iPad drawing

I got an iPad this week. I hope that it will help me do more drawing. I'm not one of those artists that loves the tactile feel and physical process of painting. But I am all about convenience. Once my stylus comes in it will be very handy to do some sketching and not have to deal with all the paper. This little mess was done with my finger in bamboo paper by Wacom.

Back-hoe operator

I did some sketching in Photoshop tonight, and I like what came out! These are some concepts for the supporting character in my backhoe story.

I really like the extreme characterization. I don't usually push things this far. If he stays this extreme, I'll have to re-work the dragon somewhat to fit this style. As I translate my characters into 3D, they invariably slide away from characterization into a more realistic style. I think this is an almost inevitable symptom of the "realness" of working in 3D. You can't cheat the same way as in a drawing--at least not without making your model a nightmare to work with!

RAWR again

This little guy was dreamed up by my son. You'll be seeing more of him, hopefully. He has a better chance of seeing daylight again, since I already have a solid story outlined for him. He was done in AM. Below is one of the iterations he went through. This one was done in Sculptris (a great free digital sculpting program). It has some appeal, but I was afraid it didn't have enough range of expression in the eyes.

shot 2 blocking B

extended the action for this shot.

Regular 'ol animation

I finally took a little time to play with PAP 4.0 today. It's pretty intuitive (for something as complicated as animation, anyway).

shot 2 blocking

Shot 2. Lunch arrives.

toads1blocking*

I'm finally animating! I had to very consciously make myself stop tweaking and begin animating. I can tweak and nit-pick with the best of them, but I need some practice animating. So here is a first-pass blocking render of the first shot. Isn't it exciting?

You will notice that the toad just "jumps" from one place to another. Right now I have simply blocked out the action with rough timing. I think  I will try to make myself block in the entire project before I do any "real" animation. I am not doing an storyboards for this project, so I'll really be discovering a lot of the action as I block the shots. I don't want to get bogged down in detail of animating just yet.

*toad project shot 1 blocking pass

Crunchy!

Whoa! Than looks Crunchy!

Here's a WIP and a bit of a spoiler. From this you should be able to gather what this short project is about.

Project Attention Deficit Disorder

Yes, I am starting a new project. I will pick up on the previous one (or at least use the models I created) sometime down the road. But I want to do some animation, and the project I had in mind with the fisherman and the pterosaurs required too much setup and prop building. I am going to try and focus on something simple (two characters) and very animation based. It will be a chase between this toad and his intended lunch.

New art direction 2

I worked on the smaller pterosaur today. I'm already much happier with him. I liked him before...now I like him a lot! I am taking this in a much "toonier" direction than I originally intended.

New art direction

This weekend we took a trip. And while my wife drove I put on my "art director" hat and did some sketching. I realized that I was not pushing the designs of my characters far enough. My characters always loose a little of their edge when I translate them into 3d models. And my designs this time were mostly pretty tame. So I reworked several of the characters (and invented a new one). I will have to redo some work. But based on my revisions of the first character I'm confident I'll have a better end product.

I think the new design speaks for itself...in a scary, freakish voice.

Smash

He reminds me of the Incredible Hulk in this pose. Just a little update about...not much. I did some tweaking today to improve his proportions and I worked on his facial control rig earlier in the week (evidenced by his glowering eye brows).

Design a fabulous ray-gun: go to NZ!

Weta is hosting an interesting CG design competition. This is one example of their fine work. The winner of the competition gets to go to NZ to meet the designer at Weta.

Color Schemes: Part 2

In a previous post I mentioned that I was going to use a color scheme generator to make a color palette for each character in this project. There are four major characters, and each has its own palette based on the master palette in the center. These palettes turned out quite a bit more lively than I anticipated. This is either going to push me into much brighter color territory than I anticipated, or I will deviate from these palettes as I texture. But whether I stick rigidly to these or not, my thinking has been greatly expanded by using a palette generator.

This is a bit of a digression from my previous rant about rigging suspenders. Last night I spent a few hours fiddling, and I have rigged the suspenders so that they stay "ok" in most situations, and have a few controls to tweak them to perfection after the main animation is done.

The beauty of doing a project like this alone is that there is always something else to do if I get tired of working on one aspect of the project. But it is dangerous because there is always something to "fiddle" with that may not make any real progress!

P.S. Here is a link to a bunch of other color palette tools. I haven't tried any of them out.

EDIT: I did some playing with texture maps based on these colors, and the results are not happy. I think I will need to do a lot more testing to determine if these will work. As palette they look ok. But, in the words of my venerable brother, "Don't let an automatic palette generator make you make bad art." Such wisdom.

The suspenders are killing me

I like suspenders. I don't wear them anymore (thought I did go through a phase in college...) but I still like them. There is something very manly about a hefty pair of braces.

Image via Wikipedia

The epitome of manliness. (Note the suspenders!)

But they are a PAIN to animate. They seem so simple... but actually they are very difficult to work with. The body of this character is very flexible. Each bone of the body affects the shape of the body, and the suspenders somehow have to remain on the surface of the body shape as all those bones move around.

 If I wanted to do it by brute force (meaning meticulously animating the suspenders manually) the rigging would not be a problem. But I'd rather spend some time rigging ahead of time so that I could just tweak the suspenders to keep them looking good and not have to focus on them during animation. If possible.

I am cautiously optimistic that I can make them look good enough for my purposes. But I don't want to spend too much time on suspenders. How much effort is the aesthetic advantage gained by suspenders worth? Would my time be better spent giving him a belt and forgetting the suspenders altogether? Probably. But I won't give in quite yet!

Plastic Animation Paper: free

I've played with the demo version of this software, and it is quite user friendly for a paper-less drawn animation workflow. The developers have released the full version of the software for free, no strings attached. I'm not sure if I have any readers at this point, but if I do, maybe you'll be interested in this.

Free download page
Thanks to Speaking of Animation for the news!

Back to basocks

I took a break from animating last week to make a few more sock creatures. I only remembered to take pictures of one of them, and here he is!

Smiley

Who's your dentist?

This is a WIP shot of the last major "character" of the project. It may end up having dozens of cousins, uncles, etc., but he will be the main attraction. It is loosely based on my memories of other artists' depictions of actual pterosaurs. So I guess that makes him (her?) authentic!

(What, you don't see the resemblance?) Image via Wikipedia

I did decide to go with a bold red color scheme for this one. It will have quite a bit more color once I do some textures for it. But that probably won't come for a while. I hate making textures, and sometimes they make animating less responsive, so I may wait a loooong time before I do them. Or if I get inspired, they may come sooner! I still have some more work to do for this. I see a medium-large crest in his future...

You're going down!

"You're going down, hand control bugs!"

I spent about an hour reassigning points to the bones in his hands. This will result in smoother, but not perfect deformations. But with the level of realism I'm aiming for, a few funky finger creases won't bother me. I thought I was going to have to reinstall the rig because of the hands. But I found out I just didn't understand the controls for the fingers! So after tonight I will turn my attention back to the pterosaurs and the zeppelin (which I haven't really shown yet).

Color Schemes

When I started working on this project I wanted it to be very "pretty." I tried to be deliberate in choosing my colors, instead of just randomly slapping different colors on different parts of the characters. The result was this outfit, which we all now know and love:

(Yes, I also mourn the loss of the suspenders, but I didn't want to fight them through the whole animation process. Only a few new frontiers per project, please.)

Back to the point. Today I discovered an online color scheme chooser. Using my base inspiration (the orange shirt) I made this monochromatic color scheme:

Kind of uncanny how closely my previously picked colors matched the generated color scheme! But it gets even more interesting. Here are shots of the critters I created for the project:

(In the interest of full disclosure, I tweaked these colors to match the palette, but the original colors were very similar. I just didn't remember the exact colors after-the-fact when I made the screen grabs.)

And finally, here is an overall color palette I generated based on the starting color (the orange shirt):

Yup. There's the shirt, there's the pterosaur, And there's the shark. I wonder what color the next major beastie in this project will be? I really was not planning on having a bright red critter, but now that I look at this palette, I'm seriously considering it. But will my artistic vision over rule the generated palette? Only time will tell.