Retro-Ellis is here!

Meant to post this last week! Super-fun read. Ellis sent me copies of some of the material in the mail, back in 1994 or so - about a year after I graduated from college - and I was just blown away by it. Seeing it in book form is such a thrill!

Simple Block-In Animation

Here's a block-in of a simple jump and climb animation I did today. The goal was to do something more elaborate than a walk or run cycle but nothing so complicated I'd get all tangled up and quit in frustration. It was just going to be a quick jump from a hang (like you see in a game) but I decided to make it a little mini-movie after I got going. I believe I'm getting more fluent in my tools, because I had to shuffle time, add stuff at the beginning after I got the main thing done, then add stuff back at the end. There was a lot of compression and decompression of time - rescaling and adjusting the major beats. While it was challenging to do all that stuff, I never felt overwhelmed or like I wanted to just throw my hands up in the air in frustration. The camera stuff was something I just threw on after the fact (and found it to be quite fun and satisfying to animate). So it's a very rough first pass, and there's a lot of errors all over the place, but I dig it. It's fun to watch and I am now feel more confident in my working methods, which makes me want to keep at this. :)

Doing something in Illustrator

I've forgotten everything I thought I knew about Illustrator.

Trying to make a simplified, stylized copy of this lion head. I'll get it.

A lot of it is smart methodology.

Good exercise.
Got me into practical reach of doing something better.

Back to the basics...

Not as beautiful as Marty's wonderful marker painting, but I thought I'd show off a test I just finished. This is a simple walk cycle made in Blender. I used Daniel Martinez Lara's free 'Red Nelb' model that was already rigged and ready to go. Mainly learning Blender's animation workflow (dopesheet and graph editor), but I also played with the Freestyle Renderer which gave me a fairly calligraphic inking effect on top of the main render. I like the result. I mentioned a few months ago I might want to render frames out and ink on top of them in ToonBoom, but I think this rendering style combined with the ability to have animated sculpture via Blender's Shape Key functionality might give me largely what I was wanting without all the additional work.

More Horses

For my niece's birthday this week (it's all about the unicorns...).

These felt tip marker drawings are tricky to get into the computer. Too big to scan, so I take a digi-pic--but my photo has a lot of fall-off around the edges, and I have to tweak levels/contrast/brightness/saturation in all sorts of distinct "zones." And I still didn't get it right. Horse is too dark. He looks real sculptural now because I went in and "erazed" some highlights as a quickie solution. Now it's all messed up...shoulda found my white right off and worked backwards from there, but when I did I was losing way too much of the saturated stuff.

And those dang markers never bleed into each other enough on the big fills....Sigh.

But hey--two Tuesdays in a row! And original content, no less.

Tesla Tube!

Hey gang!  Here's a little something that we are up to at work.  What could a Tesla Tube be?  Stay tuned and find out! BTW, I didn't build this, just did the concept drawing, art directed and helped design the game it goes into.

It's a twister Auntie Em!

Just the effect. Maybe as low as an F0. Why you don't want to be anywhere near an f5. May get that chance tomorrow. More storm cells coming. Kinda monotonous.

Everything is intact. Just lost power for three days.

Now that I have the internet again, I'm fine.

More Blender awesomeness: Now with Pepe!

Moved this post here:

Pepeland Awesomeness!

Feels like a better fit here.