Category Archives: Art

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:

HMSSurprise_acrylic

 

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.

shipSketch

 

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Look out world

May I present to you Dr. Randal Direen Ph.D

picture of dude in a lab coat and underware

(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 :)

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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!

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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!

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Revolution 2217

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 :)

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