Term One Recap and Crap Talkings

Alright, lets do this. I tend to go through phases. Only in my head, where I start thinking about posting a blog and think of all the stuff I could write, but then I come online and the moment has passed and I can't be arsed. This seems to happen more and more with things I want to do but which also require a little effort. Luckily I've had a lot of free time online today and have found myself in the mood to do a blog post.

Anyway stop talking bollocks. First lets recap the term, starting where I left off.

So I finished my forth character of the bunch and two background concepts, as I said in my last post, and on top of that I completed pretty much everything else that I said I needed to do, disregarding baddies (I settled for one little sketch that i'd done, and noone seemed to mind. Apart from Justin? He wanted more baddies lol.). My Powerpoint was fairly standard, although I can never help but make everything just how I like it. I was really happy with my design bible when it was finished and all printed up. Forgiving some very minor printing errors and the fact I needed the pages stuck together, it looked pretty sharp and the effort that i'd put in paid off. I don't mind a nice bit of graphic design. Although my stuff is relatively basic, it interests me somewhat. Also, during this process I learnt more about photoshop brushes and making your own, which was cool. Onto pitches.

I thought my initial pitch with Andy was alright, but that's probably because he's too nice to us :P so I was vaguely confident about the real pitch, but I came away from it kind of disappointed. I was happy that it was all over, but it left a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth. I felt my delivery was sort of cold, a little too nervous and a bit of a mess, but when I got the written feedback from Andy and Sarah?? Terrible memory sorry, It really helped me figure some things out and I think my next pitch will be a million times better for it.

The BBC lady thought my idea was too complicated for what it was, and after a second of disagreement after being told this, it all made sense and I realised that all that crap about the war didn't need to be contained in my pitch at all. What i should have done was talk solely about the kids, their surroundings, and be really passionate about the whole thing. Not go off on some tangent about stuff that wouldn't even have been in the show like the big baddy.

I believe this confusion on my part was because I had originally planned what is now the last episode (where they kill the 'bots and everyone's shocked and they're whisked away to be cadets or whatever) to originally be the first episode, and the rest of the series being their adventures outside the cube. If you follow. I'm not proof reading this crap.

Anyway, that's enough about the personal project. In summary: It was fun, I really enjoyed the process and being given loads of time to do whatever I wanted with. I'm fond of some of my characters and through this task I think I have a better idea of time management, improved skillz and I think my future pitches will benefit greatly.

Just realised this is gonna be a looooooooooong post. Noone will read this :P

EXETER PR0JECT!

This project got a little lost in the grand scheme of things as far as my participation goes, sadly. I really would've liked to have had more of a hand in things, and it's not like I didn't offer myself up for as many parts as I thought I could handle. I said i'd be part of the 3D team and the background design team, but noone ever approached me after the initial meeting about anything background related. I was all up for it at the start, but i'm not going to lie because i'm sure if I had talked to Alex, Mike or anyone else on the team I'm sure I could've got myself a part in it, but that's such a hard thing to do when you already have your hands full with a personal project.

The only thing that I got given in the end was the clock tower in 3D. No pictures because of those nobs in the media store who took my hard drive off me (Wtf is the point of a hard drive you can only keep in one place???? grr) This was way harder than I expected, but I fumbled my way through it and after plenty of pain I finally got it done. I really think it helped improve my knowledge of maya quite substantially. I'm glad I did it. Texturing too. While being really gay, it helped me learn a bit.

That's all the term stuff covered I believe, now onto something i've been doing in my spare time. This guy!



Probably doesn't look much, but a considerable amount of effort has gone into him. This is actually his second incarnation, I pretty much completely did his head then decided it was all wrong, so i've started again and this is where I am. I'm having fun making him, but it's taking me a long, long time.

I'm becoming more and more aware that in industry, maya's used very little ...if at all in making Hi-poly models. I'm gonna continue to make this guy in Maya, just so that I can learn more skills and stuff, but I really want to start getting to terms with Zbrush and a workflow which will enable me to create models just like companies would make when creating a game. (Here's an amazing link where a pro character artist has sculpted an awesome hi-poly model in zbrush and converted it to a low poly game character. I feel this is ultimately what I should be progressing towards, although to be honest i'm not completely sure this is how it's done, I still have a slightly naive outlook on the business crud.)

Blerg anyway. I can't really think of anything else work wise, and this is a huge post so i'll start wrapping up.

I've had a few ideas for little projects in the future, and i'll post em here in case I forget one day. Firstly i've thought of a fun idea for a hack n' slash game, (which would never work as a real game due to copyright issues, but awesome to work on I think) it'd be sort of a parody of every famous computer game out there. The enemies and bosses would be characters from existing computer games, i'd think up some ridiculous plot and completely construe what the characters are actually like. Lots of in-jokes and sillyness, but for one I think it'd be awesome fun redesigning and ruining the classic and current computer game characters, and fits perfectly into a project on the work side of things. I could make concepts and models, it'd be great or something. Hmm.. I did have more ideas but thinking of them again they aren't up to much. I guess that's my only idea for now.

The very last thing I want to talk about (yay!) is what I want to learn. Sam Pascizzle recently bought into an online Gnomon event, and was ridiculously kind enough to lend me his account to get in on the goods too. Thanks again! Burying myself in these videos has sent me a bit nuts and I can't stop thinking of what I want to, and what I NEED to learn if I want to make a living for myself doing things I love. Of late I haven't been sketching as much as I was at the start of the term. It's sad but my job just took all my free time away from me, and what little time I had I spent relaxing. Hopefully next term i'll have enough money so that I don't have to work and can get back to really learning as hard as I can.

Things I want:

---To have a strong knowledge of anatomy. Incredibly important. I've found after picking up the pencil again, I remember that I feel like I don't know the body well enough to draw what I want to freely. I can't let myself just draw characters most of the time because I just get caught up on the figure, and I can't let myself just draw shoddy shapes. I want a really strong understanding of the figure which will allow me to really get into just drawing the characters without having to worry about the technicalities. I'd love to have someone teach me about this, I find it very difficult to learn by myself. My plan right now is to draw as much as I can over Christmas, and if i'm still as motivated when I get back to uni i'll go to the library and see if they have any good books which will help me out.

---To learn the ins and outs of Maya, and to be able to create models of all levels of detail. I think I just need to make more models. But do I spend forever creating highly detailed things in Maya or should I just do the base models in Maya and send them to Zbrush and push my skills in that? These questions probably won't ever get answered.

There're more but they aren't as important. Basically these are the two things in my work life right now. 3D and 2D. Digital 2D too but I understand that somewhat, and I know the only thing I can do to progress there is to do more and more paintings. But those two puzzles are what's bugging me right now. Anatomy and 3D stuff in general. And splitting my time up between them is hard. Everything's hard. I'm worried about how little time we have left until we're thrown out into the business world, and I really hope that what's left of university will give me the time and the oppurtunity to further my skills to a place which will allow me to go into work where I want to work! I want to be a concept artist/character artist/character modeler but i've a long long way to go. WORKMOREWORKMOREWORKMOREDRAWWWWWWWWWWW

definitely been writing for too long. I had 62% for this term by the way. I think that's about right. I don't agree that the exeter project was made for advanced maya stuff though.

Helloo.

Blog's a little slow, eh? Think this'll be simply a text post for now. Can't be arsed with pictures, maybe tomorrow. Err so what's happening. Design for Animation's coming along. Speedily finished two backgrounds to a reasonable standard, Four characters are finished, although as usual I don't like the last one i painted. Wow i really haven't updated this for a while. Things left to do are aplenty; Draw several baddies, One more background, a front cover, make Design Bible, er.. Plots, etc etc... Make a powerpoint. /Cry. I'll get it done though, or at least, most of it.

Other thing is the Exeter thing........ I think i'll update this tomorrow rofls, otherwise it'll just be a sub-standard post. BRING ON CHRISTMAS!

woo

Finished my first/third guy :D I've hated him for so long, but weirdly... I almost like him now. It literally happened in the last 10 minutes when I was finishing the painting/playing with the colour levels and saturation. Strange. I think it's cause he just helped me realise the importance of playing about with the image when you're done with it. Helps give the image much more impact. I've heard people saying that but doing it yourself really changes things. Once again he looks pretty different to the other two characters in my opinion, but I think that may be indicative of the things that i'm learning as i continue on with this project. The first guy I finished took me forever, I was getting too bogged down in the details and only realised half way through. The next character is much less detailed but more dynamic. I think I might need to do some colour correction though. And comparing them all together right now makes me wonder whether I went overboard with the colour stuff on my latest finished character... lol. Oh well, I'm learning and that's what's important. How long have I been doing these? Seems like forever, I don't even want to know...

Really need to nail my story and character bios asap. I feel kind of bad that I'm creating these characters with little in mind but aesthetics. I don't think that's the way to go about it. Thinking about it, I have a problem where I try not to get myself into trouble by thinking of character traits and personalities too early on, as to not end up having to omit them because i'm not good enough to convey the emotions properly when it comes to the actual painting. I just start sketching with a vague idea in mind and see what I come up with, then plan around that... Totally the wrong thing to do I'm pretty sure. I'll need to set this straight at some point. I find it reaaaaaally difficult conveying subtle character nuances, or even really obvious ones sometimes. I hope with experience i'll have a better handle over emotion and stuff like that, so I can have a strong idea in mind and blast it out straight away.

Think that's all I have to blab on about right now... Although I do have some sketches. Lemme scan em.



There's a potential fourth character and a potential bad guy. Both very simple sketches. I'm having trouble deciding what to do for my fourth char... I'm gonna have to think about it for a while I think. Do I go for a crazy character? Silent and brooding? Tough guy? bleh.

Anyway, here's my finished third guy, who is... I think.. The main character in the group, although he doesn't deserve to be because he's given me so much hassle :P.



p.s. I'm not ill anymore :D :D

hi again

stuff that's happening: I'm getting on with my Design for Animation project reasonably well, I think. The first character took me foreverish to paint, but I'm happy with him, then when making my first steps on the second (but original) character, I got really stuck and didn't like how he looked. So I sketched up a third character, a girl this time, and somehow i was pretty happy with it straight from the off, and i did it sooo fast compared to usual. I can't remember where but I think I did some of it on the bus? I dunno, terrible memory. Anyway, I scanned her in and surprisingly it carried on in exactly the same fashion. I flew through it and finished her in just two days I believe. Shockingly quick. I think i may be loosening up just a little. I still won't leave something that i'm unhappy with or looks messy, but I'm learning to paint in less detail, because when you're zoomed in to 700% the detail is not only lost when you zoom out, but most of the time doesn't even look very good. Anywho. I've restarted the original guy today and am finally making some headway. I've managed to get a face from scratch that I'm pretty happy with, and the body's all drawn out ready for me. Just have to whip that up, but after a few hours painting today i'm kind of burnt out cause i'm REALLY FUCKING ILL. Christ it's annoying. hopefully it'll leave me alone sooner rather than later, and I can continue working in peace. Oh, also I'm scared my characters are looking too anime-y. That's not cool, I want this to be fresh...

Maya's going alright, I feel comfortable with the interface but I need to get my head around the theory (or whatever you call it) eg, correct edge loops, topology, workflow, etc. When I get that all that'll be left to do is modelmodelmodel until I'm speedier and able to make tasty characters. I'm kind of anxious to get more into the 3D stuff, but as the design for animation project deadline is looming, all of my efforts are going towards that at the minute.

Something i've noticed is that I always do things by the book... and I don't mean being honest but rather I never try to invent something new. Of course I try my best to make exciting characters with interesting clothes and stuff, but I get the feeling that it's all been done before. Most of the time I like my work, but I want to be original. I find my stuff almost derivitive sometimes. And that doesn't please me. I think next time I get the chance i'm going to go completely crazy and make the most abstract and original thing that I can think of... Maybe. It'll be a difficult hurdle to jump.

I like blogging. My head hurts. Beardman is cool. Out. No wait, here are my pix:






(WIP)

Later.

moar

Took me longer to re-blog than I expected. Anyway, I have lots to say.

I want to talk about games. Recently, the Tokyo Games Show has been blowing me away with trailers with amazing CG scenes. The few that stand out to me are Starcraft II, Diablo III, Bayonetta, Prince of Persia and Dead Space. I'll talk about em a bit.

Starcraft II - I'm in love with the cinematic trailer for this game. Everything is practically perfect; the model, the attention to detail, the animation, the atmosphere, drama, etc, etc, etc. I've watched this a ton of times and it still amazes me. Here it is in Standard Definition but do yourself a favour and watch in HD.



Diablo III - Another Blizzard title, and surprisingly I've never been a Blizzard fan, even their most recent games like WoW, but I'm loving their art direction right now. (Maybe this is why I don't see anything wrong with how this game looks; a lot of hardcore fans of the second in the series hate how the new game looks, due to it not being as dark as the second.) The thing that I love the most about this game at this point is the concept art. There's a huge gallery on their official website www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ and practically every piece is brillilant. There's a mix of different artists and styles too which is really interesting. Here's one of my favourites, but check them all out.



Bayonetta - Now this is a really interesting new game. It first caught my attention with it's awesome CG trailer which I absolutely loved, but the CG looked so good that when it came to showing a little of the actual gameplay I felt let down. But I went to it's official website - http://www.sega.com/platinumgames/bayonetta/EnglishUK/index2.html and it kind of restored my faith in the game. It turns out that it's created by the same guy that made the Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe series'. Two games which I love and not only that, he talks about
“Pushing 3D Action to a New Dimension”. And I know everyone says that they'll be doing things differently and breaking the mould, and even though the gameplay in the trailer looks like every other action game ever made, I still kind of have faith. I think maybe i'm just being naive, but whatever, it's exciting. Disregarding the game itself, when looked at from a purely aesthetical stand-point, the CG in the trailer is brilliance anyway. I especially love the crotch-pan :D. Here it is.



Prince of Persia: This game has looked amazing all throughout development. From the super stylish concept art:



To the most recent trailer, which I believe is completely made of in-game footage, and still looks amazing. The gameplay looks really interesting, where you basically control two characters and I love the change in direction they're taking with the series. Everything looks brilliant. Here's the trailer.



Finally; Dead Space: This game only very recently came to my attention, and it looks amazing (i've so overused that word in this post). A Survival horror game, which again, i'm not really a big fan of, but the art direction is so up my alley that I can't help but adore it. Who knows if i'll ever play it because it looks so god damned scary, (They really nailed the atmosphere, and they have some sort of fear-gauge so the closer you get to enemies, the more tense the music gets) but the trailers really won me over.



His glowing spine shows his health! Genius

---

Err okay that took longer than expected. Guess i'll leave it there for now. Will probably update when i've finished my first character concept. Almost there, time for work :)

Oh yeah, I also want to talk about the bus...

chopchopchop

Hello again! Getting straight down to business, the first week of ten in this term is over, (Ten isn't nearly enough) and we've three new projects on the go.

The first is the Design for Animation thing, and I think I've concreted my idea. Originally it was between two;
1. A computer game with a sort of steam punk style, where for some reason a massive chunk of history was missing, maybe 500 years or something, and noone realised. Say like a black hole happened or something to that effect that erased an amount of time, so everyone wore historical looking clothes and stuff but there was still a lot of technology around for everyone to use. And you'd travel the world, so it'd be quite a rich environment with all the different cultures and stuff I think.
2. A cartoon series (Undecided on the target audience...) that evolved from a sketch i did of a scrawny kid wearing one piece of oversized futuristic armour. The armour he was wearing was an old piece of his fathers, who was some sort of armour-wearing guy, like in the armed forces of the future. The piece was unused, maybe hanging around in their garage so the kid takes it for himself. A few of the boy's friends do the same thing, each of them with different pieces of old equipment that has been left around, and the story grows from there.

Anyway, I decided to go with the second option, not only because in the game there would be soooo many plotholes due to my limited knowledge of history and blahblah, but I also get bad vibes from it, I think it'd turn out kind of soulless, whereas i think the series has a ton of potential and loads of areas to explore, and I feel quite passionate about the ideas I have for it. I have tons of ideas floating for this project but I think i'll label them in a later post, or this one with be mega-gigantic.

The second project is the Sound Design thing. At first I was slightly skeptical but it's very clear that we all need to work on our sound design, and while we're still doing solo/small group projects and have to make our own sound, I think it's easily justifiable that we do this project. As far as ideas go, I'm thinking of a grimey, rusted submarine somewhere, where a burly, jaded war veteran kinda guy sits smoking a cigarette, drinking strong alcohol(?), maybe listening to the radio (although i need to be careful with songs/lyrics so it doesn't get too literal) just wishing away the hours. There's been no action in weeks or months, when the siren goes off and he bolts out of his lair and up the metal ladder to...somewhere. That'd be where it ends, probably after a dramatic silence with only the siren. Maybe he's warning the captain, or waking his friends, or something, I dunno.

The third 'project' is the Animated Exeter/Advanced Maya stuff. I'm kind of irked that this is being pushed on us, it was said to have been optional at first and it all seems a bit messy at the moment. I still don't know enough about Maya to be making things that I'd be proud to show, especially to an animation festival of all places (are the idents even going to be made in Maya??).
It seems we've all been put into groups to come up with ideas and pre-production stuff in the time that I anticipated to be focusing on Maya. Even if we (The advanced Maya people) had to make the idents in Maya, I'd be much happier if Georg trained us up while the people who wanted to do the pre-production thought up the ideas for the stuff. I'd be happier still if we didn't have to worry about making things with minimal skill and just concentrated on improving ourselves on that one afternoon per week that is meant to be dedicated to it. All that said, though, I'm very excited that we have Georg to tutor us now, he seems to be knowledgeable in everything that I want to learn and a very nice person to learn from, and even with the way it's all set out I'm sure that I'll learn a good bit. Fingers crossed anyway. If not i'll have to bug Georg and fit as much learning of Maya into my free time as I can.

Now i'm just going to ramble about stuff of little importance, so continue reading only if you have absolutely nothing of interest to do.
I've had myself a job in Falmouth for the last two weeks, and it's haaaarrrrrrrd. I work in the kitchen of a pub/restaurant washing dishes, running for the chefs and doing all the crappy jobs and it's very tiring, especially with early starts the next day. I still feel as if i've not settled down yet here in falmouth, what with my job and only being one week into the course, It's all a little hectic and i'm yet to decide if I can take it all on and have the spare time I feel that's necessary to learn, party and be happy. We will see.
As far as art goes I've been drawing/painting more over these last few months than I probably ever have, and while i'm far from prolific, I know I put a lot of effort into it. I feel as if i'm learning even when I'm just looking at art, or thinking about it. I'm still learning anatomy and my eye is always at work when I look at people. Same with colour, trying to learn to paint in photoshop has opened up a whole new world of struggle, and i'm always observing how light lands on things. Films are great for this. Am I right to think this way? I've had the same sketchbook since last term and while I feel that i'm putting a lot into my art it's not nearing completion yet. I like how it's going, though. Again, time will tell. I need more of a routine to emerge in my life so I can properly dedicate time to painting/modeling(maybe?) my arse off and getting somewhere with my art.
Anyway, I actually completed my first digital illustration (If you can call it that) this summer, and i'm still reasonably happy with it. I think i'll end this post with him. I've got much more to say but this post is already too long. I like blogging so expect more soon!

Here you go:
Click for bigger version.

Note to self: Remember Straw Dogs for next post.

Group Project Logs

Here's a log of which roles I played in the various different group projects we've been assigned throughout the first year

Pixelation Project
I believe this was the first group project we had to do, although it was a minor one. I didn't actually feature in the video, or really play a big part, but there was a lot of us in the group and the entire thing was created in one day. My part in this video was some work with the camera, taking the stills, positioning and moving props around and small bits and pieces like that. I believe James and Sean edited it and added the titles etc afterwards.
Role: Camera work, Bits and Bobs.



Exhibition Project
In this project Sean and I decided to create an exhibition for the work of the Animator Jan Svankmajer. We came together on numerous occasions to discuss thoughts and ideas for the project, and spent a few days working on the plan for the exhibition and the pieces that we would show in it. We worked up a final booklet to showcase the exhibition, which I created in photoshop while Sean helped make decisions about the look of it. Deciding on the writing inside the booklet was very much a joint process.
Role: Ideas/Brainstorming with Sean, Creating look of Booklet in Photoshop, Co-writing Booklet with Sean.







Student Project
I was mainly in the Pre-production team for this project. I initially went through the script with the rest of the team and brainstormed ideas for the characters we would create from it. We then went away and each drew a few rough pages of ideas and a final look for the characters we were assigned to by the project manager, Holly. In my case this was the Ant character. When all the characters were designed, most of the team went away to storyboard, while I had the job of creating backgrounds for most of the animations. I created 5 in all and handed them over to the team to animate.
Role: Pre-production (Brainstorming/Ideas, Character Design), Background Design in Photoshop.

Alien Background

Beetle Background

Dolphin Background

Ant Background

Rhino Background


Library Project
I moved onto this project straight after completing the backgrounds for the Student Project, and was assigned the opening scene of the animation. My job was to Animate the character over the top of the rough render of the 3D scenes, which I completed yesterday :D
Role: 2D Animator, Scene One.



Original Video - More videos at TinyPic
(Ignore the rough background and crappy quality)

stuff

Time for an update, I think. So yesterday was the third(?) day of intense flash animation for me and... I didn't like it. I was sick of flash already and found myself getting increasingly frustrated with it, not necessarily for a certain reason but I was in a bad mood with it. I kept going though, and I'm actually very pleased with the results. I did the scene where the guy is swallowed by the book, and even though I had to deal with nasty camera angles/movements and perspective, I did it and looking at it today i like it. I think that's the thing with flash and other 2D animating stuff, you fiddle around drawing a million drawings and nudge them along in tiny incriments, clearly punishing yourself horribly because you hate yourself or something, then in the end you get a lovely moving thing.

Yeah so I hated it yesterday, I wondered why I was doing this when I would much rather be keyframing some model that was already made and didn't need me to draw out every single frame. And I'm not sure whether it's the rewarding feeling I got from looking at the scene this morning, or the fact i'm listening to my favourite band whilst doing today's scene, or maybe because I haven't done anything complicated today, but by some freak brain accident I've actually been enjoying it and am considering doing some animating in my own time??!??? It feels therapeutic, helps forget my hangover.

I just tried to make a movie of my last scene but I'm not sure how, so I won't upload it, but here's a crappy mockup of how the final thing will look to make my blog more beautiful:

Doneee... on this project

Here are the final two backgrounds :D. Miraculously the beetle one only took me a few hours and is one of my favourite backgrounds. Nice and simple and fun to draw. The Alien background may look familiar... that's because I completely cheated, flipped the Ant background, erased some trees and fixed it up a bit and called it anew :P I really had to get onto the Library project, though, (which i'm starting today) so it's allowed.

In this Library project, my job is flash animating... which even though I hate flash I don't really mind, i'm looking forward to making some good animations, although maybe when I actually start i'll become slightly less enthusiastic. Anyway, time to start flashing. The painting was fun, now the hard work begins.

updateupdate

k just 'finished' the Rhino BG a few hours ago:



I'm not really happy with how it turned out to be honest. I was really happy with it in the rough stages, and I think it was possibly stronger than it is now at that point. I threw quite a few snazzy textures and crap on the painting, initially to add the grit and dirt to the roads and walls, but I think in the end they were there more to cover up my poor painting than to directly add to the painting itself. And after three completely covers, playing around with photoshop I finally realised that I never had Opacity set to pen pressure... which would have made things a ton easier for me. Stupid. I feel quite worn out right now, so i've allowed myself a break for an hour or two. Can't decide whether to play in photoshop or maya, but i'm doing something for fun rather than for the project. I think i'll start my next (and possibly last? or second to last) painting in the morning. That's the dung beetle one, which is looking quite simple to complete; just a little patch of dirt and a background. Hopefully it'll be as easy as it looks. Andy's been doing a few of the backgrounds since he's animating some of the characters in flash, and while this eases the load for me, it's probably not the best idea for unity of style.

I've been looking at a lot of amazing paintings by digital and traditional artists today and i'm not sure whether they inspire or discourage me. I guess a bit of both, I definitely feel an urge to improve and while i'm not super optimistic at the moment I think i'm on the right tracks right now. Still working hard in class and when I get home I just look up more and more paintings and 3D stuff. Both mediums compliment each other really well too I think. It feels like 3D modeling is a lot more technical than painting, less emphasis on your artistic ability and more your mind for space. Or something like that. So when I'm not feeling particularly creative I can work with the mechanics of the stuff, and vice versa. It's hard to fit everything in but i'm sure that's a good thing, it means I won't be stopping for a while.

Also i'm quite into this blogging thing too, i'm quite a loudmouth really.

p.s. Bugger off Han :P

Wooo

Everything's going well with the new project; I've finished two of the eight? (*gulp*) backgrounds, and my third is coming along well, as of the last few minutes. I've been free to get on with my paintings and have been putting alot of time into them, most nights i'm in til past 6, but the atmosphere is really nice and I haven't really been feeling frustrated at all. The Dolphin background caused me a little annoyance with it's colour scheme and architectural details (it's really annoying drawing straight/curved lines all the time) but i managed to finish it, and while i'm not entirely pleased with the results, it'll do for the time being. Here are my backgrounds so far, Ant, Dolphin (completed apart from the Water. At present i'm unsure whether or not it will be animated. I do have a rough sketch of the water which looks much nicer than the plain blue, but I'm not going to waste my time finalising it if it'll just be painted over in the end anyway) and Rhino (rough) respectively. Click for larger images:










My favourite so far is the Ant, closely followed by the Rhino which might beat out the Ant if I do it well enough. The Dolphin painting doesn't sit well with me, maybe because it wasn't a lot of fun to paint all of those steps and poles. The colour scheme's a bit bright for me too, but really it had to be since it's an aquarium type place. I think it'll be okay as the actual background when it all comes together though, i'm not worried.

I think i'm doing reasonably well on time, I was never going to finish one per day like i'd have liked to, but that's quite unreasonable to ask of myself considering I usually take forever. I am learning to let myself loosen up a little though, which helps quite a bit. I'm getting each painting completely in about 2.5 days at the minute, which will do for me. I'm not sure what's going to happen next week when I'm meant to switch to the Library project and I inevitably haven't finished all of the backgrounds, but i'll cross that bridge when I come to it. At the minute i'm happy just to plod along having fun in photoshop :D I don't think i've learnt a lot more than I knew as far as photoshop goes before I started the project, but the practice helps a lot, and I think i'm wising up my colour choices and challenging my eye for composition. All in all i'm very much enjoying this project so far :)

new haps

Another week, another project. With the new setup (4 teams on 4 projects and mixing and matching) it's a bit strange but we've just finished the ideas phase and it's going okay. When we work in teams like this it's a little difficult fitting everyones ideas and expectations together, but as long as you come to a compromise it's not so bad. I'm a bit of a control freak so it's a little difficult for me. I'd like to be able to do everything myself but obviously I can't, I just have to have faith in the others lol.

I've given myself the hefty task of doing the backgrounds for the student project. This'll definitely keep me busy and surely improve my photoshop skills which is nice. Especially situations like this where you won't always be doing something which you want to be doing. In this case i'm skipping storyboarding for background design and this suits me fine. My only worry is taking forever on these things which is a very likely outcome, but i'm aware of my time restrictions and in one day i've managed to rough out the first background and have started polishing it already, which is probably a record for me. Maybe i'll upload some pictures in a few days.

Apart from the project, for the past week or two i've really been trying to study human anatomy. I've got the basic landmarks on the front of a human down and it's quite satisfying. It's something i've wanted to learn for probably about 2 years now, something which I think is extremely important if I want to improve as an artist, and i'm happy to have started. Up until now it's just seemed a bit daunting but when I was bored the other day I started reading a book by Andrew Loomis that I downloaded a while ago. It's a very good book and inspired me to finally start learning seriously. The book's out of print or something, so it's free and legal to download and distribute, and i've uploaded it incase anyone else would like to have a read. I'd highly reccomend it. Anyway, I think i should be able to keep up this learning and hopefully soon enough i should be able to draw completely accurate people :D Download down there.

ANDREW LOOMIS FIGURE DRAWING PDF

The Flour Sack

Just a quick post about my progress with the flour sack. This is HARD WORK. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, in fact I think i'm enjoying it, but it's almost 8 o'clock and i've been in the studio all week and i'm about half way done. It's going well though, I feel like the sack has some character, even though he's only walked a few steps at the minute. The technical side of it is a bit messy; i'm sure i'm doing quite a few things wrong (or at least going about doing them the hard way, my graph editor is hilariously messy) but these are mistakes i'll just have to make until I learn how to do them the right way. I'm happy with the amount that i'm learning at the minute, and i'm just about managing to pull the animation off the way I want to. I'm feeling very motivated, not just in this task but in general and it's lasted for a week or so already and still going, rather than the occasional flicker. I'm trying to do and learn as much as I can, I know I need to be like this to get a good job and all that crap. Hopefully it'll last. Anyway, Here's the sack so far:



UPDATE 01/05/08: Spent today getting as much done as possible after the storyboard session (which I actually enjoyed :o) and i've come a little way. Today was the most frustrating day for me so far, but only because of a short period of time where I completely messed up my character's ears in the section I was working on. They completely spazzed out and I couldn't figure out why, which led me to restart from a previous save, losing a short part of my work. I don't really mind, it's probably better off for losing it. Now my character is ready to jump, but i'm undecided which route to choose. Either the sack will puff up his chest and bravely jump off, or close his non-present eyes tight and throw himself off the edge. The first option is quite a change in the personality of the character, which is why i'm hesitant to choose it, but to be frank it's probably easier and I only have one day left. The second is more in-keeping with the sack's cowardly character but i've had some problems with the ears and they'd have to be used quite a lot showing the 'scrunched up' reluctancy of him. Since I only have one more day to complete him i'll probably choose the first option and deal with the inconsistencies. He is only a sack after all. They can't be that intelligent.

UPDATE 2/05/08: Done :D It's not bad either, I decided to go with the superman off the edge and it looks okay. The anticipation is a little dodgy (I couldn't get a really big squish before the jump without it looking funny) but I put that down to the rig being poor/me being poor at controlling the rig properly. Same with the ears, I would've liked to have animated them a little more or a little better, but I just found the ears in particular so difficult. Two out of the three rings around the ears seemed to have very little control over the ear itself, and the other seemed a little irrational. Due to this I kept the ear movements down to a minimum but what I have is okay. Surprisingly I haven't really felt forced to complete this animation. There have been times (but only very few) where I felt frustrated with it, but apart from that it's been reasonably pleasant, and i've just got on with it at my own pace. I still have time which I could use to tinker around with it, but I think i'll call it a day and wait for my next project :) Here's the finished animation:

Bouncing Balls!

So we finally got around to delving further into Maya and it turned out to be quite difficult indeed. We were given the task to create 3 animated balls; a football, a bowling ball and a pingpong ball.

The first ball I created -after quite a few hours fiddling in maya- pleased me at first, but after having a few other peoples opinions and coming back to it after a little while away from the computer, it seemed overly bouncy and unrealistic. You can see this version below.



I then proceeded to create the exact opposite, an underly bouncy football.



It was difficult finding a mid-ground, especially since I was completely new to the graph editor and the entire animating side of Maya. On top of the technical difficulties there was the question of how much stretch and squash to put in -how much realism I wanted- something I hadn't realised before. Usually you just draw the ball a few times and that's it; the way you can tweak things right until the end in maya was a new experience. The day after I created these two animations, we had a talk with Peter Bailey. Aside from being a really nice guy, his visit was handy because watching him animating in maya taught me a few things, specifically how you control handles in the graph editor. This was a great help in refining the bounce of my balls. I spent the rest of the day playing around and created a ball I was quite pleased with (which i won't upload because I think two progress shots is enough for anyone).

I spent the entire next day in the studio, first off I tweaked my football into something i'm very happy with, then in a significantly smaller amount of time managed to create my Pingpong and Bowling ball animations. I found it much easier when i'd found my bearings in the graph editor. All 3 animations are below, hopefully you'll be able to tell which is which without me explaining, or i'm a complete failure.







Overall i've enjoyed this assignment. It was definitely intimidating and a little disheartening at first, but as time went on and I learnt the tools a little better, things became much easier and I've made some animations which I'm really pleased with. The only scary thing is how complicated animating a simple bloody ball was lolz, it won't deter me though, I look forward to the next maya task :D

Storyboard and Scriptwriting

When we were given these tasks over easter, I thought nothing of it, they seemed relatively easy and we had an entire month to finish them off, which is quite generous. When it got round the the actual doing, though, they (or at least the scriptwriting) too a little more time and thought than expected.

I attempted the scriptwriting first, a story about a Leaf which had been in my head for quite a while. Well, the Character had been in my head, and it's basically just a leaf, so I thought up a little story for it as I went along. I wanted to do something different, something alternative to the normal start/middle/end story format, but this was a lot harder than I thought, and my finished result is actually quite a normal story, just in an unusual circumstance. Something I found difficult was the directions, especially since my characters were all static. I ended up writing the story first and transplanting the directions in later, which i'm not sure is the best approach. I think they may have suffered slightly because I was trying to keep the script length down to a page and a half. I wanted to make the script snappy and witty like the writing that I admire, (eg. Chuck Phalanuik stuff, minus the violence) but since I don't do much writing it wasn't easy, (and obviously came nowhere near to his standard) but I'm reasonably happy with the final outcome.

The storyboard was much easier than the Script, and was what saved me when I had writers block. Also since Andy said they don't have to be works of art, it freed me up a little, allowing me to concentrate on the action in the poses of the characters and the camera angles that I wanted. This was nice but after seeing a few other peoples storyboards i'm wondering whether or not I went too loose (which is weird for me). Nevertheless I had fun thinking about the film language, and think I got some pretty cool shots here and there. It's an interesting way of thinking for sure.

All in all it was a very interesting task to be set, but I hope we don't have to do it again any time soon, I'd rather concentrate on areas that I plan to progress in (i'm pretty sure i'm not going to be a scriptwriter in the future, lol).

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greoqirj

After Effectz

This turned out to be probably my favorite Tuesday of the course so far, I couldn't really say why, I've never really been interested in after effects and the things that we created weren't anything that I'd looked forward to creating, but I just felt as if the course was moving in a very positive direction and had a very pleasant day.

We started off with some warm-ups in Photoshop, which led up to some simple After Effects tasks which, whilst being quite simple to perform, gave me the sense that I was learning things which would be really valuable to me and all without having to labour over it too much. It seems like everyone is now a little more attuned to how we are meant to be working in these sessions on the computers, which I think helps with the overall attitude of the class, or maybe it was just the fact that we were given documents with the tutorials on them, rather than being talked through every step (Something which I was really grateful for after the Maya sessions). This was all topped off with the tutor being very cheery and helpful, completing a very light and pleasant day's work.

Flash Workshop #1

I've always been aware of Flash and it's uses in animating as i'm online 79.3% of the time and Flash seems to be very popular with the online community as a quick and easy way to create animations in your home, but I've never really been a fan of it. Apart from a very small percentage of Flash animations, i've never really enjoyed the style. Mainly because of the overuse of the pen (i think?) tool, and the way in which it seemingly ignores the stroke that you've just drawn and decides to make it look however it pleases. Due to this I never really bothered to use it at all, and didn't really look forward to the session. However, to my surprise I found the session to be much more enjoyable than i'd previously expected.

After a reasonably short and sweet introduction to the program by Andy, we were pretty much left to our own devices. At this stage with my previous mindset towards flash I may have just nipped off home, but I found myself getting caught up in the program and made a little animation of a winged man falling off a cliff, which I don't think I saved or I would've uploaded it. The session's changed my outlook on Flash as a program, and I'll happily use it in the future for my animating needs.