This post will cover my multipass workflow, my experiments with smoke, and a whale character from the script including some simulations and the swim cycle.  This will likely be the last Isaac and Isabelle post for a while, as I’m gearing up for thesis year and expect that it will take over my personal work schedule for the next six or seven months.  I’m really excited to work on my thesis project, I’m going to do some live action with a heavy lean on compositing and grading. So lots of post work and still lots to show on the blog, but a very different kind of work.  Something I don’t really show on finlay.to very much, so that’ll be fun.

Okay first up are some new, more finalized renders with the ‘outside’ parts finished and included.  It was tricky to get so much into a scene that my humble computers would render in a realistic timeline, the solution ended up being to have everything on the other side of the window to be projection mapped renders onto simple geometry.  I’ll go into the whole process after the jump, but the result is something I’m really happy with.  Better than just putting flat renders out the window there’s real depth, so camera moves are convincing and depth of field is accurate.

This is going to be a quick post on my progress with the short.  I’ve finished all of the human characters in the short now, the last of which was the teacher.  She’s unnamed for the time being, but she’s got such a small part it’s not really pertinent.  After the jump there’s a 360 of her in her chair and at her desk as well as some video examples of my grading process.

This is going to be a quick post,  just wanted to keep up with the progress on the short, which looks like it might be renamed simply to Isaac, that one’s still up in the air.  So here are a bunch of pictures of the sets, another character called Isabelle, a reworked version of Nikolai the Owl, and some maquette renders.

Between my first and second semester at school this year I had a full month off, and I used that time do the prep work for my second term where I’m going to do a sort of dry run for my thesis in fourth year.  Since most of my projects at school thus far have offered only two or three weeks work time I haven’t done any major projects.  My intention this term was to start with rigged characters and a script and spend the whole term doing little bits for the larger project which will be a short 3D character animation.  I guess I’m a little behind then, but moving the whole project forward is an enormous amount of effort.  I’m going to try to stick to the purpose of this blog and explain what I’m doing as I go along, this post will pertain to rigging.

So this is my rig right now, and it’s the template that I’m going to use for the rest of the characters in the story.  It’s just a matter of scaling the bones to fit the different sizes of characters.  Once everything is programmed the skeletons can be dropped into a scene and with a few hours of skinning it’s all ready to go.  In the short there is a scene in a grade three classroom full of students, in the interest of time I’ll be using the auto weight function of the weight tag to quickly make each student poseable.  Since they don’t need to move that much the auto weight should suffice to pose them in their desks, and morph tags will be my solve to get those characters working quickly.

This is part of the Aiming at Mountains, Shooting at Stars project with Mike. The project’s been slow going but I’ve got some new renders of the whole Isaac body.  It’s still early, but I’d like to rig it before adding the seams and fabric detail on the clothing, I doubt there will be much in the ways of texturing as we want a polished and plastic/plasticine look.  I’m still thinking about using actual cloth clothes versus mesh, we’ll see.  Full shots of the model after the jump:

Last week a friend asked me to help out on some special effects for a little project they were working on, they needed some CG and I was happy to help.  I was tasked with taking video and making a character “shatter”.  So we plugged away and in an afternoon we had come up with a nice little XPRESSO rig to handle our mesh.  I posed the model and baked the projection and set a few computers to render the passes for the comp.

While doing separate passes I came across some pretty stunning renders, especially the ambient occlusion pass (which I was using to fake shadows on my render).  So I got to thinking it might be a nice piece to work on for my Post Production class, in which I had to come up with something for a final project.  This was my jumping off point.
UNDER THE LINK I’VE ADDED THE FINAL VIDEO

For this years Nuit Blanche I was asked to be a part a project called Words Travel Fast. The idea is to get poets and animators together to make some moving poetry to be screened all night on all the LCD screens in the TTC. Here are my two animations (click on the thumbnail to view):

I got paired up with a really cool guy named Matthew Tierney. We meet for a beer and he gave me his latest book, The Hayflick Limit, from which I chose two poems for the project.

This is just a quick post about the breakdown page for my demo reel. I’ve split up the sections of the reel and done explanations for each, as well as posting plenty of production stills, sketches, screen caps, test renders and videos. I really enjoy reading about other people’s projects, seeing how they went about solving the problems, maybe somebody out there will find this interesting.  I think sharing secrets and keeping an open dialogue is vital to the growth of an artistic community, so feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

BACK AT IT

A few months ago my friend Dan Cohen asked me to do some illustration work for his band Stop Drop (formerly Stop Drop N Skank*). I’ve been out of the game for a while, but it was nice to be drawing again. It was also a reminder to why I moved away from illustration in the first place. Regardless it was really fun, and I’m quite happy with the result. What they wanted was a boat lost at sea about to be overtaken by a huge wave. This was to be the album artwork for their new LP “A Wake//At Sea”. Dan and I met for lunch and we hammered out the details. Then I got to drawing and here’s what I came up with.