More 3D goodies

Hello again!

I'd like to start off apologizing to anyone who has listened to 7th Row Center and figured out I had some bad information about The Secret World of Arrietty, and Studio Ghibli, and Hayao Miyazaki himself.  I realized that Patrick Stewart was in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, not Tales of Earthsea.  I was thinking about another fine British actor, Timothy Dalton, who played Ged/Sparrowhawk in the English language version.  Also, Miyazaki did not direct Arrietty; it was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who was a key animator for several other Ghibli (and non-Ghibli) films, such as Spirited Away and Ponyo.  Miyazaki has been credited as a writer and executive producer, so he was involved, just not as the director.

I'm sure I got more wrong, but if you have any questions, complaints, or comments, feel free to drop us a line at 7throwcenter.com, or on facebook, or reach me directly on this site or my facebook page, or find me on twitter at @WeaklyAnimated.  I know I haven't been that active on any of these lately, but I want to make sure I get good grades first, everything else comes after that.

Now that THAT is out of the way, I have some more images for people to view.  I have been working on modeling and texturing these models for a few weeks, in preparation for a scene focusing around the life and world of Harry Dresden, one of my favorite characters of literature.  If you are unfamiliar with Harry Dresden, I HIGHLY recommend you check out the Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher, or the audio books narrated by James Marsters.  So while I work on the lighting, take a look at the objects themselves.

For those with keen eyes, yes that is Discord from My Little Ponies.  Don't ask.  I still have more tweaking to do, but these are pretty much finished.  The rest of the scene is all about lighting and camera work.  Soon, I should have fully lit scenes using 3-point lighting for you to enjoy.  Comments and feedback are welcome as always.

Cheerio!

Great Metallic Balls

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!

Till next time,

GUTEN TAG!

In for the long haul

Howdy all!

If you haven't heard yet, I've added a Facebook page for my blog, which you can access by searching for Weakly Animated on Facebook, or clicking the link on the side of the page.
I am also going to e in an episode of the podcast SeventhRowCenter, which I will be adding a link to soon. If you are into movies, or want to know what is worth your dollar, this is the podcast to see... err... hear.

This will be a short post today. Tomorrow I start up fall classes at SCAD, with a focus on animation (yay!). I will be sure to post a lot about how my classes are going, what I've been learning, but also more movie reviews.

If you are interested in hearing about something specific, let me know!

Adios!