Part of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
I got to rig this frosty fella :)
Humbugged! Rockettes to the Rescue
All posts by James
Canvas for the Cause
So, Reel FX has an annual Canvas For A Cause fund-raiser, and I was happy to be apart of it this year. I’m pretty happy with the way mine turned out:
It’s been quite some time since I’ve done a traditional painting, and it was my first time with acrylics, so I started by doing a quick digital sketch to figure out how I wanted to approach it.
Look out world
May I present to you Dr. Randal Direen Ph.D
(I’m not sure the world is ready for this…)
oh, I should note that this was heavily influenced by Pete Oswald’s work on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which happens to be Randy’s favorite movie (I’ve never seen someone identify with a character so much before :)
I drew me some aminals
Sketches from a day at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo
And these are some quick (60 sec) gestures from the cool Animal Gesture Drawing Practice Tool on pixelovely.com
Softball
This bambino is about to BAMBEAN it! … that or egregiously miss, spiraling to the ground — there might be a reason he only plays on the weekends at a kids field ;)
Quick Watercolors
Oh watercolors, how you challenge me so. These were done in a small 3×5 watercolor sketch book. The first two were done from vacation pictures; the later two were done on the spot.
(though doing a water color under water sounds like an interesting challenge :)
Been holding out on you
Funny how getting a new job and moving to a new state can keep a guy from his blogging duties ;P
Anyway, here are some drawin’s from the drawing class I’m taking at work:
(all were 5 min. poses)
Spelunking
Went spelunking in Belize last year, and it left a lasting impression :)
Wunderkinds
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:
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!
Shoulder Test
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:
The animation was done quickly and I would love to tighten it up, but again I need to press onward!