Charon Textures

Very close to having the model for the Acheron city done, but today I decided to wrap up the textures for the lava-ship Charon:

There's a little bit of detail-modelling left for the Ecclesia, as well as it's textures. Once the Ecclesia and Acheron are out of the way I'll finally feel comfortable jumping into animation.

and some more Texturing...

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!

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!

Rough Animatin'

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

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.

Goaticorn and Portfolio

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.

Choo choo!

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

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

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?

Dutch Kart?

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).

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

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!