I know it's been a while since my last post but rest assured there is lots going on at the moment that I can't wait to get on the website!
In the next month or 2 you can expect to see some great progress on the projects I've been mentioning, as well as some new ones. As well as that I think it's about time I sorted out my gallery page so I'll be collating concept art, renders etc. to give visitors a lot more to look at!
Exciting times!
P.S. - Here's a teaser of one the projects : )
Monday 12 April 2010
Tuesday 12 January 2010
Happy New Year!
Hope everyone has had a good Christmas and New Year : )
Unfortunately this is gonna be another short update, been working a lot of hours lately which means more money but less progress on my many projects 8-)
I've had some time to do some render tests for a style I've had in mind for the postman short I've been working on. I wanted to come up with a way of making the animation look like its made from different pieces of cloth stitched together. I whipped up some sketches so I knew what I was aiming for then started thinking of a way I could actually accomplish this that didn't involve drawing on every frame by hand...
I had a few ideas on how I could do it but the one that I thought would be the most straightforward involved using Maya's vector renderer. I figured that I could render out the outlines of my character and objects with the vector renderer, which would output these as vector paths, which I could apply a brush to in Illustrator to get my stitching effect. Luckily I was right : )
This was my first test using a Helix primitive. It was pretty straightforward in the end and seems like something I could automate using Illustrator's actions so I was pretty happy to go on and do some more tests.
I was pretty happy with this render of the Postman model, but I wasn't confident in going on without a motion test.
With my lack of free time I decided to do a quick camera move rather than an animation test. I'm glad I did now because I learned some things that would have made an animation test a waste of time...
This made me realise a few things...
1. I animation would have to be quite limited almost stop motion style
2. The camera would have to be static
3. The stitching needs to be bigger
Since then I've been working on some animation tests with the above in mind, but... the postman character is very awkward to animate :(
I'm going to try and see if I can work on the rig a little to help but I'm pretty sure it's a design problem. It's a fairly big set back but I've designed and built enough characters by now that it doesn't take me too long anymore.
As well as this I've been thinking a lot about Growing Pains. I get at least 1 good idea a day on how to improve it whether that be story, visually or something technical. I'm going to make a start on that as soon as I've finished these "stitched" shorts.
This year is going to be a busy one for me but one of my resolutions was to have Growing Pains out by the end of it and I intend to stick to it!
Cheers.
Unfortunately this is gonna be another short update, been working a lot of hours lately which means more money but less progress on my many projects 8-)
I've had some time to do some render tests for a style I've had in mind for the postman short I've been working on. I wanted to come up with a way of making the animation look like its made from different pieces of cloth stitched together. I whipped up some sketches so I knew what I was aiming for then started thinking of a way I could actually accomplish this that didn't involve drawing on every frame by hand...
I had a few ideas on how I could do it but the one that I thought would be the most straightforward involved using Maya's vector renderer. I figured that I could render out the outlines of my character and objects with the vector renderer, which would output these as vector paths, which I could apply a brush to in Illustrator to get my stitching effect. Luckily I was right : )
This was my first test using a Helix primitive. It was pretty straightforward in the end and seems like something I could automate using Illustrator's actions so I was pretty happy to go on and do some more tests.
I was pretty happy with this render of the Postman model, but I wasn't confident in going on without a motion test.
With my lack of free time I decided to do a quick camera move rather than an animation test. I'm glad I did now because I learned some things that would have made an animation test a waste of time...
This made me realise a few things...
1. I animation would have to be quite limited almost stop motion style
2. The camera would have to be static
3. The stitching needs to be bigger
Since then I've been working on some animation tests with the above in mind, but... the postman character is very awkward to animate :(
I'm going to try and see if I can work on the rig a little to help but I'm pretty sure it's a design problem. It's a fairly big set back but I've designed and built enough characters by now that it doesn't take me too long anymore.
As well as this I've been thinking a lot about Growing Pains. I get at least 1 good idea a day on how to improve it whether that be story, visually or something technical. I'm going to make a start on that as soon as I've finished these "stitched" shorts.
This year is going to be a busy one for me but one of my resolutions was to have Growing Pains out by the end of it and I intend to stick to it!
Cheers.
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