Animal Sketches

Some pages for my flatwork port. I just found a whole bunch of animal drawings I had done a while ago. Looking at these reminds me on how much I need to work on line quality. I hate when some people can draw a scribble and it still looks like the most amazing scribble in the world, and then there are people, like me, who try to draw something and it just looks like a plain 'ole scribble.

Yeah...yet another thing for the 'to do list.'

Hallway

So I finally put textures on that hallway scene and mostly have the lights figured out. I am thinking it is still to dark in the back, but with my textureing job there are worse parts to the piece. I'm not to happy with how it came out, maybe I will have to revisit it for a 3rd time.

Modeing

So I decided that the first thing I am going to do after graduation is make a generalist demo reel. I figure that most of the companies that are willing to hire a just out of school no experience animator are smaller companies that are probably going to be looking for a more well rounded artist. So I have been scavenging around my files for 3D models. Just today I went back to my dolphin boat render and redid the textures and made a camera rotation for it.

Another Run Cycle

I didn't get much done over the weekend except working on a really old scene that I had wanted to fix up. I'll put some renders of it up tomorrow once I get the volume lights looking a little better. I also got some gesture drawings done and took a few photos of the buildings around the city. It was a fun trip...except for the sunburn.

And here is a quick run cycle I did...its a bit rough, but it was nice practice. I need to work more on run/walk cycles.

That Bar Scene

I have been working on this bar scene animation on and off for months now and every time I go back to it there seems to be more things that need fixing. I can at least say that the animation itself is finished as far as getting the story down. Now it's just a matter of going back and exaggerating and fixing all those issues that I never noticed before.

Since I started this animation so long ago many of the problems come from the fact that I have learned so much since I started. I have been temped just to start from scratch and reanimate the whole scene. Unfortunately my demo reel is due next week so I really don't have the time to do that. Maybe I can try redoing it sometime in the future. It would be interesting to see how much I have improved.

Surfur Girl

So I was scrambling around trying to gather all my doodles, drawings, scribbles and any other flatwork I could find. I ripped all the pictures off the walls and scoured all the sketchbooks I had from the past few months trying to put a decent flatwork portfolio together. I still don't have any decent gesture drawings, though I have plenty of animal sketches.

I put together a bunch of my surfer girl drawings, she seems to be everywhere in my sketchbooks at the moment.

Squirrely Rig Jump

I decided to play with the Squirrely Rig by Josh Burton. It's a pretty nice rig and the character is very cute. I did a simple jump test with him, the tail needs some smoothing out but it was a lot of fun to make.

Beginner Tutorials

I tried another of those really beginner tutorials from 3DTotal (The Basic Modeling Techniques in 3ds Max tutorial by Michael Bauer) to see if I could learn anything. I figure I need to know the basics before I can really move on. I was happy to find out that the tutorial pretty much covered things I already knew, though it did show me a few ways of getting certain things done quicker and easier, which it always a plus.

Textureing Troubles

I need to learn how to unwrap and texture. I tried making a simple scene so I could practice, but it seems teaching myself better texturing skills is going to be a much bigger project then I originally assumed.

It's going to have to be an 'after graduation' thing...

Falling In deeper.

I think the one problem with critiques is the more you get the more work that needs to be done. It seems everyone has their own take on things and how things should be done. More then that though is that the more people you show your demo reel the more problems people seem to find in it. At this rate these animations will never be done.

But as I once heard from someone who obviously had experience in these types of matters, "Animators never usually finish anything, they just run out of time."



I managed to add some simple animation to my credits scene. The animation is only on half the screen because the other half will be black for the text to go on. If I get the chance I will try to animate it more, but I think this scene is at the very bottom of the 'to do list.'

The Sneak

So I started working on this last week. I have most of it down, it's just the second part of that turn I can't seem to get right.

Jotting

Welcome to The Jot, my personal blog made to keep track of my daily doings.