Arashikage Fray

The newest G. I. Joe - Kre-O short I worked on is online this week. Most of the assets were carried over from the last project. I really wish I could have rerigged the Storm Shadow character for the drastic poses he needed. Using the old rig was a battle.




This short is suppose to mimic a Daffy Duck Robin Hood Short. Here's a snapshot of the original next to the Maya project.

This was also the first project I used motion blur with Maya, which ended up being fairly straightforward.

In other news: I moved into my new apartment/workspace last week which is a big improvement over the situation I had over the last year. I've been working on my CyberSnow piece in between setting things up. Might post an update if I get far enough anytime soon. Tomorrow I go back to working for Language Sprout doing illustration work though.

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.

Fish Awakening

I've continued my work on my origami sealife short.

I've done a very basic rig using a joint chain, some simple expressions, and a few nurb curves to use as controllers.

I made a basic replica of the set used in the footage to scale including the lights.

After animating the fish in the shot I rendered and composted the effect. Here you can see the finished product, the animation, and the original film footage I took.