More info about my process why I made this and my process in a later post.
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Tag: after effects
For the past couple of months I’ve gotten into a new webcomic called JL8 which features various members of the justice league as little kids in school. The go to school like normal kids except that they have super powers and the comic explores this in many ways often with a side of humor.
The creator of the comic Yale Stewart posted a some desktop wallpaper images on his deviantArt page and I got the ideas to try and do some camera projection using those images. I chose to use C4D because it has projection man which makes this very easy to setup.
After brain storming what kind of camera move I wanted to do I found a character model that was similar to Hal in the picture and started adding parts that would match the image and give it some slight depth. Using projection man to manage the images allowed me to easily jump back and forth between C4D and Photoshop and extract various parts. Above is a hardware video where you can see the geometry I used.
My final goal was to create a simple 5 second camera move animation that featured Hal focusing on sky and his glowing ring.
One of the areas I feel that I’m not as strong at in 3D sometimes are my rendering skills and the specific skills that help with it like understanding scene scale and lighting. I’ve also have tried out various tools to help me speed up this process. I have used Vray for 3DS max at work for a bit now and it greatly enhance the renders without much effort (at least for the type of work I do). At home however I don’t have max or vray and getting just a trial for vray for c4d is not a seemingly easy thing to do. So looking around I came across Maxwell render (now owned by Nextlimit, Realflow) again and this time I decided to give it a serious try.
Just going through the tutorials I was impressed with the real looking renders you get without much effort so I decided to get the learning edition which is only $99 with a few limit like render size but no watermarks. The above render is a character I modeled and rigged from a logo I found on brands of the world.
moskarachos
I’m still not sure what the word means that the image was titled with even after trying to look up the word, hopefully nothing bad. I had two ideas for how I wanted to render the scene either glossyish plastic like a toy or flat shaded to seem like the logo vector. I decided just to go with the flat shade for now but it still has very nice lighting overall. I think I may work on a static image of a plastic version for a still shot.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and learning how to use Maxwell Render. I did forget to turn one effect on in my scene for the final render which I’m kind of mad at myself for not doing but I’m not going to render it again now.
If you don’t know about Bearmageddon you should because its an awesome webcomic by Ethan Nicolle. If the title doesn’t give it away it’s about Bears taking over and ripping people apart. I found out about this comic through Ratfist, which is another awesome webcomic.
I deiced to do this for couple of reason, the first is I really like webcomics or comics in general and the ones that I find are the best visually are really dynamic and have a lot of motion on each page. I’ve had on my list to animate a webcomic for a while now but still have not really done it yet to where I really like it. (I did a commercial spot for I Kill Giants)
When I saw that Ethan was taking a break I though I should do something to show how great the comic. I also saw that other people where posing other cool images about the comic and thought I could make something too.
Originally I was going to animate the last few pages from where the bears start chasing the van, but realized this would take a lot more work then I had the time for. So after some quick brainstorming I came up with the idea to animate the sites banner image which is also in desktop format.
I planned to do a 3D camera project of the image on to some rough geometry to give it a more believable feel then some of my other animations. I still had to cut our the whole image into parts and map them onto geometry and make sure it looked ok. My first tests where good with my original camera moves but I change the move a bit at the end and you can see some repetition where I didn’t think anyone would see.
I did some final composting in After Effects to try and give it a more movie feel. I also added a whole host of sounds effects that I mixed together to try and help enhance the already amazing visuals. I paid a bit more attention to it this time trying to create a good mix of sound with in the piece that didn’t just become mush when you listened to it. Tried to give it a real stereo sounding feel to it so if you listen with only one headphone you wont get the full sound.
I think this is one of my better 2D image to animation pieces but still has bunch of things that could be worked on. This was supposed to be just a weekend project but it wound up taking a few days more but the result is better because of it. So here you go my a 3D camera project animation of the Bearmageddon banner/desktop image.
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Bearmageddon Banner Animation
This is a 3D camera projection animation I did using the banner/desktop image for the webcomic Bearmageddon. http://bearmageddon.com/
I will be posting some notes soon on my process.
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Reel Update 2011
Updated my with some more recent projects and swapped out some of my weaker projects. Currently working on another personal project to replace my least favorite project still in my reel. Then I think I will do a completely new reel with a new opening, closing and music.
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Jux Animation Notes
I have been using the newish blogging system called Jux. It a simple platform that lets you publish content a number of ways but focuses on your content in a full screen way no ads way. Initially I didn’t want to start using a new system but It looked to cool not to try out at least once. After using it for a bit I found I really liked how it displayed my photos and videos and have continued to post there every once in a while.
After looking around the site’s blog and others Juxxers I deiced to make a quick animation about the platform use their post’s, “Top 6 Reasons to Jux” as inspiration. I entitled my animation 6 Ways to Jux and choose to make it 15 seconds long.
I did a mini storyboard and after collecting some assets I proceed with the design, first using some vector logos that Jux provided. Then I browsed other Jux blogs via SURF JUX to find images that I would used for each section. After that I went started to animate and work our the final composite.
My last remarks are that the mp4 versions have a lot of banding due to the compression process. The uncompressed looks fine so it seems I will have to play with the conversion process and re-upload to get ride of the banding. Also in retrospec, I would have made more of a distinction in the orange and yellow or possibly placed them differently.
G=out
https://ct907.jux.com/ – Chrome and Firefox & ‘The creative adult is the child who survived’ & Here, take it. & Back to my Lego
http://nuwin.ca/ – Just another Pokemon Battle
https://olaviakite.jux.com/ – Places I’ve Dreamt About
Union Ident – http://audiojungle.net/item/union-ident/674275
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6 Ways To Jux Animation
A short animation showing the ways you can post on Jux.
https://jux.com/
http://mojux.g2bproductions.com/ – my jux blog
All pictures and videos featured where posted by other juxers. More info on this project on this blog soon
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Nutcracker Holiday Animation Notes
I wanted to make another personal project since I haven’t made one in a while and since it’s the holiday season I thought I would make one to fit the season. It just so happens that I made a model and had it rigged just for this occasion.
- mecha nutcracker by kidchuckle
About 6 months or so a go I saw this image by KidChuckle and thought it would be cool to model it in 3D and animate it. Since it was holiday themed I figured I would animated it finally for the holidays. I decided to clean it up a bit and make it a bit more accessible to animate and tweak the rig a bit. I also change the color on the models to make it a bit more festive.
After my few tweak I built a scene using a simple infinity floor with some Christmas like trees to randomly in the background so that I could blur out the background to indicate some depth. For the text in the foreground I tried a few options and came up with the one in the video that read the best though composition wise I like the one that had Holiday in the front better. The ornaments are from a pack that happen to be a free give away.
The audio is from audio jungle and drove most of my animation as far as a timing. I planed it all out a head of time then re-adjusted it to the audio that I edited a bit. My main goal was to show off the drill which spins a bit and the gun that shoots nuts.
I’ve notice now that I’ve seen it in full quality that I have some flickering issues. Not sure what is causing it exactly but its in my light multi pass channel.