I have been working on the same project for a while now and I wanted to try work on something different. I came across this sneaker template psd on deviant art. I though t it would be cool to try and animate a texture on to the sneaker. I never got to the animating part as I just kept working on the design more and more try different things on the shoe.
After all I tried I decide to keep it simple similar to how the comic book it designed with just red and white. I added two images from the comic that I already had broken up with the man of action logo.
I didn’t really have a good title for today but since my comp over heated twice using Photoshop I decide to title this post a feature I wish it had. It seem working with Photoshop files that are 5000px+ by 5000px+ causes my comp to overheat…They where big scans.
Anyway I’ve been working on my I Kill Giants Spot that I should have finished in a few days. You can check out what I have so far on my 365 project. I have the beginning slow parts done, just have to do the giant fighting scenes.
I didn’t get to any animation today but I did make this image while I was working on breaking up the images. It didn’t fit the style I’m going for with the single frame images but I thought it was cool so I kept it. I took an extra 15 mins. to add some more stuff to it to make it look even cooler and below is what I came up with.
I used some water colour paper textures for the edges and some grunge paper over it all to try to bring it together.
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.
I thought the Hammer from I Kill Giants was pretty cool so I wanted to see how it would look translated into 3D. I although that I may do some projection mapping on to it for my IKG spot to have some fake rotation on it.
I the modeling of it was pretty straight forward, it’s all composed of primitive object with booles to cut away certain parts. I wasn’t to sure of the color since the comic is black and white so I went for the shiny reflective feel.
The hardest part was the chain, in the comics it’s just a mass of lines that look like a chain but is more just a black shape. I made the chain links and put it helix with the cloner, I believe the duplicate on spline would off set 90 degrees perfectly but the cloner gave me more flexibility. I found that the sync option allow the random effector for almost near perfect equal rotation on each item.
The chain kills the render time, not to bad overall(5 mins) but it does push my computer near the magical number of 90 degrees Celsius for instant shut down(at least if I try to do other stuff while rendering).
I think as far as modeling this hammer it’s pretty much done for what I need and more. I’ll probably tweak it a bit and post on my DA page and here when it’s finished as an extra post/
I read the comic(graphic novel) by Joe Kelly + JM Ken Niimura called I Kill Giants. I got it when I went to comic-con last year and I got it signed by Joe Kelly. The story is very good and the art is cool black and white stylized comic style for the drawings. It sort of reminds me tekkonkinkreet as far as animation goes.
My goal is to create a 15 second spot for a fictional motion comic. I picked 15 seconds because I thought it would be a reasonable amount of time to give a little peek into this comics world. My inspiration for this the unofficial titles of the walking dead tv show. I really like the 2.5d effect in this animation and how it all flows together.
I began by re-reading the comic and picking out cool parts. There where few key scenes that you will see in the PDF that I thought where epic and had to be in it. After that I started breaking it apart so I could have all the parts I needed. I started out trying to make it fairly good then I thought this is just for my own personal storyboard so it can be messy and quick so I can just get to the storyboarding.
I made an out line of what I wanted to show Home–> School –> Giant Fighting. As I progressed with the boards I realized I wouldn’t have enough time so it got scaled down to School –> Giant Fighting. My goal was to go from calm to chaos.
You can check out my pdf storyboard if you want to see my notes. It may have some(a lot) of spelling error since I just type my thoughts quickly and and theres no spell check in the program I used. I still need to tweak some parts like flash after the hit so it’s more noticeable. I also seem to need to fix the scene numbers.
This is a quick little animation I put together of James Whites’s(signalnoise) design with his Character Head for his nomination for Faces Magazine in Halifax for their Faces Choice Awards 2011. Vote for him on the voting page.
Originally I wanted animate his character head that he has up before his broadcast. I had the idea to have it do sort of the typical talking head thing, probably sync it to him saying “Keep the metal alive”. Then I saw this one and I just had to animate.
I recreated the design in Photoshop and Illustrator. Then I animated it in After Effects. I made sort of pseudo rig that allows me to flip the eyes down easily and open the mouth. The tongue I animated with the puppet tool. I designed the tongue by looking at reference of Gene Simmons tongue…I also looked at some Youtube videos for the tongue animation…(I would not really recommend doing this, I should have used a safer place).
So in the end I got this James rocker head poster animation that rocks out to the music as the text comes in with a little tongue action at the end.
This is my submission to roberleger.net Xpresso Lesson number 6. The image above will goto the vimeo screen cast that I have of it working. Unfortunately I was not able to render the full quality screen cast due to to time but I will render the full quality one and switch it out.
The only issue is reading the Xpresso nodes, so for that I have created a mini gallery here so you can check it out. (WordPress is having some issues so this will be up in a bit.) You can also check out the My Xpresso setup in the C4D file as well. My set up it pretty much the same for each item just different ranges on the range mapper.
I made a little teaser at the beginning using the android droid mascot. I did all of the movement with the(2) animators except for the hands and head. Oddly enough though the item I used to show the espresso is a an apple iPad…
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.
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.
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.
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.
I though t it would be cool to try and animate a texture on to the sneaker. I never got to the animating part as I just kept working on the design more and more try different things on the shoe.
