Tuh Dah!

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Demo Reel Breakdown

Edit: I’ve updated this animation. Pushing the lip shapes and dialog accents.

Here’s a dialog animation I did to test out the facial setup of my character:

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New Version

Old Version

I know a medium close shot of a character just delivering a line of dialog isn’t the most interesting thing you can do in animation; however, I had a lot of fun being able to focus on it’s subtlety. I didn’t actually use any reference for this animation (not always a good thing to do), but  I recently read a book on facial psychology written by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen called “Unmasking the Face” and tried to put a lot of what I learned from that book to use. I find it very interesting what triggers a facial expression, and tried hard to show it as my character is thinking through his dialog.

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear any and all feedback!

I’m done with my character’s rig… well, done enough anyway.  I could certainly keep working on it, as there are a lot of places I’d like to improve it;  however I need to press on and get things done.  Besides, I’ve created a flexible enough pipeline that I can easily go back and make changes/corrections and have it propagate through everything I’ve already done and am going to do.

I am now starting to do some test animations.  Not only so I can show them off in my new demo reel (that I will be making shortly), but also to find out if there are trouble spots in the rig. I’d rather find them in a short test animation, than having to deal with them in a longer animation that I’ve committed myself to :)

Here is a quick test I did to show off/test my characters clean shoulder deformations:

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The animation was done quickly and I would love to tighten it up, but again I need to press onward!

My friend Tom and I just recently released this game Revolution 2212, which we have been developing on and off for the last couple of months. It is a good ol’ action arcade game with that classic ’shoot the enemy aliens before they obliterate you’ game play. It is currently only available for Android phones (G1, Droid, Hero and so on), though we are thinking of porting it to the iPhone in the future.

Though it was often hard to find the time, I had a lot of fun creating all the graphics for the game. At the risk of ruining some of the surprises (if you haven’t already played through it) I thought it would be fun the share the graphics I did for it:

(these ones are really fun to blow up)

If your interested in finding out more about it, we’ve set up a site at: www.tojamgames.com

Search for it in the Android Market :)

(This is a QR code for those of you who don’t know. It will take you directly to our game in the market if you take a picture of it with a bar code scanning app on the phone :)

Cleaned up the weighting on the hands today:

Yup, there is work in progress on this guy :) In fact, he’s moving along pretty good now.  I’ve pretty well solidified the rig and have finished with most of his skin weighting. I was messing around with posing him to test his deformations, and thought I’d share:

I’m pretty darn happy with how clean and flexible his deformations are. I can actually corkscrew his leg 360° without any geometry tearing!

On the trip out to Florida, I did several quick paintings to keep myself amused in the hotels we stopped at.

All were done in roughly 15 -30 minutes.

Sure I’m a couple days late with this post, but I just got home from vacation yesterday.

Spending Christmas morning with my parents, I pulled out a small portable watercolor set to pass the time :)

These were both done on 2.5″ x 3.5″ water color paper (trading card size)

Well now that I’ve got some time, I’m moving forward with this 3D character I started quite a while back.

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The texturing could use some tweaking, and I’d ultimately like to go with a different technique for the hair; however I’m going to start pushing forward with rigging so i can quickly get this guy moving.  I can always come back and adjust things to my hearts desire later.