This robot has a skeleton

Pretty much done rigging the robot; now I gots till the end of January to animate, texture, light, and render (and maybe sound?). Fun stuff!

Listening to Said The Whale!

Later,
Stuart

Riggin' Robot

Started on rigging my robot main guy. I don't know if I've posted a WIP pic for the robot, but here he is. Would have looked better if I started with ref sketches. I've definitely learned that lesson for next time. Pre-production, pre-production, pre-production. Just do it.


Random non-cg related fact: I'm listening to Muse at the moment. (I've heard these types of posts add human interest. On second thought, it results in a twitter/facebook-esque compulsively updating feel. Forget that. No more music updates.)

Good-night,
Stuart

Picture and few words

Rigged vehicle. Not much to see. Will have a robot guy rigged soon.
Later,
Stuart

Words and no pictures again

So I didn't really accomplish my goals for last week and the weekend, but didn't miss by much. I call it a success. I completed the rigging training kit, did 3 sketches, and finished all the storyboarding for my animation.
This week so far I've done another sketch and almost finished a training kit on animation which has been very informative so far. It should really help with my short animation once I get to that stage. I've decided I'm quite stuck with the modelling. I have no real idea of where I want the character to go, visually, and I seem to be bad at modelling hard surface stuff out of my head. For the future, I'll definitely put the time into sketching out 4 or 5 reference images for a character of this kind. Lesson learned. I think it's time to just do the rigging and get busy with the animation, regardless of how silly the character looks.

Sorry I don't have anything to show right now. I haven't bothered to bring my sketchbook into work to use the printer scanner here... maybe I should get one for my own. I need a bigger desk. It's hard enough trying to squeeze a little tablet in between my keyboard and mouse.

Anyway, I've been reading "In silico: Animation and simulation of cell biology with maya and mel" alongside "Around the World in 80 days". Right now it's just going through the basics of the maya interface, most of which I know already, but hopefully soon I'll get to jump into some biologically based projects, like simulating actin filament growth. If you've seen "Inner Life of the Cell" by Biovisions at Harvard and XVIVO, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I won't post again until I have a screenshot at least.

Later,
Stuart

Sketching and Rigging

Little update on my goals... almost there...
1) Did 2 sketches so far, a pointilism "sketch" of a transmission electron micrograph (influenza) and a real sketch of a tree frog
2) Almost done a whole course on rigging (not the vehicle one I was going to do because that's more advanced and I needed to get some of the rigging basics first)

3) Still haven't touched my short animation in maya, but the storyboarding is done for that. It was good to get concrete storyboards to look at and plan around. Maybe that counts as the 3rd sketch :)

Overwhelmed

Yesterday I went and did something slightly foolish but long desired. I bought Adobe Production Premium CS4 with my christmas money. Student edition, so it cost a fraction of the regular cost, but that's not what was foolish. Now I have:
Premier Pro (video editing) **was deeply in need of this one**
After Effects (compositing and effects) **was really excited to get this one**
Photoshop (you know what that is) **Gimp is functional as far as it goes... but PS is something of a standard**
Flash (2D vector animation and scripting) **I remember doing flash in high school. I wonder if I remember any of the tools**
Illustrator (vector graphics) **yay... later.**
Encore (DVD and Blu-ray authoring) **yay... I wish I had a blu-ray burner**
Soundbooth (sound editing) **yay... I can't find my microphone**
Pixel Bender (some photoshop plugin) **no idea**
Mocha for AE (motion tracking) **sweet... maybe later**
Bridge, media encoder, version cue, device central, drive... (little apps for various connections and communications) **sigh, time to put my organization to the test**
So this isn't to brag about my purchase (though I've wanted all this software for about 3-4 years or more) but I have to LEARN all of it now. And I'm supposed to be doing Maya (my own project and learning tutorials) and sketching and doing stop motion and traditional animation etc etc etc.

So feeling a bit overwhelmed but not regretting my purchase. Except... CS5 will be out soon. But that's a moot point. New software will be out soon regardless of the purchase date. Right? Right.

So what to do. I think there's so much tons of hours of loads of information and learning that are available to me now that I don't really know what to do first when. Oh yeah, with the CS4 bundle, I got the option of 30 days free lynda.com subscription which is really nice. And I'm not going to start it yet. But that will be good for photoshop and soundbooth and premier and some of the others which aren't covered that well (or at all) by digital tutors. I'll pick a 30 day period and rage through all the essential training I can. Rage might actually be the right word.

Ok, ok, short term goals here.
1) Go through rigging vehicle course (to be done by the end of the week)
2) Complete modelling and rigging crash short by end of weekend
3) Do at least three sketches (on paper!) by end of weekend

Alright, that's feasible. I'll start tomorrow.

Later,
Stuart

PS Book update. I did finish Brave New World in December. Quite enjoyed, but a bit odd. Didn't understand many of the subtle societal themes and implications. Understood that a lot of the book had sexual overtones (undertones?) and that the creator of the assembly line replaced **SPOILER** God **END OF SPOILER**.

My book for January is Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. Loved 20,000 Leagues, and I'm enjoying this one so far.

Short short update

Still working on my short short thing. Haven't done that much over the holidays, mostly spending time with family. I've decided to settle on something a little less ambitious, but hopefully still fun and interesting. Here's the setting for it, instead of a whole city... yeah.
Once the holidays are done I'm hoping to get a lot of time in Maya and some other formats.

Speaking of which, for christmas I got two books, one Keys to Drawing with Imagination, which has lots of interesting ideas and principles for creative drawing, the second is The Animator's Survival Kit, which I've heard is one of, if not the, greatest book on traditional animation. So I've started in on those books and have been doing a bit of doodling and sketching (on real paper!!!).

Later,
Stuart

A done and a WIP

So as I promised (I think) here's a render from the directed study project that I did with three other people who were doing a combined CSC/Art Bachelor's. I was actually quite pleased with the final product and I have the feeling it will be on youtube eventually, so stay logged on for that (tuned doesn't work anymore).

I've also started a battle on simplymaya as I think I mentioned, so here's a couple WIP screenshots from that.


This one was a bit ambitious, as I'm going to basically have to construct and texture an entire cartoon city, as well as build, rig and animate a character in a car. I'll have to stay busy with this over the holidays, but when it's fun, it's not really hard work.
Here's the battle threads if you want to follow along there:
http://srv01.simply3dworld.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=53
Dango77 is my "opponent". He's really good at modelling, and really nice too, so it will be a lot of fun.


Later,
Stuart

Quick note

Getting really really close to finishing the directed study project. I'll post a production still (i.e. a rendered frame) if/when I get permission from the others. We'll see if this ends up on youtube ;) and if so, there will definitely be a link.

Entering a mini-challenge/battle with someone on simpymaya, so there should be some good WIP shots for that. I know... Christmas will be really busy, but I couldn't resist. This blog has been silent for too long.

My computer has been rendering pretty much straight for 48 hours with 8 cores at 100% and yet there's a cool breeze drifting from the output fans. I really love my new computer. Worth every penny. Maybe. Anywhoo..... I'm just backing up my computer and trying to upgrade my OS. I tend to blog when I'm waiting for some other task to finish.

I'm doing the read-a-book-a-month personal challenge, starting with Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as my December novel. It's a mind stimulating book, that's for sure. I might post up some of my thoughts on it when I'm done if anyone's interested. That's pretty much all that's new for me, and the disc is almost done burning, so I'll bid adieu. (Call and raise you an au revoir)

Stuart

Movin' right along

So you've probably noticed I haven't posted anything even after I finished Nanowrimo. Not to worry, I have been working on Maya (and Mudbox a bit), but since I've been going through training kits that don't follow a single project through there haven't really been good WIP items for me. I've also been working on animating my scenes for the directed study which is coming along and getting close to finishing.
So I'm in the middle of:
Intro to Rigging: Kinda technical and quite long and disjointed (hahahahaha... anyway) so I can only take relatively small doses of that at a time
Intro to Mudbox: Lotsa fun this one, working on the tablet to do some digital sculpting. This one actually does have a project to work through so I'll probably post up a couple screenshots next time. It does make my hand sore after a while, I need to get a good position on the stylus that allows me to press the buttons on it comfortably.
Intro to PaintFX: Just started this one, and it uses a tablet too... but pretty interesting so far. I haven't found PaintFX to be useful much in the past, but I'm sure this will change my limited perspective.

I finished Intro to Dynamics a while ago and learned how to do some pretty nifty things. I'll have to give it a try on a project of my own sometime.
On a note that is more related to my potential career, molecularmovies.com released a Maya toolkit that allows you to import PDB models (empirical structural info on molecules) and work with them for purposes of animation. I'll have to play with that too. Looks very handy for a topic that would otherwise be a pain. I'll keep you posted as I go through these training kits. I think I'll have to take a break after these few and see if I can apply the principles to a small project of my own. Tutorials work best in combination with repetition of the techniques, so I'm anxious to strike out on my own. Builds more confidence as well.

More later,
Stuart