Well it is getting down to the end of the quarter, and the final projects are starting to get assigned and worked on. Currently, I have finished a new walk cycle of my character (as in, the character which is a caricature of me), Adam, from TangentArtists.com's comic Donuts for Looking. This character is actually going to appear in other places as well if I ever get the time to finish the other various projects, since my brother's character, Evel, is his evil twin, and we are planning on working on several projects together. Get it? Adam and Evel. It's a joke.
Seriously though, here is Adam in his overly-optimistic walk. Once again, this was intended to be a loop, but I haven't yet figured out how to do that in youtube.
Not perfect, and not my first walk cycle, but by far my best! I know now that I can do better, and with finals coming up, I will have that chance.
I also have a slightly updated version of the flour sack animation, with slightly better timing. Check it out here:
The fact that you can see the lines through the sack is merely an artifact/limitation of the software being used, Flipbook. It doesn't do complex things like masking, it is only designed to do simple flip book style animations and pencil tests.
I also just finished a new podcast recording with Alex over at 7thRowCenter. It should be up this weekend, so be sure to check it out!! Subscribe on iTunes or check it out on his website, 7throwcenter.com.
Other than that, I am thinking about adding a video blog to my website at some point, if I have the time. We'll just have to see how things turn out. It will mostly focus on campus life at SCAD, and might have a few interviews if I can manage it.
So thanks for checking me out. With finals coming up, look out for a lot of new content soon!
I will keep this post short. Seventh row center has a new episode up all about Holloween movies, the scary and the not so scary. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever podcast are sold. :P
I am also trying to work on something new for the blog, a video blog entry every now and then. I should have more posted soon about that later as well as about my latest animation projects.
Well for all those interested, I have yet another new animation for you. This one is coming to you a bit late because our teacher was out sick on Monday. Actually, that's not why it is late. It's late cause I procrastinated and then tried to make up for lost time but ended up only finishing one project, and not the other... Moral of the story... don't put off today what you can fail tomorrow.
LUCKILY for me, my teacher was sick. Not that I think it is a good thing to be sick. I hope he feels better in time for the next class, and wish him the best, he really is the coolest guy. But God put his hand in when he saw I was working so hard to catch up for bad judgments, and I was able to finish the animation for the next class. So here it is! I call it... The Great Sack Escape!... not really... It is about a sack of flour trying to escape the bakery, only to get... well... watch and enjoy.
So there it is! Hope you enjoyed it. Short yes... I am not satisfied with the truck... didn't plan out the movement well enough. But the sack turned out great!
So what was the other project I finished? A storyboard... which I may or may not be able to show you. it is big and glued together... We'll see what happens.
Other than that, I have a new toy, but I'll go into that one later. I will be doing a new episode of 7th Row center with Alex "da movie guy". Should be up this weekend. Also, if you have any suggestions of movies or genres or anything else you want to talk about, let me know, and I'll gladly bring it up with Alex!
I have been really busy this last week. With the completion of the GENERATE challenge (of which the Patchwork Pirates got 5th place), I have had to work on a hand-drawn animation of a waving flag (not an easy one for students to figure out), as well as an animation that involves following various principles of screen design and focusing on showing Z-depth (which is really just depth on a 2 dimensional screen), not to mention a presentation for a proposal for a term paper. Busy all around really.
The cool thing is there are now 3 new excellent animations finished for my classes, all of which look better than I thought they'd turn out.
Also, I figured out why the bob-omb animation looked so bad. Apparently I uploaded the wrong file, although the final one still has compression issues, but it looks a zillion times better.
Besides the bob-omb animation, I have the others to show as well. Here is the flag waving pencil test:
This is the flag wave animation. It took me several hours to complete, and I had to essentially start over at one point when I suddenly realized what I was doing wrong. I kept drawing the various keys and inbetweens wrong, and it suddenly clicked, and I figured out how to make it work. This is the result. It is short, but fluid.
Next up is the Screen Design Z-Dept project, or as I all it... Marble Maze:
This animation is intended to loop. The point of the exercise is to show depth in a 2D screen. There are several ways to do this including scale, overlap, perspective, and more. I originally intended to draw this out in Photoshop and then bring it into After Effects and animate it there. However, after struggling to make it look the way I wanted to, I started modeling it in Maya, and decided it turned out so well, I'd just do the entire thing in Maya, and proceeded to do just that. I used Maya 2008 (and 2012 for rendering on campus), and only used basic shapes and methods, but with very effective rendering techniques. All the lights use Ray Tracing and shadows, the wood surfaces use many layers of textures to make it work, the rendering used mental ray, and Final Gathering, in order to get such effective colors and lighting etc. It took me about 12 hours or so to render the final version (and I had to render it twice... one scene once... cause they earlier ones didn't look good), but luckily I could use multiple computers on campus, and managed the entire thing in about 4 hours.
In other news, keep your ears open for the latest episode of 7thRowCenter, where we talk about the power of cheese. These movies are so bad, they are Gouda!
All day Friday and into Saturday Morning, SCAD Atlanta hosted the GENERATE 24 hour challenge. This is a sort of contest where they take each department (animation, sequential art, etc.) and split them into small groups of 3-5 people. Each department has a company come in and host a challenge that has to be completed within 24 hours. Each group is usually assigned a unique topic. My group was the Patchwork Pirates (so named because of our hodgepodge of members), part of the animation department. This year, Turner hosted our challenge, and the challenge was to create a series pitch within 24 hours. The pitch had to consist of:
A 15-30 second animatic of the opening
A Treatment
A 15 second Elevator Pitch
3-5 Character design style sheets
A full color style frame
3 Merchandise ideas in 3D
And an outline for an entire season
All this had to be completed within 24 hours of the start, which meant 10am Friday to 10am Saturday. Each group within the department was assigned a different network to pitch the idea to, which meant we had to research demographics, etc. We were the group everyone wish they could have been, because we had Adult Swim as our focus.
We did have some trouble though. First, our original idea was poopooed by one of the professors who was leading the event. The problem was the story idea had (unknowingly to the rest of our group) been used before by one of our members for various projects/classes. So we had to rework the idea, change some of the character designs, and make things more edgy. When we had finished that, we pitched the idea to the head of Adult Swim (or was it Turner Animation?) who loved it! The second problem was that the member with the most experience in 3D and animation left for a previous engagement. Unfortunately, another member also had to leave due to medical reasons. That left 3 of us to do a huge task, and none of us were very experienced.
Somehow we managed to pull though. With the help from a friend, we managed to complete everything with an hour to spare. Personally, I still think the look was too "cutesy", but since I was dedicated to doing the animatic by myself, I couldn't keep rejecting images so I just worked with what I got and tried to make it work. Adult Swim usually does cheap, simple, exaggerated, and over-the-top animations, which are edgy and stylized. I think we should have really pushed this more, but we would have needed more members involved through the entire project to assure the look we wanted. However, I think we still managed to pull out a very good project with the limitations and complications that arose. Since we did all that work, I won't go into presenting all of it again from scratch. However, I will post the final PDF of the project as well as the animatic here, so you can see what we did. Enjoy!
