MONTREAL – Animation studio E*D Films has announced the release of PSD to 3D, a new plugin that converts 2D drawings into 3D content. Artists with little to no 3D experience can now bypass the modeling phase, turning Photoshop sketches into moldable scenes and characters, ready for animation.
Art + tech director, Daniel Gies, E*D Films, commented, “An illustrated look is hard to replicate in 3D, even if you know the software. With PSD to 3D, every line and brush stroke is passed onto the 3D meshes, so artists can bring a unique look to their animations.”
PSD to 3D was developed in-house at the Montreal-based studio. The production-grade converter is simple enough that a 3D novice can start converting Photoshop drawings and paintings within minutes. After conversion, the 3D objects will be available within Autodesk Maya for tweaks, including depth and resolution. All objects correspond to the original Photoshop layers, giving artists an easy way to build up and adjust scenes and characters.
The new plugin replaces an outdated After Effects method that often requires artists to produce hundreds of layers to achieve a 3D look. Since After Effects wasn’t made to be a 3D engine, the process is slow and difficult, lacking the real-time speed that most artists use to iterate effectively. With PSD to 3D, a simple conversion makes all of Maya’s tools available in minutes, helping artists animate much faster.
To mark the launch, E*D Films has prepared a short demo demonstrating how artists can start using PSD to 3D on their animated projects today.
Also in the pipeline for release are eight new production assets including custom sound bundles, handy scripts, workflow helpers and special assets like sparkles, fog and bugs. These items join a growing list of tools, brushes and animated aids already available from E*D Films.
PSD to 3D is available in two versions that cater to artists with different levels of 3D experience. More information on pricing and availability is available here.
Create Your Favourite Actor From Nothing But Photos
Written by David Conrad
Sunday, 13 December 2015
Graphics techniques are becoming so sophisticated that it really does
seem like magic is being done. Now a team of researchers has
implemented a way of constructing a 3D model of a well known actor and
using it to create scenes they never played in.
If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you might not have to wait much longer.
A University of Washington team has essentially reversed engineered
what makes an actor recognizable as that actor, or as the title of the
paper puts it "What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks".
The model is first created using photos. The method relies on facial
recognition to locate the standard points that make up a face. The face
is then warped to place the standard points in the same orientation so
that all of the photos are reduced to face-on shots. Then they are
wrapped around a standard 3D model customized to give the required
distances between the standard points. The warped photos are then used
to construct a texture to overlay the 3D model to make it look natural
and more like the target.
This amazing enough, but the next stage is to analyse a video of the
"driver", i.e. to work out the deformations in the puppet needed to make
it follow the driver. This is the real innovation - working out how to
convert the movement of one person into those of the actor.
To quote the paper:
"Our answer to the question of what
makes Tom Hanks look like Tom Hanks is in the form of a demonstration,
i.e., a system that is capable of very convincing renderings of one
actor believably mimicking the behavior of another. Making this work
well is challenging, as we need to determine what aspects are preserved
from actor A’s performance and actor B’s personality. For example, if
actor A smiles, should actor B smile in the exact same manner? Or use
actor B’s own particular brand of smile? After a great deal of
experimentation, we obtained surprisingly convincing results using the
following simple recipe: use actor B’s shape, B’s texture, and A’s
motion (adjusted for the geometry of B’s face)."
So it seems that it is sufficient to use the movements generated by
the driver and simply modify them to take account of the geometry of the
actor's face.
Although the researchers don't draw any conclusion from this, it
suggests that the character of an actor comes about from displaying a
universal human facial expression using the physiology they happen to
have. So much for acting...
Why motion design is now a required skill for designers.
Last week I attended Google I/O for the first time and participated
on a small panel about cross-platform design challenges. There was so
much going on that it was a bit of sensory overload, much like walking
down the Las Vegas strip for the first time. Google announced many
welcomed Android improvements such as a battery saver mode and
lock-screen notifications; something you'd previously need to use
add-ons for as mentioned in Android is better.
More uses of the Android operating system emerged: Android Wear,
Android Auto and Android TV. A smartphone won't be the only thing that
comes to mind when someone says Android. It'll be this family of screens
from couch to car to wrist.
“If there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art.” — Matias Duarte
With Android and other such Google products now being used in more
contexts it became necessary for Google to step back and voraciously
think through their design. The resulting visual design language was
dubbed Material Design.
At a high-level it introduces constraints to craft a framework within
which Google and others building on top of Android can more easily make
design decisions.
However, the real news from Google I/O wasn't about Android or Material Design itself. It was Google's
implicit announcement that motion design is now a huge, required
component for creating great software for mobile, desktop and wearable
devices. Motion was mentioned in every design session at I/O. This coming from what has historically been a developer-focused event.
A year ago I had a half-written post sitting in my drafts folder
called “The right tool for the job.” The gist of it was using a suite of
tools during your design process to effectively communicate the
entirety of your intended design. It was going to be about showing
animations and transitions with tools like After Effects, Quartz
Composer and building HTML/CSS/JS prototypes to interact with on your
mobile device.
This was around the time Facebook made waves in the design community when they discussed how their design process for FB Home included Quartz Composer:
Not only does QC make working with engineers
much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a
design. When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can
instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel [...] Julie Zhou
At the time incorporating such attention to motion and
gesturally-interactive prototype work in your design process may have
seemed nascent; if not entirely optional unless you wanted to customize
everything and add another level of interaction detail.
"Carefully choreographed motion design
can effectively guide the user’s attention and focus through multiple
steps of a process or procedure; avoid confusion when layouts change or
elements are rearranged; and improve the overall beauty of the
experience.”
Motion can and should go beyond a veneer of polish or delight. It's
another avenue for adding personality, educating your users about how to
interact with particular elements and for creating a story for the
user.
Changing an entire page on the user requires them to re-scan
everything to see what has changed. This affords an opportunity to
choreograph, or string together several transitions to provide context
around what is changing.
For example, Google has described much of their motion in terms of ripple
choreography: using a sequence of small, delayed transitions as an
affordance to express the transfer of energy from the user to the
system. By connecting user actions to the resulting change you can
improve the user's understanding of the relationship between spaces.
Design tools
One of the questions Roman Nurik
asked us on the design panel was about how to best present your designs
to others. This spurred a conversation on the power of functional
prototypes.
Though when you think of the term prototype in the context of design
process over the last 5 years, more often than not the first thing that
came to mind was something rudimentary like linking a few pages of a
flow together with tap targets. Fast-forward to today where prototypes
for me mean experiences that can just about fool someone into thinking
they are real apps when put on a mobile device — real page transitions,
draggable elements, scrollable areas, animations, keeping track of state
where necessary and so on.
In the past it probably wasn't the best use of a designer's time to
recreate designs in a tool like Adobe After Effects. Doing anything
beyond sliding in new page might have even been considered polish.
Polish is a dangerous word as it implies that it's not vital and if
it's not vital it's likely to be cut from the project when deadlines get
tight.
Instead After Effects was used to detail new microtransitions or
object transformations. That was about it — tinkering with small, more
complex nuggets of an experience. Beyond that it was easy to communicate
with engineering teams about how the rest of the flow was supposed to
work. This modal falls down, this page slides in.. standard app page
transitions and the like.
Times are changing. Things like page transitions will still exist but involve more of the elements on each page. You'll begin choreographing.
In the next few years consideration for motion will be required to be a
good citizen of your desktop/mobile/wearable/auto/couch platform. It
will be an expected part of the design process just like people will
begin to expect this level of activity and character in software.
One of the popular questions at Google I/O design sessions was how
designers should go about incorporating motion into their design
process. Googlers mentioned that they personally use After Effects but
mainly only for microtransitions, things like loaders and icons
transforming. The also mentioned their own Polymer web framework that
includes the new Material Design UI components.
In short — there was no good answer. There's a huge opportunity here for new tools to cater to budding new choreographers.
Polymer can help with choreography by including things like animating along a path and some affordances for sequencing animations
but the components are only great if you're using the material design
components exactly as they are and don't need any customization.
I have been using Framer.js on an
almost daily basis to build interactive prototypes of my designs. It's
basically a JavaScript animation framework and can take some time to get
up to speed if you're not comfortable with JavaScript. However, unlike
other tools anything you learn about JavaScript while using Framer is
applicable for web development in general.
Framer is exceptional at testing out small bits of interaction or
linking together several pages of a flow. But as a next generation tool
with more needs for managing choreography, keeping track of state, and
working with draggable and scrollable elements, you incur significant
overhead for managing your code. I found myself creating views to manage
other views, much like I used to do with complex pages when I was
building Backbone.js apps, but I digress...
There are more WYSIWYG tools like Pixate,
which lets you use a drag-and-drop web app to create your prototypes,
then view live on your device. But without a preview mechanism on the
web this seems to slow development down with constantly having to
publish to the device.
I'm still waiting on the right tool for this new mix of motion and
interactive prototyping. Building your design also makes you think about
how it should be built and the constraints of the design; things you
might have only run into later when it was actually being developed. And
of course one thing's for sure: putting a real prototype in front of
your team is the best form of communication. No more explaining your
design to others by trying to talk through it .. "then you tap this, and
this happens and that loads, then you slide this.."
What are you trying to say Stammy
It’s a great time to be a designer. We have never had so many capable
platforms to develop on, nor as many ways to use our products and on so
many new categories of devices.
The more designers we have thinking about motion the more we'll have a
need for great design tools and the better design tools we have, the
easier it will become to build our designs as intended. And with that
we'll have more delightful and easier-to-use products that set their
users up for success so they can solve the problems you set out to solve
for them.
To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master. Milton Glaser
Posts
