this series; They're psychological narrative paintings, pulled from somewhere in my subconscious. As such, I'm not entirely sure what's going on in them - the characters and scenes arise as if out of a dream.

There's an edge to this one; echos of original sin? The woman standing while the unsmiling man pulls her along (walking on water? At least partially). Empty seats for spectators? It's a metaphor all right.

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Here's a detail of the man. You can click to see it more or less the size of the painting (which is 24" by 36", and done in oils on panel)

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Orange Lilies

2010-09-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

I know contemporary criticism doesn't take floral painting seriously, but doing them with integrity is a test of any painter. It's easy to slip into sentimental cliche, but by keeping your eyes open and painting them honestly, you can still make a good painting.

This study's fairly small (12" by 14") but it's accurate. It's painted with oils on canvas.

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New series of California Landscape paintings

2010-09-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

For the last year or so I've been working on a series of ambitious, sweeping California landscape paintings. They're all large (5 feet wide), and painted with oils on linen.

With all of them, my goal has been to capture that feeling of exaltation that this landscape evokes, while remaining true to it's particulars. And to do so at a scale that does the landscape justice; that's large enough to recreate some of the transcendent sense of actually being there.

I hope you like them!

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Briones oak

2010-09-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another small, loose painting on paper. It's a study of a handsome oak tree in Briones, one of my regular painting spots.

By August up here in Northern California, the grass has gotten all yellow and dried, and looks practically golden in the right light.

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Hana waterfall painting

2010-09-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

On the road to Hana from Paia, there's an unmarked turnoff.
If you take it, and bounce up and down over the potholed road for a bit, you come to a bridge. Park the car, because the bridge has been condemned and there's a chain across it anyway.

Cross the bridge on foot and eventually you'll come to the Queens' pools. A lovely series of pools and waterfalls working their way down to the lava-rocky coast.

This was a little painting of one of them, done with oils on paper.

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The overhanging trees make the whole place feel deep and green and sleepy, like something from a children's book. And there are some awesome Banyan's around there too, but that's a different painting.

Alden in Orange (oil on paper)

2010-09-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a small painting of Alden, done in oils on paper.

I really love the loose translucency that oil on paper allows, and the way that the marks of the brush-strokes come through.

Standing model

2010-09-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing of a lovely nude model, done in conte. It's a few years old; I found it in a pile of my old drawings.

She's standing, which is always a hard pose to hold! Especially for the 2 or 3 hours that a drawing like this requires (although leaning against the wall helps a bit).

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Painting from Mt. Diablo, late afternoon light

2010-06-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

Here's another oil painting on paper. This one's a landscape; with a view looking down from Mt. Diablo in the warm, late afternoon light. It's 14" by 20", more or less.

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Portrait of Alden on green

2010-06-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Here's another little (10" by 14") oil painting on paper; this one is of my 7 year old son standing in a field of green.

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Here's a detail, showing the brush-strokes that make up the face (which is only about the size of a quarter)

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Drawing Bongos at California Academy of Sciences

2010-06-12T21:57:00.000-07:00

My 8 year old and I spent the afternoon drawing at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. I drew the Bongo diorama, but she only had eyes for the (admittedly very charismatic) Waxy Monkey Frogs.

They have a "Hall of African Mammals" that's pretty good, although the painted backgrounds are just awful compared to the ones in the American Museum of Natural History (James Perry Wilson's in particular, are some of the best landscape paintings in New York)

But one thing you can say for the dioramas is that the animals hold still! Here are few drawings scanned from my sketchbook.

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p.s. Isn't Bongo a great name for an animal?

Study of Giacomo

2010-06-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a small painting, done in oil on paper (which works just fine so long as you size the paper first; I like to use rabbit skin glue).

It's a little bit looser and more open than some of my previous paintings, and I'm enjoying that.

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Here's a detail, you can see more of the brushwork at this scale

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Portrait of Alexandria in a blue sweater

2010-04-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

A portrait (in oils on panel) of my daughter when she was six. Done from a photo, as trying to get a six year old to pose for a painting is essentially impossible

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Intestisaur

2010-04-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

The most charismatic creature that came out of Spore's development was undoubtedly the Intestisaur. It was created by Flux, who interned with us one summer.

The thing was fascinating to watch, but disturbing and creepy. It became our unofficial mascot. Here's a Maya render of it, after exporting it out of Spore.

And a little animation of it (him? I was never sure about Intestisaur's gender, but I'll settle on "him") walking. The animation system handled him just fine and it was fun to watch him saunter around.

Still life with olive oil, squash and coffee cup

2010-04-19T00:03:00.000-07:00

This is basically a kitchen still life, from period (almost 15 years ago!) when cups and cans and bottles and squash and the like were my favorite subjects.

At the time, I was interested in them for the challenge of rendering all sorts of tricky surfaces; creating the illusion of oil in a bottle or a metallic can, or translucent tape. Just getting them to evoke the quality of the real object was a thrill.

Now, looking back at them, the technical challenges are long gone, and what remains are the particular qualities of a given object, and the associations it carries. They didn't start out to be kitchen still lifes, but that's what they've become.

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SimCity 4 mockups of change

2010-04-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of design mockups I did while art-directing SimCity 4, both showing how buildings change over time.

This one shows the arc of a building's construction, development and ultimately decay and abandonment. In SimCity, the buildings are your window onto the state of the simulation, so they needed to represent all of these states, which cumulatively tell you how well your city is doing.

And this one simply shows how buildings change over the course of a day, as their lights go off and on and the sun goes up and down. It's the animation-test version of this design.

Standing model chiaroscuro

2010-04-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing of a standing nude, done in charcoal and white chalk on toned paper. It's a chiaroscuro in the original sense; a drawing on toned paper, heightened with white.

I was pleased with the atmospherics of this drawing, how the other artists in the murky background make a space for the model to emerge out of.

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Black Holes, Protoplanetary Discs and the Galactic Core

2010-04-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Here are some animations of astronomical features I built in Spore, using Andrew Willmott's effect system.

I was going for an aesthetic of caricatured reality. These things had to look more like people expected them to than like they (probably) really do.

Here's a black hole:

And the galactic core (with huge jets shooting out from the poles)

And a protoplanetary disc, where a cloud of dust and gas is collapsing to form an infant star and solar system:

Creating animated, interactive versions of the things that I read about in Our Universe in fourth grade was a total blast. It's pretty much the best job I could have imagined having as a 10 year old.

(I loved that book when I was a kid! Especially with those amazing Michael Whelan paintings of aliens floating in a Jovian atmosphere)

SimCity 3000 Box

2010-04-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

This was the interior box-art for SimCity 3000. We way overbuilt that geometry for how large it would ever appear in game, so it held up to print resolution just fine.

I'm particularly proud of the launch arco on the left; it's a little white suburban house complete with a picket fence and a tricycle in the yard, all enclosed in Buck Rogers style rocket ship.

Oh, and the Battersea power plant from Animals came out nicely too.

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Toy Sailboat still life

2010-04-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

I think I must have been about 7 when an old family friend gave me this toy sailboat, and I've held onto it ever since. It makes a lovely subject for a still life.

This painting was done back in the Clinton presidency, when I lived in a big brown shingled house in Berkeley with a bunch of other housemates.

It's painted in oils on linen, and is 24" by 36".

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Lighting buildings in SimCity4

2010-04-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

SimCity 4 was really a giant compositing engine.
Visually, the city was a collection of sprites all layered and blended on top of each other. As the view panned around, a strip of new stuff was exposed and added to the existing image.

It was kind of like an elaborate, automatic matte painting. Like a matte painting, we used 3D geometry to help with sorting and overlaps, so that realtime elements (like cars and people) could be composited in.
So the natural way to represent night was by layering additional sprites on top of the existing scene. Here was my design proposal for night lighting, one that we wound up more-or-less implementing.

Let's say that we start out with a building like this, and want to make a nighttime version of it

First, we automatically make a mask for the the windows by assigning them all a particular material so that they'll render into a separate buffer. We did that in our pipeline, using 3DStudio Max.

Then we get an artist to light the building, by placing point and spot-lights in the appropriate places. Charlie Aquilina lit most of the buildings we shipped with.
Now our pipeline had to render the building twice, once with normal daylight lighting, and once to capture the artist-placed lighting.

Then when night comes in the game view, we tint the whole scene blue. We could even animate transitions, if performance allows.

And to show that the building is inhabited (and that the power is turned on) we just add the window lights and the hand placed lighting over the building sprite.

I tried to break the windows into sections, so that they could be turned off and on in groups (showing how full a building was), but we didn't have enough memory (or disk space!) for the additional window masks. Those big sprites wound up taking a lot of disk space.

Other elements, like streetlights and headlights were nothing but additive textures on quads, placed appropriately. Give how simple the system was, night came out quite nicely.

Alexis America's water paintings

2010-04-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

My Mom, who's primarily a watercolorist has been doing these really beautiful aqueous monoprints recently.

Although the process tends towards abstract, swirling designs, she's been able to evoke the feel of flowing water with them.

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Model Boat

2010-04-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

Just a simple 3D model of a rowboat, built in Maya and rendered in Mental Ray. I made it as reference material for this painting:

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Museum show

2010-03-31T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty thrilled!
The Barbican in London is going to be showing some of my paintings in a new exhibition that they're organizing.

It's called Game On MkII, and it's opening in Australia at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, before going on to Athens (if all goes according to plan.)

They're showing these pieces (which I've posted about earlier):

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And I was hoping that they'd take this one (it's part of the same series) but at 8 feet across, it's just too unwieldy.

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One thing that's kind of interesting about these big oil paintings is that I designed them in 3D, using Maya.
It's blending fine art with the techniques that I use as a game designer at Maxis. And I love it when those worlds come together.

Sleepy model

2010-03-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing of a sleepy model, waiting for the drawing session to finish up.

Over the course of a two or three hour pose, the model goes from being peppy to being half-asleep.
Since the details (like facial expressions, for example) go in towards the end of the session, most of these drawings are of models who look like they're pretty much ready to go home.

It's done in conte and heightened with white chalk.

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Paia sugarcane landscape painting

2010-03-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a little oil sketch of some sugarcane fields on Maui.

The view is from the Hana highway, between Baldwin beach and Paia, looking up towards Makawao & Haiku, with the old sugarcane refinery in the midground. Later, that sugarcane will get really tall, and they'll burn it during harvesting. The clouds of smoke rising off of the burned fields were a really dramatic sight when seen from upcountry. Less attractive when you were downwind of them.

I partially grew up in there in Paia, in the shadow of that refinery (it's shut down and dilapidated now, but was working when I was a kid). When the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, man did it stink. But it makes for a romantic landscape now....

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Greyscale painting of a nude model

2010-03-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Here is a 12" by 18" grisaille study from the model, done in oils on panel.
It was painted alla prima, in a single session, and has a brisk quality that I find satisfying.

Mt. Diablo landscape, evening

2010-03-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a 12" by 16" landscape painting from few years back. It's of the Mt. Diablo foothills, by Shell Ridge in Walnut Creek.

I love this time of day, when low, warm sunset light contrasts with the blue, reflected light of the sky.

It's painted in oils on a linen-covered panel, and is 16" by 20", more or less

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Floral scanner art

2010-03-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

Mom's an artist, who mostly paints florals in watercolors.

She was visiting a while back, and I showed her some scanner photography that I'd been playing around with, and she was inspired to do some similar art.

This was on of her experiments, and it came out pretty beautifully. The diffuse background wash of light gives the flowers an ethereal, otherworldly quality.

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Drawing of a standing man

2010-03-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing of a naked guy with a rocking '70's hairdo. His look reminds me of Neil Young circa 1975, but without any clothes on, which being the 70's probably wasn't that uncommon an occurrence.

It's done in conte and sanguine, and is around 18" by 24".

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SimCity 4 style previsualization

2010-03-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a visualization from back in SimCity 4's preproduction.

We were trying to figure out what the game should look like, and while we didn't hit this look precisely (we punted on the cliffs, for example), it's still pretty close.

It was mostly done by David Patch and Shannon Galvin, in 3DStudio Max R4 (a great program for it's day!) And used assets that were sitting around from SimCity 3000 which we'd finished a year or two before.

I didn't work on this mockup, because I was off designing the asset pipeline (how buildings would get from 3DStudio Max into the game), and thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to look like anyway. I didn't think that it would be that valuable.

Boy was I wrong! It turned out to be crucial, once it was done the project really picked up speed.

It made the project seem much more real at that early stage of production. Everybody on the team looked at it and said "Oh, so that's what we're making" or "So that's what it's going to look like".

And not least, it was useful for demonstrating to the various executives who had an interest in the project that we knew what we were doing!

Spore's creature editor, Version .1

2010-03-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a screencapture from the first iteration of Spore's creature editor, from back in 2004 or so.

We had originally experimented with a much more free-form approach to the creature editor. The player could assemble an arbitrary creation out of bones and nodes, and it would hop around using physics and a pre-Chris Hecker animation system. And this was before we started skinning it with a metaball mesh, so it's just the naked skeleton.

As you can see, we were playing around with a cel-shaded look that ultimately fell by the wayside.

Drawing of a standing woman

2010-03-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing of a (sturdy) nude model, done in conte. I was taken by her architectural solidity, the way that her limbs brace her.

Check out that contrapposto!

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Prototyping planetary atmospheres for Spore

2010-03-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a prototyping video I did while designing Spore's planetary atmospherics.

I've written about them before, but in a nutshell, the atmosphere needed to be soft and diffuse when seen from above, but make for pretty skies when seen from below.

And the system had to be continuous, so that a zoom would seamlessly take you from the surface looking up at the sky, to orbit looking down at a thin layer of air.

This was a pretty successful mockup.

It only addresses atmospherics and the interaction of atmosphere with the sun, background and camera. Everything else is abstracted away (and kind of ugly). It's only trying to address a narrow set of problems, and as a result, represents a pretty clear design.

I had talked to the engineers to get a sense of what the capabilities of our engine were. So in creating this animation (within those constraints!) I'd represented an approach that we could use for the game.

And here are a few screenshots from the Spore itself, showing how it looked once we had the whole system working.

Digital Elevation Map of San Francisco

2010-03-19T22:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a 1024 square heightmap of the San Francisco Bay, constructed years ago from DEM data.
Sorry, I don't have the 16 bit one sitting around, but I figure an 8 bit version might still be useful for somebody.

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Eve in Clay

2010-03-18T22:55:00.000-07:00

This was kind of an accident.

I'd been working on a batch of figurative sculptures (in Maya and zBrush) and experimenting with surface materials.

Thanks to Master Zap, rendering skin in Maya is fairly straightforward, but I'd been inspired by this amazing Japanese sculptor Katsura Funakoshi, and wanted to make a surface that was more, well, poetic.

Needless to say, I didn't succeed with this one. She just looks startled to be splattered with mud. But this was an early attempt, and I got there eventually.

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Portrait of Bridget

2010-03-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

Here's an alla-prima, single session portrait painting. It's more of a study than a finished piece, but it came out well enough.

For years I had a really funky studio, just an old, cold, damp, dark garage, and I couldn't very well ask models to come by and take off all of their clothes, because they'd die of pneumonia.
Cold models! It's becoming a theme.

So a few years back, I bit the bullet and remodeled it, and now it's a proper studio, with north light and french doors and hardwood floors. Now I can have models over, and do proper figure painting.

This little portrait study was one of the first pieces I did once it was all done.
It's painted in oils on a linen-covered panel, and is 12" by 18"

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Portrait of Michelle Kern

2010-03-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

A portrait drawing of Michelle Kern, done in pencil on bristol, back in 1994 when we were both in art school (or maybe I'd dropped out by that point. She was in art school, in any case).

She's wrapped in a blanket because I was living in an (essentially) unheated warehouse in San Francisco with a motley bunch of other artists and staying still while posing for a drawing would put you at risk of hypothermia.

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Decorating buildings in SimCity4

2010-03-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

SimCity4 was a proper 3D engine, with the view constrained to an orthographic perspective.

Buildings were rendered by projecting textures onto very simple 3D geometry. This allowed for sorting and interaction with terrain, that wouldn't have been possible with simple sprites.

The buildings were basically imposters, a graphics technique that I'd seen at Siggraph back in 2000.

They looked pretty much normal if you saw them from this angle:

But if you rotated the view, the illusion was blown and everything looks weird.

I was hoping to use the underlying geometry to attach details like signs and water towers, but we ran out of time (and in any case, we didn't want to create an authoring pipeline for sticking them on)

You can see what's really going on with this view from below

My first experiments with imposters were for Simsville. In that game, we had a perspective camera, so they had to hold up to a little bit more camera motion. You can see some artifacts where the texture is projected through the roof, but all in all, it holds up pretty well.

Simsville didn't come to fruition, but the stuff I learned while prototyping it fed into SimCity, so it wasn't a total loss.

Seated model (with shrunken head)

2010-03-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

A study of a big-hipped, small-headed model with a scarf wrapped around her hair.

I'm pretty sure that I shrunk her head, and that her proportions weren't quite that odd, but it makes for a more interesting drawing.

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Model with red head scarf

2010-03-14T22:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a painting of a model with a satisfyingly folded red head scarf and a serious attitude.
I like her sneer and her purple lips.

It's done in oils on panel, and is 12" by 18".

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Sims2 Roof Texture design

2010-03-12T22:58:00.000-08:00

Once we figured out how to create the geometry for the roofs in Sims2, I needed to come up with some way of automatically texturing them, so that they would look more or less correct as they got created, combined and demolished.
Here was one of my early mockups showing the major components: all of the peaks and valleys and borders, and how they'd be placed on the dynamically created geometry.

And this was the debug texture constructed while trying to figure it out. This is an early iteration,the layout got worked and reworked as we resolved the design.

It was a problem somewhat reminiscent of the road design in SimCity 4, in that we had a library of tiles and needed to figure out which tile needed to be put where based on it's neighbors and the underlying geometry, and how it would be flipped or rotated to fit.

And once you've got a template, it's fairly straightforward to swap out more attractive textures.

I have to say, I learned much more about roofs during that phase of the Sims2 than I had any desire to know. Oh, and also that Irfan Zaida was a pleasure to work with.

Woman's portrait in charcoal

2010-03-11T17:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a portrait drawing of a lovely young model, pulled from an old sketchbook.

I'm not even sure when I did it, but it must have been back in the late '90's. So if she's about 20 or so in this drawing, she'd be in her mid 30's now. I wonder if she's still posing?

It's done in charcoal, and is about 10 inches high.

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Sims2 Roof Geometry design

2010-03-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

Probably the second hardest thing I ever had to design was the roof system for the Sims2.

The roof geometry had to be completely clean, and everything had to snap together perfectly, vertex to vertex and edge to edge without any overlaps (because we had to be able to hide and reveal different roof sections without any ragged edges showing).
And we couldn't just solve the problem with CSG, as Irfan Zaidi quickly informed me, at least not with realtime performance.

It seems like it would be perfectly straightforward, but dealing with all of the crazy intersections and permutations felt like taking a 2 month long IQ test.

Here was a mockup I made in Maya while trying to think through the problem.

And this was just for the straightforward, rectangular roofs. The tricky problems came up when the roofs were rotated 45 degrees off of the grid.

Mojoworld and fractal landscape

2010-03-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

To get a sense of how to create planets for Spore, I experimented with a whole bunch of different 3D landscape generation programs.

Probably the most impressive of the batch, just for sheer scope and ambition was Ken Musgrave's project, Mojoworld. Here are a couple of test renders I did while noodling around with it.

I'd read an article that he'd written back in the '90's about generating entire planets as fractals, from the scale of the largest continents down to the fine detail of ripples on a beach. It was an inspiring vision, truly epic!

He commercialized a lot of that vision in MojoWorld.
At one level, it's a tool for creating fractal landscapes. Everything from the atmosphere to the topography to the textures is fractally generated. And all as a whole system, allowing you to zoom from the ground up to the entire planet, with detail generated at every step.

Ken describes the landscapes as already existing in a huge state-space of potential planets. Kind of like books in Borges's Library of Babel, or like Platonic forms. In practice this means that you have to twiddle lots of knobs and combine lots of nodes to resolve the sort of landscape that you're after, and you have more of a sense of hunting for it than creating it.
And it's technically a bit challenging. Probably offputting to casual hobbyists.

It seems like they've stopped developing it. There haven't been any updates to their web site for a few years now.

I'm guessing that as a tool, it wasn't as successful as they were hoping.
I think that's because, in the final estimation it wasn't a tool so much as a fantastically ambitious art project. One that tried to swallow and embody the whole potential of landscape. It's piece of landscape art that systematized and represented landscapes across all possible scales and variety.

So kudos Ken, you've made one of the coolest and most impressive art projects I've ever seen, albeit one with a specialized audience!

Captured worm

2010-03-09T08:31:00.000-08:00

OK, I don't really know how to defend this drawing, other than to say that I was a little bit bored in the life-drawing session and decided to add a silly, and not-at-all threatening monster to accompany the model.
He's kind of a cross between a golden retriever and a snake, I guess.

(click to enlarge)

p.s. It's my birthday!