Making it through November

[Dec 2011 Edit: Removed Concept III animatics; Added LWF Tutorial; Re-linked Push Pull animation]

Juniors had a pretty rough deadline, our Push Pull animation being due on the same day as our 1 minute animatic and our drama digital painting due a day later. We made it though!

It was really tough, 4 days before Push Pull was due I had just finished wrestling with all my renderman problems and my lighting was still crappy, the animation wasn't in spline yet and I knew I was going to have to invest a lot of time into concept over the weekend (at least 12 work hours). Luckily, things started to make sense when I found I could duplicate the shaders on my referenced objects and reapply them so they were in my lighting file and they wouldn't be overridden by upstream changes on my rig. That way I could bring my lighting and texturing up together without jumping around in files. I also got my feet wet with Nuke, which was the first time I really dug into composting a project. It turned out to really help my workflow- It allowed me to see it as a whole and decide what needed work both in lighting and texturing, but also in regards to animation (something became apparent that just weren't visible in a playblast and other things turn out to be not as big of a deal). Still a few things I'd like to do before adding it to the reel.

I should also mention this is the first time I've rendered Linearly and it really worked the way it should and allowed me to get much further along with my textures and light than I would have otherwise. I'm presently working on a tutorial.

Here's a 15 minute LWF How To for rendering Linearly and outputting to an 8-bit format.

Enough talk, we're going to have to go through all these deadlines one more time before the semester's up.

Push/Pull


Until next month...

September Dump - Click to Play

[Dec 2011 Edit: Removed Concept III work; Re-linked CA Projects]

Silhouette project - Click to Play
My emotions: Cheerful -> Confused -> Gloomy

Waiting with an object - Click to Play


Push Pull Character Design - Click to embiggen


This year's been very fruitful, I feel like I've come a long way and grown a lot. Particularly in concept, while my drawings can still use work and my staging might not always be the best I know there's no way I could have managed to keep up with this last year- A 15 second animatic over the course of a month or so made me really consider if I wanted to be here at Ringling. Now I'm about to finish up a 45 second animatic in 2 weeks and I'm having a long of fun with it. It's very gratifying to put an idea in motion so other people can actually see what you're thinking- it's hard to describe, but it's what brought me to animation.

I am still struggling a lot with Drawing For Animation. It's very difficult for me to invest myself in something that isn't yielding very satisfying results. On the bright side, I think my Push Pull character is the first character I've ever created that I really like. I can't wait to get him in Maya and get some textures on him. So, I can't say I'm at a total loss with DFA. My hope is that I can get to the point that I draw without feeling embarrassed by my drawings. I don't want to be drawing just to get by DFA, concept and prepro, I want to enjoy it like I enjoy animatics and story and just about every aspect of computer animation.

LWF

I've tried understanding linear workflow before, but never seemed to get over the hump. I think I'm finally grasping why people use this technique.

maya/renderman

It really bothered me that textures never render quite the same as I had painted them. I also use to wonder why using lights with linear decay looked better than lights with a physically accurate inverse^2 (quadratic) decay. Who knew I was just texturing and rendering incorrectly for the past 4 years- and why didn't they tell me? Now that I know, it's hard to sleep. I don't know if it's cause I'm excited or upset- or maybe it's just cause summer's quickly coming to an end :P

ps. coincidentally I used the same wood texture in this test as I used (incorrectly) for my floor in the previous post.

Sit Stand

a quick update for a not so quick project

Animatic (for your amusement)

***Final***

C&C welcome and appreciated

Sit Stand Ref

Getting ready for sit-stand first pass. When you're 6'10" you can get a lot of crazy stuff happening with your lanky limbs, but when you're self-conscious it's hard to go all out when you're shooting reference in a public place. I like to play my odds and shoot a crap load of reference. There's bound to be some good stuff here and there. Now I just need to find the time to really use it. Here's the frame that inspired me to update.

I had just popped a balloon and so I was getting up, nervous and embarrassed, pretty authentically.