Still Life of Computer Setup

I've finished the computer setup still life

Computer Still Life Light tests

I'm back, I took a small break from my art, was trying to learn C++. A very complex language, which everyone said it was going to be. However, I did attempt learning it. I was planning on making my own game with my own game engine, but after doing some research, might not be the best idea. So, I've switched it up a bit, now trying to learn C# in Unity.

I've gone back to my digital arts. I'm currently working on a still life of a computer desk of a digital artist. The setup resembles a lot of my own, with a few differences here and there. dual monitors, a labtop, 2 speakers with a small subwoofer behind the monitor, as well as a lamp and some wires hooking a batter backup. Added a couple pill bottles and some external harddrives. I've done some lighting tests:

I'm thinking about going with the second to the last one, I liked both monitors and the lamp behind them lit. Lighting up the monitor though, I felt was too much, it messed upt the symetry.

Revised and a New Animatic and Vegas Still Life

It's been a while since making a post. It's been a hectic time, I had surgery about 2 weeks ago, then was sent to the ER later that night. Some relatives I haven't seen in probably 15 years came by to visit, and now, I got a cold. Never the less, I did get some things I wanted to do completed.

I refined the Possession Animatic, mostly to the beginning. I'm still having issues with the dialogue between Phillip and the Bust.



Heres the second film for Johnny the Ferret. This time I have him in a driving adventure. He wants cereal, but don't have the ingrediants so drives down to supermarket, but by the time he gets there, the store closed. I still need better transitions in some places.



I've been working on this piece for a few years, soon after I made my first still life, which was about 3 years ago. I was having a lot of issues with rendering glass and water, which I recenlty got the hang of.

Johnny's Truck Update

Hey! I've been working on Possession story and I showed it to my uncle, because after a while of working with the story, I can start becoming blind to it. I see the story in my head, to me it makes sence, but to someone else, it might be the best. So, I start working blind on stories, until I get input from a new pair of eyes. I showed to him, but haven't really talked about it yet and he sugggests it needs work. So, hopefully, I can get with him soon and discuss it.

In the meantime, I'm working on a some other projects, including my elf short film, which I haven't made any further progress on yet and my Adventures with Johnny the Ferret short with him driving. I've been modeling a car, and have since made improvements to, almost done modeling.. at least for now, until after animation. The challenge would be rigging it. I want to make it a cartoony car, which means squash and stretch capabilities.

Heres what the truck looks like so far:

 I want to keep under the hood simple, since it's cartoony, but still looks like 'under the hood.' This is probably the most challenging part of the vehicle.

Possession Animatic, Johnny's Truck, Lord Chamberlain

I've been working on animatic for Guilty Conscience. Something about it I didn't like. It was missing something that the original idea had. So, I've made a lot of changes to the story and have went back to original story concept with some newer ideas incorporated into this story.
The name of the story has changed from Guilty Conscience to Possession (working title). In this story, Phillip is now a younger guy, a minor living with his parents in a house they just moved into. They have a fight and he sneaks a drink. He hears a noise, which leads him to a locked up cellar. He breaks the locks and goes in. The bust comes to life and encourages him to touch the crystal ball. He does so which sparks chaos around the cellar. He later finds out, that he actually signed a contract, which leads him to being possessed (think of the Exorcist). His parents come down and finds him deformed and he starts climbing the wall and jumps towards them.

Story still needs to be written up better, need a script, camera angles needs adjustments, missing a few shots here and there. I use storyboards simply as a guide for myself.


I've also been thinking about another short film, on top of this one and the elf short. Is using my character Johnny in a driving short film. I've been making a truck model, using a 50's Chevy truck as a reference. The reason why I chose a truck, cause my vehicle is a chevy truck and the character just seems that he would have a truck, he's an adventurer and curious; he's more likely to go off-roading.

Recently I've been working on a still life. Lord Chamberlain, Skeksis from the Dark Crystal. It was a learning experience, it was the first time I've messed with Mudbox in a while. I modeled a base head in Maya, then imported into Mudbox and subdivided about 4 or 5 times and added a lot of wrinkles. I've heard from many that I'm doing it wrong, that I should only subdivide after I finish adding the wrinkles, then move to the next substep. For me, though, it's easier to just get a high poly model and work on the details. It's easier for me to visualize and see what I'm doing. I also painted the texture, which the UV layout is nothing more than an auto UV layout. Turned out good though, colors are a little less saturated that I would like it, but it fits the character though.

Phillip Rig

The Phillip rig is complete. It's combination of the rig for Johnny and the mermaid. He has a stretchy leg, but no stretchy arm. Doing the mermaid, I ran into a lot of problems and havent quite figured out a solution. With the mermaid I used a condition node to work the scaling of the joints. For the most part, it did work, but had some hiccups where the arm would be bent, when it should've been straight. Thinking about it now, I might be able to work it using scale constraints, but haven't tried it yet.
He has IK/FK arms, only IK legs, no reason to have FK for this project. Has a flexiplane spine, manual facial controls, as well as blendshapes.

I recently watched Secret Window, with Johnny Depp, and started noticing a bit of similarities, specifically when Phillip throws something at the TV, saying 'leave me alone!' So, I want to go back and change the story a bit. Possibly going back to some of my original ideas which reflected more about becoming demon possessed. Don't know if I should just incorporate some of the ideas, or just go back to the story. In which case, I would probably need to change the character a bit.

What I still need to do is: 1. modify the story 2. make any neccessary changes to Phillip to better suite the story 3. create a proxy for animation 4. do color tests

Guilty Conscience, Macaw, Skull

I've started work on Guilty Conscience, I've been working on the character, Phillip. This is a basic proxy of the character for now and a few color tests. I see him being a laid back, but a little flashy. A person of the night, work as a bartender... or waiter, but more likely bartender. After working on the character's personality a bit, I need to go back in the storyboard and rework it to make it fit the character more. Modeling heads is always a bit interesting and a little unconventional for most. I've never really been good at making unique human faces. So, I got a front and side of a celebritie's head that I wanted my character to resemble and used it as reference. Making a few tweaks here and there and making eyes bigger, it doesn't look like the person I based it off of. Very unconventional way of doing a head, but it usually works for me.
I haven't been the best at making front side body references so I was in the process of making a humanoid character to be used for animations with all the limbs seperated. So, I used that character and made it into a character reference model. Scale the parts I need bigger/smaller, move extremedies to where I want them. I made a front pose then freehanded the sides. Then use that to draw up a final front and side reference images.
I've also been working on Brother Lost, but haven't begun modeling.

In my spare time, I've also been working on a Macaw, to use for rigging and animation exercises. Still needs a bit more work, but it's getting close. I'm realizing, rigging the wings and feathers is going to be big challenge. All the feathers are it's own geometry. Specifically, bringing the wing towards/from the body.

I modeled also modeled a skull, eventually I want to model the entire skeleton and rig it. Think it would be interesting to animate a skeleton.

Animatics and Artwork

I've been working on animatics for my next shortfilm, here's three stories I'm considering. I'm liking Guilty Conscious the best, but I got a comment that they liked Brother Lost. Here's the three animatics:



Besides shortfilms, I've continued practicing portraits:

 

Hectic Time

Since my last update, I got a local job. It's a part time position, but I've been picking up a lot of hours. So, I haven't had all the time in the world to be working on personal stuff, but in the past couple of weeks, I've been getting better. I'm making a few animatics of different possible stories to go with. I've also been talking to a composer to get custom music for my Adventures of Johnny the Ferret Short. Recently, I've been messing with an app called 'my paint.' Kind of like Photoshop in regards to painting, except it's more geared towards making art. Different brushes to simulate pencils, charcoal, paint, etc. So, I've been having some fun with that. I've noticed that my human drawing skills has gone down quite bit, I've been trying to get into anatomy. Here's the two sketches I made: I made some others, but they didn't turn out very good. I spent a little more time on the portrait, because I started noticing that one was turning out looking better than any other. The woman is Victoria Secret's Adriana and the guy is someone I found on the internet. (I don't own the photographs of which these come from

Update April 11, 2014

A lot has been going on since last update. I've been learning French, learning to render in Mental Ray, been working on a still life, working on my next shortfilm, thinking about modeling and rigging some animals, changing computer from XP to 7, re-install programs, as well as some personal stuff been going in my life that I've been having to deal with.

Firstly, I've been looking at Digital Tutors and watching some of the tutorials on rendeing in Mental Ray and some of the lighting. So, with what I've learned, I've went back to my still life I made a while back and re-textured, re-lit, added some more detail to some of the model. This is the result:

I've been working on some rigging projects. I've created some biped and fish type characters, but not really any animal rigs. So, I've been wanting to do a quadruped and a flying creature. I've limited the options to either a cat, a cheetah, or a wolf for quadruped; a macaw for a bird. I love cheetahs, because they're skinny and fast, I used to have a little cat, I have a story idea for some wolf characters, and the macaws are just cool, they're colorful!
Since choosing these animals, I have done some research and looked up the skeletons for these creatures. Knowing where the joints are and how long bones are is basics of the basics. Especially important for birds, since I'm not very familiar with birds.

The other thing I'm working on is a shortfilm. It's going to be called Possession (working title). I've been working on the shortfilm off and on for the last five years, never really happy with the story, hopefully I will be able to get a story more grounded. So, I'm going to start working on the sotry and script.

Action Shots, Bust Progress, and Francais

Since the last update, I've been working on a few things. I got my action shots down, including: a volleyball spike, a football kick, and snowboard jump, and I included it on my demo reel, which I'll post here. I didn't have quite enough to make entire youtube video out of.

I've almost completed the bust. The rigging is pretty much done. I tried to make the character really cartoony, very flexiple. Everything is a stand alone, not musch joint hierarchy, the only ones are the face controls are controlled by the head Control and Global Control controls everything, other than that, everything is manual on this guy. I used 4 flexiplanes, one in the torso, on each arm, and one in the neck. The face is controlled using a curves and joints. Very much like, if not exactly like the system I used for the mermaid.
The most difficult chanllenge on this character was probably the skinning of the mouth, specifically the lower mouth, because the skinning had to be very pecise and pretty large range both in and outside, behind the mouth. Still needs a bit more work though
The picture below, shows (on the left) an example of the deformation and (on the right) shows the base pose.

jThe character was originally going to be used in one of my short films, called Possession. Was about a guy feels like he's losing his mind and eventually becomes possessed. The charater was going to represent the Devil or a demon. The story has been in prepoduction for around 5 years, gone through a lot of changes, so much so, that this character is no longer a part of the story, which is a little depressing, but that's how it goes.

On top of all of this, I'm starting to learn French. Over the years, I've always had an interest in knowing other languages and from time to time, I've tried learning a number of different languages, including: Spanish, Mandrin, Japanese, German, and French, but after a while I always quit. However French and German has stuck with me for a while. Currently I'm not learning German, but I plan to after I learn French. I've been studing French for a while now. No where near fluent, but I usually get the jist of what someone is saying in written Fench. So, maybe in a few years I'll be fluent and be able to go to Quebec or France.

Bust Model

So, I finsished the mermaid rig and it all worked, but I came back to it and the IK stretch is causing a lot of problems. It's the same problem I had with Johnny, but I foun a solution, but that solution isn't working for this one. The stretch still works if it's being rendered out, but it's just really annoying and frustraing. I got to spend some more time with it.
In the meantime, I've been working on some action shots. I just finished working on a football(soccer) kick and currently working on a volleyball spike, then will work on a snowboarding shot.
I've also continued working on the Buts. I finished the model and the column it sits on. Now comes the rigging part. I'm not sure if I want to make it mostly blenshapes, or go for a curve and joint based rig.

Mermaid Rig

I finished the rig for the mermaid. Surprisingly, the arms were the hardest part of this whole rig. She has an IK and FK system, as well as a stretch system attached both of them. I am hoping I can use this as well as my Johhny rig for my second demo reel for Rigging. Then I can have two dedicated demo reels, one for animation and one for rigging.
I figured out the tail problems. It turns out, the regular IK spline works just fine, even better than the flexi or ribbon spline. The facial rig, is a combination of a curve and joint based system. Facial animatins will all be by hand.

The Adventures of Johnny the Ferret and Mermaid Model

Here is the final piece of my short film.

School is now officially over and now ready to start looking for jobs.

Besides applying for jobs, I'm currently working on a character, a mermaid. At the moment she doesn't have a name, but I envisioned her being a volumptuous and cut mermaid, but looking innocent at the same time. I'm not sure if I got innocent down, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Below is the concept art and the model. I noticed very quickly I needed to be careful with the color scheme, to avoid looking like another famous mermaid. Through the process I was wondering what I should use for her covering. I didn't want to use shells or star fishes, that's been done to death. My other option was to use octopuses, which I liked
The story I had her in was like this: a prohibition hits, an alcohol like drink is now illegal. Our protagonist (which isn't her), goes out looking, desperate to find some. He runs into this mermaid, who has the drink, instead of the protagonist focusing on her, all he sees the the drink she has. She tells him that some drinks are in a dark cave. He ventures into the ruinso of Atlantis, where he then finds lots drinks, but also finds a sea monster (which I'm currently working on). Then there's a chase... that's all I have right now, the story is in the early stages of development.

I have begun rigging her, which i have ran into a lot of problems, mostly with the tail, which I thought would have been the easieast. I've tried using different techniques, including flexi planes and ribbon splines, but I haven't tried the IK spline yet. Apart from the tail, everything else is coming along. This character I gave an FK and IK arms, that also stretch. The face is going to be either curve based joints or just regular joints, not using blendshapes on this head.
 I decided to make a mermaid character, because I was interested in animating a character moving in the water.