BLOG ARTICLE Interests | 9 ARTICLE FOUND
- 2010.07.04 Joyce Jonathan - Je ne sais pas
- 2009.06.20 Kobe Bryant, the MVP of NBA Finals 2009 1
- 2009.04.11 Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen.
- 2009.04.07 50 Jobs in 50 States
- 2008.06.08 쿵푸 팬더.. 1
- 2008.02.08 콜라와 햄버거 그리고 미국의 정신..
- 2008.02.08 돈과 행복의 상관관계 2
- 2007.05.19 Imocap Technology !! Pirates of the Caribbean (Dead Man's Chest) 5
- 2006.10.26 [펌] 대한민국에서 부자되기..? :) 1
어느 팀이 더 보기 좋을까 ...?
Kobe Bryant's Best
Hopefully, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is scheduled for a June 26, 2009 release.
SBS 스페셜에 방송된 다니엘의 모험기
FOXNews- Daniel Seddiqui
실패와 좌절까지도 마음껏 경험하며 도전과 용기를 마음껏 드러내야 할 20대.
하지만 우리가 만난 20대들 중 상당수는 자신의 꿈은 안정된 직장에 들어가는 것이라고 이야기 했다. 안정된 삶이 인생의 꿈이 돼버린 시대. 이것이 20대만의 문제일까.
최근 미국의 언론은 남다른 길을 선택한 한 청년의 이야기를 앞 다투어 보도했다. 남캘리포니아주립대(University of Southern California) 경제학과를 졸업하고 40번이나 면접을 봤지만 취업에 실패한 스물여섯 살의 청년 대니얼 세디키(Daniel Seddiqui).
세디키는 안정적인 회사에 취직하려던 계획을 버리고 6개월 전부터 미국 50개 주를 돌아다니며 매주 한 가지씩 50가지의 직업체험에 나섰다. 안정을 포기하고 새로운 것을 찾아 떠난 도전에서 그가 만난 것은 과연 무엇일까.
그의 홈페이지 : Living the Map !
특이하게도 온갖 언론에 비춰진 영상과, 추억들 그리고 이력서가 담겨있다.
나의 일상에도 무언가 자극이 될만한..
활력소가 필요하다 !
아이언맨에 이어 넋을 잃고 보고야 말았다.
13구역 같은 액션을 좋아하는 나로서는 정말 흡족하기만 하다.
코믹한 부분도 많아서 끝날때까지 웃었는데 ㅎ..
등장이 너무나도 화려했던 타이렁의 엔딩이 허무하긴 하지만..
2편을 준비하기 위한 어설픈 마무리인 듯..
하면 된다. 정말 마음에 드는 주제와 문구..
OST는 비(Rain)이 불렀는데..
역시 월드 스타인가?
이미지 출처 : 네이버
돈과 행복, 무엇이 먼저인가?
재테크 전문가들이 가지는 고민거리중의 하나가 돈과 행복에 관한 상관관계이다. 돈에 쪼들리는 분들은 돈만 많으면 무슨 걱정이 있느냐고 말씀하시지만 이분들이 생각하는 돈 많은 분들을 만나보면 반드시 행복하지만은 않다는데 고민이 있다. 그래도 돈을 많이 모았다는 자체는 다른 사람들의 부러움을 살 수 있는 요건 중 하나는 충족한 셈이다. 많은 분들이 행복의 전제조건으로 돈을 드는 이유는 돈이 개입되지 않은 일이 거의 없기 때문이다. 따라서 돈을 모으는 것을 우선적인 가치로 둘 수밖에 없다. 돈을 모으는데 절대적인 가치를 두게 되면 다른 많은 것을 희생할 수 밖에 없다. 하루에 14시간을 일하고, 주말에도 회사에 출근하고, 좋은 옷, 좋은 차를 사는 것은 고사하고 아이들과 그 흔한 회식한 번 못하면서 처절할 정도로 아끼고 일해서 돈을 모으는 사이에 아이들은 커버려 대학생이 되어 있고 부인은 자기 나름대로의 대안을 찾아 나가는 과정에서 아빠는 돈 버는 기계로 가족들로부터 왕따를 당하고 말게 된다. 가족을 위해서 죽도록 일한 결과가 왕따 라면 정말 억울할 것이다. 우리는 돈과 행복의 상관관계를 어떻게 규정하고 있을까?
행복한 부자의 조건
“행복한 부자”란 한마디로 ‘가치 있게 돈 버는 사람’을 의미한다. 여기서 “가치”란 ‘진,선,미’와 같은 철학적 가치가 아닌 삶의 과정에 있어서의 중요성의 의미이다. 한편, “돈 버는 사람”이란 객관적인 돈의 많고 적음을 의미하는 것이 아니다. 돈을 버는 방법을 알고 있는 사람이며, 절대적의 자산의 크기 보다는 소득의 창출 능력을 의미한다. 가치있게 돈 버는 사람의 의미는 돈과 가정의 행복을 모두 소중히 여기는 사람을 말한다. 결국 행복한 부자란 “가치 있는 삶을 살아가면서도 자신에게 필요한 돈을 충분히 벌 수 있는 사람을 의미한다.”
그런 것이 가능할까? 무엇인가 포기하지 않고 어떻게 돈을 벌 수 있을까?
가치 있게 돈 버는 방법 중 한 예가 “자신의 꿈과 계획을 가족과 공유하는 것”이다. “내가 이렇게 고생 고생해 가면서 돈 버는 이유가 다 당신과 아이들이 행복해 지기 위한 것”이라고 아무리 주장해봤자 가족은 아빠를 돈 버는 기계 이상으로 생각하지 않을 것이다. 우리가 진정 행복한 모습으로 살아가고자 한다면 돈도 많이 벌어야 하며, 누구의 희생에 의해 그렇게 되는 것이 아니라 온 가족이 같은 방향으로 움직일 수 있는 신뢰를 상호간에 쌓아야 한다. 따라서 남편은 부인을 함께 돈을 버는 동반자로 인식하여야 하고, 부인은 돈을 벌고 있던 아니던 남편의 삶의 과정을 바르게 지켜주는 파수꾼이 되어야 한다. 또한, 자녀가 부모의 돈에 대한 철학을 이해할 수 있도록 가르쳐야 한다.
왜곡된 부자의 모습
우리가 살아가면서 정말 크게 왜곡된 생각을 가지고 있는 사실이 특별한 부자들의 모습이다. TV속에 부자는 하나 같이 좋은 차에 좋은 집에, 명품을 쓰는 모습으로 나타난다. 부모를 잘 만난 부잣집 자녀들의 사랑이야기를 정말 시청자들이 좋아해서 그런지는 몰라도 우리가 직접 접하지 못한 부자의 모습들은 대부분 이런 간접적인 경험을 통해 볼 수 밖에 없다. 대부분이 의사나 변호사, 회장이나 사장 아들, 연예게 스타나 아주 특출한 투자 능력을 가진 영웅들이 부자의 모습으로 나타나고 있는데 이는 뭔가 특별한 영웅이 좋은 이야깃거리가 되기 때문이다.
많은 부자들의 모습은 건강을 위해 지하철을 타고 다닌다는 이유를 대면서 대중교통수단을 이용하고, 허름한 작업복을 입고 5000원짜리 설렁탕을 즐겨하는 분들로, 일반인과 다를 것 없는 생활을 하는 분들이다. 이분들의 모습 어느 곳에서도 우리가 일반적으로 생각해 왔던 부자의 모습을 찾기는 어려운데, 이런 습관은 대부분 자수성가하는 과정에서 몸에 배인 것들이다. 만약 이분들을 대상으로 드라마를 만든다면 매우 따분하고 재미없음은 자명하다.
한 조사기관의 발표에 의하면 당대의 부가 다음세대까지 이어지는 확률은 3분의 1 밖에 되지 않는다고 한다. 반면에 자영업자, 소규모 사업자, 전문직 종사자 등이 새롭게 부자가 되는 비율은 전체 부자의 80%이상이 당대에 이루고 있다. 희망을 가져도 좋을 것 같다.
돈과 행복의 상관관계
행복은 욕망 충족의 과정이다. 욕망을 충족하는 방법이 풍족한 소비에 있다면 행복하기 위해서는 많은 돈이 필요하다. 그러나 만약 욕망이 소득의 증가에 비해 더 빠르게 증가한다면 아무리 많은 돈을 벌어도 절대 행복할 수 없다. 욕망의 증가는 대부분 상대와의 비교가 원인이 된다. 따라서 나보다 더 많이 벌고 더 많이 쓰는 사람이 있는 한 절대 행복할 수 없다.
행복의 원리를 안다면 행복해 질 수 있는 방법도 쉽게 알 수 있다.(그러나 실제로 이렇게 행하기는 낙타가 바늘구멍 들어가는 것 보다 어려울 수 있다. 하지만 자신이 소중하게 생각하는 가치를 위해 살아가는 습관을 얻게 되면 행복은 저절로 굴러 들어온다.) 먼저, 욕망을 억제하는 것이다. 이 것이 힘들면 다음으로 욕망의 증가를 소득의 증가보다 늦추어야 한다. 이것도 힘들다면 적어도 남과 비교하지는 않아야 한다.
욕망의 실현은 실로 다양하게 나타난다. 다른 사람에게 자선을 베푸는 것도 한 방법이요, 고급 차를 타는 것도 방법이요, 공부를 하여 지식의 욕구를 채우는 것도 방법이다.
이제 결론으로 돌아가자.
행복해 지기 위해서는 “자신이 가장 소중하다고 생각하는 가치”를 찾는 것이다. 자신의 가치를 버리고 남이 가진 가치를 추구하고 그 것이 없다고 실망한다면 남이 가진 가치를 찾았다고 하더라도 결국은 행복해 질 수 없다.
명심 또 명심할 것은 자신의 소중한 가치를 다른 사람의 잣대로 재지 않는 것이다.
ILM raises the character animation bar with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and Bill Desowitz gets an overview from John Knoll and Hal Hickel.
By Bill Desowitz
[ Posted on July 14, 2006 ]
With the help of the Imocap system, Bill Nighy’s creepy Davy Jones is the next great CG performance after Gollum and King Kong. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. Photo credit: ILM. |
As most of you have seen by now, the results of the character animation are very impressive. They’ve already begun talking about the creepy Davy Jones as the next great CG peformance beyond Weta’s Gollum and King Kong. Lord of the Deep and commander of the mysterious Flying Dutchman ghost ship, Jones is a delicious mutation: part human and part squid, with a beard full of wiggly tentacles, and crab-like claws.
Unable to rely on traditional MoCap or hand animation, ILM created an innovative new system called Imocap that allowed onset and on location motion capture to elicit the most believable look and performance possible out of actor Bill Nighy.
“The characters required a lot of careful examination of human performances and then trying to combine that with the animation,” explains animation supervisor Hal Hickel. “We knew that there were going to be actors cast to play Davy Jones and his crew, and that those actors would be on set in the plates that we were going to be put those CG characters into and that somehow we had to extract the motion of the performances without having to reshoot later. We didn’t want to bring the mocap stage onto the set. So the R&D and MoCap groups came up with a solution: special [sensor-studded] suits that would be worn by Bill Nighy and other actors playing his crew. We would take reference cameras onto the sets and untethered cameras out on location with lightweight tripods and position them at angles off of what the main taking camera was seeing. This allowed us to track the movements and provided great data from the hero plates with the actors in them, casting their real shadows and making good eye contact with the live actors, and then we were able to extract their motion and apply it to our CG characters and put those characters right on top of the actors. There’s still a lot of animation artistry in there because there’s a lot of interpretation. This is just about getting the skeletal motion of the character; we still did all of the facial animation by hand [in Zeno].”
A second R&D project at ILM involved creating Davy Jones’ tentacle beard itself. Many tests were done to get the behaviors right. |
Zeno added an additional challenge. ILM came into Dead Man’s Chest with only a small portion of its creature pipeline function intact. War of the Worlds and The Island, the two previous projects done with Zeno, were primarily hard surface works. The creature work on those didn’t need cloth, sim, flesh or hair. A large part of the effort was re-enabling the pipeline, particularly the facial animation.
Meanwhile, the second R&D project involved the tentacle beard itself. “Our R&D folks worked with James Tooley, our sim guru [creature development supervisor], and Karin Derlich [creature technical director], who came up with behaviors,” Hickel adds. “And we’d do tests and I’d say, ‘This one is too tentacly and this one feels too much like an elephant’s trunk and this one feels too much like a snake.’ We would look at tons of octopus references. After we got it, then those behaviors were added to the solver through what we call ‘Joint Motors,’ so all the tentacles were divided into little joint segments and each segment was essentially a little motor that was directed to move this way or that way. So those joint motor impulses were sent out at the same time the tentacles were receiving force information: I need to swing this way, I need to swing that way… and so it would all happen together.
“Once we added those behaviors to our sim engine, the last thing we needed was something called ‘Sticktion,’ which is a combination of friction and stickiness. The problem was that without Sticktion, the tentacles would just slide onto each other. We really wanted them to be this heap of viscous tubes that would stick to each other and stick to his chest. And the ones at the bottom of the stack would stick there in a big matte. The biggest ones out in front that hang from his chin and moustache-like tentacles could really swing around.”
The crew of The Flying Dutchmen features a cast of characters with visual references to the ocean and its creatures, including coral, sea sponges, barnacles, mussels, hammerheads and puffer fish.
“Imagine a piece of spaghetti sticking to a leather jacket,” suggests visual effects supervisor John Knoll. “That was the effect I wanted to get. R&D added this subtle stickiness to the engine.”
“The great thing,” Hickel continues, “is that as complicated as it was, once Karin came up with basic settings for all of the controls, the sim artists got up and running very quickly. I’m pretty amazed by that, actually, because this was very stressful for me. Back in December, when we really didn’t have this working yet, there was no plan B. We couldn’t animate it by hand and we looked at other sim possibilities, but they didn’t achieve what we had in mind. There are more than 200 shots and 15 minutes of screen time of Davy and we had only one artist who knows how to do this.”
With as many as 50 animators working together on a total of 18 CG characters, there were plenty of technical and artistic challenges. “What makes these characters so complicated is that they are encrusted with sea life and we had to figure out ways to cover them with barnacles and such,” Hickel observes. “We wrote tools that the modelers used where they had a sea life picker, where they could pick a mussel or a barnacle. As our model supervisor, Jeff Campbell, said, it was a little like flower arranging. And they also used ZBrush for displacement textures for the sea life and for the characters themselves and our usual suite of modeling and paint tools.”
The crew of The Flying Dutchmen include Ogilvey, who has a sea sponge head; Palafico, whose head is a red fan coral and very translucent; Koleniko, in which one side of his face is a puffer fish and can puff up with spines; and Knoll’s favorite: a crab-like creature whose head rotates in and out of the shell.
The Kraken’s tentacles modeled in Maya. The creature was keyframe animated with some flesh sim enhancements in Zeno, courtesy of the new creature pipeline. |
Utilizing ILM’s new fluid dynamics engine, developed in cooperation with the Stanford University research program, Dead Man’s Chest, like Poseidon, contains improved CG water, in which nifty algorithms are put through multiple processors. And thanks to Zeno, which has been described as “Maya on steroids,” you can introduce particle controls, Soft Body, Rigid Body controls and other techniques.
“We started out in parallel with Poseidon, but they got into a bit of a crisis and we loaned them my entire water crew,” Knoll admits. “They wrapped in April and I got them back to finish my shots. They really pushed the envelope. The development they did at the end of Poseidon really paid off here. We did a lot of difficult water shots right up to the last day. The crew really knew what nobs to turn to get it to look good. We used CG water around the bases of the tentacles when they’re sloshing back and forth underwater. The Flying Dutchman travels underwater and reaches the surface like a submarine, so those shots were done with CG water as well, and the Dutchman is 380 feet long. We got realistic droplet size and realistic dispersion of particles.”
The scenes on Cannibal Island, where Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) narrowly escapes, contain a large number of shots where you see different variations of the same view under different lighting conditions, so Knoll and matte supervisor Susumu Yukuhiro needed to think about a 3D solution. “We saw ads for a product called Vue. It’s designed for organic landscapes and getting realistic renders. We started playing around with it and it became our primary tool for big, exotic landscapes.”
Overall, Knoll believes Dead Man’s Chest takes character animation another step forward at ILM, especially considering Nighy’s performance. “There are not as many shots numerically as on Sith, but it’s [a greater accomplishment] in terms of the amount of shots in the time that we had. Sith had 2,400 shots in about two years and this had 1,000 shots in about five months, but the average shot complexity was higher than on Star Wars.”
Looting CG Treasure From Dead Man’s Chest — Part 2
Bill Desowitz concludes our two-part coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest with a report on ILM’s innovative Imocap system.
By Bill Desowitz
[ Posted on July 17, 2006 ]
Tasked by director Gore Verbinski to come up with more complex and authentic-looking CG characters in Dead Man’s Chest, since Davy Jones and the crew of The Flying Dutchman would be interacting closely with the live actors, Industrial Light & Magic put its R&D team to work on a new incarnation of its proprietary motion capture system, dubbed Imocap. The results of Jones are so impressive, in fact, that people have already begun talking about the sea-encrusted villain with his creepy tentacle beard as the next great CG performance breakthrough.
ILM’s new Imocap was used to create the CG characters of Davy Jones and his crew in Dead Man’s Chest. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc. Photo credit: ILM.
Early concept art for Davy Jones. | |
Imocap became a new protocol for measuring the actors and obtaining data during the actual shoot for the creation of skeletal motion in the computer. The software contained added functionality and new ways of tracking data. Special sensor-studded suits for the actors playing CG characters were created, which were more comfortable than typical MoCap outfits, as the actors were required to wear them in a variety of simple and treacherous conditions. “…On set, I wore a gray suit, which had reference points comprised of white bubbles and strips of black-and-white material, so that when they come to interpret your physical performance, they’re better placed to do so,” adds Bill Nighy, who plays Davy Jones.
According to Sullivan, “the suits needed to be ‘dignified.’ They had to be comfortable and not look ‘stupid.’ There were a few iterations of the material itself, which started out as a cotton blend but ended up being a stretchy, semi formfitting material. And we arrived at a neutral gray to help with our lighting calculations... and we used some markers and bands to help with the capture process itself. Those needed to be comfortable as well. Cameras were based on location and shooting conditions.”
“For shots where we used reference cameras, Kevin Wooley, our Imocap lead, housed some cameras in watertight enclosures and wired them to a computer for storing the images,” explains animation supervisor Hal Hickel. “This was great for the onset stuff. For beaches and jungles, we used untethered cameras with lightweight tripods. They were a little more trouble on the backend because they weren’t synchronized to each other, but both solutions worked well, and will continue to be used on the third Pirates movie [At World’s End].”
Thus, by integrating the MoCap process with the actual shoot — providing the animators with hero plates with the actors in them, casting their real shadows and making good eye contact with the live actors — they were able to create, for instance, a more expressive, nuanced performance out of the maniacal Davy Jones, with the help, of course, of Nighy.
Davy Jones and the crew of The Flying Dutchman interact closely with live actors throughout the film.
“We had new ways for the computer to analyze the images,” Sullivan continues. “The software piggy backed on MARS, the matchmoving [and tracking] solver. It understood what the actors could and couldn’t do. Our process is more holistic than traditional MoCap. We try to capture the whole body at once from different kinds of information, and that allows the flexibility to use many kinds of cameras and to work with partial information sometimes.
“The product of Imocap comes out as an animated skeleton, just like regular MoCap, and the animators do with that whatever they want, with artists in the middle running the post process. Sometimes they’ll need to cheat the body to get a better composition of the image. But the advantage is that the animators are overriding things and animating for performance reasons rather than just getting the basic physics and timing down. That all comes from the actor.”
Although ILM is currently developing its own facial performance capture system, Hickel determined this wasn’t the time to introduce yet another R&D component. “We have a lot of confidence in our facial animation, so we decided to do it by hand. The creature pipeline was being moved over to Zeno and most of the faces were different enough from the actors anyway.”
During the actual shoot on beaches and jungles, ILM used untethered cameras with lightweight tripods to measure the actors and obtain data that was then used to create the characters’ skeletal motions in the computer. |
Concludes visual effects supervisor John Knoll: “For us, it’s taken character animation another step forward with Davy Jones and how nice Bill Nighy’s performance comes through.”
Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.
Note: Readers may contact any VFXWorld contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@vfxworld.com.