Sorry for the lack of updates

I've been working with a group of 3 on a live brief for the company Kurodragon. the work is going well but with only 20 days to complete, its a bit of a push to do that, and update my current work. therefore, Im putting my magpies on hold for around 20 days, the model is finished, just waiting to be rigged.

for this live brief i am modeling a rabbit and an elephant after making some model sheets. work is going well, and we are receiving positive and constructive feedback from kurodragon's Stuart.

update soon!

Joy Model update!

Hey, here is the updated version of my joy model, 4 days through now, and im pretty much there, the pictures with the black background have the symmetry enabled so please try and forget about the terrible seam line running along the character, (especially on the top of his head)

I can weld it together tomorrow (as long as im feeling ok after my hostpital apointment) and then once its welded, a few more touches and its done, this will give me a while week for the rigging so i can take my time in making sure all the steps are done correctly (because theres nothing like getting through the entire rig, just to realise youve forgotten something and need to rig it all over again...)

My first year Animation showreel (segmented)

Here I will upload all of my showreel animations (ive had to separate them all out because blogger cannot cannot handle the file size unfortunately)

Here they are in order from newest to oldest:

Mosquito E4 Stinger Animation

This animation is composited with live action footage, 3D character and parts of the environment to cast shadows, 2D flash overlay of the purple paint, pupils, legs and antennae of the character. a good use of compositing, and first use of morph tags.

The unfortunate life of Crabby the Crab My first try at using Cinema 4D, this animation was make to style with 2.5D animation. the character was animated in hierarchy.

2 Tester Pieces for Gila Tyson animation:

These two video's are test pieces for my final Gila Tyson animation which is here:

Final Gila Tyson Animation:

This is the latest animation, and my first attempt at a rigged 3D character in Cinema 4D. I am really pleased with the effect, and would only change a few things, such as the pupil texture wasn't stuck onto the actual model so it flailed about all over the place.

Magpie model so far

in about 5 hours of work, ive got pretty far already, im well on track with my weekly time plan, but lets just see how the rigging goes after this.... thats going to be the time killer.

(*by the way im working in symmetry here, so the model is a virtical cross section*)

What your seeing here is kind of a before and after picture, if you look at the shape of the 'cheek' part of the beak. it curves like that because my character has a really exaggerated smile and i wanted to show this in 3D. I chose to include the previous picture because i just wanted to show the way the beak is quite hollow inside, and i find that defining the inside of the mouth gives a good chunk of realism (well.. believability?)

wings, eyes, brows, tail and tongue, then finishing touches.... well, at least the hard mouth is finished.

Weekly Plan for 11/10/10

Weekly plan for: 11/10/10

	MONDAY	TUESDAY	WEDENSDAY	THURSDAY	FRIDAY	EXTRA-WEEKEND
AM	Add a time scale to my animatic in after effects	check over and finalize back stories	try out ring tutorial, put tutorial on blog	capture video footage	update blog	update skillset essay
PM	write script referring to the time and scenes in my animatic	draw rings and add pantones to model sheets	CAAD SESSIONS	test compositing with flash characters over the top of the footage	do any extra work on model sheets and print	take pictures of magpies and park scene

Model sheets of Sorrow and Joy - work in progress

The backgrounds were created after the assets, and i used an urban city theme because it suits the cartoon style of the characters along with the actual setting they are based in. the names of the characters are made to look like they are held up by the scaffolding, and if you look really hard, you can see that i have tried to replicate a few newcastle symbols in the background too.

changes to be made:

• pantones added
• character backstories to be added
• small descriptors for the dynamic pictures

looking at character animation 5

Mr wobbles nightmare

I like the live action background and a flash 2D overlay, the effect is quite fun and simple to recreate.

looking at character animation 4

Mr. Iiuu and The Nasty Bird

I am particularly looking at the way the bird character is made and animated here, being the only 3D character, but displaying a 2D look.

looking at character animation 3

Oggo - Saiman Chow

Oggo is an animation also using the toon effect on the 3D characters which is closer to how I would like my characters to look in the final animation. The animation also runs with a music track like mine will.

looking at character animation 2

Monsters: 092 Castle

Monsters: 092 Castle from Volstok on Vimeo.

The use of a live action background here, is what im really looking at, along with the characters interaction with the real people, I would love to have a clean interaction with people using my characters, especially the marolyn monroe scene.

looking at character animation 1

David Oriley's - Octocat adventures

Octocat Adventures (HD) from David OReilly on Vimeo.

This animation is a crazy paint style, but it is the 3D end part that i am most interested in, and the sketch and toon effect that has been applied to the 3D characters. Id love to recreate a similar cartoony lineart effect on my own 3D characters.

Sorrow Dynamics Page

Here is one of the earliest looks at my model sheets. This one is the dynamics of Sorrow. I took the images mostly from my animatic, because the flash character lineart quality was good enough to scale up in illustrator. Also, the use of many characters gives a really good idea of character dynamics.

However, there are changes I would like to make. During a class discussion, people commented on how the page already looked "too busy" and therefore, I have came to an agreement with my peers in that, "8 to a page" would be much easier to look at, with the name in the middle, 4 on top and 4 along the bottom.

Animatic

This is an animatic I made over summer, it was a better plan than producing a script first, because the exchange of ideas needed to be timed with the music, how to do this best? go straight in and animate with the music.

I made this animatic in Flash. The timing seems to be a bit off however, in the exporting of video instead of flash .swf but blogger refuses to allow flash files unfortunately.