This video of morphing and turning space rocks was created not by sculpting or modeling in the usual way, but rather by using fractal mathematics. (Video link).

One of the principles of fractal geometry is self-similarity, where large forms are composed of smaller and smaller components that share the same geometry. This is a design principle found in nature in rock forms, cloud shapes and branching forms. Fractal powered digital graphics provide a a tool for building worlds for animation and computer games.

The video was by Julius Horsthuis, rendered in Mandelbulb 3D, with music by Maurice Horsthuis.

Here's a remarkably believable computer rendering of a human eye by Chris Jones, using Lightwave, Sculptris and a little Krita. He wrote the music, too. 

Popular Science put together this video summary of the phenomenon of the uncanny valley in robotics, computer animation, and games. (Link to video)

The term "uncanny valley" was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. It refers to how artificial characters become more and more attractive as they become more realistic—up to a certain point, when they become creepy and repellant.

Another example is the rampaging baby in Pixar's early experiment "Tin Toy." (Video link)

A Scientific American article suggests some explanations for why these failed lookalikes put us on edge. The phenomenon might be related to the unconscious switchover that happens when we believe something to be truly human. Our rising empathy in what we believe to be human can be betrayed by a simple failure of eye contact or head movement, invoking our concern or disgust at seeing a fellow human who is ill.


A related dreadful feeling happens when we see a Madame Tussaud waxwork, only to discover that it is real. This video shows such a prank as fan girls pose with what they think is their favorite boy band. (video link).

Masahiro Mori's paradigm suggests that there's a way out of the valley on the far end, as we approach very accurate simulation. Are we there yet? Have you seen anything recently in the realm of robotics or CGI simulation that you feel is truly appealing? If so, please let me know in the comments.

Previously on GurneyJourney:
Activision reveals real-time face simulation
Bert Untooned

Tomorrow a fun new app for the iPhone and iPad will be released called Waterlogue. The app interprets a photo to look like it was painted in watercolor.


The developers let me play with an advance version of it. I started by taking a photo of our teapot using our iPad. Then Waterlogue started dissecting the image in real time, searching out contours, dropping in blotches of color, and applying watercolor-like effects, such as a wet-into-wet color bloom. Like magic, and it's accurate with ellipses!

It goes beyond typical Photoshop watercolor filters because it has more visual intelligence, and more of the feel of the real paint. But of course you can still sense the photo behind it.


Here's one based on a photo of me sketching on the streets in Shanghai. The app gives you several different painting styles to choose from. My favorites were Natural, Luminous, and this one, Travelogue. Like a sketch, it leaves unpainted lines at the top, and little white dots in the darks.

The app was designed by John Balestrieri and Robert Clair, who are readers and commentators on this blog. Of course it's no threat to traditional artists (unless the art that someone does is little more than an app), and no substitute for actual sketching. To my mind, it's just a fun new way to think about image-making.

You can pick up a copy of the app when it's released tomorrow, or sign up today for a reminder at the Waterlogue website.

Artists in the digital realm continue to create fresh visual wonders. Here's a fluid effects reel by Jesse Pitela that shows off some amazing splash and flow dynamics.

I'm not sure exactly how this stuff works, but I'm guessing it involves some sophisticated simulations involving momentum, air resistance, surface tension, and gravitation. Plus a wonderful artistic sense of timing, lighting, and composition. (Link to video) Thanks, CG Bros.

In big-budget live action movies, an increasingly important part of the CGI pipeline is a step called "postvisualization," which means a series of shots with low-res digital effects created after principle photography.

(Direct link to video) This documentary explains the advantages that postvis gives the director and editor to allow them to make good storytelling decisions and bid the effects accurately before the expensive rendering of the final shots.
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Via CGBros

Blog reader Aaron Becker created the bestselling picture book 
He told me that he builds digital maquettes before doing his finished illustrations in traditional watercolors.

I invited him to do a guest post explaining the process, so here it is:

In this remarkable demonstration, Daniel Cohen-Or and colleagues demonstrate a method of digitally inferring a three-dimensional solid from a 2D photo. (Direct link to video). This could be a big timesaver for digital modelers and matte painters.
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Thanks, Rob Nonstop

Here's some mesmerizing digital animation of pulsing, fluid-like forms timed to music, by Matthias Müller. (Video link)

If you ever need to animate your logo for video, you have two choices: spend thousands of dollars on a high-tech digital motion graphics that will look fake and dated in five years, or make it yourself for next to nothing out of cardboard, wire, and mud. (Direct link to video)


Here's me and Jeanette behind the scenes during filming.

With a lot of filmmakers looking for practical, in-camera effects, this is the best way to get logo animations grounded in reality.

This analog technique is also a good way for artists using CGI to quickly and cheaply generate reference of real effects little nuances of wind vortices in smoke, cast shadows, etc, which would be hard to imagine in purely digital simulations.

What I plan to do with this re-usable frame is to shoot it in a few different environments, such as in front of a roaring bonfire or in the middle of a fern garden.


Here are some of the real animated logos for inspiration (link to video).

Google is making huge strides in artificial (or machine) vision. Until now, most machine vision systems have been used on robotic assembly lines and other highly controlled environments.


One of Google's goals is to bring machine vision into the real world and see how well it does recognizing objects. Above are images of both specific and general objects gathered into sets based on features that the computer is trained to look for. Extracting these features from a digital image—or from a live video capture— can be immensely complex and subjective, especially when an object is seen in various angles and lightings.

As it improves, machine perception will help with driverless cars, so that the car can read street signs, look for garage sales, or distinguish black ice from a wet street. It will also be valuable for Google Street View to be able to know what it's looking at, and Google Glass to aid users in recognizing things at superhuman levels of ability: for example, to know the make, model and year of every car in your visual field.

It won't be long before machine vision surpasses ours in certain respects, and it already does so in many ways. One recent study demonstrated a machine system that could extract 100,000 features from a scene, while a comparable human could extract only 10,000. Part of the computer's advantage comes from GPS location-based information that gives it context to make such observations.


To make progress in this field, Google has been supporting scientific research in visual perception, and hosting experts in the field to give lectures, which you can watch online. This one (video link), by Dennis Proffitt brings out the point that non-human creatures definitely don't see the way we humans see. The frog, for example, is predisposed to see moving edges, moving dots (read insects), and changes in illumination.

Later in the talk (at 20:00) Proffitt describes a study that demonstrates that a right-handed person perceives their right arm to be longer than their left arm, and at 36:00, he shows that a person's estimate of walking distance to visible objects is directly correlated to their physiological health. At around 48:00, he suggests that our perceptual systems compresses vertical dimensions depending on the size and position of the screen or canvas.
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A list of Google's online resources about machine perception

Is it possible for a computer to process a video so that it looks like a comic book?

Friday Lunch from Tinrocket, LLC on Vimeo.
This video by Tinrocket (Direct link to video) demonstrates a beta version of a "graphic novel filter" that can be applied to video images. The software has a few tricks that go beyond a normal Photoshop filter, and those tricks are part of a patent application that's currently in the works.

The magnified visual "noise," the low frame rate, and the stark simplicity of the black and white imparts an artistic effect. This happens not only because the images superficially remind us of the appearance of human-created drawings, but because the computer software simulates some of the organic processes of human visual perception.

In the coming years, with advances in computer processing and progress in our understanding of human vision, we will see additional automated filter apps that can alter timing, proportion, color, and detail so that video footage can be morphed into various artistic altered realities.

Thanks, John Balestrieri

Siggraph is the forum for sharing innovations in computer graphics and interactive techniques. This highlight reel shows some of the recent breakthroughs. It sort of makes visual sense even if you don't understand all the technical jargon.

Thousands of professionals in the industry will be converging on Anaheim, California this July for Siggraph's 40th international conference. (Direct link to YouTube video)

(Video link) IllumiRoom is a home entertainment projection device that extends the action of a game beyond the screen and onto your living room wall. It even scans and learns the furniture in the room and distorts it to enhance the game.

On Thursday I visited the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts as a guest of the department of Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD), where I gave a  lecture on Worldbuilding.

The IMGD program at WPI is designed to provide students with both programming expertise and art knowledge so that they're well rounded in their approach to interactive design.

One of the professors is Britt Snyder (left, with a Jordu Schell sculpt between us). Britt has worked as an artist in the field of video game development for the past 13 years, with clients like SONY, Blizzard, Liquid Entertainment, Rockstar, THQ, and many others.
He teaches 3D modeling, digital painting, and concept art.

WPI was one of the first to develop a program in game design, and is one of the top-ranked academic programs in the field. Since the department is part of a larger engineering school, there's always a focus on blending art and technology, with an eye on fostering close working relationships between artists and programmers.

(Direct link to video) One of the reasons I'm glad to be a traditional painter in a digital age is that there's so much to learn from my fellow artists who are on the cutting edge of computer graphics.


In this video, Epic's senior technical artist Alan Willard takes us on a walk-through demo of Unreal Engine 4, a digital toolset used by a lot of game developers. The game engine offers designers the ability to modify parameters and see how they look in real time.