Cityscapes

Here's a little speed challenge that my brother and I did. We had to do a cityscape type picture in under 2 hours but we were allowed to do a paint-over of a photo if we wanted, which we both did to some degree.


Mine's the top one here, of a "power plant".


And the competition, here, of a "city at night" (I got to name them...)

Comments please...

Later,
Stuart

PS I've pretty much finished the Maya Foundation book. I only have one bonus lesson to do on compositing with Toxik. After that, I think I'll do a free tutorial from Digital Tutors on modelling a character for rigging, which I guess is similar to stuff I've done before, but I want to try out the DT format before I pay for a subscription to them.

...and fire!

Here we go with some dynamics stuff:


It took me the longest time fiddling with the animation speed, the catapult basket shape, and the firing tangents to get the rock to actually hit the darn wall... I thought it would be easier to just move the wall into the path of the rock, but for some reason it was locked to its original position... and the path wasn't actually the same twice in a row when I changed some seemingly unrelated factor. Ah, frustration. But here we go in the end, a simple playblast of a rock knocking down a wall. Dynamics are pretty awesome, I have to admit. Imagine animating it all by hand... what a pain.
Well, next up is some path animation I think, so I'll hopefully get working on that soon.
Later,
Stuart

Load the catapults!

New milestone here... :)
Posting a playblast (not a real render, really just an animated screen grab of the camera movement etc. In this short film, our hero Delgo conquers great obstacles and loads a catapult.


I don't know if you can tell, but during the animation, after he **SPOILER** releases the rock **END OF SPOILER** his hands go weird and swivel around a couple times. I tried fixing it in the graph editor, but I have a feeling the problem goes back to the rigging, so not really sure how to completely fix it. I know my wrists can be picky at times. The whole thing still feels quite rough to me and I'd work on a lot of details, but I'd rather spend the perfectionizing on my own project, so I'll move on to rigid bodies... that is, dynamics. Let's smash some walls with this siege weapon!
Later,
Stuart

Pickup animation

So I finally got back to my maya beginner's book and did some more animation of delgo lifting a rock onto the catapult. There was a bit more artistic license with this bit, though I still got through it by checking every keyframe against the book's... and he still looks a bit of a robot... haha. Here's a screenshot of part of the process:

Nothing too special. I'll upload the whole animation once it's pieced together. I think that's the next section in the book, i.e. combining the walk cycle I did and the pickup animation into a complete little clip. Should be fun.

I'm looking forward to finishing this book so I can order some training DVDs which I found on Digital Tutors. We'll see if that happens first or me ordering my new computer!! Yay! I'll post the specs once they're finalized, but it's looking really sweet right now...

Later,
Stuart

Furniture challenge

So... due to an unfortunate series of events I haven't been able to do much on my computer, including concept art, so I'm going to have to just post my bro's entry and give him the win this time :)
Seriously, he did a pretty nice job, and I couldn't really figure out how I was going to visually convey the concept I was thinking about... ah well, I'm going to spend some time tonight working on my Maya again, hopefully get back to Delgo, who I haven't worked on in a long time.
Anyway, here's my brother's futuristic furniture:

I'll get back to you once I get somewhere with my Delgo animation.
Stuart

Challenge 1-Alien

So here's my final concept art alien submission pic thing:

I'm moderately satisfied with how it turned out... learned a bit about photoshop and brushes, layers, workflow, lighting and all that sort of thing. I'll be doing lots more painting in photoshop to practice lighting and color schemes and stuff.

Erick produced a decent effort, but neither of us spent a ton of time on the pics, so the first challenge resulted in a draw. (haha, get it)

Next challenge: Due Saturday evening, a piece of futuristic furniture...