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Daily 365 Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Task 7

 

This is my submission for Robert Leger’s Xpresso Task 7. The task was to create you standard product table. After the last hair puller the straight forwardness of this one was welcomed. This one was hosted by Ryan Hamilton, a xpresso task regular who is always producing some great work. To add even more awesomeness to it this one is a contest of for an Iphone App…although I don’t have an Iphone.

As far as the xpresso setup I didn’t hit any major snags while building it. I did however run into an issue where instead of using the radius of the shape to control the size I used the scale so I wouldn’t have to link up each different shape. My main reason for this, besides not wanting to make a bunch of connections over and over, was so I could use any custom shape. So I used scale with a small increment to make it seem like the radius is getting bigger.

I didn’t add any other features to this one like I normally do. Instead I focused more time into creating this animation.

 

Lego Mario Build Up

I wanted to do something then just have a random product on a table with it rising. My original idea was to have mickey mouse’s head and shoulders one the table and have it rise up as the ears rotate around and land on his head. I couldn’t find a good model of his head and I didn’t want to take the time to build it, so I did some brainstorming and thought a lego would be cool to build up.

I found this model of lego mario on 3d ocean and figure it would be cool to use. After that I just built the scene up and made a little Xpresso setup for the body parts. Then I created the swirling blocks to wrap around Mario while the product table(tunnel) goes up.

It’s a standard effect of sorts but it does look cool I think. I think I was inspired by the stop-motion like work of a recent lego spot that was on tv (web since I don’t have cable),

 

 

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Daily 365

Reel 2010/2011

I felt that I need to update my reel with some of the work that I’ve done recently so I decided to crank out a reel so that I can continually have something to work towards updating this year. Granted most of my work is geared toward that end but having a new one for this year makes it seem more significant.

So it’s time for a personal reel crit…were to start.

Let’s start with the beginning, the opening slate so to speak which is actually a third of my whole demo reel. I sketched a few idea’s based around my new logo that I developed and I decided on what I dubbed the “Platonic journey”.  I wanted to have a platonic travel through my logo and then transition in to my reel clips. Overall I thinks its good, the style is somewhat backwards in terms of mograp with the matte colors and ambient occlusion but I wanted to try something different which for me is no shiny stuff. I also ran into a bunch of technical issues but those problems will be saved for another post.

The reel it’s self I feel is decent for where I’m at right now. My level of work needs to go up but it’s better than my previous one. I attempted to keep the pattern of 3D to 2D work until the end. My strongest pieces I feel is the beginning one, although I have gotten a crit about the shadows, and the grooveshark, although thinking about it now it seems very similar to the standard circle logos with a swirl thing around them. Although I did it from scratch (I don’t even have particular, I wish I did) and the swirl thing I added at the end it seems kind of typical, so maybe it’s not so strong.

The weakest I would say might be the anime mx or the woot one at the end. I though of cutting either one per the GSG instant demo critique but it wasn’t the weakest thing I had laid in the timeline. When I create some more stuff those will probably be the first to go.

The ending I went for the simple text on black. I thought of bringing back the G2B from the beginning but it seemed like a bit much. I opted instead for the simple clean name and year at the end with my logo.

So now its time to post it and get some feedback from people about what they think needs to be changed.

 

Random side note: my spell checker is trying to make me type British with colour instead of color. I always though colour was just a cool way some people spelled color, learn something new all the time.

 

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Animation News Daily 365

Cool Golf Mini Prev + Legend of Korra

So apparently I made  the mistake of rendering my cool golf animation at my preview render instead of my full render so I have a mini preview for now until I render the full thing.

Any avatar fan will probably have good guess about what this is. It’s a image from the upcoming series Legend of Korra the follow-up of Avatar the Last Airbender. Other than one other image of Korra’s back this is the first time any one has seen her up close that I know of.  It’s a pretty epic picture showing her already using fire with her natural element of water.

For Avatar fans this is highly anticipated show which makes this new image sweet yet sour since it seems now that the show won’t air until 2012 instead of late 2011, November.  So fans will have to wait a little longer for this to come out. One can only hope that I will be as good as first series with anticipation so high who know what might happen if it’s not as good or better than Avatar The Last Airbender.

 

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Daily 365

Xpresso Task Test Droid

This is a quick render I put together to test my Animator for Robert legers Xpresso task. This one took me quite a while to get working, I had a complicated setup like most it seems before he gave the hint about just using a range mapper. Which helped  but I still had some trouble getting it to work even though I’ve used the range mapper even before I started these tasks.

So I watch some of his older tuts and it clicked that I was just using the wrong values to map every thing. My setup is fairly simple I think just takes a lot of repetition of connections to get it to work for the different values. I say in the Vimeo Xpresso group that other people where having some trouble as well. Some of the solutions seem somewhat complicated for my taste.

This scene was inspired by the android commercials with their mascot.

I will post my final file after I tweak it bit and maybe add some more controls.

 

 

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Daily 365 Downloadable

Minion Character Rigs

I thought it would be cool if I cleaned up my my rig for the minion character and posted it so people can play with and maybe make their own cool characters. It’s noting to pretty inside so this is one of those as is type of files.

The rig has the ability to control the eye(iris) position, the eye lids for the top and bottom independently (lazy eye), both lids at once for a squinty look, and a full close. The mouth has 4 poses including smile, which I fixed now so that each range corresponds to a pose (ie: 0-.99, 1 to 1.99, etc…). Before I just had 0,1,2,3.

The arms are fully IK and so is the feet but it only allows for small movement since he has now legs… There is an also controllers for the middle top of the head and the bottom by the legs to add some extra movement.

It’s self contained in a zip file.

My other quick submission is my style frame for the cool golfers logo animation. I finished all of the animation correctly now which looks pretty good. I was planning on rendering it to today but I ran out of time.

My goal with the final design is to try and make it seem on top of the grass or some what coming out of it without a light really beaming down on it.

I still need to work on the lightning of the logo and I notice some errors in the text.

The biggest error that I missed though is that in all of my previous submissions I spelled golfer golgers. It’s funny how you can miss things like that. I wish cinema had a spell check for times like this. I’m sure someone made a script for this.

 

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Daily 365 Series

QR Code Dunny, They are Among Us

This is my final version for the QR Code Dunny that I was working on. I render this one out with a linear profile from cinema 4D which initially was very dark but I remembered reading a blog post about linear work flow from heloluxx.com. (Which has a load of stuff for learning Cinema 4D. ) So I was able to switch over the project profile and everything look alright, some what.

I did some color correction and tried to make have some color so it wasn’t so plain with just black and white. In addition I added some sound and time remap effects that work together. I think it make it seem kind of cool and ominous.

The music I found just Googleing monolithic , which brough me to Dr. Mabuse – Monolithic. It a pretty cool experimental video by Angelique van Grootel. Not sure why I originally thought monolithic since I forgot the definition but after look it up it makes sense. Music by Dr Mabuse.

I used the spy photo preset from all bets are off production for the time remapping. originally I was doing by hand(mouse using time remapping but them I remembered this preset).

The dunny model is from http://soulkreig.deviantart.com/art/Munny-DIY-3D-Model-192341036

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Daily 365 Series

QR Code Dunny(Preview)

So this is the animation I’m making for the QR Code Dunny I worked on a while ago. The render will take to long so it’s just a preview for now. My original design had them bunch together and at diffrent angles, but that looked odd to me with every thing floating, moving and intersecting so I went with the floating ring look.  Pretty standard I suppose but it’s ok.

I was able to achieve the spring effect using the spring connector in cinema 4D v12. It took me a bit to figure it out simply because I was trying to create the effect using one spring which would tip the box over with anything added on top. I tried aiming multiplier springs at the corners which helped but not much them. Then I realized I could just use invisible walls on all four side, higher in the back to keep the dunny from falling back sometimes. After that is was just tweaking every thing. Might do some more before the final render.

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Daily 365

Pez Model(M Head)

I was sketching (or attempting ) some logo designs based around the letter m when I started doodling this character head that came out of a M. I also think I was subconsciously influenced by megaman and some of other cartoon.

So I decided to scan it into my comp and out line it in illustrator and translate in into 3d. A simple task one might think but no so since the m shape is quite hard to get it to place right on a circular surface and conform right. I tried a number of things including projection and deformer but it looked off. So I when with a loft and make the second copy of the spline smaller. The I adjust the points on the front one to bend in. It still had some issue if you bent it to far but I was able to get it to a decent place.

The body Pez part just came about since I need something to put the head on. It’s mainly made of a bunch booles like the head with some extrusions. I was even able to find the pez font to add-on the side. Booles work well but some complex items like sphere give you weird edges like around the eyes, which I need to fix. I was lucky enough to actually have a pez dispenser which helped a lot even modeling this simple object.

The lightning I was going for is similar to the product displays on the pez website.

Overall I think I got somewhat close, the bottom body is off and doesn’t pick up the specular quite right. Also I think the M head covering isn’t picking up light right or is just to white to pick much up. I used soft boxes from http://www.creatingfilm.com/ renderkit.  Also looking at it now I think I should have added some ambient occlusion. It look to strong when I tried it and my original reference was a lot more washed out.

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Daily 365 Downloadable Series

Xpresso Task 5

This is my result for the expresso task 5 from robertleger.net. I was able to have all of the required functionality plus I added a spline warp that gives it path follow capabilities.  I have also included the file below if anyone want to check it out and use it. I made a screen cast of it in action which is taking a while to upload so when it’s done I will add it to this post.

G2BProductions Xpresso task 5 Final

Categories
Client Work Daily 365 Series

UHouse Tribute Opening Final

This my final version for the Unity House Tribute Opening 2011. Overall I like the whole animation. Some parts could use some more tweaking but I think it works well. I added some color with some curves to the whole scene since straight back and white looked odd to me.

The hardest part of this was trying to get the wall texture to look right. The real Keith haring room/museum/store, that he painted was seamless with everything connecting to each other.  I tried different projections but none really worked. Some would just work for one cornet and not the other. And moving the texture just seemed off. I thought of making a repeating textures but it didn’t quite work with the different characters. I opted to just go with flat and adjusted it a bit.

I think solution would be to make a separate texture for each side of the room and have it aligned up photoshop. That would be a bit more time consuming, which I didn’t have time for. I also noticed once it was full rendered that the texture look pixelated up close which sucks since I did vectorize it. I guess I just didn’t output a large enough copy for the texture.

I’m not sure if I mentioned it before but the song is the begining of Pon De Floor by Major Lazer