The Eternally Ongoing Trilobite Restoration Project

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January 23, 2006
I've used the time over the past few months to finalize the textures of the trilobite. This involves far more than just determining the colors, since in 3D, all aspects of the object's interaction with light have to be determined by "maps". These are paintings that show the program whether a given area is to be dull or shiny, bumpy or smooth, or even transparent, translucent or opaque. The maps applied to the trilobite are about 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, which makes them fairly large. This will allow me to zoom in on the animal without having the map detail become grainy or pixellated. While I had initially thought that I was going to create the maps using the UV coordinates that I had set earlier and painting the maps in Photoshop, in the end, it proved easier to create the UV maps in ZBrush and create the textures by painting on the object itself in 3D. In addition, I used the texturing plug-in for Lightwave G2 to allow me to manipulate the way the edges of the trilobite accepts reflection, as well as allowing me to make the thinner areas of the shell translucent. You can see the G2 effects in the image at top left, where the blue of the surrounding water is strongly reflected in the edges and the legs are blurrily visible through the shell-fins on the sides of each segment.

In other big news, Richard Fortey has submitted a paper to rename Opipeuter inconnivus to Opipeuterella inconnivus. I haven't gotten to a library yet to read the paper, and all the online versions require expensive memberships before you can read the entire paper, but I gather from the title that there was a question of precedence for the name. I believe that there is a genus of lizard already named "Opipeuter". So, I'm going to have to completely rerecord the soundtrack for the movie, since dubbing "-erella!" after every mention in the existing script would be really messy.
Click on the above window to see an animation of the textured trilobite. It's slightly jerky, because to save rendering time, I rendered alternate frames.

Quicktime, Sorenson 3, approximately 1 MB

February 21, 2006
Finally a completed composite. The scene was rendered in layers, with the foreground particles, background particles, and trilobite all rendered separately and assembled as layers. This lets me concentrate on getting the look for each element precisely right. The foreground seaweed particles are "Hypervoxels", a Lightwave virtual volumetric particle. They are generated mathematically around an otherwise invisible point or particle.. I made a group of particles to deal with the look of the "flow", and then tweaked the settings on the Hypervoxels until they looked like seaweed.

Click on the image at left to view a small version of the animation. 4.5 MB, Quicktime Sorenson 3.

March 11, 2006
The old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees is certainly true of me. I completely forgot that trilobites have limbs in both the head segment and the tail (or "telson"). This was patiently pointed out to me by Dr. Sam Gon, and after rending my hair for a day or two, I got back to work and added the limbs and rerendered. They don't appear too well in this view, but in the setup animation below, the difference should be clear. In addition, I cleared up a little glitch that caused the eyes to render as gray, colorless and in need of antialiasing. I also changed the spotlights to area lights, which softens the shadows a little and better approximates "real" lights. Barring feedback that indicates that I've made yet another unforgivable error, I'll be going on to set up and render the next segment.

This is the revised render, about 5.5 MB, Sorenson 3 compression.. Click to open the animation.

This is a frame from the test preview of the motion of the new limbs. Click on it to view the test. 1.5 MB, Quicktime Sorenson. It's pretty big, too.