New Videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!