Straight Ahead

Head down, full speed, straight ahead.

A week or so back, fairly late at night I had a strong urge to do a very body mechanics heavy shot.  As I wanted to animate then, I forsake pre-pro, planning, and any forethought. Just loaded up a rig, put in a couple boxes and started making him move.  I've put a couple nights into this so far, each one just another straight ahead pass over the other.

Don't look at me like that, you know sometimes you just want to get into it, animate through the night without thinking and wake up in a stupor.

As is to be expected, it is not the best method.  The frames are a bit ugly, the graph editor got very little love, and there are quite a few issues.  Not sure if I am going to give it the love it deserves for a final polish.  However, it was fun.  And for a personal shot, fun is very important.

The people will always remember it

The dialogue is chosen and reference is shot.  The next 6 weeks of life is all set.  I am excited as this is the largest (in scope) shot I've yet to tackle.  Roughly 20 second 2 person dialogue shot with 2 cuts and full facial animation.  Here is my only horribly emberassing vid ref and quickie animatic. 

Lot of dead space in the audio track to play with and figure out what to do with my damnedable hands. 

I don't know what my problem is

An animation from last term, my first lip sync animation.  Much was learned.  I think we all feel like this every now and then.

He makes no mention of the gap in time between uploads. 

Rockin Some Blockin

Refreshed and at it again.  Here is my first pass at blocking my 'lift and throw' assignment. No critique from peers or mentor yet.  Overall I'm likin it.  Few hitches and such but I'm definitely getting my head around a solid workflow and orchestrating the body.  

Another one down

This was perhaps the most hideous animation I've ever done.  The finished result isn't bad, and with another week or so of polish it could be something I am proud of but I royally botched the blocking.  Many, many, mistakes were made but just as many lessons learned.  Hopefully I'll knock the next one out of the park.

I have been revisiting a lot of childhood / teenage memories recently and decided to watch "Katedra" again.  It's an animated short by Platige Image and Tomek Baginski.  I saw this when I was 13 at my first real introduction to the 3D medium.  I went a 'project fun' summer workshop at Cogswell in Sunnyvale. At the end of the week our teacher loaded up the best short films of the year as decided by the academy and on it was the aforementioned short. It blew me away, many of the images and stayed with me for years to come and it is a large reason for my interest in special effects. 

Without further words, here is Katedra.  Enjoy.

Triple Jump

This current term is broken into 3 assignments that each take 4 weeks. Each one having a successively more complex rigs, ending in a (drum roll) complete bipedal human.  I know, impressive right?

The first one is now finished, and was a triple jump, which you can see below. 

Max script: planes of light?

I have been working my way through the MIT OCW introduction to programming class.  I have found that I enjoy programming.  I get a chance to use mental muscles long dormant, rust covered, and cobweb laden.  I gave myself a few tasks to do with this information.  One of them was an attempt to get planes to be created above an image in a regular grid where more planes will be created the brighter pixels.  I felt that "The Scream" by Edvard Munch would be a fun choice.

Below is the result. 

I think the result is fairly interesting, even if I can't really think of a practical application for it.