Computer Animation Arts

A number of you on CGAA are in the business of mixing your media in continuing quests for innovative art direction from which to derive distinctive cgi.  We've got students working with ink, with paint, with marbling, and with free-form expression inspired by music.  Sometimes, I detect a sense of inhibition - even nervousness - from students about accessing more expressive, more abstract, more 'arty' methodologies in relation to cg.  There is a fear perhaps of 'letting go' and of not being able to predict the outcome of your experiments - a need to control, as opposed to discover.  I suspect that sculptor Dale Chihuly knows no such fear - just check out his drawings below, inspirations for his breathtaking glass sculptures.  Feast your eyes on their energy and flourish - the sheer explosiveness of colour and line and texture!  There is something wonderfully Willy Wonka about Chihuly's work.  His glass-blown rods, pods, and ...

This one will be really useful for First Years later on in their time on CGAA. "A short experimental piece featuring a blend of Macro Photography and CG Animation. This project started with an idea by our friend David Parvin at Two Rivers Partnership to shoot abstract forms using macro photography. We loved the concept and together we came up with some great ideas. We shot the project with David and we ended up with a plethora of unique and intriguing footage. The footage was shot with a Canon 5DMKII and a 100mm Macro lens. Back at Gecko we experimented with interspersing CG elements with the footage, to construct a narrative from the forms we saw."

When you're devising innovative colour palettes and ideas for texturing, this website might prove useful. 'The Colour Of' website creates impressionistic colour swatches from image searches resulting from a key word, i.e. 'Halloween', 'Parrot' and 'Coral Reef'. Annoyingly, the resulting swatch includes the keyword itself as part of the image, but, that aside, it's a quick way of getting ideas about colour up and running. For another useful site to assist in the design of colour schemes for effective character design etc. go here.

Like something from the imagination of David Cronenberg , the sculptural installations of Henrique Oliveira magnify the sagging ringlets of tumors and bulge of prolapsed viscera to giant proportions. It's as if the architectural fabric of these spaces have suffered some catastrophic hernia or disease... "Artist Henrique Oliveira was a student in São Paulo, Brazil when the plywood fence outside his window began to peel and fade into different layers and colors. The wood, called tapumes in Portuguese is ubiquitous in the Brazilian city, serving as enclosures and barriers for various sites. When the fence was dismantled, Oliveira harvested the remains and used them as materials for his senior show. The result propelled him into his current work: undulating, swirling, bulging peels of wood layered onto hallways and walls in daunting forms... Oliveira begins with a PVC skeleton, tacking curls of scrap wood around established bends and tucks. He finds the bulk of his material i...

One of the big aesthetic challenges of Unit 6 is identifying exciting ways to convey the often abstract, highly organic interiors of the human body. Just take a look at these examples of marbled paper - and see how evocative they are of micro-biological imagery. For many more high-quality examples, go here . Some of these may be just the thing as the basis for a matte painting or texture.