Friday 18 November 2011

A Lighter Workload

It's been a little while, sort of missed my schedule on updating the blog. Still, I have updates to provide! Finished the animating project, here's the final render.




As usual with my work, I can't say I'm completely happy with it. It's quite jerky and robotronic at the start, with some moves I think are quite fast. On the whole I think it sort of gets the point across, but I could have pushed it further.

With regards to what I've been working on at the moment, we've just started the next section on Advanced Techniques. This time around its lighting and compositing, not exactly my forte as I haven't done it before, but it should be interesting and fun anyway.

First stop was to light a scene with three balls, using only standard lights. Which sounds simple but then we needed one chrome/metallic/reflective ball, one glass/refractive ball and one self-illuminating glowing ball. Also a red and a blue wall on either side which we'd need to simulate the reflected light from, as with standard lights we had no Global Illumination or Final Gather to play with. I think my attempt turned out fairly well, but I'm pretty sure I overdid some of the lighting a little. Need to work on my subtlety...


Other than that we have to do a studio light setup for our hand model, then the tricky part is two composite shots. Both live action camera shots, with an object realistically lit, placed and textured so it blends in as seamlessly as possible. Still keeping up with drawing a fair bit, but I'm not going to throw loads of images up any more as it wastes a lot of space really. So yeah, between this, that and a couple of other bits and bobs, I've been kept pretty busy recently.

Hopefully I'll update vaguely on time next time...

(also please excuse the terrible pun in the post title)

Thursday 3 November 2011

Animating At Last!

This week we've finally started animating our scene, so we've got about 3 weeks to get it done. First week of that  I spent blocking out to try and pin the scene down, although seeing as it's now Thursday I'm a little further than I would have been if I'd updated my blog on time. But to blazes with that, I'll just put stuff up whenever, once a week at least though. 

I'll stop beating about the bush now anyhow, here's my block.


There are some bits which are admittedly ropey, but those are largely in areas where I don't want to spend too long fixing keys that I'm going to rip out anyway to smooth my curves. My main concern is that he's maybe too energetic, but I'll see how it looks as I get further into my smoothing and maybe take some of the large poses out, or scale them down a bit. The teapot is sort of a placeholder at the minute, I'm hoping to put a guy in it if I get chance. If not, then I guess at least CG people won't be confused as to why there's a giant teapot

Another thing any game art/animation types might be interested in: the latest episode of Extra Credits: 
Nice and daunting. It's a good show as well if you're interested in the industry, they make some good points.

Also: some drawings again!