Animation, Artcamp, Awesomeness

I've neglected to post stuff to here for a while, so here's some update....

Finished my film about robots.

I gathered all my papers and notes from the process of that, so I'll do a few posts going over the whole process of making it, it's evolution, etc.

After that, I went and participated in Noah Bradley's Art Camp, which has been a ton of fun. Updates from that soon.

I had a surgery for a hernia, toward the end of that. I may post some pictures of my insides later on.

More recently I spent some time working on this

But I'm suffering from carpal tunnel at the moment, so that kind of stopped my progress on the SpiderBot for a bit. Expecting to get back to it soon, though =D

In between the Art Camp and resuming animating, I also started working on an independent game with some peeps. I'm really excited about that, and will start posting some updates from that when we get a little bit further along.

That's all, for now :)

Demo Reel

 Here's my demo reel, as of now. Will keep updating this and eventually migrate it to my website, as soon as that gets done.

Modulz

Applied for the Hasbro workshop here at school. So here are some bits from that.

Gestures :D

Sit Stand character sculpt. This was the first time I tried a zbrush centric workflow. Made the sculpt, then retopologized with NEX, UV, back to zbrush to project normal/displacement maps and do more sculpting on the face(that's the one with the eye lids). Had some horrible problems, realized my UV's were overlapping, then couldn't transfer uv's from the fixed model for some reason, learned an interesting work around involving messing with the heirarchy of the shape node and the transform node. Over generalizing here to keep from rambling too much, but the point is, it was a hell of an adventure.

Push Pull model. Had some interesting adventures with the push pull project, too. This time it wasn't the main character, but the "squid-ball" he pulls off the rock that later attacks him. Maya on our render farm wasn't interpreting the IK's position properly for motion blur. Ended up having to render a section locally, a handful of frames at a time.

Did this as a demo to show some friends how zbrush works. 1h30m, I think? Also did a shrunken head in an hour, but have no idea where that file ended up.

Color Photo

Awesome gallery of depression era photos. Fantastic work. http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Still Life

This is a texturing/lighting project from last semester that I decided to make a little video of the process for. I've been saving stuff from my Push/Pull, too, so that will pop up soon. I think I'm going to keep this as a theme.

PProgress....

DFA assignment turned in today. As with everything, there's so much that still needs to be done to it, but it will have to wait.

We started with thumbnails. I found it interesting to make random scribbles at high res, take a little section, then scale it down and back up so it loses resolution. The interpolation it does when it scales back up looks interesting, I think, as well as noise filters. Had a ton of fun.

Then we had to make some kind of sense of these things using characters we made in a previous assignment.

Then we picked one and ran with it, which is how I got the final at top. Some progress from the Push/Pull project. First one's my first render when I threw some lights in there, I love seeing where things start compared to where they end. It's interesting to see things so raw, with all the stand-in of where things get comped, where the bush goes, etc....

This is closer to where it's at, at the moment. Also, the basic blend shapes of my PP character. I just thought this was funny. He can do basic emoting now, but I plan on expanding the capacity of his facial rig after the semester is over, spend the winter making something REALLY pliable. Will post the animation when it's done :D

Animation Exercises

First one is a silhouette assignment, emphasis on posing and clarity. Character's required to go through 3 different emotional states.




This one is a character waiting with a prop. I have a friend who seems to have an outright physiological impairment with respect to waiting for the microwave to finish. Without fail, he always, ALWAYS stops the microwave with a few seconds left. On top of it, he'll heat things about a third of the time he's supposed to, and ends up either taking forever to heat his food, or eating it cold.




Now I'm working on Push/Pull(pretty much what it sounds like, but with our own character this time).