All the Videos

...and little working this week.

Taking a break from paid work this week because:

1. I can! No deadlines!
2. The "simple" rigging system(HumanIK) I tried to use is buggy as hell and I'm gonna have to start that over. Which is really frustrating because of how much time I wasted trying to work around bug issues..
3. Cat-sitting is time consuming and more work then it sounds.

 But I fiddled around on some of my own projects, finished Timber(finally!), and re-did my Motion Graphics and General Reel! 

All I had left on Timber was the title graphic which the client had been very specific about the graphic design and then decided(very rightfully) that it needed more animation to it. Then, she disappeared so the Title animation is all my own thought, although the graphic is less so. I hope that makes sense.




Well, when I say done, is that I am done. There would be some music and a voice-over made, but I don't know if that will ever happen.



Here's my Motion Graphic Reel! You know you wanna see that Timber logo again.



By the way, the logo animation was inspired by Video Copilot's disintegration tutorial. If it was my project, I would have the finished graphic be more charred. But then I also don't know much about the plot.

Lastly, my general reel has had quite a few shots added to it since the last version 6 months ago(where is the time going?). New song in the background too(Odyssey by Overwork). Every time I watch it I want to dance! Hopefully not just because of the awesome song.








In other news: I finished animating another shot of the origami fish. Still tweaking the lighting and I got a little compositing to do before putting it up. And I sadly won't be able to get to that for a while most likely. While I was looking through the footage it occurred to me that I could probably puppet tool the origami turtles instead of the whole 3D process so that should save a ton of time. If it doesn't work out I may just cut them as they have such a small roll and I didn't expect to be working on this that long (or have so little time for it). I took reference images for the remaining fish I have to model and animate, but the lighting wasn't super even so I might need to retake them for texturing.

I went to a super awesome lecture last Friday at MCAD about Visual Conception Art with Disney Animation Studios' Mike Yamada and Victoria Ying. I stopped by Grey Studio Gallery, which hosted the event; looked at some of the work on display. I bought an awesome deck of illustrated Tarot cards from one of their previous shows for inspiration too. (Tarot Deck illustration will probably be forever on my to do list between hand making a kids book and making a Fey based special effects series.)

And I signed up for the MCAD ART SALE. The sale isn't until November, but I sort of miss illustration and I could always use the money so I'll probably try focusing more that way soon unless a new fancy job pops up.

Monday I return to rigging and I shall be a champion!

Unify Video

I've been super slacking on my blog again.

Here's a link to the big commission I've been working on all summer. I finished it almost 2 weeks ago.




For this I was redoing the commercial with a 3D look after an already made flash animation and locked sound track. Most of the work was done in After Effects, except the characters that were modeled, rigged, and animated in Maya.

I made an odd decision with the eyes deciding the to do them in After Effects tracking the place they should be and laying them on top of the animated frames. It didn't go as smoothly as I predicted but I think there may be better opportunities for using the method for that I developed in the future, now that I better understand its limitations at making things faster.



Right now, I'm working on episode 6 of Fang and Talon, which I should have updates on soon. And I'm in the character modeling and texturing phase of another paid full 3D animated project. Hopefully I'll be cutting a new reel in the next week or two as well!

Motion Graphics

Look, I did some motion graphics examples so I could maybe get more work. They really aren't that special. Just something to show that I can do things.

Here's Plop. I could have used nParticles to make the puddle, or I could have made a blend shape or some deformers on it, but I wanted to do it fast, so I didn't. I just animated a blobby shape going through a plane like a lazy person.



As for the Plop letters themselves. I just used the Text tool with a bevel and a little experimentation. I seperated the letters and then regrouped them. I used a lattice deformer on the group to make the letter bend as they fall, but I probably could have just used a bend deformer. Then when the letters float in the puddle I just animated the individual letters rotation and position. Since the lattice was on the group and not actually the letters, it was all pretty simple. Slap on a blinn, animate a camera, done.



Shing was even more simple. I made the text with the text tool as before and then used the cut faces tool to make the cut. Most of it was just animating the cut bits falling down. I did animate a point light across the cut. After it was rendered I put in the flash in AE by animating a mask on a solid.



Pop was really the best. I was messing about with shaders to try to make something extra sparkely or something, and I found a bubble shader on Creative Crash that was free use. Looking at it, its pretty simple and I may use it my origami short. Anyway, I made pop to try out the shader. I took the text shapes and bulged them out with the bulge brush and just rendered the text out sitting there with its animated bubble texture. In AE I made up a background was some stock photos and animated the rendered 'pop'. I added some turbulant distortion to make the it more wobbely like a bubble and put a short simple particle effect at the end. Groovy.



I have ideas for more, but I'm not sure I want to spend the time on it with so many projects going on. Maybe if I see a motion graphics job post I'll do some of them.  I'm back in illustrator working on La Jolla's Mermaid now. But like I said, lots going on.

FT Title Sequence Done

Finished! They didn't like the green glow so now its brown. :(  And I tracked footage they shot so the tree fits in better.