ZBrush Practice

Been working with ZBrush digital sculpting. This is one of my early successful sculpts. Guess which famous hip-hop artist this is!

Sansa e200 rendering

Rendering of a Sansa e280 media player.  Modeled, textured, and lit from scratch.

Effects in Kazu Kibuishi Style

The assignment was to choose another artist and draw, paint, or render an original image in their style. I chose Kazu Kibuishi, a comic artist, particularly the style of his Copper stories.  I used several elements from his various works, and created the image digitally.

The second step involved adding in effects using Maya and a compositing program.  I used Maya to generate the spore particle's random movements, and I used Autodesk Composite to add in the spores, the balloon's movement, and distortion on the smoke.  Both are shown below.

Walk Cycles

This assignment was to learn walk cycles, and apply the knowledge of arcs and overlapping action. We selected from several pre-modeled characters, so we could come back and animate them later. I decided to do a 3/4 view to make it more challenging.

Various Speed Sketches

Various sketches from throughout the Fall 2010 semester. Each took 1-2 hrs, not necessarily including time coming up with the composition.  Click to englarge.

Matte Painting with Animated Perspective

This matte painting was generated on seven layers, using Photoshop.  The perspective animation was created in Maya.  Below are the static image, and the perspective animation generated from it.

I wish I had been able to go more into detail, but I burnt out towards the end, simply because there was so much going on in the image.  In hindsight, I should have worked a specific area, so I could start putting detail into smaller objects, rather than having the large fields of hill and sky that were relatively uninteresting.

Lipsync and Body Gesture Animation

The focus of this animation was on gesture, lipsync, and overlapping action. The sound is a clip from a sketch comedy TV show, and was drawn out of context for humor's sake.

Flour Sack Animation

The focus of this animation was on character. A flour sack, a emotionless, almost formless object, had to make a realistic jumping motions, and the animator had to visually give a reason to make the flour sack jump.

I was not the only person to 'kill' their flour sacks. For all, it proved to be an fun test of creativity to dispose of the flour sack in a humorous fashion on top of meeting the requirements of the assignment.

Storyboards for Elephantal Disaster

Check out some of the new boards for our pitch for Elephantal Disaster.  I've posted three scenes here, showing the main beats of our story: brotherly competition, argument, and friendly resolve.

DOESN'T IT LOOK LIKE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY?

From the feedback we received by our peers over the beatboard and initial pitch, we decided to drastically change the story we were working with.

Originally, the story was very focused on the fight itself, and much less on the characters and their personal interactions.  We decided the delivery of the theme would be much more effective if the audience was able to make emotional connections to the characters and their situation.  We decided on a chance discovery of a single peanut by two brothers walking with each other.  This would explain a mild rivalry that could get out of hand, and a mutual learning experience that the brothers could share, and the audience could easily read.

Our goal was to make characters with obvious intentions, and play to the audience's likely experiences and perceptions of stereotypes, as to make the audience more easily understand the situation and, thus, more deeply experience the moral.

WHAT WAS THE RESULT?

The storyboards were shown along with character sheets, color diagrams, charts for story, character, and camera, reference images, and samples of existing works. The group presented the story to our peers and superiors in the format of a narration over a short acting play. A quick Q&A explained our choices and intentions, and left us with some more ideas to work with.

From the original seven, this story was one of the four to be picked out for further development.

Architecture Matte Paintings

The fourth and final required realistic matte painting.  I had chosen Art Nouveau style architecture.  The assignment was to practice geometric structure and convincing perspective.

I decided to use a different method as before; I started with a sketch, again, but moved onto a grayscale value piece, rather than jump in color.  After I decided enough of the image was completed, I added color to the grayscale, and drew over the necessary sections to add texture and variations in color.  I couldn't decide if the method was an improvement, or simply another option.  The piece took around 16 hours.

Suprise Teapot Animation

The point of this animation was to use a cycle (the pot shaking) and anticipation of the next action.  The ending was to be an unexpected event.  This project was interesting for me, as I generated a larger quantity of test frames than I used in my final shooting.

Though I fulfilled all of the requirements and received good marks, I was less content with the mundane and not-particularly-unique teapot in this project.

Foliage Matte Paintings

The third required matte painting.  Instructions were a little more clear.  I altered my workflow to start with a basic sketch and establish a pallete before beginning color.  From there, I lay down a quick base, and went from section to section, adding detail.  I hand-drew most of the leaves, but also created special "leaf" brushes to create a base for the large areas.  The piece took over 20 hours to finish.

This piece was well received by my instructor.

Beat Boards for Elephantal Disaster

WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

These are beatboards for Elephantal Disaster.  It is a storyboard that describes important beats in the story, or important moments throughout.  This quantity of images could also pass as an early storyboard.

I was thumbnailing for character interaction, location, and environment (and changes that happen to them in relation to the story.)  I tried to consider interesting camera perspectives, and I made some comic-like frame breaking in some of the shots.  Some of these boards were to be re-purposed later as storyboard roughs.

WHAT IS ELEPHANTAL DISASTER?

Early in the program, we all wrote stories, and among 28 great stories, we collectively picked our seven favorites and split into groups.  The group I joined worked on Elephantal Disaster, a story written by Anthony Fariello.

The story was originally about two elephants who come across a peanut on the road.  They begin to fight over the peanut, but towards the end, they forget about the peanut while fighting.  The ending involved one elephant running away, and the other, having won the battle, exits the scene, having forgotten about the peanut.

Anthony had written in some creative effects, as the elephant's outfits would change as the battle progressed, and the location they were in (a forest next to a city) would become more and more feral, in relation to the elephant's reckless abandon. The environment would become more and more destroyed during the fight, hence the name, Elephantal Disaster.

Cloud Matte Painting

The first required matte painting.  The instructions were vague, except we were to go from a reference photo.  Given little instruction, I used a technique I had learned in the past to start with a rough base, and slowly work up details evenly throughout.  The "sketchy" lines were intentionally added in towards the end.

After a project like this, I've started to notice clouds in day-to-day life.  Clouds really do look unreal.

Bouncing Ball Animations

The bouncing ball, the quintessential first pencil-test for a beginning animation.  We had strict guidelines for our first bouncing ball, and then were given free reign to try different materials and bouncing surfaces.

 

Regular ball bounce on Ones, Twos, and Threes

Ball bounce off of a wall with contrasting materials

Ball bounce with more organic materials

Elephental Disaster Character Designs

Here are my character sketches for Elephantal Disaster, the short film I am currently working on!  I tried to make the characters very different looking, as their motivations are similar.  I ended up focusing on a square, straight, strong build, then a triangle and circular lazy curvy build.