Michelangelo-like Marvel!

So, I made my first sculpture of my life today. Ok, not including some things i vaguely recall messing around with when I was 8. We got some clay a month or two ago and I finally found some motivation to sculpt with my dad. My dad used to be relatively good, but that was when he was younger than me, so he's obviously a wee bit out of practice. I'm excited to watch him as he gets back into it though, I think it'll be pretty cool.

As a side note, I feel like there's some joke to be made about how it's a clay rubber duck....of DOOM!

In This, Our Time of Reckoning

I find myself feeling extremely satisfied with myself and the work I have done over the past two weeks.

Especially the past four days, tuesday to friday.

Something inside of me turned me into a machine. I have been dedicated to the animations for the game to an extent that I'm pretty sure classifies me as obsessed. It's as if there's a spigot of work ethic inside of me that opened up and told me "WORK!!".

I have slept a total of 10 hours over the past 4 days. In that time I modeled two additional characters, animated all of the hero's sprites(111), another 121 sprites for the Skeleton enemy, and another 121 for the Knight and all of his actions.

So The Designer said he wrapped up the demo we've worked on for IGF and now it's just a matter of waiting.

In the mean time though, my work ethic doesn't feel like it's fading, so i'm still plugging away. I made a walk cycle for the skeleton character, and all of the character portraits. I've also resolved to do at least one walk and one run cycle every week. Since I was able to make something passable in about 40 minutes, I think that using a bit of my free time over the course of a week and fordcing myself to create full action cycles within this time frame will be great practice. On second thought, I'm thinking that the rules I impose myself should be one movement cycle(running, hopping, walking, skipping, swimming, etc....) and one non-cyclical action.

Also, i'm going to see if I can get myself to start consistantly sketching. I draw for my classes, but my ethic towards drawing extra-carricularly is significantly below where I want it to be.

With that said, here are the three reference sketches for the 3 characters i've modeled so far. I'll upload that characters themselves later on.

Knight, an enemy character.

Skeleton. Inspired by the Ray Harryhausen skeletons in Jason and The Argonauts.

Lastly we have the protagonist....of DOOM!!

I had almost forgotten that convention(of DOOM!) that I intended to use at some point in every post....of doom.

The Time of Reckoning Fast Approaches

So.... with only a few days left, it is very unfortunate that I have so many assignments to do this week. Including writing a speech, an After Effects project, and silhouettes for my next illustration project.

This is to be done in the same time that I try and crunch out my characters/animations for said characters in record time. With Tuesday(today), Wednesday, and Thursday being the days that I conceivably have to finish(maybe Friday morning too? though unlikely in the extreme).

So here is the final rig over which I have lost so much sleep as of late.

Wait....I can fix that! I can TOTALLY fix that....

*Ten Minutes Later*

Though I think the Grand, Stretchy-Armed, Groping Groin-Grab of DOOM! would be a very effective fighting technique for him, it would have caused cohesion problems with his fellow actors :P
Ok, so I think I've frozen everything's transforms, zeroed out all positions, checked all the orients, etc, etc....

The one thing i'm still worried about is the spine. I've never used one like it before and i'm kind of nervous about how it will work out.

Here he does his voodoo dance of anti-life induction(better known as "death").

Ok, so now that that's done. Tomorrow i'll make the Knight, though it was supposed to be done LAST week, the rig obviously delayed me quite a bit. So these time constraints obviously also mean that i'm going to be transfering over animations between characters. Though I do have the Skeleton model sheet done too, so hopefully I can get a version of those in as well to make up for my tardyness.

Now i'm off to bed, in order to get 5 or so hours of sleep before getting up to do my other projects, animate this little sucker, go to school, do my After Effects project, and then go home to do more game work. At some point in the day i'll also have to write and rehearse my speech :\


P.S. I realize that he doesn't have eyeballs OR a sword. I also realize that his frontal silhouette is weak, but luckily he won't be SEEN from the front. With that, i'm off to bed before i pass out in my chair xP