Hair finally modelled, animation and my top films of all time

Feel like it's been ages since i've blogged (and it probably has) so I better make it a good one :)
Basically I've been spending all of my time trying to model some hair for this character and it's driving me up the wall! Everything I tried ended up looking too flat and I couldn't get a really good alpha texture in time to keep up with my deadlines so I eventually decided to change the style into something much more choppy.

This is what I came up with after hours and hours of tests and many falling outs with the program:


No doubt I'll change it as I'm still not happy with it but it'll do for now. I'd really appreciate pointers on this because it's all a bit chaotic at the moment trying to get this sorted.

Anyway, onto better news, I'm really getting somewhere with my animation. I've so far animated around 4 seconds of the male's side of the 11 second dance I've put to music. Its pretty fast paced but so far I think I've got the timing right and it's quite smooth for my first properly animated piece. Again, here's what I have so far, the music isn't attached but I'm sure you can use your imaginations :)

So, other than that I've spent any free time I can borrowing dvds from the library with my flatmate as we've taken on the mammoth task of watching all of Empire Magazine's Top 500 Years of all Time. We're currently around 150 in, so it's going to take us a while to finish. Most recently was tonight with Hellzapoppin', which is one of the most hilariously wacky films I've ever seen.

Hellzapoppin' (1941)

So after watching this, and a long conversation with another friend on what our favourite films of all time are (not necessarily the best but our favouite), I decided to make a list of my top 20. The first 10 I'll post tonight and the second 10 I can post tomorrow as I'm practically falling asleep writing this. Night all.

20. The Green Mile


19. House of Flying Daggers


18. Scream


17. Harry Potter



16. Breakfast at Tiffany's


15. It's a Wonderful Life


14. Mrs Doubtfire


13. Beetlejuice


12. Nightmare Before Christmas


11. Back to the Future


So those are 20-11 and as soon as I wake from the deep sleep i'm about to enter I'll tell you the rest :)

Aliens, Flowers and finally some Animation

Finally, back to uni so I can get some more blog posts done. As I said before, I've been away this weekend for my brother's birthday so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on and a lot of it's happening today. I've been asked to do the art for a comic book for a society at university and my flatmate has written a short story for me to transfer into panels so I have to read over that this morning. Not to mention our whole class has been given a choice of about 4 sound clips to choose from that we have to animate to. The choices are pretty good but I need to sit down and make sure I have a good idea before I begin the planning stage. Of course, my final major project is still in progress so I have to finish up tweaking the vertices on my female character, then texturing my male character and finally modelling and texturing my non-existent third character. Oh and finally comes my French studies. I've been putting them off for a couple of months now and thankfully I've not forgotten it, but I started up again over the weekend. So that's pretty much everything I've got to get done in this next week or so. Busy times, but I like being busy.

So I said that I'd upload a video of some animation work I'd been doing with CAT rigs and I've finally rendered it out. But first I have to say that it is still unfinished (as you can see it stops pretty suddenly) and the speed we started on was wrong so I need to slow it down when I have some time free. But anyway, I think it's quite good and I really surprised myself with it.

Any comments on my animation are appreciated andI'll admit I can see a few of them myself, I'm always happy to hear criticism :)

So, other than that I've been continuing with digital painting practice on photoshop, which is something I've picking up pretty quickly I think and I'm really enjoying it. I never really liked painting and photoshop takes away the annoyance of error. Good old Ctrl + Z has helped me a lot.

Here are some quick painting I've done, the second is still unfinished but I'm a bit short on time to finish it in at the moment.

First is a random alien sketch that didn't turn out too well but it's kind of fun:


The second is a flower (yeah very manly). I drew it while watching an episode of Bones about a plant, a bit strange but I grab inspiration whenever I can.

Behind the scenes at Pixar and more texturing..

So what have I been doing over the last day... about the same as every other day this week, trying to get my characters looking right. Most of my time has been focused on the main female character and after hours on tweaking I'm getting close to what I want for her. There are going on a hundred different files for this part of the project and it's getting to be taking up a lot of time but I'm finally enjoying it. Here's what I have so far, and what will probably change again very soon as I look over it, picking the faults as usual (the nose and mouth are in the process of being reshaped so I've cropped them out):


As you can see, the shape is a lot better but I'm still having trouble making them look somewhat cute and the eyes of someone you could empathise with. If anyone can give me any pointers on this I'd really appreciate it.

Other than that, somebody on Twitter (can't remember who sorry) posted a link to the New York Times website to a really awesome video behind the scenes of Pixar. I mean, I'm sure any of you animators out there have seen a number of these videos but they always make me happy to see. Plus, I think they're a great thing to look at if you're feeling disheartened or struggling with something. Really give you something to work for! I thought it was great anyways so thought I'd share it with anyone listening, give it a watch I'm sure you'll like it too.

I'll post another update when I've got some free time, I'm heading back home for the weekend for my brother's birthday so might struggle to fit one in. Anyway, here's the video.

Eyelashes and Monocles

Hey, I'm back for another quick blog post before I settle down for the night. Today I've spent most of the day both changing the shape of my character's (the waitress) eyes and making some eyelashes for her. It's been the biggest pain so far, a whole day staring at the screen trying to make eyelashes...

Anyway, I think i've finally cracked it and i'm getting somewhere. They're looking a lot better than before anyway, but you guys can be the judge (I'd appreciate any pointers):

Before and After:


Other than that I've just been playing around with my Wacom, trying to get used to it again. Also trying to draw some more cartoony characters as I figure I can't always draw realistically.
This is the result of that:


Not too great but I'll get that cartoon style eventually :) At least he has some personality.

While I'm sitting here with the songs from Tangled stuck in my head (saw it again - amazing film) I'll post one of them, anybody who hasn't seen it - see it. Anyone who has I'm guessing you loved it so go get the soundtrack.

Here's an awesome villain song, on the levels of Jafar and Ursula. You've gone and done it again Disney, and this time in CG! So glad they've finally cracked it.

Portholes and Photoshop

So the meeting with my tutor went really well, he pointed out a lot of problems that I had but didn't reacognise and my character is already looking better. Even better than that though is that he urged me to use my graphics tablet more. So yesterday I pulled it out of my draw and started doing some sketches. I haven't tried to use it since my art improved a lot recently and I'm so glad I did. It took me a while to get used to it but once I did I didn't stop. I've spent a lot of today sketching and I just spent the last few hours creating a texture for some texturing practice totally separate from my uni project. I think I had to get away from it for a day to not go crazy.

Anyway, here is one of the sketches I did, it's not too great but I'm only just getting the hang of drawing on a tablet again so bear with me:



But the thing I'm most happy with is a low-poly model of a ships port hole textured with an image I created on my tablet in Photoshop. I'm really happy with how nice it looks despite it having relatively few polygons. Here are a couple of renders I did with some pretty basic lighting etc. Oh and even though it was a totaly coincidence, these portholes were made on the 182nd birthday of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" author Jules Verne. So happy birthday!


And another...


Hope you like them :) Click for a bigger version (I normally upload all renders in full HD but it's a bit big for blogger).

A bit of a short blog post but I'll get round to a much better one soon.

Texturing and possibly the cutest animation I've ever seen

I've done texturing before (as shown by my café model) and I think I'm pretty good at it but it's when you get down to character texturing that the real trouble starts. I've just spent the majority of my day (along with some exercise and other random things) trying to texture the male character I've been working on. After about 10 different saved texture files for the face and a few more for the eyes and this will do for now. I'll obviously change things as I learn more about it and I'm never happy with my work anyway so it'll probably be a lt different but the time I'm finished. But here it is:


Not too bad but I need some advice, so I'd love any advice anybody can give me but I've also arranged a meeting with my tutor to discuss how my modelling/texturing is coming along. This is the guy teaching us animation so he's really great at what he does.

So I'm looking forward to that but don't really have anything else to say, other than telling you guys about one of the nicest animations I've ever seen. I got linked it this morning and it's amazing. Here it is, I think you should all check it out. Bye for now :)

The changing face of animation

I've been looking at shows on CITV and Cbeebies lately as it seems it's where a lot of animators go these days; kids television, and some of the stuff is really weird.

A lot of the animated shows are pretty well done and I think the only thing that is wrong with them is how weird everything is. Seriously, most of the writers and artists for these shows must be out of their goddamn minds. I know in the nineties we had some kids shows that were a bit "out-there". Ones that jump to mind are Courage the Cowardly Dog and stuff like Tellytubbies. But everything on kids tv today seems to be really bizarre. And honestly, I don't think I could animate for something like this:

Waybuloo (A somewhat creepy Canadian/British CG animated kids show)

I'm not saying that it's bad, it's clearly something kids want to see, but it's a style that seems to dominate childrens television nowadays. I remember when there was dynamically animated shows filled with action and some of them are still around now which is great, but things now seem to float around calmly and stare eerily into the camera in an almost hypnotic way. I think it's due to the anti-violence thing that's been in fashion for the last 10/15 years but I think it's a lot more to do with kids hanging around with nothing to watch :) We took so long saying kids should play outside rather than watch tv, I went for the nice medium as a child, I watched the cartoons when I got in from school then went outside afterwards.

I notice the old favourites like Pokemon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles popping back up every so often which is nice but I really feel like there was a time when 2D animated cartoons were the rulers of kids tv. Fox Kids was my favourite for this, showing stuff like X-Men, Batman: TAS and the Animaniacs. And I can't forget Cartoon Network with DBZ and Cartoon Cartoon.


I realise that a lot of this new style animation is aimed at a much younger audience and there are things airing now that I reckon I'd have been watching as a kid. One that's popular is Ben 10. Now that would've been my kind of show. Well animated, with an action packed adventure every week. Good stuff.

The main problem I think we have today is that in the 80's and 90's, most kids of any age were watching the same shows. As a 5 or 6 year old I loved Power Rangers and I so did a lot of 10/11 year olds. As parents got more and more worried about what their kids were exposed to, kids tv seemed to be dumbed down. CITV when I was a kid showed a lot of different types of cartoon and everyone seemed to watch them. I personally will allow my kids to watch what cartoons they like and I think channels should put more plot-based cartoons out there rather than bright colours and characters speaking unintelligible nonsense. I think it helps with creativity and a bit of cartoon violence never hurt anyone.

I knew I would do this, having a blog on animation makes it too easy for me to get nostalgic about shows I used to watch. But to make it a little bit professional I'll talk a little bit about what I've been up to at university in the last couple of days.

I'm happy to say that I've finally learnt from a real animator how to properly animate a walk-cycle. I knew how to do it but the thing I found so helpful was all the little tips he gave us, all the different tweaks we could make to the movement to make it move in a smoother way.
We also started using CAT rigs in this lesson which I have found to be much easier to use than bipeds. If anyone's using Max 2011 and not animating with these, I urge you to try it out. One of the best things I've learnt so far.

I'll upload the walkcycle I did once I get it from the university computers but for the moment I'll be more optimistic about the animation of today. I don't mean to be all doom and gloom about the animation industry at all though. I'm really pleased about how things are going, especially with Disney's (brilliant) decision to get back to their roots. Things are really going to change in the industry and I expect once Disney get their 2D influece back into the animation world, tv will change along with the movies. Here's what they've got in store for us this summer :)

Quick post before I learn how to animate

Thought I'd get a blog post done before uni uni and what's probably the best lesson we've been given; actually learning animation techniques :) So glad we're finally learning it.

But on to what I've been up to since my last post. I've had so much trouble with modelling ears, I've done them before but I realised I need something to make my character a little less generic so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and model some headphones for my character.

I chose the chunkier headphone models as a reference image and started to model some in 3DS Max but they still need texturing and that's gonna require something a little more than shaders, I'm going to have to UV map and make the textures myself.

Anyway, here are the headphones I modelled (and the guy wearing them):



Found it kind of difficult to rehape them to fit his head and I didn't really see any point rigging them to open and close but I might do that later if I want to animate them at all.

A short blog post and not massively interesting but I've been busy. Did manage to get some more done on my drawing of Julie Benz :)

Characters and Bookshelves

Well correction; a single bookshelf. After finding out we were staying in the same accomodation next year, my flatmate and I (both animators) decided to get a bookshelf to hold all of our animation/drawing books/graphic novels/regular novels. It was a pain to carry all the way to our apartment but it's looking great now and displays our books awesomely.



Oh and an awesome Return of the Jedi poster to add to how great it's looking.



Anyway, onto some CG stuff because I can't keep going on about shevling all through this post. I've been creating the base model for the male character for my animation and it's looking really good. I started with the base model of the female that I worked on and deleted chunks including the chest and the bottom of the back and manipluated the rest of the vertices to make the shape look much more male. I used some reference but mainly what knowledge I have on anatomy to make sure it looks fairly realistic. Here's the body of the male character with clothes modelled on top of the original figure:



I then started to model the head and as I wanted to keep as much realism as possible and for the character to have that average guy sort of look, I used reference images of the actor Andrew Garfield (the guy cast as the new Peter Parker, not that anyone reading this wouldn't know that) and modelled to his facial features, and afterwards changing it to look different. I added a quick model of some hair, which I'm pretty sure I won't keep, to make him look a little less odd and here's what I got:



I'm going to continue modelling and start texturing the character and work on changing the female character to get a much softer body shape as it's looking quite angular at the moment. Tiring day and I have a lot to do (and a lot I won't get done) so I'm going to end this blog post now. I should get another post done tomorrow morning if you want to check back. Until then, why not enjoy an animation I saw today, it's hilarious.