LINK: New York Times – What’s Up, Doc? New Looneys

Meanwhile, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote are going back to work in movie theaters in a series of 3-D shorts. The first of these shorts — Warner has approved three, and three more are in development — will play ahead of the movie “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” which arrives in theaters July 30.

And the fan response over at Cartoon Brew is pretty awesome too. Fans really seem to be getting excited for the CG shorts! Here are some of my favorite comments…

Rafa says:

The road runner shot looks amazing!
the bugs & daffy, not so much…

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lampshade says:

auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

hey, the CGI shot doesn’t look so bad though

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Fooksie says:

I agree, Rafa. Wile E Coyote looks fantastic.

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erlab says:

I was seriously SCARED of Daffy’s welcoming expression! Now that I know Bugs WILL look like that, I will just have to live with it or ignore the show.

CN is still running the original cartoons in the morning right?

That CG Road Runner series has potential to be really good.

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A.J. says:

The cgi coyote looks pretty nifty!
But Bugs is having a serious tude problem…and his feet and face..wtf?

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Taber Dunipace says:

Why is Daffey made of thistles? I hope that Coyote shot is going to be as good as it looks now!

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coyote says:

“The short will be in theatres? That’s great! The shorts were made in India? That’s really unfortunate.”

Don’t worry, the shorts aren’t being made in India. They’re being done by Reel FX in Dallas.

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tgentry says:

I guess I’m just restating what many others have already said, but the genericized, Flash-happy Bugs and Daffy make me incredibly sad. It’s odd that the 3D coyote looks much more organic and cartoon-like than the more trendy and souless look of Bugs and Daffy. Looking forward to the updated Roadrunners.

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mrscriblam says:

i like the coyote cgi shot

looks almost like stop-motion, which is a style i think would work very well for that sketch

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vfx says:

The real fun will be when everyone gets to frame-by-frame through the CG animation to see just how spot on it is to the classic stuff.

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The comments just go on and on. So I’ll let you thumb through them at your own pace.

But I will end with this. To all the fans who love the original Wile E Coyote and Road Runner shorts, the CG shorts will not disappoint. I dare say, you’re going to love them! I’m so proud to be a part of this project, as is every other single person on the team. And we’re putting in the hard work and long hours to do justice to what Chuck Jones brought to life all those years ago.

This is most certainly not all folks Just you wait.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2010. | Click here to comment

Check out this really well done short by Patrick Jean, called Pixels.

Using wonderful special effects and combining the upbeat music, Patrick has made a wonderful nostalgic video that features the old style and pixel look into a realistic suburban city with the Pixels taking over. With so much color, sound and things happening at the same time, I really could not attempt to explain what is going on and just urge you to press play and really soak in this amazing creation.

The cool concept aside, this short has some really superb lighting and compositing going on. And I really love the marriage between the 8bit modeling style, and the really high res particle simulations. The shot of the Tetris blocks collapsing the building? Fantastic.

I would love to see a making of!

Please, Patrick…pleaseeeee?

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2010. | Click here to comment

Just incredibly busy.

Hince my lonngggg absence from posting on my blog. But don’t worry I’ll be back soon, I promise. I’m even spending what little free time I have designing and coding the 2010 update for DH.com! I’ve learned a lot in the past 6 months about web design, so I can’t wait to bring some of that knowledge back home to this site. There’s some really cool stuff coming to this site in the coming months, both design wise and new work! So stay tuned!

While you wait, check out this awesome episode of the television show that inspired me to do what I’m doing now. “Movie Magic”! It’s really cool to see this stuff again, especially the cat from “Hocus Pocus”. I was in awe of that cat when I was a kid. But man, does this makes me feel old, ha.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2010. | Click here to comment

It’s not easy to make 0′s and 1′s emotionally moving, but that’s exactly what the VFX artists have done here. Really impressive work.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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Making Of:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2010. | Click here to comment

For fans of our previous podcast, Lingo: A Geekly Podcast, this new show marks the evolution of something Andrew and I started over a year ago. This time though it’s not only a podcast, but also a blog to share with you all of the random stuff that we talk about through out the week prior to recording on Friday. Movie reviews, funny pictures we find, random posts we stumble across. Think of it as your one stop geek shop! And we promise, lots of YouTube nut shot clips. LOTS.

That’s the goal of this new show. To take what we’ve learned over the last 16 months, mash it all together, and give our fellow geeks something that I think you’re really going to like. And something that Andrew and I are already really proud of.

So head on over to MyRemoteRadio.com to subscribe and check out what we put together for you! We’re building something here, so come join us!

LINK: MyRemoteRadio.com

What is My Remote Radio? Well on the surface it’s a geek-centric Podcast and Blog. But below all that, it’s a place for Andrew and I to share all the stuff that we love. Whether that be movies, comics, toys oh umm, i meancollectibles, television shows, video games, gadgets…you name it really! In fact that’s our one and only rule on this site. We only talk about things we love, not things we hate. You won’t find us bashing people, places, or things here. Because honestly, what fun is there in that anyways?

So sit back, poke around, and drop us a line to let us know who you are and what you think!

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This new podcast / blog also marks a new focus here at DH.com. The blog lost some of it’s direction over the past 6 months, and became more of a log of my tweets and life stream rather than what it really was supposed to be about. VFX, and my journey of working in that industry! But that’s something that will be changing very soon. And to make up for my long hiatus I’m even going to throw in some Nuke tutorials here and there too. So let me know in the comments or an email if you all have any requests! There are a ton of great new features in Nuke 6 that I think will really blow you guys away. But more on that later!

Right now, Jess and I gotta run into the studio. So be back soon everyone, and I promise…a real post VERY soon! Hopefully though MyRemoteRadio will give you something to check out in the meantime!

Talk soon…

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2010. | Click here to comment

So…things a good. Busy. But REALLY good. Our new apartment is nice and swanky, Dallas is a great city, and our new jobs at Reel FX are an absolute dream come true. Basically…we feel at home. I wasn’t expecting that. I mean I thought that would come in time, but I didn’t think it would be instant.

It’s a strange feeling to have your dreams come true. I’m rolling my eyes at that corny phrase, but it’s true! At first I really didn’t want to trust it. There just had to be a catch to all of this. Something behind the curtain that would pull the rug out from under me while saying that it’s time to get back to the struggle. But then I had a moment during our first day at Reel FX where I sat back and realized, good things CAN actually happen. A simple thing to come across, but also something I had forgotten over the last 4 years. If you work hard, and are patient, it seems to be almost a certantity. How else can you explain these last few months of my life? Marrying my best friend, an awesome trip to Italy, and now a brand new life / job in a great town doing what both me and my wife love? I’m starting to see this, and it leaves me with nothing but a feeling of humility and graditude. Which is a pretty good feeling to have on Christmas I suppose.

Now, what’s next? Well hopefully not much! Normalcy maybe? Please? I honestly don’t know how much more change I can take! So I’m just hoping for things to get back to normal around these parts soon. That, and not to see the inside of an airport for a while.

Most importantly though, I want to thank all of my readers so much for sticking with me during these crazy life altering changes. That’s right, thank YOU! I promise that the new year holds some pretty exciting stuff for DH.com that will reward your patience. Daily posts again, Inspirado resurrected, a new podcast with Andrew, and PLUS…you guys are going to crap yourselves when I’m allowed to show you what we’re working on right now. I know I do on a daily basis. It’s pretty awesome.

So to all you VFX’ers and devoted readers out there I just want to say, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2009. | Click here to comment

Check out this amazing piece of software coming out of Cambridge, that turns your little old web cam into a surprisingly accurate 3D scanner. It’s called ProFORMA for short, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition for long, and it works by generating a point cloud through a Delaunay tetrahedralization process. Which means it uses 2D XY vertices to generate 3D polygonal triangles, forming the mesh of the object you’re scanning. Man that sounded smart, but in truth I just Googled it and found this paper, ha.

LINK: The Delaunay tetrahedralization from Delaunay triangulated surfaces

Given a surface mesh F in R ³ with vertex set S and consisting of Delaunay triangles, we want to construct the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S.We present an algorithm which constructs the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S given a bounded degree spanning subgraph T of F. It accelerates the incremental Delaunay triangulation construction by exploiting the connectivity of the points on the surface. If the expected size of the Delaunay triangulation is linear, we prove that our algorithm runs in O(n log^* n) expected time, speeding up the standard randomized incremental Delaunay triangulation algorithm, which is O(nlog n) expected time in this case.We discuss how to find a bounded degree spanning subgraph T from surface mesh F and give a linear time algorithm which obtains a spanning subgraph from any triangulated surface with genus g with maximum degree at most 12g for g>0 or three for g=0.

But enough of this, “math” and “science”, check out the video below to see this program designed by Department of Engineering student Qui Pan in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

LINK: Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner

It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are. Then things go over my head, involving a process called Delaunay tetrahedralisation to turn the 2D surfaces into a 3D model.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2009. | Click here to comment

I think it’s time to announce a big change that’s coming in the next few weeks for Jess and I. I’ve been keeping quiet about it for a while now, just waiting until everything was official. But now that the papers are all signed, I wanted to let you all know what’s going on.

November 27th is going to be Jess and my last day here at Speedshape. It was a very hard decision to make, because over the last 3 years we’ve become really close friends with the artists who work here. But the opportunity presented to us was just too big to pass up, so we’ve accepted an amazing offer from Reel FX Creative Studios to work as Lighter/Compositors in their Dallas, TX studio.

Now I can’t tell you what we’ll be working on obviously, but I can tell you that this is seriously a dream come true. It’s not only a huge step for us career wise, but it also gets us closer to Jess’s family in New Orleans. Which is something we’ve both been wanting for a long time now, especially now that we’re married. So put those two things together and what do you get? Excitement. Pure, unadulterated, excitement.

We’re so thrilled to be joining the amazing team of artists that they have down in Dallas, and we can’t wait to get started! They have employees from all over the VFXsphere, making the talent and years of experience that they have gathered together simply stunning. And I’m very proud to say that we’ll be working together and learning from an absolutely amazing group.

Needless to say though, the next few weeks are probably going to be pretty quiet around “the blog” while we’re moving. Right now we’re knee deep in boxes, painting the old apartment, and getting ready for the long drive down to Texas. It’s going to be a little bit of a gypsy existence for us over the next few weeks. But things will be back to normal soon enough and I will be updating my Twitter feed as much as possible.

So stay tuned everyone because big things are happening.

Better start working on my southern accent!

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2009. | Click here to comment

“Shut up woman get on my horsssse!”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2009. | Click here to comment

You’ve probably never heard of Houston native Steve Johnson, but I know you’ve heard of his work. Predator, The Abyss, Ghostbusters, Spider-Man 2, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on and so on. The point is that he’s had a very long and successful career in practical make-up fx. Now he’s nearing retirement but instead of writing his memoirs or shopping for a comfy rocking chair, he’s decided to start up a new channel on YouTube to share with the world a ton of never before seen behind the scenes footage of the films he worked the last 30+ years on. The coolest thing though is that he’s also bringing back the artists responsible for the work his shop did on those films to talk about it themselves!

I’m so glad to see such a seasoned and talented artist pulling back the curtain, and I want all of you who read this blog to go to his channel and subscribe to his videos. Let’s keep this ball of transparency rolling and hopefully encourage more of the greats to follow in Steve’s footsteps!

LINK: Steve Johnson (IMDB)

LINK: Steve Johnson FX (YouTube)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Take a behind the scenes look at some of your favorite movies with the people who actually MADE them! Hosted by Hollywood special effects legend Steve Johnson, the effects artist behind Ghostbusters, Big Trouble in Little China, The Abyss, Blade II, Species, Spiderman II, Where the Wild Things Are, and hundreds more!

All the footage you see here was shot in Steve’s own studio, with his cameras, his crew and on his dime.

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Doug Hogan is a VFX compositor and freelance web designer working in Detroit. He's a 2006 SCAD graduate and has worked in both the broadcast, web, and feature film corners of the Visual Effects industry.

He also co-hosts the weekly geek podcast Lingo: A Geekly Podcast with his long time friend and author, Andrew Marcec.

© Doug Hogan 2009. | Click here to comment