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.
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?
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!
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).
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'
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
