Anniversery

This week is the first anniversery of our departure from the east coast and our cross country trip with the dogs. I have restored the images that were on Blue's Blog in honor of the trip:

http://daisyandblue.blogspot.com/

Maybe the dogs will post more pictures.

Much has happened in the past year, I've met a lot of cool people (John Brown, Kevin Llewellyn, Sofia, Kamal Hatami, Nate Homan, and Mr. Wisconsin to name just a few...oh and Ang Lee) and worked on some interesting jobs. I feel younger than when I left which is the nicest part. i love California and I've really enjoyed my classes at Gnomon. my skill as an artist has improved alot as well.

Tomorrow I am registering for a 5 week class at Gnomon, most likely Neville Page's Character workflow class. I'm a big fan of his DVDS. I still have to watch the flesh rendering DVD.

OK, so this weekend I took a break from work related animations and made a shoe for my dwarf character. I'm almost ready to put him together, who knows if he'll actually render...










That's one shoe, I still have to texture the other. If you're wondering why the shoe is duct taped to a block of wood you'll have to scroll through the blog to find the original sketch. essentially the dwarf is a moderately skilled pool hustler. He uses his height as a way to trick people into playing against him. He uses the blocks on his feet so that he can reach the table and also to play on people's sympathies. The idea came to me while I was sketching him, I guess I stole it from the monk character in Princess Mononoke.

Gnomon Live 2

Wow, big weekend.

Another great Gnomon Live event has come and gone. Thos one was just as great as the first with a lot of good talks, but fewer fire-spewing robots. In my opinion the highlights were the talks given by Sparth, Feng Zhu, and of course the amazing PuddnHead. However all the talks were excellent and I walked away with great ideas from each one. I also picked up both Puddnhead DVDs and Mark Lefitz Digital Environment Workflow which I think will be espescially helpful in my scientific animation work. I may watch some today.

Aaron Sims' lecture was an overview of his four DVDs. Very helpful in that it gave me a clear workflow idea on how I can create an present my character designs using Maya, Zbrush, and Photoshop. I'm less concerned now about doing everything in 3D, I feel like its enough to build, texture and pose the model and finish the compisition in Photoshop or in Zbrush's 2D environment.

Sparth's talk ignitied lightbulbs above the head of everyone in the lecture when he demonstrated his use of custom image based brushes. I made this image last night in another fit of insomnia:




It took about 30 minutes once I had a design going I liked. And most of the time was spent arranging it into a composition I liked. Its not a great piece and certainly has a ways to go if I continue it espescially with lighting. But I like how I can use the custom brushes (these based on images of factories found on google) to quickly get an idea on the canvas so that I can really spend time thinking about the composition. I may do a number of these just focusing on composition until I have more confidence in that skill area.

I am thinking a lot now about how to put my dwarf character in a composition. I am going for an informal portrait type photograph setting like something you'd see in Lenswork magazine or in Steve McCurry's work. The working title is "Small Time Hustle" and it will show the dwarf standing beside a pool table in a bar backlit with daylight. The bar is in Detroit or Chicago in Winter and the heat is broken so I have to find some way of conveying that its cold, beypnd the dwarf's clothing. The bar is in a sketchier part of town but not without charm. I'm going to lose the red eyes and replace them with more human looking eyeballs and replace the vagabond boots with the toes sticking out with some hightop sneakers, still duck-taped to blocks of wood so he can reach the pool table. I may have to give him a nice grin or something.

At the end of this month I will be registering for Zack Petrock's Zbrush class, very excited to be taking a class again! Finally a digital class!

Laters

Project Runway

Ok, here is the jacket and pants together.





I'm not sure I'm happy with the texture on the pants. I may redo it once the whole guy is together and rendering. The idea was that he is wearing old grimy green sweatpants that are way to big for him but I don't think they read very well as sweatpants. I'll have to see how I feel once I can get the entire model to render without crashing. The texture sizes are pretty big, I might have to cut them down a bit...or buy a new computer.

'night.

Again with the Hovercraft

OK, I actually kind of like this design. These are quick textures and it needs some detail but I may try and put it into a scene and se how she goes.










Granted, there is something oddly Freudian about those engine cone thingies in the front, but again, this design is based on Scott Robertson's work so those are his psychological problems, not mine.

Coming up, fashion for the modern dwarf...

Valentine's Day Madness Sale

OK, nothing for sale here, but I've always wanted to have a madness sale. I'm cutting proces so low, its insane! my accountant turned a gun on himself! here's progress on the jacket for my dwarf character, basic model and textures:








I have a hovercraft model going that I actually like, hoep to post somethign soon.

Sunday Stuff Again

More progress on the Dwarf hand. I went made bump, spec, and color maps today in Zbrush. The last few imades include an ambient occlusion pass. The jacket is the next thing I have to work on.






























Next weekend is Gnomon Live, looking forward to some cool lectures. In particular Puddn' Head character design and Taron's LW?Zbrush Normal Mapping.

insomnia

Another evening of coffee induced insomnia. Curse you blended Mocha!

Anyways, here are some images of my second attempt at a Scott Roberston inspired hovercraft done in lightwave. needs more detail, better lighting and much more texturing. I may start a 3rd vehicle and keep doing it until I find somethign truly inspiring before putting it into a scene. I'm having trouble achieving the same kind of detail i know I can get out of Maya. bit of course Maya is busy earning a paycheck right now...or crashing depending on its mood. Irealize vehicles are not my forte but its all about the practice and it beats surfing the web.

Here's a link to some of Scott's stuff:http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=2048&page=2










Hoping to do more work on my dwarf hands this weekend.

Sunday's Handy Work

I love posts with puns in the title.

I took a break from work stuff and spent Sunday on the hand for my dwarf. This took suprisingly little time. Still working on the bump map of course. Since this is a hand for a dwarf (a little person, not a tolkien mountain dweller) it's a little deformed.












I'm going to make the fingernails seperate pieces of geometry.

chalk'n it up

Not really crazy about this design so I'm chalking it up to LightWave paractice. Maybe I'll start a different one. Came out a bit too "Batmobile".




Today I'm taking a break from work stuff so that I can put some effeort into finishing the dwarf model. Mostly I'll be working on the hand today.

New new stuff

I'm working on building some hovercrafts based on the designs of Scott Robertson in LightWave while my PC renders away at some work related things. This firts one looks pretty cool, might be a disaster aerodynamically though. I based this off of one of Robertson's profile thumbnails from the Concept Design 1 book. Maybe I'll try one that looks more physically feasible. I do like the ease with whihc you can create a nice car paint texture in LW. So far I've only textured the outer shell. I'm running into problems as I had no idea how archaic the UV texturing tools in LW are.

New Old stuff

I've added some images of some older models to my cg section: http://www.bloopatone.com/cg/

I've also added links to print res PDFs of the Dwarf, Girl, and Spacedog models. I need to get around to texturing and rigging these guys. I had most of the facial expression/lip sync blendshapes rigged and attached to the girl model right before my hard drive died last fall. Luckily I was able to recover the scene files.

missing post

My last post seems to have disspeared, how odd...

Anywho. Up to my eyeballs in work and loving it. Doing it all from home with Maya on my PC and LightWave on the G5. While Maya reners out my various work animations I've been noodling with some models on Lightwave, trying to make 3D versions of some of Scott Robertson's hovercraft designs. I do love that you can get a good looking render out of lightwave very easily and quickly.

I found some stuff I was working on before the great HD crash of '05 that I completely forgot about. I had my surfer girl model half rigged for lip sync and facial animation and it completely slipped my mind. In any case I hope to add some more images to my meager digital gallery.