Smoking Tiger

Dragons

Some line-less colouring study done in Corel Painter - with dragons, because dragons are awesome...

Early rig practise

Continuing where we left off after the Luxo-lamp rig - explorations and assignments featuring more rigs provided by the school: a floursack and a simplified, but well-rigged human character called Hogan. 

• A sack drop
• Sack hop-cycle (which I regret looks like a bunny)
• Hogan; 7 still poses to fit assigned moods
• Hogan weight-shift
• Hogan doing a tennis serve (no wonder these players injure their elbows so often)
• Nico, early facial rig test

That last rig is a freeware download for non-commercial use, called Nico. It's an incredibly well-rigged quadroped model that I've started to play around with for personal practise. As of now, he is still too complicated for me, but it won't be long before I'm doing stuff with this guy. Right now I'm just having fun getting to know the facial-controls.

The Nico rig can be downloaded here for free, for anyone who makes an account (which is also free).

Introduction to Maya assignments

The very basics - we have returned to the infamous bouncing balls.

And some practice with a simple Pixar Luxo Jr. lamp character. I loved acting with this guy. Pole vector was a bit glitchy, but this is only the beginning.

Fair warning, the last part of this clip has balls performing to music. Also, these are just playblasts - we're not in this for the rendering...

I'm really starting to like Maya and it's technical approach and its many different possible ways of doing thing; it IS an acquired taste.
Physics become harder to portray properly and convincingly, but at least the model is consistent by itself now.

These two weeks have been very fun, even if a bit frightening. Maya is not the most intuitive thing - but it IS very powerful and versatile.

Fun with makeovers

Here are some ruff character expressions as part of a re-design of this old character of mine:

Monochrome 1

It's grayscale-time!

I love doing grayscale renders, it's the easiest way to study and express shapes without confusing yourself with too much colour-theory...

A little fun I had showing my inspiration for the ears on a favourite original (owlbear) character - Stitch's big flappy bat-ears are always fun to draw. So here the two meet, admiring each other's ear style.

My Special Friend

Didn't even realize how much I missed looking at colours; what with all the black-on-white sketch-a-thon I've been doing...

freestyle - now with a spork-gun

Because why not?

Fun with Acting: nervous/apologetic

3 keys for a little acting practice with a new style I'm exploring - as seen on my new blog-header.
This is fairly close to how I would draw people given absolutely free choice of style...

Dance Animation -second take-

I was so disappointed at the tied-down outcome of my first Dance animation assignment that I decided to use my 3 days of self-study making a whole new version. This time I chose the charming and bouncy piece of Bruno Coulais' soundtrack to Secret of Kells.

I then chose to use my own character, which I was comfortable and skilled at drawing. Animating this was much easier because of this. This is as far as I've managed to clean it up, and I left the rough animation and time-charts visible underneath because I like ruffs with charts; it makes it look like you know what you're doing :)

I may have taken the high-road on this, but the character's personality really comes across, and it gave me a great excuse to practise bounces, overshooting and settling-wobbles. Fat characters are fun to animate.

Also, here's an old little rough practise I did of a flirty finger-walk, 12,5 fps:

more stuff -update-

A gift for my 4-month-old nephew, a family portrait with owls in comfortable, kid-friendly pastel-colours :)

Owl Family Portrait by *PrecosiousChild on deviantART

Secondly, an hour of speedpaint study in greyscale with a gradient map thown into it... Not the best, but I'm happy about my progress in learning digital painting... Still much easier than the actual painting course we've just had, which I will post about shortly...

digital speedpaint - Unplugged by *PrecosiousChild on deviantART

A summary of Workflow Styles

This basically sums up what it's like to be a Character Animator and a Computer Graphics Artist, respectively...

I actually really like this style. Better experiment some more on this...

Thank you, internet, for the inspiration ;D

"Escape" Project Animation

The final outcome of the 2-scene excerpt of a story, thought up, written and storyboarded by CG artist David Crisp and myself.
David did the backgrounds and compositing, while I did the animation part (plus that last silly credits title-card)
These are the last two shots of the story called "Slaughterhouse Dreams", in which the main character, a little pig, accepts his fate...

We are going to hell for this one.



Due to an economical (read: easy) character design, I even had time for some serious procrastination at my workspace... So I put my old photoshop skills to use and made myself a wallpaper (and some silliness)

Have you hugged a derpy-looking salamander lately?

AfterEffects 2 final compositions

1 week course in Adobe AfterEffects for compositing. Used the bird flight-cycle from our previous TVPaint class and threw it all together. The plane near the end is a mood-killer, teacher and I agree, but it was part of the assignment to have a plane in there... I chose the creepy, rainy evil caste mood.

The final, "close-encounter" assignment... put onto a screen and played with camera-movement. This assignment basically involved a UFO flying around a background element like the tower here and to abduct/or beam down an animated character (animated using AfterEffects, here the Pin Tool)

This was so much fun, and very useful in our future projects...

New Concept Illustration: Technocracy

The more observant reader (and watcher of my dA profile) will have noticed that I have been developing the look and world of HOMINIAN for many years now.

Basically it's what happened on Earth millennia after Man went extinct. This new dominant race that took over our technology is called the Doffogils. The Doffigil society is heavily reliant upon the ancient human technology that they's discovered beneath layers of soil. Some skeptics postulate that the humans are a myth, while others are certain they share a kind of kinship with this obsolete culture. The main idea so far is simply that doffogils are revealed to be the direct descendants of mankind and in realizing this the main characters embark on a journey to free themselves from the bonds and dependency of tecnology in order to find their true purpose, despite the fact that this is seen as radical and dangerous by the ruling technocracy.
(huh, I don't think I've ever written this idea down before) Well, now you know...

So being a much more futuristic/technology-based world gives me an excuse to make coll glowing lines on everything. Also, I like holograms :) So here's so practice of a doffogil in his natural habitat - a huge metropolis run and based on advanced technology.

People sketches

Learning about values has helped me understand how to indicate facial features faster... I like this sign of progress. I'm almost comfortable with doing these now.

Oh well, here's two page of it made with a 2B pencil.(pardon the class-notes)

hands practice + lecture thumbnails

As I mentioned in an earlier post I'm working on a 5 sec scene with myself as a kid. I've had a lot of trouble with a balancing part, which was due to some bad and unnatural key-poses. Today during lecture I finally got my act together and re-did the middle part of the scene here. So these are alternative keys that I traced onto separate frames and linetested into the scene - and eurika, now the scene is much more fluid! I've realized that I like this thumbnailing aspect of the trade. Frames 4-5 definately need a breakdown.

Got inspired by a blog-post by Toby Shelton. I love hands, they're a great secondary acting device... So I tried out some angles.

Thumbnails from Disney's "The Rescuers". We're currently very focused on how Milt Kahl animates. This sort of doing croquis from frame-surfing is very fun and personally I get a great overview of how the keys play out. I'm definately going to make a habit of this whenever I get in-over-my-head or confused with a scene just like in the 'kid-scene' mentioned above.

Oh, and here's my "unrelated sketch of the day"...

Freestyle (from the fancy leatherbound)

I have this really old-fashioned leather hand-bound book that I bought in China. I absolutely love it, it's one of a kind (although the paper is not the best for drawing), but I constantly find myself thinking "I am not worthy of defiling this cool-looking book with my feeble sketches!"

Ever so often I will make attempts anyway - and because of the brownish paper it's great for experimenting with coloured pencils...

Also for hard light and highlights I experimented with a white-out pen.

And last, a few sketches of my classmates paying attention in class... I had forgotten that I actually enjoy making these. Since the Drawing Academy I've gone back to that comfort zone of not drawing people; this made me realize I had little to worry about. So you'll probably see more of these.

Updates from the sketchbook

Sketches inspired from reference video during lecture.

Study of structure on a character.

More character thumbnailing from the 'yourself as a kid' animation.

Illustration dump

A sheet I made detailing the structure of a character.

 Said character violating the boundaries of social conduct...

Character design - a military version.

Crime-solving noir anthro-bird and dragon? Sometimes I don't even know...

You ask if I like drawing bird-anthro art? Why, what makes you think that?

 John K complains in his blog that all characters today suffer from too much 'TUDE, so here's one of my characters displaying some 'TUDE... haha. John may have a point, now that I think of it.

An early Flash brush practice.

I really try not to, but I suffer from this 'butterfly-as-generic-eyeline-point". Seriously, everytime I draw a character that is supposed to look at something I just sort of stick a butterfly in there... 

This is an early character design that I ended up using in one of my animation storyboard portfolio.