Aviation Progress

Here's some screenshots of the progress of my senior film, Elementary Aviation.



(That's kinda how I feel at times when working on her rig...)

The Canary is super fabulous though.

Snow Leopard Cycles in progress

Snow Leopard rig and model is property of Rhythm and Hues, who have graciously allowed SCAD to use it.

Future Project

The title says "future project" but it takes a blast from the past to understand.



I did this for my Digital Form, Space, and Lighting class (same class as painting with light, violin, and the violin gone bad) and we had to use ONLY basic polygon shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, toruses) and piece together some sort of aquatic figure or scene with the shapes. And we could only use the three basic manipulators (rotate, scale, translate) on the shapes. No extruding, sewing seams. I was pretty proud of my outcome.

Another future project idea? Model the character in my title bar. She's got talon feet, that'd be fun.

Now I want to go back and take that same idea and make a new model of it. Fun! First I need the time. I should be posting the progress on my senior film soon. Models and rigs oh my!

Winter Village

I just recently finished helping my roommate with her level design project. I got to do some low-poly modeling of a bunch of decorative assets, along with some brainstorming help on the quest details.

Because the objects I modeled, uved, and textured were decorative pieces, I feel the best way to display them is by showing them doing their purpose.



In this scene I did the anvils, spears, axes, bows on the table, and the red oil lamp. I did a few other things but either they weren't used in the final turn-in or you can't see them in any screenshots. I'll post a few single shots of assets later.

You can find more screenshots of Katelyn's project at her site, http://www.katelyn-mp.com, which I'll be adding to the sidebar of links also.

Thundercats, HO!

I didn't get to watch Thundercats much as a kid, but my brothers did have a couple action figures. The cat-people were amazing to me, but my mother found cartoons to be brain-rotting and I couldn't discover their source till later in life. Now there is talk of a CG movie in lieu of other 80s cartoons becoming movies, and the talk has been buzzing for a while now... well, kinda. It's been pretty silent for a while actually. I hear Warner Bros has delayed its production, but thanks to the folks at MovieLine, we have four concept images!

This is a mostly personal blog, so I have decided that only one concept image will be displayed here. But not just any one concept image, no, but Lion-O himself. Why just one? I love characters, and Lion-O looks good. Perhaps I have a particular liking because his face is much like the face I tried to employ on my Caprean designs like Dallas and Jestir.

I hope that production continues on the movie. It's currently being said that Jerry O'Flaherty is directing the film, and he's credited as an art director from video games such as Gears of War and Command & Conquer: Renegade. An art director being a film director? Interesting. I really would like to see how this could turn out, especially with the pretty concept art they've released. (Yea, the movie could still suck, but if it can look pretty while doing it!)

Pitch Poster!

So, myself and a few others from SCAD had their senior project pitch posters selected for the SIGGRAPH issue of Animation Magazine. Had no idea it was even considered, but for some reason the old version of my poster was submitted, not my shiny new one. Oh well, I can't complain, it was submitted, and that's awesome! So go vote for me and my classmates!

http://www.animationmagazine.net/pitch_party_09_vote.html

Up up and away!

If you haven't bookmarked or even checked out my new short film pitch blog, then do it now, because it is getting updated this weekend. I could update it right now, but I'm trying to get the posts in about the same order as the book that goes along with it (that if I'm talented enough I might include as a downloadable .pdf), so untill then , enjoy the layout and my pitch poster as seen above!


PS - I feel a bit like a sell out, but I have a twitter. Find it on right side of page -->

(goes to hide in shame)

I Feel Pretty

Hamster the Rhino would like to say hello.



"Hello"



And do you like the new addition to the sidebar? (I miss having real fish Q_Q)

New Blog! (UPDATED)

I'm not moving, I just set up the blog (in its barest form currently) for my undergraduate senior film.

Elementary Aviation


Not much there right now, but check back in a couple weeks.

UPDATE: The film and blog have a new name (Actually, the film has changed completely but you don't have to worry about that)
Keep up to date!

Turn in Day

I get back to school two weeks ago and I already had to turn in three animations. Curious?


For 2D, had two different head turns to do, using Mushu.



Had to do a quick simple one...



...and a more complicated on with anticipation.


As for 3D, we took the Andy rig and did a hop. Hopefully I'll find the time to redo this with proper weight and such, but in the mean time, if you see this and want to add critique, go right ahead!



Enjoy!

/youtube

Heh heh heh...

Youtube didn't need it compressed. And youtube keeps the videos bigger. So here it is! My final from 3D Character Setup and Animation with professor Brian Schindler at SCAD.

Now I'm just waiting for my professors to google their cohort and find my blog... again. :D

Tying Bottles of Eau de Cologne to Mah Cat's Tail

I tried posting my 3D character setup and animation final last week, but the file was WAAAYYYY too big for blogger's uploadermajig. So I have to compress it before I post it, and I've been too lazy to do it lately. And by lazy, I mean I was busy playing WoW and getting my tauren druid up to lvl 80, then discovering I was sucking at being a DPS feral druid and switched to BOOOMkin, but now I'm just bored with the game. So, in my boredom, my character sits undergeared in Dalaran, awaiting to get her fuzzy cow butt handed to her during this weekend's raid, while I decide that my time is better spent on...

redoing my other final.

Yea, that's right, I'm animating during my break. The Acting For Animators final was a total flop. I got an A on it, but I think it was an A for Attempt. So, I'm forgetting that horrid piece of pencil test disaster and going back into a different direction. I'm going to pound out a satisfactory animation using the newest Moom rig, using my final voice take (that I am not satisfied with either), and will hopefully get a good piece of dialogue animation out of that. From there I might use it as reference for yet another animation that will actually use the Sophie Rammeyer character I created for the project. (In the essence of "I like what I did here, so let's do it over here..." not for factual reference)

I have a mirror behind my computer on my home desk, so referencing the facial animation is going to be fairly easy... might make that a necessity for all my desks in the future... my desk is technically a vanity table...

So, enough blogging! On to animating!

Summer 2008

So I haven't had anytime till just now to really just sit down and breathe. Honestly, it feels like it's been from one thing to another. I worked all summer long at the Chelsea Teddy Bear Co. store here in Chelsea, Michigan, and when I wasn't there, I was thinking about being there. I didn't help myself either when I became addicted to World of Warcraft... heh, oops. I've been a terrible friend this summer, not keeping in touch with my friends from school or from home! They're all at most twenty minutes away and I've only seen them a couple times this summer. Also, I've gotten nothing creative done this summer.

Now I just have two weeks before I head back down to Savannah and stay at my boyfriend's house for a week, then move back in and start up classes again! I'm surprisingly not very stressed about the idea. I'm trying to have a more Hakuna Matata outlook on life, seeing as I can get so pent up over next to nothing.

I have managed to see a couple movies this summer. I got to see WALL·E earlier this summer.



Absolutely adorable movie! Disney/Pixar score again in my book. However, I am not a fan of the use of life action filmed people in these animated movies. Happy Feet was an enjoyable move for the most part, but not one of my favorites. I was especially turned off when I saw the filmed people towards the end of the film. It felt cheap to me for them to use real people like that. There's something about an animated film that just has its own feel and character to it that is interrupted by the use of mish-meshing medias like that. So when I saw the clips of Fred Willard being used in WALL·E, I was afraid. But, I was pleasantly surprised with how they used it this time. The progression of how people became what they were in WALL·E's time was very smart. Showing the captains' portraits, up to how they become, fat and baby like, was ingenious and reassured my confidence in the film. So, just having those few filmed clips didn't bother me as the film progressed. The minimal use of dialogue was amazing. In our beginning animation classes, we're stressed to on how to animate things without having to use verbal cues, and still being able to portray action and emotion. Now, in WALL·E, we still got sound effects and little blips of language, but for the most part they had to rely on expressions and movements to get the emotions across. This, in my book, puts WALL·E up there as one of the best pieces of animation I have seen to date that has utilized non-verbal cues like that.

I didn't get to see Kung Fu Panda, so I don't have much to say about that. I did get to see Dark Knight, and was very impressed with it. It's a shame we had to lose Heath Ledger, he had quite the future ahead of him. But, on an animation note, I've been told that part of Harvey Dent's burned half was actually animated. If this is true, then that was some damn good visual effects right there. If not, then that was some damn good prosthetics job.

However, as a side note to all this animation talk, whoever made the rigs for the cat forms in World of Warcraft needs to be slapped. Cats can't sit without a disgusting pinch at the hips. Yes, I understand it's just a video game and it doesn't have to be a neat as a feature film, but a good rig can't be so hard to ask for! Even with a certain polygon count. The texture people can't cover all the imperfections of a polygon model!

Oh, yea, and PS-

I've given up on DeviantArt. It's gotten too fancy for me.

When violins go bad

And this is what happens when violins go bad and get attached as the head of a jockey in a Degas painting that's been modelled while being sent through a cemetary.

It's a work in progress. The violin final had one extra step, and that was to be put in a team of three people and they combine their pieces into one. So the modelling on everything that isn't the violin was done by two of my classmates, Chris and Erma. It'll be cool.

A Little of the Bandits Soul

This is the painting as done by Rene Magritte.



This is the 3D modelling of the painting as done by me.

Painting with Light

I was pretty proud of myself when I finished this.
Not when I got to class though and found how ornate people had gotten with the project. Bugger. Oh well, enjoy what my disco lighted spheres!

Hey, I have to be proud of something between the emotional emo rot, back spasms, and lack of proper meals. I can only last so long on mac and cheese dinners. And I'm lactose intolerant. The fake cheese is eventually going to get to me.