I just watched “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid” and realized that they cut the entire bit at the beginning with Bender and Zoidberg entering the pet show.  It’s annoying that they cut out a little of the episode to increase the commercial time, but that has been standard syndication practice for a very long time with other shows so it’s not surprising.  But then later in the episode, after everyone on Earth became stupid and Fry’s coworkers were suggesting what they should do, Bender said, “Hey, let’s all join the Tea Party!”

What?!!  The original was, “Hey, let’s all join the Reform Party!”  They are changing dialogue now?  Updating the jokes to make them more relevant?  I am not outraged because they chose the Tea Party (frankly, they deserve to be made fun of), I am outraged that they are modifying the original jokes for no real reason.  Doesn’t the Reform Party still exist?

Time to find my Futurama DVDs, I guess.

Warner released an official poster for the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises (click on the picture for a bigger version).  And they also released a teaser trailer for the movie, although a lot of the footage is just recycled from the previous two movies.  But you do get a shot of the new villain: Bane.

What little I know of Bane is from the animated series (and from reading the Wikipedia entry, of course).  It seems like this character, supposed to be one of Batman’s toughest foes in the comics, has not been used very much in television or film.  It will be very interesting to see Christopher Nolan’s version of the character.

As an added bonus, I compared the performance of my new computer (well, six months old, anyway) to my brother’s computer, which is about the performance I’m used to using.  A render that took 19 minutes on my brother’s computer only takes 3 minutes on my computer, which is a very impressive increase in speed!

First, I created a simple image in Photoshop to use as my displacement map (left). My goal was to apply the image to the face of a cube, rendering the pattern as new geometry.

Next, I created a cube in Lightwave’s Modeler with a UV map assigned to one face. After loading the model in Layout, I assigned the displacement map image to the UV map in the object properties (pull up the object properties, go to the “Deform” tab, and apply the texture to the “Displacment Map” texture button). When I rendered the object, the only difference was that the face with the map applied was pushed 1 meter in the direction of the displacement axis.

Suspecting the problem, I reopened the object in Modeler and subdivided the displacement face a few times to create more vertices. When I rendered that new geometry out with the displacement map applied, you can roughly see the displacement map, but with a lot of distortion and odd bending of polygons.

It turns out that Lightwave only applies displacement maps to existing vertices on the geometry. In order to get a more accurate representation of the displacement map, I would need to add more polygons to the face that will receive the displacement map. Since I wanted to use displacement maps to reduce the geometry of the base model, this defeats my purpose for using them.

Maya takes a different approach to displacement maps. I can apply a displacement map by adding it to the shader network for the material assigned to the face that I want to deform. First, I load the image file as an image node in Hypershade. Then I connect the alphaOut (or any of the individual colorOut values, since it’s a greyscale image) to a Multiply/Divide node (to control the strength of the deformation). Finally, I connect the output of that node to the “displacementMap” input of a surface (note: you can middle-mouse-drag the multiply/divide to the surface and choose “displacementMap”, or you can manually setup a “Displacement Map” node that connects to the surface’s Shader Group node — the first method is a shortcut for the second, but the shader network will look identical either way).

Now that the material is ready, I just assign it to a single polygon and render out the results. As you can see, Maya turned that single polygon into a much more complex piece of geometry during the render. The precision can be controlled using values in the “Displacement Map” section of the object properties (higher sample rates == higher precision). But even with high precision, you will still get some distortion and banding of the original image in the final render if you get too close to the object.

So it seems that displacement maps are great in Maya for smaller detail work that does not require close-up shots of the displacement. There are some other neat tricks I found using Maya at this short tutorial, including using temporary geometry in Maya to bake displacement maps and how to get ambient occlusion to work with the displaced geometry.

Too bad it’s not real.

What I found is an article reporting that Adult Swim has lost the rights to Blood+ (no big loss) and Death Note (a shame, but I have already seen the entire series). However, they have announced that they have probably picked up three new anime series, but they have not said which.  As a side note, I watched the mini-Death Note marathon on Saturday night, not realizing that it was the last time the episodes will be aired on Adult Swim.

Clicking more links from Google, I found out that Adult Swim aired a bump that announced when they are airing new shows: Bleach on April 3, Venture Bros. on Aug. 22, a new unnamed show on Feb. 6 (obviously not on the current schedule), and another unnamed show on Sept. 25.

I learned one other thing: there is a new InuYasha series out called “InuYasha: The Final Act”, which covers the end of the story as written in the manga.  If you watched the original InuYasha series, you may have been disappointed by the end of the series.  Because there wasn’t really an end — the episodes just stopped abruptly mid-story.  Since this time around they have an actual end to the story planned out, I am hoping that one of the unnamed shows is this new series.

Cool stuff.  Now if only there was a Sonic nearby, I would actually try their food.

Painting with Polygons from Outside Hollywood on Vimeo.

“The State” was a great sketch comedy show on MTV.  Some of the cast members have gone on to create some other memorable shows, such as “Viva Variety” and “Reno 911″.  Comedy Central has another new show premiering next month with two other State alums, “Michael and Michael Have Issues” (starring Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter).  In fact, it was this new show that prompted me to check Amazon to see if any new “The State” releases were scheduled.

I have been waiting for this release for a very, very  long time.  I even sent Viacom an email years ago asking why they have not released the series on DVD or at least shown re-runs on Comedy Central (a natural fit, given the sensibilities of the show and the fact that cast members have had several shows on Comedy Central).  Of course, I never heard back from Viacom.

In case you are wondering about the title of this post, it is one of the more memorable repeat sketches from the show.  The main character in the sketch, Louie, spends the entire sketch praising items by holding up ping-pong balls and declaring that he wants to dip them in the item.  Juvenile?  Yes.  Hilarious?  Definitely.  Which pretty much sums up the series.

Personally, I did not read the manga until after I finished watching the series.  I wasn’t thrilled by the ending, but I did like the series.  However, once I started reading the manga (which you can do for free, if you are so inclined) , I realized just how different (and inferior) the anime storyline was from the manga’s.

So the new anime was created with the intent of following the manga more closely.  But it doesn’t follow the manga in lockstep (like the Hellsing Ultimate OVAs are doing, another series that had a similar problem with its first anime run).  The first episode, for instance, never appears in the manga.  But it does a good job of introducing  a lot of the characters and sketching out the various relationships between them.

You might be wondering how I know what happens in the first episode.  It’s because I just watched it online through the US distributor!  Funimation announced that they will release subtitled versions of the episodes online within four days of the original Japanese release.  There are currently five episodes online (I have only watched the first).  The fact that the episodes are subtitled may turn you off to watching the series online, but personally I am excited to get to see the series now that I have become more of a follower of the manga.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I used LightWave so I decided to create the classic “bouncing ball” animation to quickly reacquaint myself with the keyboard shortcuts and general workflow in the program. Luckily, I have a copy of “Learning LightWave 9.0″ handy for looking up a few basic things I completely forgot (like how to parent an object to another).

One thing I realized this time around: the procedural textures built into LightWave are very limited and difficult to work with. I played around with Maya a bit and created some interesting surfaces using the built-in textures. Maya spoiled me, because each procedural texture has its own set of custom controls that let you change the way the texture looks. For instance, the “marble” texture of Maya let’s you choose how much marbling is in the texture as a percentage. The equivalent texture in LightWave does not have nearly as much flexibility.

In this specific case, I was trying to add a very slight smoky marble to the floor. I needed the marbling to be small in scale, a small percentage of the overall surface, and zigzagging throughout the floor in a random pattern. I ended up having to use a multi-fractal pattern instead, because the “Marble” texture couldn’t accurately create a marble surface.

Live and learn, I guess.

If you have never seen Cowboy Bebop, run out today and buy, borrow, or beg a copy to watch. Cowboy Bebep is one of the best anime productions ever made and has a very strong following. The strength of the show comes from the combination of great, believable characters, fun action sequences, and excellent soundtracks. What really solidifies Cowboy Bebop as my favorite anime are the over-arcing story lines that reveal each character’s past and then show that past catching up to them. And most of the time dedicated to those story arcs are spent on the main character, Spike Spiegel.

Unfortunately, that style does not translate well to a movie format. Although the characters can stand on their own, the movie will lack the story-telling magic that defined the success of the series. Instead, the movie will have to rely solely on the characters and a well-written, self-contained story. And in a live-action adaptation, that means that the actors must do a good job of matching the original character from the series.

So that means that the big question for the movie is: Will Keanu be believable as Spike? I guess we’ll find out when (if) the movie is released.

I also want to know: Who will be cast as Faye?

The second, http://tooninstitute.awn.com/main.html, has a few short tutorials about hand-drawn 2D animation. It covers some pretty basic material, but it’s still a nice read. It’s good to be reminded of the basics every once in a while, just to make sure you don’t forget the fundamentals.

Recently, PiVisuals posted about the movie Coraline, which is being distributed by Focus Features. Coraline is the first animated movie to be released by Focus Features and they already have a second one slated for later in the year: 9. 9 is a 3D CGI story produced by Tim Burton about rag dolls in a strange, post-apocalyptic setting. Even though the release is still half a year away, they already created a trailer for the movie: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/9/. It’s tough to tell if the story will be any good, but the animation looks fantastic.

9 was originally a short 10-minute film from 2005 which you can still see on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4qHy0RruA. There is no dialog, but it is well animated and makes the movie seem very promising.

When I was watching Ratatouille the other night, I watched most of the credits because I enjoyed the 2D animation that ran during them.  Shortly after the animation ended, I noticed the image to the left scroll by.  I knew that Pixar animated everything by hand and did not use motion capture, but I find it interesting that they make it a guarantee.  I hope that they stick to their guarantee as an animation studio, because it lends a certain “hand-crafted” charm to their movies that cannot be replaced by motion capture.  The animations are actually works of art, as opposed to just virtual representations of data captured from the real world.