Concept and Character Design

I'm trying to make up for not posting for months :)

So here's the latest character I've developed, which I'll be using for my next two animations. I'm currently modeling him and his ship, so hopefully some follow up posts to come soon!


And here's an animatic I did on a rather glum story idea... sorry for the downer :)

Animatic: The Door

It was a dark and stormy night... cliche, I know.

Animation Update

Hey everybody!

Sorry it's been so long since I updated! Here are a few animation exercises for your viewing pleasure:

Walk Cycle
Waiting Exercise

More stuff to come soon! I promise :)

Texturing and Lighting

A quick look at the last two assignments of the semester. We had about a week for each of these. All the models were provided, we were just responsible for texturing, and lighting them. Also posing the still life models.

I was pretty happy with both overall, though the cemetery could really use some work.

The Still Life: No subsurface scattering or ambient occlusion was allowed. Also, I wound up using depth map shadows as opposed to ray tracing, mostly because I liked the look I was getting, and I loved the time I saved test rendering by turning off the ray tracing attribute.


The Cemetery: I did use ray traced shadows for this one. We had to do two lighting setups, a daytime and a nighttime.



Here's a quick movie file of my daytime lighting on the cemetery. I apologize for the flash of black towards the beginning. When I rendered this one it failed to spit out one of the frames. I just haven't had time to fix it. One day!!

Click me to watch!

Yay Sit-Stand!

Here it is! Still could use a lot of work; from an animator's point of view a lot of it makes me cringe, haha. But it's done!!!!!

Click me and sit in boredom as I take forever to load! yay!

That other class that I have... but never post anything about.

Hey guys! Just a quick update: still busy but having fun! Below are a few of my concept development sketches, along with my animatic for a 30 second commercial. Enjoy!





This is the animatic: (it has sound by the way)

Click me to watch!

Sit-Stand Process Work

I'm back! Actually, I've been back for a while, just too busy to even sleep, much less keep up with a blog. I've finally conquered my mountain of homework that I've been behind on the entire semester, quite literally... so as soon as I'm done posting this I'm going to pass out for about a week and begin the whole catch-up process all over again. This is the life of a CA.

The semester so far has been all process work leading up to our animated short that we will produce in about a month. This is the first time we've worked with a full bi-ped character, and like most things related to animation, it all takes a lot of time. The animated short we will make soon is appropriately titled: the Sit-Stand. Three guesses as to what our characters have to do. Actually, if they had wanted to be perfectly accurate they should have called it the Enter-Sit-Stand-Exit... but that's a mouthfull.

Naturally we have to have a story to go with this, just watching someone sit then stand is a little boring. We began last semester developing a character and situation for the short. Then we started this semester by modeling our character. A quick background: My character is Bert as Ruffus the Dog. He works at a cheap state fair wearing a dog suit from a popular TV show to entertain the kids. He hates his job, but needs the money, therefor he's a glum chap who has to force a smile all the time.

Below is my Character Turn-Around and a screenshot of my modeled character with the wireframe visible for anyone interested in seeing what these things look like in-process. Also visible are the controls for the rig (essentially the skeleton of the character, it's what allows us to move them).


Once we had our characters modeled we began a series of other essential processes to get them ready to animate. Along the way we also began some animation exercises to test our rigs, get us used to the characters, and make sure everything we were doing was working properly. We've also done our first-pass (incomplete) textures. You'll be able to see those in the videos.

Here are the first three animation exercises we've completed, just click on the link to watch them:

The Finger Point
The Walk Cycle
The Turn

That's pretty much what I've got so far! I'll try and keep the blog a little more up-to-date, but no promises!

TA: Dialog Assignment

After some struggle here's my final for the lip sync project in traditional animation. Unfortunately, Monkey Jam was being weird and not wanting to cooperate with my layers, so sometimes he flickers a little bit.

Click me to watch!!