Holiday Update

Happy Holidays! Hope you had a Merry Xmas and have a Wild New Year!

AM wrapped up, and I added my student progress reel to my demo reel. In hind sight I probably should have removed some of the items from it before throwing on there.

I believe the next class starts tomorrow and I am looking forward to it.

Delayed Update (1.7 and 1.8)

I was personally unhappy with my performance on the last assignment (Tailor). After watching the critique I understand why I was marked down and I am grateful for the the honest critique from Victor. I will make the suggested changes and hope that my grade increases.

This week is a "Vanilla Walk Cycle". After watching the lecture and doing the assignment I feel better than I did about last week's assignment. The rest of the work I have to do include making Physical Strength poses, but I have some questions for Victor about what qualifies for physical strength.

I have yet to find a way to publish my animation .mov files in Visual Lightbox. I may have to abandon the program and do it by hand :(

Class Updates (1.5 & 1.6)

I have as of yet figured out how to enable .mov files to be embeded in lightbox, so my animation assignments shall remain secreted away for now.

Last week's assignment was a lot of fun.. mostly. I missunderstood the directions of the assignment and halfway through the week had to completely do it over from scratch... twice. It was still fun. The first time I made the ball too cartoony and too much of a character. The second time I came up with a better way to go through the obstacle course and still use all the little platforms.

This week is overlapping animation. We get to play around with the pendulum model. I can't wait.

Various Updates

AM Update : Class 1.4. This week we'll be going one step further on the bouncing ball animation and add an illusion weight. We'll animate two balls, one light, the other heavy. This week, there are poses due.

Project update : I figured out how to add a gallery page for the Animation Mentor work I've been doing. I'll add the .mov files I've done as soon as I figure out how to put them into a lightbox setup.

I am excited about next week's assignment: On top of the STU poses, we will be animating a ball going through an obstacle course using squash and stretch. It will be a busy busy week.

Class 1.3 - Assignment

This week's assignment is the bouncing ball. I've decided to do this assignment in two major phases (after the initial planning phase of course). First I will do a straight forward bounce with a roll and settle. The second phase will to play around with arcs and trajectories and make the ball bounce down a slope, against a wall, and into a crevice. It should be fun.

The Pose assignment seems to be giving me trouble due to the fact that we shouldn't (not that we can't; but that we shouldn't) use cliché excited poses. I have only been able to find a few excitment poses in picture and video, but they have been in crowds of people.. all of whom seem to be doing the exact same pose (more or less).

Q&A
I really enjoyed this week's Q&A with Victor. He showed us some of his work and even the breakdown stages of some shots in Pixar films he worked on. Very cool stuff.

I'll probably start posting the poses from class so I have a record of my work somewhere besides the AM servers.

Class 1.2 (assignments)

So the assignment for Class 1.2 is done. I now have access to a simple character rig that will help me add some character (not pun intended) to my site. I've had the idea for a while, but haven't had the material (basic character) to do it with.

Hopefully this next assignment will allow me to tie in the idea with the session matierial. Stay tuned!

Class 1 - Update (Session2)

After having our Q&A this week with Victor, I came to the realization that I have a tendency to use a person's outer contour to base my sketches off of. This of course has led me to make incorrect sketches; but now that I know what I'm doing wrong and what I should be looking for instead, I can correct it and improve my work.

This week's assignment is to physically sketch several poses, pick one, and pose STU in said selected pose. I have 3 that I'm going to pose STU in: throwing a kickball, kicking a ball, and a leisure pose.

RANT ALERT
This first version of STU given to us by AM.com is rigged so that one arm is IK and the other is FK. While I realise that it is done this way to get us accustomed to working in both solvers, it irks me that we don't even have the choice to turn switch between the two modes.
END RANT

I have got an idea to create two scripts this week: The first is a render setup for making a solid color background for mental ray final gather renders. Admittedly, I got the idea from a tutorial I saw on AM.com forums. My script will simply be a one-click setup for the same tutorial. The second is a camera bookmark tool, where I duplicate a the current view's camera, name it and lock it in place to allow the user to come back to it.

Q&A 1

I had my first Q&A with Don Kim's class. However, I was unable to speak to the class due to a microphone malfunction. I have also switched classes. I am now under the supervision of Victor Navone.

Animation Mentor (class 1.1)

So classes have officially begun! This week is "get to know your classmates and Mentor" week. I'm quite anxious to start the animation lessons.

Today I "met" most of the class. Some experienced in some forms of animation, others with no experience at all. I look forward to seeing how everyone grows. Even those with no experience will be of benefit, as their input and critiques help others and themselves grow. Those of us that are experienced have loads of experience to give to the rest of the class.

Render Farm Update

Yesterday I got a price quote for the raw materials to mount my render machines to: aluminium and acrylic with stand offs. After some creative calculations, I believe I can afford to start piecing together the mounting panels one at a time.

After purchasing the initial aluminium paneling, I will aquire the standard mounting pieces for a motherboard installation. After drilling holes into the aluminium that match the form factor mounting, it should be a piece of cake to finish the the project.

Fun Times

It's been a while since the last update, but I definitely have some news.

First off, my new site is up and running (mostly). I still have to add graphics, polish a few sections, and add tutorials and files to the "freebies" section.

Attended the Austin GDC. Had a blast partying on 6th Street... oh and saw some neat stuff at the Conference. I was impressed by 3DS Max 2010's CAT system and I wish they'd port that to Maya some time, but I know they won't. The CAT system is a set of tools to quickly rig and animate (procedurally) custom character rigs. During the conference I also so the Xaitment AI suite. Very cool stuff. This suite easily rivals Autodesk's Kynapse middleware. I saw the new SpeedTree at the Intel booth and boy was I blown away. Being able to create procedural or custom vegetation that looks that good is amazing. Unfortunately they do not sell the modeler application seperately, and I have no need for the SDK.

I met alot of cool people; some professionals, some students, some.. just random people. All in all I had a blast, though I hear that the Conference Expo floor was a lot smaller than the previous year.

I have also begun work on two of the three shorts I have planned. So far, I have partnered up with an outstanding artist for Titanomachy: Christian Syaap. Right now he's creating concepts based on direction from myself and a little inspiration from games. I have also started work on Inner Demons, though it is not as far advanced as the other project.

I am working on an unrelated piece for my demo reel; something to show various forms of movement and some character/character interaction. I am still holding out hope to get another job in the game industry.

Moving Along... slowly

Now that I have a job with TheMan, the time I can dedicate to my own projects is limited. While I continue to look for animation work, I am slowly making progress on a short. Now that I have prioritized my projects I feel I will increase the progress speed.

I did an animation/rigging test on a disc to make sure I knew how to do it before I jumped into the scene and started making poses. It worked out pretty well.

Update

So my LZ short was canceled due to an IP dispute. Apparently David Weber does not allow any fanfiction in his IP universe. So I have permanently shelved this project.

I have a new set of projects (two to be exact).
1 - is a revamp of my demo reel to have sort of a tie-in theme to carry over between shots. I plan to make The ball lift my first shot, then have the ball fall off the pedestal and roll off a cliff to bounce and roll into a sleep Krag, who will wake up grumpily and procede to take out his frustration on the ball. From there I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll introduce a new character (maybe I'll finally reveal Chug?).

2 - I have a series of action-based animated shorts planned. The series is called "A to B" (or maybe "A2B"). Once I have the first environment built and a blocked in character, I'll be able to tell the amount of time needed per animation. Hopefully these will help entice investors to fund my studio and projects.

I have gotten a little more involved in detailing out the game ideas I have. I have gotten used to carrying around a little notebook that I am writing out first draft concept documents. So far I am transcribing the notes of two RTS games into concept form. Harder to do than I remember. Maybe I should find that template from college...

Demo Reel Update

So it's time to update my demo reel. I recently asked my former Lead, Mikkel Caiafa, if I should include animation tests that I have not officially taken on my demo reel. He said that id frowned on my demo reel because of this. Oops. Well lesson learned. I am reworking my demo reel to have similiar sequences but without the Hell Knight or other IP characters that I "do not have the express permission of the creators to use." So I'll be sticking to freely distributed rigs. The Tiny rig will replace the Hell Knight rig and I have a few other not-so-freely-distributed-rigs that I have animated on but will need to be reworked in light of this new insight.

As far as my cinematic projects are concerned, they are slowly making headway. Slowly but surely locking in armor and weapon designs as well as environments and sequence brainstorming.

I've recently begun to think of my layoff as a blessing in disguise. It has freed me up to further on not only my own projects and goals but to improve my animation and rigging skills as well. Go figure.

Ramping Up

In preparation to my cinematic shorts and after feedback from several industry peers, I have decided to work on animated clips by entering into the 11SecondClub's monthly contest. I'm hoping that by doing so will help me add animating emotion to my skillset (seeing as how I didn't do a whole lot of that at Paradigm). Admittedly I entered this month's contest while it was half over; but it poses a refreshing challenge that I am meeting head-on.

In preparation to start these cinematic shorts, I have also started collecting materials and contacting people whom I feel may help in my endeavors.

Getting Organized

So now that I'm officially a part of the CoD:FW mod team and animator for a Robotech fan movie, and reworking my Demo Reel; I need a way to keep all my tasks organized.

Enter past experience...

So keeping in the spirit of Sprint Meetings, I organized my own stories and associated task lists to help me keep track of my original goals and work I've completed. So far I have only compiled a list of Demo Reel tasks, seeing as how the CoD:FW team is attempting to create an online Task Database (per my request) and my art director/contact for the Robotech fan movie has not contacted me in several weeks (5 weeks).

Amonst my personal tasks are creating more "Short" sequences; focusing on character interaction and acting, environment animations, particles, dynamics, and one major cinematic short that I will definitely need help to complete. So far the task count comes to 32, of which I have completed 16 (17 by the end of tonight). Unforntunately, the other tasks are biggies: planning for the major cinematic sequence, building and rigging environments to animate, building mechanical objects to animate... lots of work, but I look forward to it.

Back from vacation

So it's been a while since I updated. Since my last post I've finalized 2008's demo reel, though looking back on it now it seems unbalanced: too much rigging & tools, not enough animation.

I'm working on correcting that with a few new animations I'm working on as well as fine tuning the HK animations.