Updates!

Thesis character turnaround:

Snippets of work from my Summer internship at Pixar Animation Studios:

headed somewhere

So I've finally decided to make a 3D film for my next school project, thanks to a little encouragement from my professor. I was pretty hesitant about making the decision because I've no experience in rigging or cinematography. I can figure out ways to simplify texture and lighting, and even cinematography for that matter. But the thought of rigging makes me nervous.

I'm planning on a robotic, mechanical character to save time on rigging, but I still have very little knowledge on how I'd go about it. So I'm redoing this rigging assignment we did in class from the Modeling and Animation Handbook, and hoping I'll be able to figure things out.

Here's a little something I quickly doodled as "early concept art" while waiting for Final Cut Pro to render an edit I did for a small intern project. The mustache was a new addition to the character design I had in mind, but I don't know how I'd animate it quite yet. I've never worked with clusters and stuff.

I'm hoping I'll be able to learn something from one of my supervisors here at Humble. I finally got to meddle with some 3D stuff yesterday. I modeled this 2D paper cut-out-ish character using poly planes and used tools like the Sculpt Geometry tool, nonlinear deformers and a few others. It might be how South Park characters are modeled, I'm not sure. I read an article about it once. But I'm pretty sure I took a long round-about method because the texturing and stuff wasn't working as easily as it should've. Anyway, so this character has a mustache and I asked my supervisor if I could shadow him while he animates it. It probably won't get animated while I'm still here though.

Anyway, and here's another random thing I did in Flash while waiting to be assigned a project. It goes by a little faster than I wanted it to but didn't get the time to fix it. I wish these players would let you frame-by-frame the videos.

Also, I found a grey hair on my head today :( And I finally watched Despicable Me! It was awesome of course, except I felt like I missed out on a lot of gags at times cause sometimes there'd be so many going on at once, right after another, and there's a soundtrack playing practically all through out the film. But so entertaining and fun characters!

Asymptote

Almost done with the quarter.

So here's what I've been spending a lot of time on and finally finished. Well not finished. You never finish. As someone once said- (artworks) aren't finished, they're just abandoned.


Anyways. I've been devoting equally great amounts of time to all my projects in class, but considering the number of renders I've had to do until finally getting the lighting almost right and solving unexpected merged vertices problems in sneaky corners of the mouths making it look like there's a tiny hourglass lodged in there...and all that great stuff, this deserves to be put up first. Woo.


It's a pretty simple looking character. The clothing is not so elaborate. But I chose to design it that way because I knew the face, the rough look of the hair and the hands would easily take up the time allotted for the assignment (1 week, excluding designing the character) plus a little bit more :)

Here's the stuff I drew in prep for it (I have some satisfactory looking gesture drawings of Anya too but don't have them scanned with me so will post later): I modeled the head separately from the body, which is why the heads aren't so accurate in the first set of turnaround drawings. I realized issues with drawing the front view of a nose based on the side view and vice versa. And getting 3 dimensional eye sockets to work from two 2D drawings. Heh.





I'm still not entirely happy with the backlight. It makes the sleeves look really exposed and washed out during parts of the turnaround,

So her name is Anya. I don't know why her name is Anya. But I felt it was fitting. It's not even a British name, I don't think. But anyway, she's a British schoolgirl. Lofty yet mysterious. Rather, mysterious yet lofty. Yes, there's a difference. She's sort of based on a character (with a few major and a few minor differences of course) in a movie I want to make at some point in my life. The younger version of an older woman if you will. But anyway. I have a background story for Anya. I'm just not in a state of mind (aka. state of awakeness) to pen it down now.

And here....is something I got out of playblast by mistake. But here it is anyway.



Good night.

Milo, the Firefighter

So for my animation pre-production class, I'll be making the animatic for Milo, the Firefighter. It's about the imaginations of a 4 year old boy who aspires to be a firefighter.

This is my first time doing character sketches. These are just preliminary sketches I'm doing ahead of time. I'm not too satisfied with them, but they're up for comparison with later sketches and model sheets.


The main character is Milo.
The secondary ones are Dan (big bro), Tiffany (big bro's annoying girlfriend), Ella (Mom) and James (Dad). I really like the sketch of James with Milo on his lap. I don't know why, but I just felt like drawing it.

I still feel woozy and flu-y, but it's getting better. Touchwood.

More art stuff to come!