All Good Things

and some more Texturing...

2012-01-29T01:05:00.000-08:00

And more texturing to come! Thanks for the feedback on Avalon everyone! But for today I decided to get Caldera out of the way, I'll be tweaking Avalon probably tomorrow. For now, here is our favourite pompous and short-sighted dictator!

Might be adjusting the shiny-ness of his shoes and cuffs, but other than that this is probably how he's going to look in the end.
Jan 29 EDIT: Just gonna edit this post with the tweaks to these texures:

Texturing!

2012-01-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

Nearly done the character's textures. Which I was hoping to have done much earlier, but I don't feel it's too bad of a set back, yet.
Anyways, I showed Mantel before, working on Caldera right now, but here's Avalon. After some mentor and peer feedback, I've decided to fiddle with her colors a bit, the first image is the original textures. It was suggested to maybe change her skin color entirely, so I gave that a whirl, a little undecided on this, but it's not hard to fiddle with. Let me know what you think!

Animatic Update

2012-01-17T22:09:00.000-08:00

A few updates, this version has the animated scene 2 cut in (still not done) as well as several key changes to the ending. I'm trying out this panning of the cannons rolling out instead of the big long shot of the ships floating in as the big finale shot. The old shot was too fast and too far away, ambiguous etc. I feel the shot works but I'm not sure if it works well enough as the very last shot, so let me hear your ideas!

Heartburn Animatic 18 01 2012 from Stephen Good on Vimeo.
Also, finally dove into mudbox and got with the sculpting of the landscapes, well one of them. I've also finalized Mantel's textures. So here's one shot of each of those, I'll take another landscape shot sometime when I've got the real lava effect in there, that should (fingers-crossed) look real nice.

PS: actually I made a change to Mantel's texture but forgot that I hadn't fixed it for this render. His clothes aren't gonna be that 'bumpy'

Rough Animatin'

2011-12-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

So we had a project for our 3D class where we needed to render out a scene with a rigged character, a prop, a background with some depth (for later compositing), and 100 frames of animation. Conveniently, my scene 2 for my film fits all those requirements, so I put together this rough version of the scene:
The finished scene will have dialogue/lip sync, some heat ripples (in addition to the current light rippling), and that run is a bit frantic, so I might slow it down.
In other news, felt like for some reason sharing the face-rig setup I have for Mantel, mostly cause, with the control-surfaces showing, he looks rather Mickey-esque :)

Now back to riggin' with me.

Heartburn in December

2011-12-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

Well it's been a very busy couple of months! I put this animatic together 2 weeks ago:

There's a few changes to the shots that are needed, but for now I am rigging. Mantel's rig is done, and his textures are almost done as well. Everyone else is still sitting at geometry done, except the city Acheron, some details on the airship Ecclesia and the volcanic landscapes. Here's some renders:

I really need to catch up on the geometry and textures before Christmas break. I'll have the rigs done by Friday, so I'll be able to put up some vids of the characters moving around then. And no, I am not suffering from indigestion.

Heartburn

2011-10-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome back! Well I had a fantastic summer internship at Chuck Gammage Animation Studios (http://www.cganim.com/) where I learned lots more about modelling, texturing, lighting and rendering in Maya. I'd go into more detail, but I think for now, and the rest of the school year, this blog will be focusing on developing this little film here.

"Heartburn" started up in the summer 2 years ago. I knew I didn't want to be fumbling around too much with story when I got around to 4rth year, so I laid out the premise, environment, characters and action during that summer, along with some initial design work.
I also knew, that this film would be done entirely 3D animation, using Maya:

The city Acheron, with its massive armoured wall to protect it from eruptions.

Designs for the ship, Charon, anti-lava suits, and structures inside the city Acheron.

Old character lineup. At top, Mantel, a worker, Caldera, a soldier and another worker. Below the lineup are various ideas for Mantel, and Avalon (the stripey girl)

At the start, the story was about an engineer named Mantel who wanted to be free of the terrible conditions in the city, Acheron. Mantel builds a ship, the Charon, to cross the lava ocean to freedom. The oppressive General Caldera is angered by Mantel using resources and manpower on what Caldera thinks is a fruitless, suicidal effort, so Caldera banishes Mantel and forces him to leave before the Charon is ready. The ship breaks down out on the lava ocean, it floods with lava and everyone onboard but Mantel is killed. Mantel, clinging to the last bit of unmelted ship, then rides the ship down as it falls off an immense lava-fall at the edge of the lava ocean. Mantel wakes up on a piece of scrap metal floating in a water ocean, where the girl, Avalon, swims up and saves him.

From the start I knew the idea I had was much too 'epic' to present in a short film, so I thought of a few ways to show a snippet of the larger universe I envisioned. The design style also evolved, initially I imagined a fairly straightforward sci-fi style for costumes, props and buildings. Around August this year I realized I wanted a more identifiable style, so I had a simple thought, "everything is trains". I love trains. So I decided the costumes, props, sets and vehicles would all be designed around the world of late 1800's steam locomotives:

Avalon's swimsuit wasn't very 1800's like, so I started considering more era-appropriate dress.

Caldera's 'steamsuit' was steampunky enough, but too limiting for movement, and still too sci-fi compared to Mantel and Avalon.

His new suit took reference from the American civil war. He's got a cow-catcher for a collar, his cane has a little boiler on the end of it. Not seen here is his monocle.

The Charon's inital design is on the top right. Current design is the big one. The top left design is again, steampunky, but you can't see a train anywhere in it.

The airship Ecclesia, Avalon's vessel that she uses to rescue Mantel from the falling Charon. At the very beginning it was a sailing ship just seen in the background on the water ocean. As I fiddled with the plot, Avalon took on a much more active role. The current story has a great big beauty shot with the Ecclesia diving down past camera. Current design is on the right, though I'm adding a few more side propellers.

These last 2 months were dedicated to getting our stories as close to where we want them as possible. Changes can still be made until December, but not very big ones. Heartburn now consists of the action of Caldera trying to get rid of the rebel Mantel, who is being supported from the outside by Avalon. Mantel is nearly killed by Caldera, and in Mantel's failed escape he is rescued by Avalon with her massive airship. Avalon and Mantel return together to overthrow Caldera.

The film is 1 minute 44 seconds long, that's including the title and credits as they are. I don't expect it to get much shorter. The voices here are all done by me, with the assistance of some audio editing, I'm contacting a voice actor to see if I can get some professional voices for the final film. Here's the leica!

Everyone says this is an ambitious project, and I completely agree. My goal is to challenge myself this year. I plan to finish this film as I envision it. However, I have a backup plan, that I can animate at least 1 minute of the entire story and call it a demo.
This week (which is reading week) I am diving head first into modelling the characters; Mantel, Caldera and Avalon. Ahead of me is modelling the sets, props and the two ships. Then there's texturing, and then rigging. All of this is to be done before Christmas break.
Somewhere in modelling, rigging and texturing I also have to figure out exactly how I will generate the lava. I intend to use realflow, where needed, and I need to learn how to handle that.

Cars

2011-03-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

So here's what I got together from the Auto Show. I started with just pencil work, then by the time I got to drawing this wonderful Ferrari 458 Italia I decided to use markers. I was happy enough with the result that I went ahead and marker-ed the other drawings I liked, and this is the result.

Pixar much? At the end of Cars they had a cameo with Michael Schumacher as himself, as a Ferrari. Of course, he was a Ferrari F430, which doesn't have quite the same visual effect (for me) as the 458 Italia. So what I'm saying is they better put the 458 Italia in Cars 2. And a Delorean while they're at it.

No, the Stig (read: Top Gear!) was not there, but I wanted to have at least 1 'human' in my assignment, so I dropped him in. Here he contemplates how he's going to get in to this decidedly too-small Audi kart. The size was on purpose, in real-life this thing looked like it was designed for a kid.

And to be cyclical, there was an episode of Top Gear where Michael Schumacher claimed to be the Stig, so have I drawn the same "person" twice here?

Here's the photo reference!

Internship!

2011-02-25T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hey folks! I think I'll put up some art here soon, but for now some news!

So I got myself an internship position at Chuck Gammage Studios in Hamilton! I'll be working with 3D projects, hopefully a little bit of everything; modelling, rigging, animating. Here's their website so you can see what they do: http://www.cganim.com

SO I'm very excited for this, it's a great studio and I get to do 3D! Also, finally no lame jobs over the summer. I've never been employed as an artist before, this is the next step up towards the dream.

Meanwhile, today we went down to the Toronto Auto show, oddly enough for Life Drawing class. Didn't draw any people, but I took a somewhat caricatured approach to drawing the cars (I think), I'll have some art from that up once I finish working on it. Till next time!

Goaticorn and Portfolio

2011-01-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't noticed, off to the right here I've got a link to my online portfolio now. Prospective employers for my internship this summer will be directed there as I keep applying. Most of the stuff on there has been put up here in some form, mostly the life drawings are new.

Also this is new. It's that model+rig I was talking about. The 2D design was done by my fellow classmate Keely, but everything 3D is my handywork: model, texture, rig and animation. I wasn't able to make much else new since this took a lot of effort on its own, possibly I might make more and update the portfolio later, but for now I'm happy with my selection and people have been giving it a positive reaction (thanks everyone, I really do appreciate it!) so for now this reel is what I'm applying with.

You'll have to go to the online portfolio for the full reel, I don't feel like putting that on Youtube, but here I'll let you watch the rotation and animation of my Unicorn/Goaticorn character:
It's been suggested that the front legs need work and more bounce in the body as well. I was going for a more pompous walk, but a nice trot I think is what people are envisioning and it wouldn't be overly hard to re-time things to get that. For now I don't have the time to re-render, but again it's certainly something I'm considering for updating the reel with later.

Year 3 Semester 1 (madness) Wrap-up

2010-12-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

SOooo that was crazy. Most of us were pulling all-nighters, some had several all-nighters in a row. But that's all behind us now, well until next semester. Or until immediately after Christmas, because we have to get working on our demo reels to get internships this summer...

While I'm working on that, here's what was put together this semester! First up is the Action Analysis project:

Well I didn't pull any all nighters for this, but got pretty close. Anyways the shadows were done last so they need lots of fixing, which is why I made them very faint so they wouldn't stand out too much. Also if I do get around to fixing this up there's lots of line wobbling that can be fixed. But overall, I mean it is 'done' and worse stuff has been put on television, even on the big screen!
Next up is the 3D animation project, 'A Thinking Character'

So I had a LOT of fun with this, and I feel there's still a million things I could play around with. Pretty much this and the 3D walk before it (might get that up, might not) taught me that I love 3D animating. I feel so much more in control and not having to worry about re-drawing the structure perfectly for every frame for me means I can focus on how the volume is moving and why. I'll always do rough paper tests of the poses before I jump into the 3D, but it's in 3D where I really feel I can start creating a unique motion.

And finally the last stop motion project, the puppet walk:

This turned out better than I expected. I didn't really do a final playthrough before handing it in (we only have 1 class to complete each test in the stop motion course), but I've discovered this semester that as long as I'm constantly flipping the frames while animating, checking to see that each one relates to the frames around it, I can trust the end product to move convincingly.

So the ending of the walk is a bit abrupt, I think even just one more frame would have fixed that, but I'm really happy with the smoothness of the walk. Again, no big plans for stop motion, but given the positive experience this semester I'll probably dabble with it somewhere.

For now, I'm working on that demo reel. The plan is to make, rig and animate one model, do one other model, and make one or two other animations using pre-made rigs off the interwebz. I've got a good start on one model and a rough on the other. Aside from that, I feel I can drop in this stop-mo walk, and maybe if I fix a few things in the Action Analysis I can put that in too. I'll put in the 3D animation I got here, but only if I can't make something new in time. I mean I love the animation, but just about every other animator from Sheridan has used that rig so I'd prefer to stand out.

Merry Christmas!

Stopping Motion

2010-11-13T22:51:00.000-08:00

Well my action analysis is actually still at the school so that's not going up this weekend. However I did discover I had the frames with me from my Stop Motion assignment we did this week, so you're getting that instead!

While I don't intend to go into stop motion (I like the forgiving nature of computer 3D much better) I am having lots of fun with the class, and I can feel how handling these puppets relates with handling a digital rig. The program we use in class is VERY limited as far as editing goes, pretty much if there's something wrong with a frame you can either delete it and hope everything else matches up, or delete it and EVERYTHING else afterwards. You can't insert frames made afterwards into a previous space.

Didn't really need to do anything crazy to fix this up. There were 2 frames during the anticipation right before the 1st swing which were slowing down the movement far too much, so I just removed them. I was going for an effect like he had real trouble swinging forward the first time he brought the club behind his head, but after I shot it it didn't really work, so I edited it to be a more straight-forward swing. I made a double swing because I felt I needed to put more energy in after the 1st still. Also, the ending is a little abrupt, needs about 2 more frames of ease-in, but too late to fix now.

Unrelated, you've probably heard about Minecraft by now, and if you haven't, well, uh, now you have. I started playing it back in July and I've built a fairly extensive castle by this point. I've been using it as inspiration for drawing landscapes, buildings, and creatures lately. I did a bunch of sketches of the monsters and this weekend I caved-in (spelunked) and scanned them so I could paint them. Here's the 3 I got so far:

1st one is actually one I made up for the game, I just call it 'cave beast' and while it might not be implemented by Notch (the Minecraft creator's alias) I hope someday I'll be able to mod it in. In the middle we have the Creeper, the exploding enemy, and the last one is the new zombie pigman found in 'The Nether', complete with golden sword! Obviously these guys will never appear in-game with this much detail, but like old games the concept art exceeding the in-game graphics has it's own charm. Something I like about Minecraft, the limited graphics (to compensate for infinite manipulability) make everything sort of iconic, like how I used to make the starship Enterprise out of 5 square LEGO bricks. And it entertained me for years.

Animals and News

2010-11-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

Well the group film is on it's way, we have the rough storyboards and will have more finalized boards by next week. We've got a great and funny story and everyone is on-board for it, so that's going swell. I've been placed as 'layout manager', which means it's my job to make sure the layouts are getting proper attention, and help everyone produce them. Of course everyone helps with every part of the process, but we each have a specific focus as well.

Layout and Storyboard class are both completely focused on the film right now. For animation class, I've got some key poses and backgrounds that I'll put up very soon. Meanwhile we went to the Royal Winter Fair, again, today so I've got studies from that. As well we're doing a small anatomy study project, and I'll have that up once I take a picture of it.

Meanwhile, here's my animal work from the fair. I started off with some pen gestures, went back to pencil for some structure practice but then I moved to markers. I had a lot of fun blocking in the basic shade and color with marker, then finished each drawing with pen contours on top of the block in. Definately gonna keep trying this, it's much better than doing a line drawing and then colouring in Photoshop afterwards:

I'll note the colours aren't quite right due to the scan, but since it's not an attempt to get exact color it's not a huge deal.

Year 3, and GO

2010-09-30T21:46:00.001-07:00

Well Summer as always did not go as expected, but it certainly wasn't dissappointing either. I picked up quite a bit of know-how for Maya through tutorials and practice, which is helping immensely as we get into Maya Animation class this semester. I have 2 short videos from that, but I'm still fiddling with export settings so I'll have them up here when that's solved.

Meanwhile, there are basically 2 projects this fine 3rd of Animation: the group film, which is only in the concept stage 1st semester and gets produced 2nd semester, and for this semester we have the Action Analysis assignment. Animation class and Layout class are both completely dedicated to this 1 assignment, I finished the rough storyreel for it today, so here it is:

The end product might have some of this art in it, we don't have to animate the whole thing, only up to 6 seconds worth. For layout we'll have to make a complete, full colour background, which also pans. We also need voice during the part we animate, the sound clip in this vid is a placeholder, though the line and timing will be roughly the same. But the sound quality will be better since we'll get access to the sound studio for recording. In the meantime now you know what I sound like! (I'll do the voice for the finished line too)

I've been doing some vehicle doodles lately that I might put up in a sketchbook dump (if you cross your fingers hard enough, I wanna hear those phalanges cracking!), unfortunately I can't put up stuff about the 3rd year film, cause it's not independent so I don't have all the rights. But when it is finished (of course it's not technically even started yet!) I'll be sure to link you guys towards it!

End of Year 2 (a month later!)

2010-05-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

So I took a little break from this after the end-of-year madness. Class ended over a month ago and I was hunting for a summer job (last time I'll have to do that though! Yay co-op next summer!). Decided to finally put a few things up from the last projects, as well as a few extra art-type works I got my hands into after school ended.

Starting off with the final painting assignment:

This used line-work from a pan-background layout assignment we did, which I never put up, which included a character walking across it from our walk-run animation, which I also never put up here...

Moving on! Final storyboard assignment used our 4 characters from that big character design project, which I DID put up, and put them into a TV-style storyboard sequence. We had to plan out a 3 sequence story and then choose 1 of those sequences to board. Then we had to observe carefully the ins and outs of TV storyboarding. I'll find out exactly how I did on this project when I pick it up in September, but I did well in the class so I'm guessing I did well with this.

Don't think you've seen the last of the trains! Having this sequence occur on a moving train, and viewed through various camera angles makes the sequence quite special layout-wise. And what do you know, I used part of it for my final layout assignment, which I'll post up if I ever get around to fixing 1 or 2 things with it.

Finally, away from assignments, here's some paintings I've done for my own enjoyment. The first one here I started back in August of 09, most of the work was done then but I finally got around to finishing the thing after class ended. Also, if it looks similar to the image at the top of this blog, that's because the top image is a previous version, one with a more cartoony rendering style. For this painting I wanted a lot more realism:

This next painting had similar motives, improving my realistic-rendering skills. I wanted to try my hands on something complex and metallic, so I choose Samus Aran from Nintendo's Metroid Prime series. I was also inspired by watching some people doing a playthrough of Metroid Prime, I would start replaying the game myself, but I've got loads of art stuff I'm trying to do right now, plus work, plus I probably enjoy painting more than playing anyways. Or rather, painting is a sort of playing for me, sometimes, which I'm sure is a very good thing.

The blue stuff is a crazy radioactive substance called Phazon. Samus is firing her Plasma beam, which is the strongest in the game, and since the sun is made of plasma I figured I'd make the visible innards of the gun resemble the solar surface, whereas in the actual game it looks more like lava. Also at first I didn't want the gun to be firing, but rather show the inside of the barrel glowing. But then I felt the void around the gun needed something more compositionally-speaking, so I went ahead and added a big fancy beam blast.

Well this post is more than big enough, as I said I have lots more art stuff in the works, so if all goes well there should be more pictures for you guys and gals to glance at soon!

Choo choo!

2010-04-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

Title happens to also be my name according to my neice.

So I decided for the final layout project to go INSANE and fully model in Maya the train I plan to have speed through the drawn backgrounds. And then I couldn't resist the urge to also rig it so the wheels and pump arms would work as it moved forward. A few days later...

Not only that, I wanted a very precise train. "The General" which featured in Buster Keaton's famous film of the same name. Which is awesome and you should see it ASAP.

So here's some renders, notice all of this is being rendered in a line-art type fashion. I just discovered how to make Maya do this and it's convenient for bringing the model into my layout drawings (without standing out like a sore thumb). I'll be making more renders of this after school's done, which is just 2 weeks away so that's not far!

Zoo punk

2010-03-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

So we had excellent weather last week, 15+ Celsius in mid-March. And then we had our Zoo trip this week, and it was about 0 Celsius. Blargggggh.

Anyways, we only need one page from this trip, which is a relief. That said, the only drawings that were of any use was the very last one I did and one I drew today from a photo I took. Everything else was rather rough gestures, and since it's only one page I felt I'd do better if I just submitted one or two studies.

So here's what I've put together, not sure whether to use one, the other or both, but I'll figure it out tomorrow:

Also, I put together something in Maya for Joel Beaudet's 4rth year film, it's a control panel that one of the characters interact with. I've already made a few minor props and I'm planning to make a bunch more, which I better get a move on if they're to be of any use to him. I don't know what deadlines he has but I bet they're coming up quick. Anwyays, here's some views of the control panel:

The main concern I have is that I didn't texture this, he didn't say I had too and I haven't had a lesson on texturing in Maya yet anyways. The colors on that Mario Kart I made is a very basic default texture applied directly to the polygons, no UV mapping was involved. You could use the same technique for most of the bits on this, but there are a few display meters that need an image stickered on to them. Might do it myself some day for fun, but for now I'll keep focusing on just making the geometry, which I am happy with on this.

Older Berry

2010-03-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

So this one was put together fast. Fortunately the next assignment is a clean up of either this animation or the previous one (aka: guy angry at the dutch clip) and considering the way I make my roughs cleanup shouldn't be too too difficult. Mostly I figure this because I make sure to maintain the volumes of each part even at this rougher stage, some things will need to be fixed still but volume is a very important factor here.
So he's a bit too active for my intention, but I often worry my animation style is too stiff, so I figure if I overshoot to correct that eventually I should land on the 'sweet spot'. The line is from Monty Python's Holy Grail for those who don't recognize it, I used the lizard I made for character design, the design I still don't have here yet...
Animation!

And there's lots more of this lizard to come. I think I may use this animation for the clean-up, and I'm already using this guy for the final Maya project too. Here's what I cooked up today for that, it's halfway done already after less than 3 hours...

People keep asking if I want to be a modeller, I'm certainly interested, I'm not sure if that's all I'll do if that is how I start up, I might move onto animating. Storyboarding also interests me... well we'll see in about two years won't we?

1885!

2010-03-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Love Back to the Future so so much.

Anyways, our latest character assignment involved choosing one of three time periods and creating 4 characters for a story within chosen period. I picked a western, so that I could have a train in the story. I love trains so so much. We needed to have a hero/heroine, someone they love (romantic or platonic), a villain and a comic relief. We needed a lineup showing their relative sizes, and a sheet with 3 poses and 3 facila expressions for each of them. So here's what I got:

Our final storyboard for this year will be using these characters, I've got the story ironed out and over this week I'll have the beat boards made for that. Yes, Uncle Sam is the protagonist, of course he's not THE Uncle Sam but I took advantage of the pun.

Basically the story will revolve around all 4 of them on a train, Sam bought some boots for Violet's birthday, Bullhorn wants to steal them to give to his own wife for her birthday, then during the standoff on top of the moving train between Sam and Bullhorn Jacob remembers that he already got Violet the same set of boots. So Violet and Jacob get off the train at their stop, Sam and Bullhorn are stuck in the standoff for eternity on the train as it drives into the sunset.

And at the same time that's going I'm working on the muzzle animation, using a character from the previous character assignment (which it seems I haven't put up here, fix that in a bit), it's like the human sync except it had to be an animal with a muzzle (dog, cat, lizard, bear etc.) but it doesn't need the whole body, so I'm making it just from the waist up. And that's due Wednesday, Beat-boards are due Friday, a Digital Painting is due sometime this week as well, along with a short acting performance. And I'm also trying my best to make some extra 3D props for a 4th year's film... WHEEE!

Dutch Kart?

2010-02-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

So I got this animation done yesterday. I seem to have a strange ability to make an animation work WITHOUT TESTING IT ONCE. Obviously I could make it much better if I tested it and reworked any issues, I don't see this as an opportunity to continue not revising my work, but rather that I have a fairly good understanding about timing/spacing etc. Again, I could improve, but at least I can do it. Yay.

So that's the animation's story, for the second part of this post I bring you more from the 3D world (or virtual 3D world to be precise). This is my first notable model in Maya, 1st and 2nd project (a bowl of fruit, and a snowman) notwithstanding. It's of my Mario Kart toy which came with an awesome Yoshi action figure, hence the kart is green, for Yoshi, who cannot hear me over his awesomeness. Here's some renders:

Really happy with how this turned out, well I mean it looks just like the intended object so that's really all there is to it. Hardest part to model? Probably the three-spoked steering wheel, figuring out how to get the spokes in with only basic polygon modelling took the most brain power, but it didn't break anything. I think.

Animation!

Mr. Big Hat dissapproves of people from the Netherlands (the line is from Goldmember if you couldn't tell).

Spaceworld

2010-02-14T14:25:00.001-08:00

More stuff that's not a school project! I'm working on a human voice sync+acting animation (or at least I will be once I finish this post), so that's what's up next school-wise.
So about this, one night before going to an extra life drawing session I decided to draw some spacey stuff with conte on the big newsprint pads we use for life drawing. This is one of the drawings that came from that, obviously I've done all the color in photoshop. It's blatantly Homeworld, but I didn't have any references on me so it is all original in design if not style. Oh and this is supposed to be very big, as in the largest of the smaller ships, added in for contrast, is about 2 kilometers long, so this thing is about 20km long.
And it still doesn't feel as big as what I was after, but I like it for what it is.
And now back to animatin'

But it's such a lovely boat... ship!

2010-02-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

Time for some stuff, from THE THIRD DIMENSION!

*sci-fi music*

So we've been starting our classes in Maya this semester, and I'll be putting up some shots of the first real project from that eventually. But before that, I'm putting up an example of some of the modelling work I did with an entirely different computer program back in high school.
Lot's of text ahead, so I'll draw you in with a single-view render!

Quick history, about middle of grade 11 I decided I REALLY wanted certain units to play with in the PC game Civilization 3 (cause I love that game). In order to do that, I needed to make a 3D model, animate it, and import those animated frames for the game to use. An advantage with Civ3, because the game uses images of models and not an actual model (unlike Civ4, where the models are 'rendered' in real time with the game's engine) you can use any 3D program you like to make the animation frames. 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender, whatever. One guy on the largest site for the Civ series (http://www.civfanatics.com/) was using this program called POV Ray (Persistence Of Vision Raytracer, from http://www.povray.com/) to model and animate his own custom units. Because POV Ray was free, I decided to try making my own units with it.

A few months later I was pretty good with it. What surprised me was that even though POV Ray modelling is entirely code based (ie: sphere {<0,0,0>,1 pigment {color Red}} is the code to create a red sphere with a radius of 1 unit at the center of the scene), which one would think a barely-passed-math guy like me would be hopeless with, I actually understood how this program ticked (of course a calculator helped), at least enough to make any geometry I wished. Animating got a little tricky, but then again I hadn't taken any courses at that time to know about things like key poses, follow through, etc.

So by April of 2005 (having started about November of 2004) I decided to tackle one of my favourite subjects, the RMS Titanic. I had a plastic model and a fantastic book at my side to get as much detail in as I wanted. After a month I had the modelling done, and in a week or two I had the basic animations necessary to put it in the game. You can grab it for yourself here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1230

I modelled in POV Ray for about 3 years after that, right up until I got into Animation, you can find all that I made over at civfanatics (mentioned this in the blog's first post I believe). The animating ranges from kinda bad to decent. I could definitely do better now, but the render times required to fix everything, or even just the stuff I really care for, would be like, a month solid. But the modelling jobs I'm quite proud of, for example the Highwind from FF7, the Ragnarok from FF8 and The Flying Dutchman from Pirates 2. There's a LOT of boats. I like boats.

Anyways, what this all led up to is that I was very confident starting up with Maya this year. I had fiddled with 3D Studio Max as well, so I wasn't entirely clueless about Polygon modelling that most programs use. So even though the POV Ray code-made models are entirely incompatible with Maya or 3DS Max, model-making concepts like booleans, co-ordinates, hierarchy/attachment, do transfer. Getting back to model work made me all nostalgic, so I decided to 'raise the Titanic' from the depths of my computer and pump out a render of the model rotating, so here it is!

Quality doesn't quite do it justice, but you get the idea, and I can't make it better without another render, which would take about 4 hours. This doesn't have every porthole, but it does have the big windows in the top decks, propellers and rudder, lifeboats, anchors, stuff. The code to make this is extensive, basic in concept but to get some of the shapes with just cylinders, cones, boxes and spheres one has to get quite fancy with booleans (subtracting, intersecting and merging shapes).

For anyone who scrolled to the bottom right away, and those who read in full (thanks!) I'll be getting my new models up here sometime soon, and might make a few detail renders of this one. Might. Anyways, till next time!

The Hounds

2010-02-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

Before getting into the next animation assignment, here's our first assignment from this semester, the lip sync. Very straight forward but also very necessary, and I definately can't say I got it perfect, but that's what I'll work on for the next one. The next one involves a full figure with acting and lip sync, should be interesting.

Lip Sync:

Zombie plan?

2010-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

This week we took a quick trip down to the University of Toronto, correction, a quick COLD trip to U of T.
Temperature aside, purpose of the trip was for life drawing, though in this case it was decidedly dead drawing. We went down to the basement of the medical science building where they had a large collection of preserved human parts for us to draw. The smell of preservatives was quite strong, could have been worse I guess. As for the experience of drawing real body parts, not as strange as one might expect. I think it helps that there wasn't much skin on them, diminished the 'human recognition' factor (look up 'uncanny valley' on wikipedia). Though some of my classmates elected to draw some of the fetus specimens available, I opted out of this since that did hit too close to the uncanny valley for me.
Anyways, I spent the 3-ish hours we had mostly drawing this arm specimen, on good ol' pencil and paper. I took the drawing and spiced it up in Photoshop, and here's the result:

Sometimes I really do feel like I'm becoming a doctor behind my back. Funny cause as a kid that was my initial career plan, until I realized that I didn't want to study anatomy THAT closely, and remembered that I had much more fun drawing stuff.
Meantime, working on a group storyboard with a plethora of cats involved, and I'll get my latest animation (lip sync assignment) up once I get the sound file from the school.

Semester 1, Year 2 in teh bag

2009-12-17T20:11:00.000-08:00

Well 1st semester of year 2 ends tomorrow! All the projects are in, only reason I'll be at class is to get my exam back and head off to see Princess and the Frog with my fellow animators. Hoping the story works great, I don't doubt the animation will be good. If 2D is to survive in the feature film market they need to remember to do what 2D can do that 3D and live action can't. There's certain liberties that can be taken by 2D and still hold the all important suspension of disbelief. That's what will keep 2D around, like how painting managed to stick around after cameras showed up.

Anyways, finally got enough time to grab and upload some of my animations from this semester. I'm not showing the walk and run, cause I hope to fix it up a bit (though that won't happen over the holidays so it will probably have to wait till summer!). What I do have is the finished Weight Lift and Toss, as well as the final animation for this semester, the Expression change, which was produced mostly this week, hence lack of work-in-progress shown here.

Oh, and I've also put up the final version of my "I Can't Sleep" (aka: Magician vs Clownz) leica reel. Music is changed because we weren't allowed any video game music at all. The 'Tetris' theme does not count, since it is a Russian folk song that is well in public domain and Nintendo only holds copyrights over its use in games, not movies. Enjoy!

Weight Lift and Toss:

Expression Change:

Storyboard Leica:

Not the clown this time

2009-12-12T19:00:00.000-08:00

Though this almost became another Easter Island thing, but last minute inspiriration changed that. Final painting assignment for this semester, in fact this may be the last traditional painting I will have to do for a long time, since next semester we start the digital painting course. Interesting enough that will be my first dedicated digital painting course.

Technically this was also supposed to be related to our final storyboard. The assignement sheet says it was to be a full background based on one of the layouts, based on the boards. However somewhere the schedule went all screwy so our teacher said we could basically do whatever we want, as long as it's not digital. I figured I'd at least somewhat conform to the intial plan, so this painting is based on the volcano eruption from my Easter Island boards, though this really wouldn't work as a background, since that cloud should be animated, meh. Also considered putting the Easter Island statues in, but then I remembered my semi-promise to myself to avoid Easter Island stuff. Anyways I felt what I had painted was good enough:

This was done in "acryla-gouache", the impossibly wonderful marriage of gouache paint and acrylic paint, so it can go down transparent like gouache but when it dries it's like acrylic in that it doesn't ever lift off again. Used this for all my other paintings (which you haven't seen, working at that) this semester and I'm really starting to like it. I'm feeling almost more comfy with it than with digital, mainly after an experimental painting during class.

And here's some digital stuff I did to get my brain flowing for the final. I was planning on painting the Easter Island one as the final but changed my mind this morning for reasons mentioned earlier:

Also I still didn't feel the contrast and composition were working right for this one.

I liked the water here but felt this was too far away and way to central in compostion. Also, if this is reminding you of the final paintings from this time last year it's no accident, I was in the mood for rehashing the idea.

This is me ripping off Homeworld on purpose. Close, still not quite right though. Hopefully I'll pick up a new brush technique or two in digital painting class proper. I can make things work but my digital stuff still feels a little more 'hazy' than I intend. I figure I need to be braver with more saturation and changing colours or something. Figure it out eventually. Till next time!

Yep, more with the clown

2009-12-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

What this project has made me realize is just how much you will be seeing your characters/story when you plan on making an animation of them. Might seem obvious, but actually doing it gives a proper understanding of the experience. Actually I can't even say that, this is a leica reel, it's not a complete animation either! But yeah from character design, to making the rough storyboards, then the good boards, and now the leica, I've seen this clown and his two magician buddies a lot over this past month.

Anyways, sound and music are all compiled, only reason this is not the final leica is because I still have to make the fixes to the images that were suggested. Luckily none of the boards actually needed to be removed, so I was able to work with the old boards for figuring out timing and music.

Sound effects come from all over the internet as well as the deep wells within my computer. I know you'll all recognize the first song, the 'climax' music is from Super Paper Mario, specifically from a similar giant clown battle, which is why it works so well thematically. Enjoy!

And at some point I really ought to put up things from other projects!

Why so Serious?

2009-11-22T20:33:00.001-08:00

Well, it's a rather serious clown now isn't it?

Got the line work for my storyboard done, which extends across a span of, 87 panels

There's a section near the beginning, the part where they make the flower vase dissappear and then the kid bring it back which might be cut for the sake of time constraints, but I hope to keep it in if I can since I feel it helps develop the relations better, and also shows that the kid asking for the wand and attempting the trick himself isn't just random. But boy does he screw it up!

My suggestion for viewing, right click and open each big image in a new window, maximize each window, then close them as you go along. Hope you likes!

There's gonna be a fade out to black at the very end.

So I need add shading/tone to ALL of these (well, if I don't cut panels 2-20) and make a colour version of one panel as well. Luckily making the colour version also takes care of about 15% of the next painting assignment (and layout is directly linked with this as well) so while there's lots to be done, at least I'm working on multiple projects with the same drawings.

Royal Winter 2009

2009-11-14T21:19:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again! We had our Royal Winter Fair trip last Friday, though this year we only needed two pages, one for gestures and one for some longer studies/better drawings, which was a relief compared to last years 6 pages. Also we spent a bit more time there, and because we got there later in the day it wasn't crazy packed like last year.

Anyways, here's what I've put together for Monday:

Last week was pretty crazy, lots of stuff that needed lots of work got done, namely a painting, rough work for storyboarding and a presentation for history class. For history we had to take a modern object and 're-invent' it in some previous era. Along with research on the era chosen we had to come up with some drawings of our new object. I choose to make a video game system in the gothic era, and well, this is how it turned out:

It's the 'Praystation 1300AD'! The giant disc at the back is the game disc, spun by a water wheel. Screen works by opening and closing shutters on millions of red, blue and green stained glass panels. The bishop seems to be playing Assassins Creed...

Yeah, that was a fun idea and my only regret is that I had to start drawing it at about 1am, but it got done and everything went fine so now I am getting my sleep back and everything is peachy. Yay.

For tomorrow I intend to get some animating done on the new walk-run project, maybe I'll finally upload the finished lift-and-toss too (cross fingers). See you then folks!

BEWARE CLOWNS

2009-11-07T21:04:00.000-08:00

Consider yourself warned!

So onto the next storyboard project, really there's only 2 this semester it's just divided into beat-board and storyboard segments which forces us to develop our stories at a certain pace, which for the most part is good.

For this one the whole class had to base their story on the conflict "Can't sleep", but other than that the sky's the limit. First class we threw around character and setting ideas that we didn't have to use but was helpful to get us thinking.

So for my story I actually went with one of the characters mentioned, a magician. We needed two characters minimum so I went with a master magician and a kid student magician. First go at making the beat boards I was planning on the master magician being a stuck up sort of teacher, who then has his trick demonstration go horribly wrong (more on that later), but I found it would be simpler to have the master be the student's father, and the student is the one that messes up, then the father saves the day. So here's the first idea:

Lots of fun drawing the maniacal demon rabbit! Don't worry, MORE of that to come! Anyways, first beat he's shoving the rabbit into the hat for the ol' rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick (notice the skull-n-crossbones on the hat, clearly the wrong hat to use!), second beat the beast emerges, last beat kid is back safe at home but severely traumatized. If I had expanded this version the rabbit would go around destroying a town, and either be put back in the hat by the magician or escape into the wilderness, in which case the last beat would not be so safe-n-sound with the fear of the rabbit's return. Whether the rabbit is still loose or not, this kid won't be sleeping for a while. However, as mentioned I found that the relation between the magician and the student was more complicated than necessary. Also, as much as I love the demon-rabbit-spawn-thingy I recieved a much better idea for something else coming out of the hat that (I hope) also uncomplicates things. So here's the second version, and the purpose for the warning in this post's title:

DON'T TRY TO PULL STUFF OUT OF JESTER CAPS! (caps, get it? sorry)

So a few things, last beat is in fact the same piece of paper used for the 1st version, surprisingly little amount of tweaking was needed there! So I've decided the clown will be caught, but of course not before causing a good amount of mayhem. And again, this kid ain't sleeping. I was actually a little worried when I presented the original idea that I couldn't make the 'can't sleep' conflict be the ending like I have, but the teacher didn't seem to mind, I'm assuming because the story at least works. If I had to, simple re-arranging of last beat to first beat and the whole thing reads as a dream sequence, in which case the ending would be with the kid asleep after the 'dream clown' is caught. But I kinda prefer having this as an actual event. Advantages over the 1st version are that, again the motives for the father magician are easier to understand, the jester hat is easier to recognize and easier to undertsand why it would A) do something bad and B) spawn a hell-clown. Also, as I'm sure some of you are experiencing now, clowns can be a lot scarier.

Other ideas include having the father stop the kid from trying the trick and then flash back to when the father made the mistake, but I found it was too tricky to show a flashback is occuring, it would lean towards using dialogue which is a big no-no for this assignment.

And that's enough text for today, working on painting, should be putting up a few things that got handed in soon.

Heavy Guy and a Frog

2009-10-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

So over the weekend I put together pretty much the ENTIRE Weight Lift and Toss assignment, just finishing clean up now. I didn't test it at all while I was drawing it aside from flipping a pair of frames here and there (yes, right now I can only 'flip test' about 2 frames) so I had no idea if the whole thing overall worked, at all.
So rather nervously I did a shoot of it today at the school and for the most part, it works! Was a very happy moment, felt really blessed to put it precisely. So anyways, here's what was shot, working on again cleanup, but also a few minor fixes and when I shoot the final I'll get it up here eventually, but for now:

Also having fun in sound class. We had a practice assignment where we were given an animation and had to add in sound effects. I've had some previous experience mixing sounds back in the days when I would make my own units for Civilization 3, it was fun then but it's much more fun now especially since I know so much more about how animation and sound work together:

Sound library at the school is fairly good but navigating it can be a little tricky sometimes. I've been growing my own sound library (lots of great samples taken from games) as well so for future films I've got lots of options already. w00t!

Yes, more Easter Island Heads 2

2009-10-16T22:23:00.000-07:00

SO scanning took a bit but I got my storyboard project all digitized and ready to hand in and put up here as well! There's 8 pages, 45 panels:

I had a lot of fun with the story for this one, at one point I honestly considered using it for a film later but we'll see what goes down over the next few years, likely will get a better idea. Anyways, I used a thick graphite stick, I think of 6B hardness to get the thick lines and put down tones really quick. I think if I had more time I might have actually gone overboard with the shading, it's easy to make unimportant things upstage what is important when you start diving into small details. Well glad this is done, happy with how it turned out, and now I think I need to ban myself from using Easter Island references of any kind for about a year, otherwise I'll probably start drawing Moai even when I'm trying to draw something completely different...

Charicamature

2009-10-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Character design this year is a whole lot of fun, our instructor is Pete Emslie (his blog is heres: http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/), over the past few weeks he's been making caricatures of us 2nd years, we haven't been disappointed to say the least, he did this one of me on Oct 13:

This is simply a fantastic balance of exaggeration and representation, I can't decide which part I like best, the eyebrows, the chin, nose, hair shape (gracious I need a haircut when it curls this much!) anyways, it's great and I'm totally hyped for the rest of this year's work in the class.

Meantime I have to make a weight lift-and-toss animation over a whole 7 days , because I just finished an admittedly overly-ambitious storyboard assignment, which still needs one tweak and lots of scanning (45-ish panels) before you'll see it up here. Amazingly, the correction required is to add in even MORE Easter Island heads. A painting also got done and hopefully I'll get it back next week, before reading week which for once will actually involve some reading...

So a Wave, a Boat and a Flour Sac walk into a bar 2

2009-10-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

Well it's quite dark and not perfectly aligned, but in essence this is my finished wave-boat-sac-splash animation. I shot it at home, and had to fiddle with the contrast to brighten it up, hence the lower production standard here. I'll get a better version up once I shoot it at the school, might scan it there (cause their scanners have built-in peg bars) for maximum quality, which is becoming quite an issue with this animation mainly because it's got 4 levels plus the background, so really that's 5, and so every speck of blank space that isn't perfectly white gets darkened 5 times, you get the idea. Just pretend you're seeing it through a periscope or something.

Fairly content with the result here, happy with the splash, there's about one frame of the boat that's a little wonky still and the sac moves around a bittoo much before the wave hits, but I'm very happy with the lift and drop after the wave. I felt I was exaggerating the drawings too much in that part at first, but the animation shows it's leaning towards not exaggerated enough. I feel it's close enough to the middle of these extremes to not need fixing, w00t.

Next up in animation is a crossover from character design... well actually the character project is the preparation for the 2nd animation. A character has to pick something up and toss it. Already got the character designed, just have to make the finished model sheet since our animation prof wants to see those for Monday's class. Otherwise I would've had till late Tuesday to complete that, but since for this weekend everyone decided to go nutzorz with the projectz I need to finish it tomorrow. Fun times.

And now, I needz sleep.

Scary rocks 2

2009-09-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

Continuing the painting assignment, I've put together some digital color roughs (still have to paint more the old fashioned way, but this helps me visualize quickly):

If I wanted to fiddle more with these I'd make the sky brighter in the 2 monochromatic ones, which are literally the multi-color painting desaturated, then with a few mouse clicks set so the achromatic lights and darks translate into the lights and darks in monochromatic. No re-painting was done, as I said just trying to quickly visualize, since I need to repaint by hand anyways, why waste time?
I do quite like the multi-color and I'm hoping the final will mostly be an improvement on that. Also after a demo in last weeks class I'm considering switching back to acrylic, only this time using a transparent method. I've always painted super-opaque with acrylic, but transparent-style painting with the layering ability of acrylic (as opposed to gouache which often gets messed up when you paint over it again) is tickling my curiosity...

EDIT: Re-uploaded the monochromatics with new versions where I fiddled with the brightness/contrast setting to get rid of the murkiness.

So a Wave, a Boat and a Flour Sac walk into a bar...

2009-09-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

Most of my fellow animation friends will be putting up their completed versions of this assignment, but since Group D's (my group within the year, D rules!) animation class is on Mondays, we missed the first week due to teh Labour Day, thus our due date is pushed back one week.

So Animation #1 for Year #2 brings us back to our old friend the flour sac. This time he is braving treacherous waters on a floatation device of choice (pirate ship, tea cup, Data etc.) Actually works well in conjunction with my first flour sac animation (recall Easter Island roasting action), he's either sailing towards the island or making his escape from the enraged Moai...As you can see I just got the wave down. There's actually 4 parts to this assignment, the wave, the boat, the flour sac and finally the splashing effects. The boat can be quite simple, pretty much trace a boat drawing and move around each frame appropriately. The sac will need to be fully animated of course, as does the splash, but the splash only occurs over a few frames near the end so that won't be too bad once I get to it. Plus it's really organic (water eh) so I can have some fun with it. I already have the movements for the boat and sac roughed out, should have at least the boat done soon.

And what you don't see in this wave is that half of the basic motion had to be completely reworked, and the texture of the water (foam-ish stuff) needed absolute reworking which involved a boat-load of erasing (see what I did there? yes I know it was awful). But I like it now, and suffice to say I don't really have time to rework the water AGAIN, so this is it.

Tune in next time to hear the punchline for the joke in the subject!

Next post may or may not include aforementioned punchline.

Yes, more Easter Island Heads

2009-09-19T14:58:00.001-07:00

Probably at the addiction level now, this is the 3rd assignment I can think of that I used easter island statues for, but whatever. Storyboard! This is the 1st assignment, we needed to make storyboard beats for one of 2 poems we were given. Beats differ from boards in that, well first of all there should be a lot less beats than boards. Beats basically describe all the action of an entire scene with one image (picture worth a thousand words pretty much taken literally) as opposed to boards which go into much more detail as to how the action happens and how the viewer sees it.

However, as with everything in art, composition/viewpoint is still very important in beats to get the mood and/or message across even if, when moving from beats to boards, the composition changes completely.

So my interpretation of the poem goes like this: these two body-less heads feel like a bunch of nobodies, but when the see what they have in common they feel happy being what they are (especially since they can do a cool totem pole trick!). But, if the statues with bodies ('somebodies') catch them fooling around things would be bad. Still, whenever they can they enjoy their time together, and mock the somebodies who's proud demeanor seems dull to these fun loving nobodies.

And now to reduce what I just used 72 words to describe into 4 images:

Now that that's out of the way, it's time to work on some wave animations!

Scary rocks

2009-09-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

So STILL not done that digital painting I've been going on about, but I do have this line work for the first actual painting assignment this year!

Really happy already with this, the rocks were originally going to be more jagged, crumbly and pointy but inspiration switched me towards the big precarious boulders like you see in the deserts and canyons in the US. One things for sure, that temple in the center would not be a safe place to be!

At the same time I'm about to start up my Wave-Boat-Sac animation, and the first phase of storyboarding project 1 might get up soon as well. Depends actually, I'm getting an urge to finish up that digital thingy and I might just fall on that. Tune in next time to find out!

Year 2

2009-08-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

*dusts off blog*

cough, well just got my timetable for the 1st semester of the 2nd year, so things will be getting busy again around here in a few weeks. Hoping to put a little something up here I've been working at all summer before then though. Till then, Ill try and keep the cobwebs clear!

The Island

2009-04-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

This is it! Final animation of Year 1!

Which is of course the famous Flour sac animation, I'm pretty sure we have more flour sac assignments in year 2. Anyways, my object was an Easter Island statue. Naturally I had it shoot laser beams (and cannons as it were). I mean how would you feel if your pillow jumped in and woke you up from a one thousand year slumber? Hmm?

Anyways we had 12 seconds to do perform two jumps and some sort of interaction with the object of choice, besides that we had free reign. I actually went a half second over 12, but the part that's after the 12 second mark isn't 100% necessary, but I sure like it!

So without further ado, Mr. Flour Sac meets his end:

Yes, he taunts the statue after the first shot by waving his butt at it, bad idea buddy, bad idea.

So even though, like just about every other project I had to stay up till 4am on the last day to get it done, still happy with the results and it would be difficult to fix the issues that are there while keeping within the 12 second timeframe. This is of course because the only real issues are with the timing, the jumps come down maybe one frame too fast and a little more time for the transitions from action to action would help guide your eyes to the right places at the right time. But hey, we still get to see a flour sac get roasted by an elder statue of death, and that's all that matters right?

Dog the Builder

2009-04-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Here's my final character design for year 1! We only had 2 character assignments this semester, weird but I'm not complaining, we were BUSY as it was.

So this assignment was basically a fusion of the last two from 1st semester, a pose sheet and an expression sheet, or all on one, either way we needed 8 of each. We had to hand it in digitally as well.

What I'm putting up is the scans I made at home. I REALLY wish I had handed these scans in, but alas I had to draw the last poses the day it was due at the school, so I had only the school scanners to use.

I thought the bad scans I got from those scanners was because I didn't really clean these up (the blue rough drawing is on the same paper) but the results I got from my scanner with the same images proves that the school scanners are in fact ridiculously dirty. I mean my scanner isn't new and it is certainly used often, and it's still so much better.

Sorry for the rant, but what are blogs for? Anyways, here's a very busy dog!

10 points for saying Precarious

2009-04-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

Almost the end! Just one test and one digital animation to do! The animation will take all of a half hour, I'll see what other stuff from our Digital class I want to put up once I grab everything off the school network on Friday (cause they wipe everything after the end of the year).

Meantime, here's my last 2 painting projects! First up is the second half of the second-last project, the interior, you know the one 'based' on that copy of a painting I put up earlier. It's Dr. Jekyll's office/lab:

Finally, the final painting! We had to take our latest (also last) character from character design and put it in an environment. My character was a construction worker doggy, so I put him having lunch on a skyscraper. I was gonna have the skyscraper look a lot less finished, but time constraints said otherwise. That way his presence at the end of the seemingly random steel bar would make a bit more sense. Also, trying not to blatantly rip off Mirror's Edge here, but I really like that crisp blue skyscraper-cityscape.

Stay tuned, more final project uploads to come!

My workstation

2009-04-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

Finishing up the final animation for this year. w00t!

Go figure it's now that I finally pull together a fully functional workstation at home. I know we get our own desks in 2nd year, but I like working at home, and anyways I don't think we can pencil test on Flipbook at our desks. And if we can, still I like working at home. It's homey.

I'll put up some rough work of my Flour Sac before the day is done (it has to be finished before the day is done!), but for now, behold my completed workstation arrangement:

My computer is less than a meter to the left of this desk, I can stand behind this setup with the keyboard on this desk or my chair, so I can hit the enter (capture) button, then just reach over, switch to the next drawing, capture, rinse and repeat.The lightbox is on when shooting to provide consistent and strong lighting, which is a problem with the stations at the school, they;re by the windows so the lighting condition can change while shooting. I have a line penciled on the wall showing where to tape the peg bar. Might just buy a 2nd peg bar and keep it taped there all the time.

Then to work on the drawings I just spin it around, take down the peg bar and re-stick it to the lightbox. If the webcam cord is in the way I can disconnect it on this end since it's on an extension, the webcam's original cord is very short.

Phone, speaker (I still have to get up to change songs gosh! but a few of my playlists last a few hours at least) and even my fridge are all within arm's reach. There's lots of space behind me so I can spin around and pile drawings there if the desk gets too crowded, which it always does!

So yeah at this rate I'll be like the people in Wall-E who can do everything they want without getting off their butts. Except I'm underweight, so that's at least a good place to start that habit, right?

Right?

The Ant and the Dove

2009-04-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

This is the final project for storyboarding class (or Mauryboarding as the 1st years call it), we needed to make a storyboard (surprise!) based off the Aesop fable of the Ant and the Dove, this is what I put together:

Instead of a gun the hunter is supposed to be threatening the bird with 'lime twigs' in the original fable, but hardly anyone knows what those are and even if you do, they're a REALLY boring plot device so the gun works so much better. Yes, the Dove makes an origami/papercraft sail boat to save the Ant.

Just 3 more projects and 3 tests left!

Interior Painting 1

2009-04-06T13:18:00.001-07:00

I know, lack of posts for like a month and then BAM!

Anyways, working on our last major painting assignement. We have to paint a room interior based on a description given in a selection of book excerpts which we were provided. I chose the Jekyll and Hyde excerpt, but that's actually not the painting you'll be seeing in this post...

Cause the other part of the assignment was to find an artist whose style we wanted to emulate in some way and make a copy painting of one of their works. I really didn't have any specific artist in mind, to be honest I wouldn't be able to pin down one specific artist who drives me, but I certainly know a piece I want to emulate when I see one.

But again, I also need to find something that first off, wasn't going to be impossibly hard and secondly had close-to the same mood as the interior painting, which will be of Jekyll/Hyde's gloomy laboratory.

So I browsed around and found a piece I liked by Lou Romano, who works for Pixar, doing the voice of Alfredo in Ratatouille and is apparently the Art director for the upcoming 'Up!' (ignore the pun, it was unavoidable). I got the image from his blog here: http://louromano.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

My version:

I used only gouache, he used acrylic and gouache. His was 11 3/4" x 23" in size where as mine is 5 3/4" x 11". Just FYI.

Next post will (hopefully) be my finished interior.

Caricatures

2009-04-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

Today's in-class activity was Caricatures! No model, well we were the models, most people went up to be drawn twice, and since multiple people drew them each time there are now a LOT of portraits floating around.

I handed one in and gave one away, but in return I received two drawings of me (equivalent exchange!), one from our prof. with his signature (bet it'll fetch a pretty penny one day but totally won't sell it) and one by fellow classmate Eva, (can't seem to find her blog, not sure if she has one), both are quite excellent so thank you!

Anyways, for most of them I felt I made a good likeness, but that's just it, these ended up too much like regular portraits, exaggerate! Grrr!

^Ashley from Lame Art

^Danielle from Danie's Stuff

^Eva will never live this joke down.

^Katrina

^Kyle from KVMOWAT

^Sam from Images and Ideas

^Shaela

^Sonia

^Vincent (Decepticons attack!)

And here's me by Eva:

And finally, me drawn by the Thurmanator (our prof Mark Thurman):

Yes, my lower half appears to have become a mannequin/pinocchio, obviously Mark was just having a little fun with this.

Polar Bear Walk 2

2009-04-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

Here's my finished polar bear, would've added more details (ie: fingers/toes and pads under his paws), but still happy with how it works overall. Onto the flour sac! 144 drawings of characterized sac-y goodness!

Zoo zoo zoo

2009-04-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

We went to the Zoo 2 weeks ago, actually could've put these up anytime but it slipped me mind (sorreez!), we needed a minimum of 3 pages with 6 gestures each, and 3 pages with 2 studies (ie: longer drawings) each. It was very cold at the Zoo, which was quite detrimental to the drawing initiative, but we managed. At least I had a chair for this trip, and they had buses! So why didn't they have a bus to the Royal Winter Fair again?

......

Anyways, here's me drawings, I ended up with just one extra gesture page:

Still Life March 09

2009-04-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

Just got this back , we had to do a still life painting involving a reflective object and a transparent one and some cloth/drapery, handed it in right after reading week (yeah we get paintings back kinda slow). It was nice to go back to good ol' observation paintings, used gouache to get some more practice with the medium.

I'll have the finished polar bear walk up tomorrow (well that's the plan), for now, onto charachter design!

Polar Bear Walk 1

2009-03-29T19:49:00.001-07:00

3rd animation assignment this semester, a quadrupedal animal walk, I went with a Polar Bear, because my Penguin army needs steeds for their cavalry-I mean, you didn't hear tha- ah whatever, the plan can't be stopped now!

ANYWAYS, here's the rough, this also marks the first animation I've made at home with my recently acquired Flipbook and Webcam. Still need a proper stand for the cam (ie: not just clipped to the top of my monitor) as well as some decent lighting, but it works fine for pencil testing, infinitely easier than taking photos with my digital camera.

I'd like to add I like Jasc Animation Shop better than Flipbook as of the moment. I'm not sure if Flipbook is actually limited but it feels like it (I know I have the FULL version), what I know for sure is that if the capabilites are there the user interface is sub-par (for instance, it shouldn't be this hard to figure out how to delete frames, not just clear their contents), Jasc handles the basic functions much better, I feel more in control, and it was just as easy to aquire the program (ie: Google search, 1st or 2nd link, download, no torrents)

Well all that's left for this is the clean-up, with low quality image capture and the unfinished state it rather does look like a Polar Bear in a snow storm...

We've had a whole lot of projects being handed in, at least in layout we handed in one project before we even got the marks back from the previous one, which was inconvenient considering how similar the projects were, would've liked to have fixed mistakes from the first one. Anyways there's more stuff to be put up I'll add it as it comes back, meanwhile I have an essay to write and a polar bear to bring out from the storm.

New Videos

2009-02-28T16:22:00.000-08:00

After an epic-busy week our reading week has begun, which means we can finally stop taking caffiene intravenously. w00t!

Anyways, two videos for this post, one is the coloured version of the Pink Panther walk with a panning background, which was our Digital assignment these last two months:
Yes, commies on the moon.

So... the next video is our 2nd Animation assignment this semester; a head rotation, expression change and lip sync using a character of our choice. I chose Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast, mostly because he's a clock, and clocks are cool. It was technically due Tuesday, but like most people I know I only got it finished near the end of this week, cause everything was intense. But it's done! Much rejoicing:

Sorry if the video is a little hard to see near the end, combination of the low quality format it's converted to when it's posted here, non-ideal image capture of the original drawings and the fact that the originals aren't all in black graphite.

Character Sequence

2009-02-15T20:45:00.000-08:00

First Character design project for this semester, we design a character (wow really?) then put it in a sequence (not animated, just the key poses) involving it entering a scene, interacting with object, encountering some difficulty involving the object, then some sort of resolution. So for mine I have created,

The Adventures of Star Platypus

Enjoy!

Come to think of it, I just realized I have expressed one of my own frustrations with this project. The door into the garage below my loft is the most tempermental door I have encountered. It seems to only open when it feels like it, and it's not even an automatic! Though the main garage door is, and has also had issues on occasion...

Day/Night Painting 3

2009-02-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

Got this done last week, but epic amounts of work have prevented me from posting the finished digital version of the Day/Night paintings. I'll put up the real paintings in this post once I get them back.

Day/Night Painting 2

2009-02-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

Well the painting project is getting quite complex, but here goes:

Made a new 'rough' (gosh how I wish I could just make it rough!) for the day scene, same in concept but quite different in colour and composition. Well it has sort of the same palette, but it's brighter overall. The line-work on the ship in the foreground won't be in the actual painting, at least that's the current plan...

Just an FYI, the ship in foreground is roughly battleship sized. The ships in the background... well as you can see there's nebulas crossing in front of two of them. Nebulas with stars (those little specks of white, hopefully that was obvious enough) in them. Yes, the background ships dwarf the stars that lay between the ships and the viewer. Think I'll communicate that better by making a few larger, more noticeable stars (note to self, vary the star colours too), but they'll still just be points of light. Anyways, I like how this new composition works, even if the ships don't really look quite as big as intended, they look bigger than they did in the last rough, partially due to atmospheric perspective as well as the smaller size and positioning of the foreground ship.

I've also started the rough for the night scene, it's not even half finished, but it has the basic elements, which may or may not change. Hoping to not go nutz with detail and have a finished rough before I go to bed, then I can spend all day tomorrow painting the two of them.

For at least part of this project we're supposed to put down an underlayer of acrylic paint, the colour should be complimentary to the colour we are going to put on top of it. Because the night scene will have much stronger colour contrasts, I decided to use this technique on this one. Even though the rough isn't finished, I know it will have this composition and basic colour layout, so I've already put down the acrylic underlay, so I won't have to worry about it being dry or not later. I simulated this in photoshop, the rough you see actually has a layer of red under the green part, and green under the red. Not as important in photoshop where there is no texture to the painting surface, and colour transparency+mixing is mathematically precise, but I figured it was a good idea to simulate the technique anyways.

Lots of work ahead still, not just on this but in every other class as well. Don't turn that knob! (oh, that is almost out of context in this day and age)

Objex

2009-01-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

Yep, more stuff! This is actually from last semester, but we didn't get it back till this semester and since there's so many drawings (20) I hadn't bothered scanning them all in until now. This was our last assignment for Layout/Perspective class, we had to draw 20 Household objects, and were given the entire semester to do it. I started about halfway through and finished the last objects I think a day or two before the deadline. I got perfect on the assigment, which to be honest didn't surprise me because I spent a lot of time on these over all, and for other reasons I'll explain throughout this post (yeah, this is going to be a big post...)

This is my hole puncher, if it looks weird its because it is awesome. How I needed this thing last year!

This drawing is self-reflexive, in that it is a scan of an image of the device that is scanning it. Must've been weird for my scanner-printer...

Need to get a new one of these, this one likes to double click...

Alrighty, this is probably Reason B for getting perfect on this assignment, the top of these cups are as normal and boring as anything, drawing the bottom though, in proper perspective, was quite complicated as you can see.

Not sure how, this spray bottle ended up having very different proportions compared to the real one, but hey, it's a spray bottle.

This is probably Reason A for my mark here. I like to call these David-Suzuki bulbs, cause he did those commercials for these. The bulb is a double-helix. To draw a double helix in perspective (properly) you need to use the 'spiral staircase' technique, twice, clockwise and counter-clockwise and beginning from different origins at the bottom. The spiral staircase method happens to be one the most difficult perspective techniques. To add to the challenge, they fuse at the top, luckily the fusion is wonky so that part allowed for some guestimating (that word is even more fun been typed than being spoken). As you should have noticed, I left the lines I used to construct all these drawings mostly intact, so the fact that I did in truth use the spiral staircase method here is very noticeable, even though about half of the construction lines are removed from this drawing, because there were so freakin many of them...

Overall, these probably add up to about four or five days of solid work. I used the 'floor plan' method to incorperate measurements I took of these objects into the drawings, which helped immensely in getting proportions accurate, although it added considerably to the amount of time needed to draw them (as opposed to just drawing a box in proper perspective then guestimating the rest within that box). I mean they're not perfectly accurate, but I'm very happy with how close they are, the big clip, Wii-mote, toaster, kettle, mouse and stapler being closest in my humble opinion.

Teh Panther 3

2009-01-30T19:54:00.000-08:00

Here's the finished Pink Panther walk!

Yes, he exits the frame a bit fast, I think it needed an extra cycle on the exit, or maybe it was missing a cycle (?) but not a big issue. Onto the Character Rotation+Lip Sync, which we officially begin next week.

Day/Night Painting 1

2009-01-28T22:21:00.001-08:00

Made a needlessly detailed rough for the Day/Night painting assignement. Planning to make two small paintings rather than one big one that's divided in half like some sort of chimeric-doppleganger, as cool as that is, and sounds. Simple idea, a 'sunny' nebula with a REALLY honkin big starship set in front of it for the day painting. For the night painting the nebula will retain the basic shape but the color scheme will be much more, well, night-like. There will be stronger contrasting colours, lots more darks, and the spaceship will be a wreck.

like how the nebula turned out here, and the spaceship is okay, I just don't feel that it looks quite big enough still, I had in mind a ship that would be larger than a planet (but not shaped like a planet cause that would be to close to Death-Star-wannabees). If you ever played Homeworld 2, and took a look at the massive wrecks in the background, wrecks that dwarf your mothership by several orders of magnitude, you'd know what I'm after. At the same time I can't just copy Homeworld's methods exactly for convincing us that something is really ridiculously big, so there's quite some challenge here. Anyways, here's what I put together in Photoshop:

Yep, it's a communist starship. Just because. Maybe it's got something to do with getting Red Alert 3 over the holidays. No the night scene is not some allegory for the fall of the Soviet Union, I just felt it would be lame for the starship to be exactly the same (aside from lighting) in both scenes. Yes, I have no idea how I'm going to paint this with gouache, should be interesting to say the least!

Teh Panther 2

2009-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

Fixed the legs, just about to clean this up, I was about to say I hope I can finish clean-up today but today has already become tomorrow (?) so... so much for that. Like everyone else I'm sure the true definiton of 'day' for me is that weird thing that happens in between sleeping, and it couldn't really care less about what the sun, moon and earth are doing. This is especially true for Animatorz. So it's still going to feel like I got it done today, right???

ANYWHO, next video I put up for this project will be the final, for now see the completed rough!

Teh Panthar

2009-01-24T16:41:00.000-08:00

Working on the Pink Panther walk, wish this weekend (the last weekend I have to work on it) didn't end up being the best time to work on this, but meh. Anyways, discovering the issues with my animation thus far required discovering how to pencil test this thing at home without flipbook or the camera tables that are at the school. Well, it can be done! I've got a program called Animation Shop, doesn't work quite the same as Flipbook but it still does the job. For getting the drawings into the computer I've improvised a setup with the peg bar on the wall and a taped-down camera, plus a lamp. If I had a tripod I could get better quality (less jumpy), but I work with I gots:

So I've yet to add the tail, but I'm already happy with the head turn (which as you can see isn't in-betweened yet) the body bounce and hip+shoulder movements. The legs need some tweaking as do the arms, for both I seem to be having an issue with when the limbs snap forward, I think it's just one in-between frame going the wrong way that's causing that. I mean it's passable, but it's not smooth enough for me yet. The Pink Panther walk should be like a glide, he's a relaxed guy, er, cat, like he just got back from a massage.

EDIT: I've fixed the arms but not the legs yet, I replaced the old video cause it only had one cycle and this one's better anyways. The new video has the fixed arms, the problem was indeed just two in-betweens being wonky.

I choose you Semestertwo!

2009-01-23T22:37:00.000-08:00

Feel free to roll your eyes at that title.

Semester 2 has started, some assignments have already been handed in, but while we wait for those to come back, here's my final assignment for Digital Tools from last semester.
I call mine 'Hot Hoth', because yeah, I inverted the planet's temperatute, it was a Canadian Winter, now it's more like Venus' summer...

More stuff later!

Holidays

2008-12-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

As the title implies, it's Holiday time! I'm off till January 13th (cause I don't have classes on Monday according to the new schedule, hoping that doesn't change) so obviously there won't be any projects.
However, hopefully I'll end up doing something artistic over this break, so if I make something I might put it up here or at DeviantArt, or both, so this won't be totally ignored during fun winter season time. Yesh.

Duelling Paintings Part 1

2008-12-09T17:16:00.000-08:00

Final assignment for this year, everything else is handed in already, all tests are complete etc., so this is all I have to work on now.
Final painting assignment for this semester is two paintings, one the opposite of the other, in whichever way you care to interpret the meaning of 'opposite'. For mine the 1st painting is a tranquil ocean scene (well the waves are rather choppy but it's still cheerful). In the 2nd I will replace the water, with lava, and that happy dormant volcano will become a raging fireball-like lava dome surrounded by the shattered remnants of the mountain's sides.
Like the previous painting (get that back soon hopefully) I'm making the rouhgs in photoshop, from which I'll paint the finals. Making the rough for the 2nd at the moment, I hope to finish that and get some progress on the finals before tomorrow.

EDIT: Finished the rough (a very detailed rough, too much fun!) for the 2nd painting as well. The 1st might be a wrecked civilization amongst crashing waves, but compared to the 2nd painting, ANYTHING else would look like paradise. Observe:

Ball and Tail Animation

2008-12-08T14:41:00.000-08:00

Last animation assignment for the semester! And thus 2008 as well. 2 other projects left, but they will be done shortly.

Here's my Ball and Tail animation. If I had a little more time I'd go in and add more frames to the part around half-way, where the ball jumps in from lower left, lands, looks around then jumps away (particularly the tail is moving too fast as it twists to the 'jumping' position) but other than that I'm happy with this:

These Dry Bones Part 3

2008-12-04T21:12:00.000-08:00

Here's the last of it, this completes my Life drawing class for this semester! Well, I still have to hand it in, but only some extreme and unforeseeable event could prevent that now. Like a Walrus invasion. Actually, that'd be really cool.

ANYWHO, this leaves an animation, 12 object drawings and a painting to finish off the semester entirely. Just seven more semesters to go! :D

This pelvis drawing was just a study I did before drawing the pelvis in full. I used it on my title page because despite being unfinished and a little 'bent', still like how it looks. The pelvis was the only bone I did these 'studies' for, due to teh time constraints later.

These Dry Bones Part 2

2008-12-02T21:03:00.000-08:00

Almost done! Well this semester, though there's still quite a few things which need rapid completion. Anyways, here's my Leg, Scapula and Pelvis bone drawings, only have the arms in supinated and pronated positions left to do, those will be done on Thursday, after I finish off my English essay (should start that, NOW), the whole thing is due Friday, but I'll have all day thursday after class to work on this, and then it will be DONE.

Well here's what you've all (ok I have no idea how much traffic I get here, meh) been waiting for:

Shark-Bait Hoo-ha-ha!

2008-11-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

Character expressions assignment, our last drawing assignment for Character design class! Though we still have to do an artist presentation...
Anyways, went with a shark for this one. Originally his head was going to be much more square, but Enzo (our teacher) suggested I put a more standard snout on it, so basically it now has the bow of the Titanic for a nose. I'll be using this guy for our final storyboarding assignment as well.
And now for a fairly rapid 2-point perspective room drawing. And I've already maxed out my caffiene quota for the day this morning! w00t

Landscape Painting Part 1

2008-11-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

Well I did the painting, but in the wrong medium. No, I didn't use the wrong paints, I mean completely the wrong medium, as in it is on the computer, not paper.

No it wasn't a mistake. I did this for my final cloud painting too, I make the whole thing digitally, because Photoshop is nigh-infinitely forgiving if you know what you're doing (which I do, w00t) then print it off and use that as a basis for the traditional painting I'll actually hand in. Basically I end up with two different finished works. The digital one SHOULD be less 'finished' than the physical one, but I often get carried away, so whether or not this approach adds or detracts from my final is yet to be discovered. I did two studies traditionally before, so the switch in medium shouldn't be too startling. Anyways, I'll be doing the real one tomorrow, for now you can see my digital study. Which I might add, you'll get to fully see, where as the finished 'real' painting won't entirely fit in the scanner.

They need to start selling bigger scanners to the masses...

If I can make something that looks like this in gouache, I will be very happy. If it looks better I might be ecstatic : D

Saying a game has vehicles section nowadays is like saying it comes in a BOX

2008-11-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

El Box foldio. Okay enough cryptic messages, it's my box fold animation. Quite happy with it, looking forward to the ball and tail assignment that's up next as well. Thank goodness that one's due at the very end, as opposed to every other class which has final assignments due the week before, ie: much sooner than is comfy.

One of which is the landscape painting, which is tonight's task. But for now, Autobox, roll out!
(no, the bad puns have no end):

Royal Winter Fair didn't have Chairs.

2008-11-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Oh the wit! But seriously, when it was lunch time we only saw about four tables, and of course there was that bar section with a whole bunch more empty tables but you weren't allowed in unless you bought a drink at the bar. Was there like another food court outside or something? Whatever, the indoor situation pertaining to seating was re-donk-u-lus.

ANYWHO, I was hoping I would make more drawings than I did while there, but I certainly have enough for the 6 pages we're supposed to hand in from the fair. Or is it 4 pages? The handout at the beginning of the year says 4, but I keep thinking I heard 6 somewhere. Meh. So here's my 6 pages, as always the drawings were scanned in and arranged in Photoshop (cleaned up a bit too), so if I have to reduce to 4 I can always re-arrange stuff:

The originals were all done with a mechanical pencil. I brought markers, conte pencils, pens and regular pencils with me, but a combination of not wanting to waste time switching between tools (in a VERY crowded building no less), and just being more comfy with my mechanical pencil resulted in doing everything in one medium. At least I had the options there.

Dyslexic Cow

It's like having the movie Dune in your drink.

2008-11-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

So in painting today we ironically didn't touch the paints, but did landscape studies using graphite powder in preparation for our landscape paintings due in a few weeks. Combining a few reference pictures I came up with this:

I'll be making some colour studies based on this using photoshop and eventually in real paint (remember that stuff?). It's a sand desert, though as it is it wouldn't be hard to convert to an ice desert. But as the title for this post suggests, I'm headed for the hotter variant. The scene is supposed to have a man-made object in the foreground, I'm thinking either adding a wrecked plane, oil well, generic hut or just rip off a Wind Trap from the Dune series (link is NOT my work). Anyways this exercise was great fun and I'm much more confident about painting dunes now.

These Dry Bones Part 1

2008-11-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Obviously I'm not done all the bone drawings, but the Skull, Lumbar and Cervical Vertebrae are completely, complete, and the Scapula is only missing 2 drawings which won't take long once I get the model again. Pelvis needs 4 more drawings so I haven't bothered assembling the 2 I do have, yet. But the Pelvis was the first bone we got, so I was still figuring out how I was going to draw these when I had it, I improved my method immediately afterwards. Haven't touched the arms and legs yet, but I'm comfy with being able to get to those in time.

Anyways, doing these with H and a 3B Conte pencils, plus a Charcoal White pencil for the shiny bits. Ooo, shiny. Done on Manilla. These were all drawn on 8 1/2x11 then scanned and shrunk down, I scanned a blank Manilla page for the background then put it all together in Photoyshop:

EDIT: Work-in-progress scapula drawings removed, cause I have the full ones posted later.

Seaweed part 2

2008-10-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

And the book too. Got them done and handed in today. Would've preferred to fine tune a few things, but time presses, at least our class is caught up now, we missed 2 animation classes due to holidays. They should really plan ahead more with that, I mean it's not like they can't see it coming. Anyways, here's my seaweed/book page turn video:

Paintings that worked!

2008-10-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

Today I was working on my Cloud Painting assignment. I still have to do the final painting for that, but half the project is the studies before that, which are now done. Lessons were learned once again this painting session, but nothing as drastic as 'bought wrong paints' went wrong this time. Some of the paintings turned out better than others, but I'll be using them all anyways, since he's not expecting the studies to be masterpieces:

Just an FYI, these are about the same size as you see them here, as in if you click the image to enlarge it what you'd see would be larger-than-life.

Things that would be changed: The one with in the desert, those yellow lines on the road were a late addition I wish I'd left out. Also, I think these have to be analogous, so that yellow sand is too different a hue. The one with the wispy clouds over the ocean (not the billowy-clouds-over-ocean), the clouds need to stand out more. Though that may be difficult to achieve. I did that one by painting a plain blue sky then adding the wisps with white paint, whereas the usual method is to leave the spaces that are to be white unpainted (which I did with every other painting). But with wispy clouds this is quite tricky, I'd basically have to paint the sky in between each wisp. And the night scene with the full moon is a little bland...

The aforementioned billowy-clouds-over-ocean might be my favourite. I feel comfy with the orange sunset but I'd probably rearrange the cloud formation. I like the crescent-moon scene too, though as-is it's pretty much the billowy-clouds-over-ocean, just with purple.

For tomorrow, the room drawing! REALLY hope I can finish it all tomorrow, but I do have Saturday to work on it as well. Wish me luck!

Character

2008-10-22T17:59:00.001-07:00

Well got lots done so far this reading week. My Seaweed AND Book Page Turn are both done, but I need to get to the school to put the frames into a video (the pages are larger than the regular scanner) so getting the videos up will have to wait till Monday.

The other thing I've finished this week is my 6 Character Poses, and I can put those up:

Yes, a zombie seems stereotypically thematic for this time of year, but you're just going to have to believe me when I say the thought of Halloween honestly did not cross my mind when I chose to use a zombie for this project. I don't think I've drawn a zombie since, grade 7 maybe?

Anyways, credit has to go to my character design teacher for the idea of the zombie taking off his arm and using it as a back-scratcher. From there I had a series of epiphanies for the other uses for his limbs. And I love that sun. The zombie does not.

Darn, I did spell Bogey wrong... You still get it though right? Right??

Seaweed part 1

2008-10-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

Just starting on the seaweed assignment. First thing I did was scan in the 'template' they gave us in the hand out, traced it into individual frames and made it into an animation. So if you follow the template drawing exactly, this is the motion your seaweed will perform:

As you can see, it really isn't very seaweed-like. Obviously this template was given to us so that we could clearly see the details of the motion, but many people end up making their seaweed move in the exact same way anyways. This template is EXAGGERATED, so if you don't want your seaweed to look like a wagging tail or some sort of vicious attack plant (I can just hear the 'thud' at the end of each swing), don't make it sway as far as this. 80% less sway might work.

Feet

2008-10-17T15:31:00.000-07:00

Handed these in today, I'm quite eager to find out how I did, but patience we must have grasshopper.

Also reading week has finally arrived and I'm so grateful it has. Lots to do yes, but I finally feel like I have more than enough time to do everything, as I mentioned in the previous post my time management had been thrown off at some point, so now it should get back on track.

So here's those feet drawings:

Handz

2008-10-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

Here's my 12 hands, I'll put up my 12 feet once they're done. Just 3 more feet to draw, they're due tomorrow, but since I'm not shading my feet they get done much faster. At some point my time management went kablooie, so it became impossible to draw all 12 feet in time with shading. Oh well, like how they're working out anyways...

For reading week, in order of importance (ie: what's due first):

-Seaweed+Book Flip animation

-6 Character Poses

-1-point perspective Classroom

-Cloud Painting

-Object Drawings (20 by the end of the semester)

So yeah, that's going to be busy. We should REALLY have an extension on the seaweed/book, since we've only had about an hour of in-class time to work on it (during which we were also finishing our previous assignment) but let's not COUNT on that happening.

Well it's time to go Back To The Future.

...

Feet.

Lessons learned: Painting

2008-10-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight I started work on my 2nd assignment for Painting, Rendering a Sphere.

Simple, yes?

Well here are the lessons learned when I started painting tonight:
A) Tape down your paper on something that won't warp when it gets wet, wood works, newsprint on wood doesn't (I was using newsprint to help avoid a mess, turns out it just created a mess on my image).
B) Good Watercolor paper is THICK (takes a lot of swipes with an exacto knife to cut!)
C) ...

USE THE RIGHT PAINTS

D) Water soluble Oil Paints act and look painfully similar to gouache, until you try to mix them, or clean them off your brush (thank goodness that was a dirt cheap brush, the trash can now contains a very orange object).

Lesson D is particularly important to learn, as said water soluble oils are sold at the Sheridan store, by the same company (Windsor & Newton) and with the same selection of colours we were told to buy in GOUACHE. And since they're paints they are naturally right beside the gouache.
And since they're paints they are quite expensive.
Whatever, I'll hang on to them anyways, maybe I'll get to use them for a mixed media thingy, someday.

In other words: I've lost the receipt.

Portfolio

2008-10-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

This is what got me into Animation at Sheridan this year. We needed a minimum 2.97/4 score to get in, the score starts at 2.5 and goes up or down depending on the competition. This is because they only let about 100-130 people into the program each year (still not 100% sure on the number of us).
I got in with a 3.12/4 while taking the Visual & Creative Arts program at Sheridan. The previous year I got a 2.43/4 while taking Art Fundamentals...
And the year before that, during highschool I got about 4 out of 100 (the marking scheme was different, but not the standards!).
As should be evident, Art Fundies at Sheridan is an excellent program, and most highschool art programs are next to useless. They don't need to be, there's so much BASIC stuff they could just tell us that would immediately improve our art skills, but nah, we'll just run in abstract circles.
I mean I really enjoyed Grade 12 art and took it seriously, but I was NEVER told anything about line quality throughout my education before post-secondary. I mean it's SO simple. Use thicker lines away from the light source, and lighter lines near it, and don't use 'hairy' lines! There, that's all you need to get started!
Anywho (yes I use that alot), I'll only put up the stuff from my victorious portfolio (w00t) cause the other stuff is redundant or, in the case of my highschool portfolio, sacrilegiously bad.

Life Drawings

Animal Drawings

Hand Actions

Character Rotations

Character Action Poses

Household Objects

Room, and the same room from a different view

Storyboard

(I really hope I don't have to draw this cat again, I drew him 3 years in a row)

Personal Pieces

The following piece is the only thing common to all 3 of my portfolios. Yes, I did it in highschool and could do much better now, but I still think it's a fairly good drawing, after all it did work eventually (I got 3.5/4 on my Personal pieces overall, so the judges certainly didn't hate it).

Quite a story behind this one, I'll spare most of the details and say this was for an anti-abuse poster contest, at the top of the original it says "Should love hurt this much?". In my actual porfolio I used a full size copy I had recieved (original is in a frame in London), the image was too big to fit in my scanner so what you see is cropped.

The drawing is of a friend who gave me several photos to choose from, I felt this angle worked the best.

Main issue is since this is from a photo, the light from the flash 'flattens out' the shadows. If the flash wasn't directly lined up with the lens, or if there was no flash (so you'd probably need a spotlight or sunlight to get sufficient lighting) you'd see more cast shadows and reflected light which would help define the form better.

These selections from my sketchbooks were all put on one page, so they counted as one peice:

My last personal peice was my self-portait painting that I've already put up on this blog.

Bouncing Ball Animation

2008-10-07T17:15:00.000-07:00

First project for my Animation Principles class, 1st year of the Bachelor of Applied Arts in Animation program at Sheridan College (that's for those of you who don't know me or what we do here).

Here's my bouncing ball, bowling ball, balloon and pendulum, all in one big happy AVI file:

Self critique: Ball bounces a little fast, bowling ball kinda jitters near the end, I like my balloon, pendulum is off center but whatever. Overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out.

Also, very important discovery, I do not hate drawing the same thing over and over. I'm actually quite content doing this because I always feel like I'm getting somewhere as I complete each frame. May be premature to say this this early, but that's how I feel at the moment.

Starting up

2008-10-07T16:53:00.000-07:00

Introduction!

Hello blog world!

So yeah, Jeremy (http://www.jeremymah.blogspot.com/) kept telling me to get a blog, not that I didn't intend to, I've just been busy/distracted.

Anywho, this is where I'll be piling my artwork, whether it be sketches n' doodles, fun projects, school projects, or (eventually) work projects.

I've got a lot of stuff up on Facebook and DeviantArt already. At DA I go by the username OrthancG. If you run into an Orthanc elsewhere on the net, chances are probably good that it's me (not that I get around a whole lot, I just always use Orthanc). I'll still be adding stuff to DA from time to time, and my stuff that's already on Facebook will stay there, but I'm going to try and make this my main art dumping ground.

Also, if you're into Civilization 3 by any chance, I've made animations for a total of 62 new units for use in that game, which can be found at http://www.civfanatics.com/ . I have my original Orthanc account over there. I've been doing that for about, five years, longer than I've known most people I talk to nowadays.

Ok, enough intro! Art already! I'll start with a piece I did last year, a self portrait in acrylic paints, so you guys have a face to these words: