Josydoodle: the art blog of Josy Conklin

Time warp!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 04:19:00 +0000

(Mid-2013 demo reel! Shot breakdowns available here: http://josydoodle.com/breakdown_2013.html)

Four-year artblog hiatus! That's normal, right?

So clearly I'm not putting much on this blog these days— most of the art I currently do is professional and controlled by other parties, with complicated licenses and stuff, so I can't just go posting it around the internet willy-nilly like I used to.

But once I acquire permissions, I am a member of a zillion portfolio sites around the interwebz where I put new stuff when I think of it (and if you too are on any of these, we should be friends or mutual followers or something):

Yeahhhhh art!

Oh and also! This is not my own work, but it is my favorite Pinterest board that I proudly curate (and has like 3 followers! don't care! still proud!):

Animation references and visual inspirations!

Also, because what the heck,

LinkedIn!

Aight, that should keep ya'll busy for the next four years.

How are YOU doing? Are things moving along? Are you happy? What are you up to these days? I want to know.

how an expert system works!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:50:00 +0000

Click for full-sized decision-making engines!

This is a pretty basic overview, but y'know, sometimes that's what you need. I think this is the only thing from my job I've ever posted here, but it was fun. Yay design!

P.S. Happy Fourth of July!

[Adobe Illustrator]

website + year-old-assignment: updated!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Fri, 21 May 2010 23:18:00 +0000

My portfolio website at Josydoodle.com has been officially launched! Be sure to check out the Extras page for free desktop icons and wallpapers!

I'm pretty proud of it. It's not hugely different from the previous iteration, but I fixed a lot of the bugs (I think--please let me know if something isn't working for you!) (...well, mostly. Known issue: does not work well in IE6 and below). And with both Google and Wikipedia's recent UI adjustments (and seeing what a huge difference they both made), I'm okay with that.

Also: I updated/revised/tried to salvage my bone remodeling compartment project from last year:

At the very least, I like that the colors are less Playskool-esque (or, as I described them at the time, "like a small child went nutso with his crayons").

And I fixed my spiky osteoclasts! They were supposed to look more like this or this, and while I didn't quite push them to that stage, I think they look slightly less terrible now. But--of course--you be the judge. :)

So those are some things I have been up to lately.

[website: Dreamweaver and Photoshop; 3ds Max project updated in Photoshop]

and now for something completely different

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:31:00 +0000

Hey look a self-portrait.

[Adobe Illustrator]

josy has a demo reel!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:11:00 +0000

Look look I have a demo reel of the coolest bits of animation I've developed over the past nine months! (...'cos that's how long I've been animating!)

(The music is "Bounty," by Felix Miklik, and it's available from FreePlayMusic.com)

You may also note that I finally got around to buying a domain name at Josydoodle.com! However, for all this end-of-the-semester stress, you won't find anything exciting there yet, so STAY TUNED for total redesign in the next month or two! (I have an RSS feed you can subscribe to and EVERYTHING!)

[compiled in Adobe Premiere]

the making of phacoemulsification

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:26:00 +0000

(Can't see the video? Click here to watch it directly on Vimeo)

So now that you've seen our final product, check out the steps we went through to make our group animation, Phacoemulsification!

This is something I threw together with our existing assets--our professor suggested we do something like this, and I woke up one morning with a vision of how it was gonna look. :)

My team members let me take charge of this project 'cos I didn't do much for the post-production on the original animation, and I still wanted an opportunity to expose myself to all the cool After Effects stuff that we were learning in class.

...plus, as I mentioned, "I had a vision" and they probably didn't want to stand in my way. :D

[assets created in various programs by various people (see credits of original animation for details); compiled in Adobe After Effects]

bad mesh!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:48:00 +0000

I've been revisiting some of my old 3ds Max projects, including this one, which I created back when I was still figuring out the program. What a mess!

In this animation, you may notice stuff that looks like gray/black flickering dirt. It's either a Mental Ray issue (i.e. a weird flicker that sometimes happens when you use a particular renderer) or a bad mesh issue. Or both!

Either way, DON'T PROBOOLEAN, PEOPLE!

...Or at least do it with discretion.

[3ds Max 2009]

phacoemulsification!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:52:00 +0000

(Can't see the video? Click here to watch it directly on Vimeo)

We did it! It's done!

You might even want to full-screen it to experience the full cinematic beauty of cataract surgery!

(Also: be SURE to check out the "making of" video to see some of the steps we went through to create this animation!)

(And if that's not enough for you, click here and here to see full versions of some of our "in-progress" work!)

[so many programs used! let's just say we're all big fans of Autodesk and Adobe and leave it at that.]

the bee's knees: REVISITED

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:37:00 +0000

I'm trying to put together some portfolio stuff right now, so I started with my knees-in-a-jar from last year. For a long time know, I've gotten annoyed every time I look at the old piece. I know so much more about 3ds Max now than I did a year ago; there were a million problems with the old render, and they were so easily fixable! It's still not quite perfect, but I'm much much happier with this version.

I'm still learning a lot of the subtleties you need to emulate photorealism with 3d programs. There are all these tiny, tiny details you don't quite notice (and so I often skip them for the sake of reducing render times), but somewhere in your subconscious, something will register as "real" or "fake."

(Which reminds me: I discovered this fantastic blog yesterday: http://3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com/ . It's architecture-based, but I love it! so much good info in one spot!)

Plus--for me, anyway--getting the lights to act the way they're supposed to always adds hours to my finagling attempts at photorealism.

[3ds Max 2009-2010]

phacoemulsification continued

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:41:00 +0000

[Also-- click here to watch a test render of the procedure animation so far!]

My group finished the actual animation part of our animation; right now, all we have left to do is render everything out and composite it in After Effects. Rendering takes a loooooong time on the super-slow computers we have available, so we're doing some test composites of stills in Photoshop, just to make sure everything is hunky-dory. (This is all just quick testing; none of this is final. It's also a random frame from the animation with not a lot going on at the particular moment.)

We started with a straight-up "beauty pass," which is the basic output the computer spits out.

We could probably use it as is, but we can do better! Let's throw an "ambient occlusion pass" on top of it.

Ambient occlusion is a mode where the computer calculates the distance between objects. When things are close to each other, you see black; when things are far apart, they render as white.

Ambient occlusion is useful 'cos it can be really hard to make shadows work perfectly in 3D programs. When you overlay one of these passes onto another one, it helps make things look more realistic.

Side by side:


Just the beauty pass	With ambient occlusion

To make the nice depth of field--like you'd get in a real camera--on the first/very top/featured image, we took a "Z Depth" pass, which calculates a map of how far stuff is from the camera:

...which you then put into a lens blur and adjust accordingly.

Sooooo that's where that is right now.

[3ds Max, Photoshop]

ROUGH phaco animatic

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:39:00 +0000

(Can't see the video? Click here to watch it directly on Vimeo)

[THIS IS A ROUGH ANIMATIC. DON'T JUDGE YET.]

I've gotten some complaints that I never post anymore. This semester isn't really yielding a lot of postable stuff; I've been doing research, animating, working, and generally learning a bit more about video compositing... but generally, there's nothing I can post here, either for legal issues or because I feel it's not in keeping with the spirit of this blog.

With animating, it takes a pretty long time to go from zero to something cool, so I won't really be able to show you very much until April or May. I'm taking a group animation class, where four of us are working on an animation about cataract surgery (aka phacoemulsification, aka "phaco"), the rough bones of which you can see above. (I was/am responsible for animating about half of the actual surgery.)

It's a great experience. I'll admit I'm getting a little nervous as our deadline edges closer, but I'm confident that we'll pull it together in the end.

[3ds Max 2010]

ANIMATION!: seeing sound: an overview of the process of hearing!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:21:00 +0000

(Can't see the video? Click here to watch it directly on Vimeo)

Remember that teaser, with the ears and ossicles and everything? Here's the final.

This was my final animation for animation class, based on a storyboard I did a year ago about the process of hearing (which was originally intended for a Flash animation... turns out, it's a whole lot more complicated to pull off in 3D). There are a few things I'd re-render if I had the time for it, but as a first animation goes, I'm pretty proud of it. I've gotten a whole lot more comfortable with the process and software over the course of this semester, which helps me justify the insane hours I put into this thing. :)

I hope you enjoy it!

[mostly 3ds Max 2009; also ZBrush, Premiere, After Effects, Soundbooth, Poser, and some Maya 2008]

the race

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:25:00 +0000

...And now for something completely different.

At the AMI Salon this past summer, I think four or five of the winning entries involved sperms/eggs/fertilization.* And I'm glad I saw them, because otherwise, I wouldn't have thought to include a multicellular corona radiata layer on my ovum. I haven't had a good embryology lesson since high school.

Be prepared for an end-of-the-semester creation-dump over the next week or two. :)

*P.S. If you click the link, check out the black-and-white thumbnail on the top row, second from the right!

[Maya 2008]

ossicles

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:44:00 +0000

Just a teaser. More to come in a week or two.

(What is this?)

[3ds Max 2009; models built in Zbrush]

carotid endarterectomy!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:09:00 +0000

Above is a still (well... an example of what a still would look like, if I actually rendered everything out) from an animation/animatic/thing I did for my surgical illustration class.

Here's the moving stuff:

carotid endarterectomy!

We were only required to do the still and some storyboards, but I wanted to see how far I could get on an animation in a couple weeks. I mean, this is far from complete--yes, I have no textures, and my brain and heart are egg-shaped, and there's a lot of movement that needs tweaking--but it's also pretty far beyond a simple storyboard.

Oh--some vocab for people who don't necessarily have animation experience:
Steps of an animation:

Script: the words that will be spoken over the animation.
Storyboard: 2-dimensional drawings representing the planned steps of the animation.
Animated storyboard (good practice, but seemingly optional): taking the images you created for your still storyboard and "animating" them, slide-show/photo album style, to your scratch track--just to give you an idea of how long each scene/view needs to be.
- 3a. Scratch track: recorded narration that approximates what the final recorded narration will sound like. This is important if you don't have a fancy microphone or soundproof room handy, or if the final narration will be recorded by some voice actor who's currently in a different state. You don't want to wait until AFTER you've created the animation to realize your audio doesn't sync up with your video AT ALL.
Animatic: a very rough approximation of your final animation, usually using things like spheres and boxes instead of complicated models. Allows you to figure out the basic camera moves/angles and how they'll work in the final animation.
Animation: in a 3d situation, this is what you walk away with after you've gotten all your models, textured them, lit them, animated them, and rendered them. You'll often walk away with a bunch of render passes, too.
- 5a. Render passes: what if your client asks you to make a cell green? Will you have to go fix that one cell, wait ANOTHER 25 hours for everything to render out, and perfectly composite everything AGAIN? Render passes allow you to find your "cell pass" and make it green in After Effects (which would be a 10-minute fix instead of a 3-day ordeal), AND you can have much better control over subtle effects like shadows, highlights, depth of field, etc.
Really Final Animation: Take the animations you exported from your 3d program and compile everything/ edit everything/ make everything look spectacularly awesome in an awesome-video-making program like After Effects.

...Now I just need to actually do the animation for my Animation Class. Which will be pretty awesome when I'm done with it, I hope!

[Poser (man model), Osirix (artery model), Adobe Illustrator (beginnings of instruments), 3ds Max 2009 (most of the heavy work), Adobe Soundbooth (narration), Adobe Premiere (putting the animation together), Adobe Photoshop (still compositing)]

dodgeball!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:09:00 +0000

So a bunch of us are in the computer lab one day. Heidi is sitting next to me, looking up dance studios in Chicago that offer interesting/ inexpensive/ nearby-ish options for adult beginners. I mention that UIC has some kindsa classes. Heidi promptly discovers that THAT DAY is the deadline to sign up for UIC intramural dodgeball and immediately tries to get a team together. I am somehow recruited on the spot.

I have never played dodgeball in my life. Neither had a lot of the other people who got roped into this.

Within a few days, everyone's mild initial interest was replaced with "wow, yeah, this really isn't a good week for me, I'm gonna have to back out," and the team ended up dissolving before it ever really began. But before it did, Heidi convinced me to design a few mascots for our team (the ARTFUL DODGERS, 'cos we were a bunch of artists playing dodgeball AAAHAHAHAHAHA).

Yeah, so. Pity we didn't actually get to put these on t-shirts. :)

[Prismacolor 10% cool gray marker, Faber-Castell brush marker, and Adobe Illustrator]

THE LIGHT FROM WITHIN

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:49:00 +0000

The week before last was our department's superfantastic Armitage Lecture series. The event is held annually in honor of Frank Armitage, the incredible Disney Imagineer who did the set designs for The Fantastic Voyage. And Frank himself comes every year!

This year's special guest speaker was David Bolinsky, the guy who did the Inner Life of a Cell animation... but several speakers gave pretty inspirational talks-- mostly about medical animation. (Last year, the theme was apparently mural-painting and 3D mummy imaging.)

(also: here are some photos of the events of the day, taken by the lovely Sara Egner.)

Common themes that I heard (other people's interpretations may vary):
1. You really need to be an ambitious mover-and-shaker to be successful in this industry.
2. Networking is crucial.
3. It's cool to make medical art that doesn't look like people's perceptions of what medical art oughta look like.

Now, our third assignment for surgical illustration class was to create an editorial journal cover dealing with some aspect of a surgery we'd watched. After watching a vocal cord surgery, I found a recent article depicting a Transventricular Chondroplastic Laryngotomy... which I won't get into here (endolarynxes, thyroid lamina, blah blah blah). But part of what makes the surgery cool is that they light it with an endoscopic light, which makes the outside glow. The photos are copyrighted, but trust me, it's nifty.

Initially, when I got this assignment, I really wanted to do a retro-looking vector image (like this), but I was considering throwing in the towel and doing something a little more conventionally rendered and medical-illustration-looking.

After hearing all the Armitage speakers and all their talk of following your dreams, my initial impulse won out. I had a load of fun making this, and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!

Rock on, Armitage guests. Rock on.

[Adobe Illustrator]

sketchin' in the O.R.

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:46:00 +0000

Some more sketches from the operating room. Most of these aren't new, but I haven't posted them here yet. (The sketch above is the only view I had of a suture being stapled.)

And because someone requested more blood, here we go:

And, my personal favorite, lest you think everything I create in the OR is a work of awesomeness:

(It's actually two separate sketches. The one on top utilized lots of bloody gauze, which I took it upon myself to scribble in.)

[graphite stick, Ebony pencil, 10% cool gray Prismacolor marker, brush pen, & red colored pencil]

anatomy

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:05:00 +0000

There was another anatomical figure drawing session this year, so I went. Apologies to any first-years who were disturbed by my presence, but I can always use a refresher in this stuff. :)

[conte crayon on newsprint]

feeshie! (the beginnings)

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:50:00 +0000

This semester, I'm trying to get back into Maya a bit. So I am making a feeshie feesh!

The body is a bunch of NURBS, and the humble skeletal beginnings are polygons.
(You can also read this old blog entry for a basic description of the two.)

As a preemptive method of trying to actually get my research underway this semester, I opted not to take the intro Maya class that many of my classmates are taking. (It's taught by a different department, way over on a different part of campus.) But, since Maya seems to be preferred to 3Ds Max in the industry, I'd like to know the basics. I'm trying to remember some of what I learned over a year ago, and I'd like to figure out texturing this time. (What you see above is a really lazy texturing job so far--I'm hoping to improve upon it!)

So far this semester, I've dabbled for the first time with:

I'm trying to become slightly (very slightly) more fluent in

On the list of programs to tackle is

Mudbox (Wiki.);

On the wishlist, since our computer lab doesn't seem to have any copies, and I haven't convinced myself to buy them yet, are

Modo (Wiki.), and
Cinema 4D (Wiki.).

I am by no means an expert in any of these.

Side note: my search widget was apparently only searching post titles (what! nonono, bad searchbox), so I've updated it to the "new" Google-based search box. I'm not a fan--I mean, it's mostly functional, but ICK. The other option, as far as I can tell, is to put the dumb Blogger-bar back at the top of the page. Grrrrrrr.

[Maya 2008]

surgeries (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:59:00 +0000

Still going to surgeries and sketching.
Still having way too much fun sketching surgeons instead of surgical procedures.

I think I've gone through about 8 different methods/media for sketching so far, involving various combinations of marker, pen, 2H pencil, ebony pencil, and red & tan colored pencils.

Just for fun: brain surgery!

It really wasn't that exciting to watch, and I didn't get a lot of sketches, but every time I considered leaving, I thought, "Dude. BRAIN SURGERY." And that was that.

[10% cool gray Prismacolor marker, Faber-Castell brush pen, 2H pencil, ebony pencil]

surgery! for realz yo!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:12:00 +0000

A small part of the reason I've been doing all these sloppy sketches lately is 'cos I'm taking Surgical Illustration this semester, which has been summarized as "visual notetaking." Basically, you go hang out in an operating room during a surgery and sketch.

I've never done this before, and I probably know [as much as]/[less than] any of my readers know about operating room procedures.

In the above sketch, the surgeon was looking through a giant microscope (covered in clear plastic wrap... for sterility?) to see what he was doing; everything he could see through the microscope was projected on a TV in the front of the room. We had to wear lead aprons to go watch that one, 'cos they were shooting x-rays the whole time (for added visualization--it was a very tiny and difficult-to-access tumor. incidentally, the big ring-shaped/sideways-headphone-shaped contraption with fabric draped over it--if you can figure that out, 'cos my sketch is pretty messy--is for shooting said x-rays. I think. maybe.).

This one was a more standard/traditional surgery. (The surgeon is wearing a face shield.)

You're supposed to be sketching the SURGERY itself from the surgeon's perspective, but most of my procedure shots... well... could use some improvement. I am no expert; there's a reason I'm taking the class.

These were probably 1-5 minute sketches. Keep in mind that EVERYTHING IS MOVING while you're trying to draw.

[Prismacolor 10% cool gray marker, Faber-Castell brush marker, and 05 Micron pen]

loose woman

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:09:00 +0000

I was inspired by Barnaby Ward's work today. This bears little/no resemblance to his style. But it was fun, and I can always use some practice drawing figures.

[Corel Painter Essentials 4]

have a heart

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:21:00 +0000

So this is a left lateral view of a human heart for my advanced illustration class.

Our program director told us a few key illustrations that are good for a medical illustrator to have in his/her portfolio:

1. a nice face
2. nice hands
3. a well-rendered heart

So I thought I'd give the "well-rendered heart" a try in Adobe Illustrator.

I've always loved vector styles; since I'm planning on going into a field that's more technology-based than straight-up illustration, and since the instructor of the illustration class encouraged us to experiment/pursue our own signature styles, I thought I'd give this a shot.

Here is what I learned:
HEART FAT IS REALLY HARD TO RENDER.

I wish I could show you a screenshot of my Illustrator workspace--I keep about a million reference images just outside the borders of my artboard, and the space just looks ridiculous--but many of the images are copyrighted. It's one thing for me to download them for my own personal use, but to repost them online is probably not legal. So it goes.

[Adobe Illustrator]

hic!

noreply@blogger.com (Josy) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:46:00 +0000

(Click on the image for a larger view)

This is the anatomy of a hiccup (for my advanced illustration class). I was trying to come up with a topic, so I contacted several of my non-medical-illustration friends and asked them, "Hey, what's something medical that you've never really understood but wanted to see illustrated?" And this suggestion won out.

Here is some accompanying text:

With all the amazingly complex technologies being developed every day, it is astonishing that nobody has yet figured out the common hiccup.

While the exact cause and precise mechanism remain unknown, the basic macroscopic process for the common acute hiccup—though still technically speculation—is pretty well accepted.

Normally, the phrenic nerves, which innervate the diaphragm, begin in the neck and fan out on top of the diaphragm itself (fig. A).

This is all well and good until the stomach—cited as the most common precipitant of hiccups—is distended, either through too much food/drink or a lot of swallowed air. In the first part of the two-part hiccup, the distended stomach presses up against the diaphragm and irritates the phrenic nerve sitting on the other side of the diaphragm (fig. B). The irritated phrenic nerve sends a signal to the diaphragm, and the diaphragm contracts. The contracted diaphragm more-or-less pulls the bottoms of the lungs down, and air must rush in to fill the new space of the now-expanded lungs (fig. C).

Less than a second after the beginning of the influx of air, part two of the process begins. While air is rushing through the space between the two vocal cords (fig. D), muscles connected to the arytenoid cartilages (which are connected to the vocal cords) contract. The vocal cords snap shut, and the air that was rushing into the larynx can do nothing but bounce off, creating an audible “hic!” (fig. E).

And there we have it: the current theory behind a hiccup.

As it turns out, there was one scholarly article written about this subject in, ohhh, 1993? that basically seems to be the last time anyone studied the acute hiccup, and the UIC library didn't have it.

Sooooooo here we are.

[Adobe Illustrator]