Global Game Jam 2014

This past weekend I decided to join in the Global Game Jam 2014 over at NJIT. It was a fun experience and I had the great opportunity to help create short game with some awesome people.

You can find our Global Game Jam Game site here. If you want to try out the game there should be a link to it at the bottom of the page.

FranknSon Trailer

This is actually a little old, I just noticed I had never posted it up. Its the teaser trailer for the FranknSon project I had been helping out on. Some of the scenes in this where animated by yours truly, it was probably the first real professional project I had ever worked on.

Some really old animations

So I went digging around my photobucket and found some really old animation I did back when I was just starting. They are pretty bad... and photobucket chopping up the timing doesn't make them any better...not much worse either.

Modeling Reel

3D Reel 2010....finally.

(Blogspot's video player didn't work well with my reel... so trying a different one.)

Wind Farm Test Render

Getting a little closer to the what I want it do look like. Needs to be a bit darker on the bottom and the spacing of the windmills is still off. I mostly want it to look more like this.

Modeling Intro

So I tried animating my lighthouse scene for the opening to my 3D modeling reel. Unfortunately the water needs a bit of work and the light on the lighthouse is going a bit fast. I still need to work on those rocks too.

Maybe if I actually get done with fixing this I might try and do the texturing.

Maybe...

(If the video is to dark try here.)

Demo Reel

So here it is, the most final of my demo reel to be displayed at portfolio review. I can't say that I like it, actually I have watched it so many times that I hate it. Even so I am still a little proud if it.

Of course I want to redo it...but that's for later, to many other things that need to be finished first.

Slashed

So I decided to cut out one of the lip syncs from my demo reel. It was a hard decision, but I think that the audio I chose turned out to be a whole lot more animated then the character was. I might go back and try to redo it with a different rig, one that stretches more and doesn't look as stiff as the LoMax character comes across. It always looked like a wooden doll to me, I think that is why I have such a hard time making it look lifelike.

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.

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.

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.