Motion graphicsss!

AS the $mation project grows close, I'm researching some tasty motion graphics to wet my creative whistle and essentially pilfer stuff from talented dudes all up in the interweb! the first i looked at was an interesting one called living cavas, i like the smooth flowy movement and the style of the whole thing!

This next one is called weeds, and unlike the tv show of the same name it's pretty watchable, it's a similar style to living canvas but does different stuff, like grows tvs out of flowers! I prefer this to living canvas, as there's more going on and it's a lot prettier, also it has a tasty butterfly!

Hello ladies and germs!

Friday again and I've had a very productive week indeed sir!

I completely rigged my character in 3 days!!!! which is better than the like, 3 months it took me last year! I got two perfectly functioning footrolls (whereas last year I got zero after several tries!) and I'm currently on the weight painting, which is a bit of a nightmare but nothing my awesome skills can't handle! See for yourself and recoil in bewildered jealousy at my wonderful crocodile man!


Here's the footroll going one way...

...and the other! Smooth!

Fangs from the back, just to show off his bones and controllers!

And from the front, yeah!

Yeah! Hands up if your a well-rigged beast!

Crocotastical!

I've put Fangs in sketch and toon and here's the mega tasty results!

Check out the piercings and stuff, he's one badass croco-man! The eyes are projected on and the face and cheeks took me longer to make than it took to build up the courage to watch a period drama!

Here's his feets, the trainrs are cannt cool like, check the laces and colours, I want some of these!

His hair is textured and awesome too, I like that it looks like a mohawk!

The belt buckle speaks the truth! I'll probably change it later on, but I like to blow my own trumpet!

And here's a full body shot, sexay!

Look at the detail in the teeth and gums! I'm a mouth master!

And this is his croc and crossbones tattoo, how very cool is that?!

Thas week!

I've been storming along with my model this week, after several annoying bits concerning lips and heads I'm finally happy with my Fangs dude, I'm doing him in sketch and toon to give a cartoony look and I've got some simple colours and textures applied for some tests and rigging, ugh, rigging! I'm going for a panini now, pictures will follow some breakfast!

Reflection!

This week I finished my infernal research once and for all! (until next project...) and I got an awesome start on my 3D model, having done my storyboards and script in the summer I can afford to spend more time on getting him just right! Saying that I will go back and revise them at one point, I haven't read my script for a while so for all I know it might be shit! Not that there's much dialogue but the little there is might not flow as well as when I wrote it after the 2 months of obliterating my brain cells that was my summer! I'm confident I don't need to change my storyboards too much, they are cooler than a penguin in a fridge!

As I have the whaling song from Futurama in my head I will sign off in the appropriate manner;

We're whalers on the moon,

we're whalers on the moon,

but there are no whales

so we tell tall tales

and sing a whaling tuuuuune!

Getting there with my 3D model!

Here's my progress with my 3D crocodile so far!
I have a few tweaks to make, like making his body seem more like an actual body and not a machine and getting his eyes right, I'm pretty pleased with myself with it so far though, I've managed to keep it really close to the original drawings despite the fact I couldn't be bothered to line up the images and made it completely freestyle!



I'm pretty pleased with his shoes and the pants going over the tops, just look at those laces, pure class!



I sculpted his awesome hair and didn't even ruin it while welding him together, this is the longest I've spent on something without messing it up in some way!



Here he is from the front, just look at that tongue, he has one of those dangly things at the back of his mouth too, I'm buzzing at how good that looks, check it out, though from this angle it looks more like a small todger!

Drawingggs!

Here's a big dump of images I've been working on, some may be a little more finished than others, but I hope you'll agree they all look awesome!

The first is My protagonist, Fangs, I was playing about creating some poses for him and these two involve him going mental, also very sad, like he's dropped an icecream or something!


These drawings show fangs attempting to solve a rubix cube, though it looks a little like he's having a tommy tank! :/ He's also been shat upon by a bird while sunbathing, so he's a little peeved!

Here's the girl of Fang's dreams, and how very lush is she?!

And here's Supa Bird, one of the annoying birdies that deprive Fangs of his much needed kip!

...And Sylvester, Supa Bird's dopey cousin, quite why he's an owl is something I'm not sure about, I just really like drawing owls! And snails, might have to sneak one in somewhere!

Researchhh!

I've done roughly twenty tons of research this week, I've looked at zillions of 3D animations and I'm so nice I'm going to show you my favourites out of my plethora! Here's the first, it's called bath time and I very much enjoy the simple style and humour of this and I like the look of the doggy!
The next is called Defective robot and it's also rather grand, it's also done in a simple style that works well and the robots having a scuffle is a funny thing to behold!
Now let's look at RGB/XYZ by David O'reilly, I love this simply because of the crapness of it, that and it reminds me of old glitchy playstation games! It's also really funny and has some truly glorious swearing in it!

RGB XYZ - Part 1 from David OReilly on Vimeo.

This next animation, RAM, isn't the best looking 3D animation out there but it's really clever and has a neat twist at the end, most of the graphics are a bit crap but you can see a lot of attention has been given to the characters!

Fallen is another I looked at, it's really awesometastic and has a great style to it, the texturing and light effects are also top notch and I enjoy the little rock dude's face as he whirls around having happy happy joy times!

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

BLOGGG!

I forgot how to use this, it's been a while!

After Caning drawings for a few days I totally didn't do much research or development, so I need to remember to spread my workload, rather than focus on one aspect!

My dudes are looking pretty good though, check out Fangs, the protagonist of my merry animated caper!

He gets woken up by birds all the time and I reckon he looks canny good, compared to the rubbishy guy I first drew!

Hand in dayyyyyy!

Here we are, the last day of this year and I'm quite confident I'm almost done! I finished my animating last night and I'm quite happy with it, though it has a few weight painting issues and a few grey bits pop up from time to time, and hie feet go a little through the floor at times but it's still canny mint! My written work is all up to scratch, I just need to brave the probably obscene queues for the printer, good goodnes!
Saw a pertty amazing animation the other day, superjail, it's one of the silliest things I've seen and it's so violent that it makes me verry happy!
I'm going off now to get my storyboards finished, so peace out and if I update in the summer it'll be awesome cinema 4d practicwe, or if I need to show something off!

Final weekkkkk!

Well It's the final week of college and I'm unusually confident I'm going to get all my work handed in, all my written work is pretty much done, I just need a bit of tweaking here and there and some screenshots but all done aside from that, I need to project my carrot's face onto the body, but that should take no time at all since I've got all the assets completed, I'm hoping there isnt some really important bit of work I'm forgetting but that's probably just me worrying, so here's a pic of my almost finished carrot complete with bump maps and some nice global lighting, oh yes I'm good! All four legs are rigged too, just wanted to bring attention to that 'cos I'm a filthy showoff!

An (overdue) update!

I certainly have been a busy wee bee the past few weeks, and my blog is becoming rather neglected, which shall be rectified with the sweeping vengence of a million cake bakers in heat!
After learning the basics of cinema 4D rigging on thursday I've had a bit of a faff about with moving the legs, also I've had a bit of a play on body paint and produced some fairly mediocre results which will improve when I get a practice on!

These are the eyes I made (above) I created a sphere, added a texture of an iris and pupil to it and set the colour of the sphere to white, while adding some cheeky specular for s nice eye sheen! I then made a circle spline and made it a target for the eyes to follow, I've akso got a rendered pic to show you the end result!

You can see my wonderful rigs above, today I'm doing more work on rigging, legs today, spine and arms spread nicely through the week, As progress goes I'm more confident about finishing this project without any hand in day woes than I've been so far, I've adopted a new strategy, get all the boring written work beasted through then that leaves more time to play with the computers and draw nice pictures!
The body paint screen shots I shall upload when I figure out why my memory stick hates me!

So all in all I reckon I'll be okay this week, the only thing I'm worried about is the pose to pose eyes we did on thursday which I had several problems with, Smithers couldn't help so I reckon I'll go through that at home and try from scratch, I was good with the 3D eyes that follow a target, yeah, they were cool!

Saw how to train your dragon yesterday, I was astounded by the visuals and really liked the story and toothless has to be my pet!

My dionosaur is on youtube!

I put my E4 animation on youtube so it can be seen in better quality than the rubbishy little player on this blogging website! follow the loink to see it's goodness!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYau20IQuV4

I love Octocat!

While doing the research task of doom I came across an awesome animation called Octocat!
It looks like it's made in paint and the voices are squeaky and odd, but it's so funny my face fell off!
It's the story of a bright red 8 legged cat who can't find his parents, so goes on a crazy mission through abstract landscapes to find them, he has a cup of tea, finds a growing tree and fence, then brutally bludgeons a space worm to death!
The animation takes a radical change at the last part, it goes uber slick 3d and gets pretty intense! but don't take my word for it, check the shizzle bizzle!

Check out the progression of my carrots!

This is Kerritron, I had to go away and re-make him due to him having no legs and looking crap, so I scurried off to think harder about him, and came up with this cool customer!

Compare it to this old one and you'll see how much I changed and how much better it looks now it has legs!

The green face was funny for a bit but the overall look is basic and bland, it was more of an illustrator practice than actual work!

Look at my 3D models!

Iv'e been busy making 3D models sir!

These fellas aren't my final design, rather a practice I worked on while I changed my character into a bi-ped dude!

I completed one side first then used reflection to conjure up a second side that I will attach and will look lushest of all!

Check out his lush saggy arse!

I didn't get the symmetry right on the head, so a rather painful gap has emerged in his skull!

10 little toes!

I reckon my guy looks a little unfit!

Thou ist finished thy Ident sire!

Check the shat out of this!

The sound took me 3.67 seconds to whip up and I reckon it looks and sounds like a lovely pie!

I expect everyone to bask in my awesomeness!

BASK I TELL YOU!

The last tests of my tasty scenes!

These are the last tests of my scenes, Scene 4 has a brief moment where you see the edge of the road but I've fixed this but don't want to waste time rendering it out again for such a small occurence!

The final scenes will be rendered in 1024-576 format so they look lovely in full screen and the sound shall be a treat for the ears!

Check out Monday's work sir!

This is my first scene, I've added some nice camera shake to emphasise the dinosaur's weight and made a pretty cloud to come up after the building falls over!

And here's me dolly zoom!

I'm not entirely satisfied with the zoom, i think it seems to jump really fast and need to figure out how to correct this crazy life!

Scene 1 tesssst!

Today I tested my first scene, I'm not actually sure I like it, i need some dust cloud effects for the falling building, but the whole thing seems to move too fast for me, i could try slowing it down in final cut when it comes to rendering but it may seem jumpy with the frame rate.

I always make busy pictures with lots to see, but detail seems to get lost and there is too much to take in I think.

I also forgot to add camera shake, what a dunderhead!

MONDAYYYYYY!

It's deadline week, AaaaaaAAAAAaaAAAAH!

I plan to spend most of this week flapping around like a crazed llama, stopping only to munch on a passing field as I cram walnuts in my nostrils, I'm 70% done with my ident, and if I really put my head down I can easily get shit done, the sound I can do in a single day, the only worry I have is the morph we need to do, because nothing makes life easier than 2 blimmin' simultanious projects, oh very kind yes!

Ten secomnds of animation will never look so swish when I'm done, gonna be canny cool ayee!

I've got a dolly zoom test!

I'm including a dolly zoom, in my ident.

Dolly zooms were invented by a dude called Irmin Roberts and was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock's movie Vertigo.

It starts off with an image of someone's face fairly close up, then instead of zooming into the face the background gets bigger behind the subject which stays the same size.

This is done by moving the camera foreward but adjusting the zoom accordingly, so the person stays the same size but thew background distorts.

This technique is apparently overused in cinema but I like the effect and wanted to incorporate it into my ident, a test is below, I'll have my lady on a street with a proper background for the final scene, I also changed the "squash-ee" to a lady because I like drawing them more as I like girls. :)

I've got a bunch of silly adverrrrts!

My city is going to have a bunch of daft adverts in the background, I like putting little details into everything I do, it just makes things so much more interesting!

Also it means the ident will need several views before you see it all, something else I like about films and animation, The more attention you need for the visual aspect the more I enjoy watching it to try and find all the hidden goodies!

Uncle GrandpaaaaaAAAAAaaaa!

I love uncle Grandpa, It's all lovely traditional animation and It's funnier than seven squrrels fighting over a barrel of mussels!

I like the crazy designs of the monster crew and the awesome fight scene, as well as uncle Grandpa's amazing rotating greeting fart!

It's been ages since I've seen such a funny animation and I likes it a lot!

I plan my time sire!

Arr! This here be me timeplan scurvy dogs!

I have a whole bunch of objectives to complete this here lil' week!

• I need to gather images of high-rise buildings, add filters to them in photoshop, export them into cinema 4D and then assemble my crazy city!
• I need to finish off my 6 adverts, (got 4 done so far,) then live trace them in Illustrator and colour them right the way up.
• Decide how I will do the "skin peeling" scene, do i do it pose-to-pose given my terrible walk cycle or do I just cut up the dinosaur and make the different parts shrink to reveal the bones? hmmmmm...
• Put it all together like a lovely pie sir!

I'm a mirror todayyyy!

Monday, a time to reflect on a week past, (see what I did with the title there, yeeeah, I went there!)

So last week I tried 2 different approaches to creating a walk cycle for my marauding dinosaur, I first tried pose-to-pose in photoshop, having all the moveable elements on the same plane and altering each limb to create movement, before saving it as a jpeg with an alpha channel, After 48 of these, (not including alphas, so nearly one-blinkin' hundred) I loaded them into cinema 4D and keyframed the sequence on the timeline.

After all that work the walk turned out to be a load of blithering oaf cables, which saddened me deeply, oh so deeply sir!

(The terrible cycle is on the previous post to this for your amusement!)

So after that I tried sticking with what I knew, not that I was defeated or anything, I just couldn't get the movement right in pose to pose, but the night after I created the crude cycle I was on my laptop, and, being me, I've set the "waiting" icon of the curser to a blue dinosaur, as I watched it walk, I realised I'd totally gone without adding any weight or kinetic movement to my Dino, instead just making his feet flick up awkwardly, I needed to make his feet move in a circular fashion, which is what I did in cinema 4D in cut-out style, and you can see by the previous post's second video it's well awesome, I just need to add a bit of a bob to his body!

I also began work on the background of my piece, at first I was going to draw the whole city, but I thought it would be more stylistic to have black and white grainy images of towers with the odd colourful billboard to add a bit of humour, (one of which I want to be "Celine Dion's world of wallpaper paste"!)

So that's what I did last week, aside from putting on a delicious Valentine's day extraveganza for my awesomely fit girlfriend, oh yeah, I rock, there was a giant cornflake cake and EVERYTHINGGGG!

My walky cycles of doom!

This is my attempt at doing a pose-to-pose Walk cycle for my dino!

As you can see it's absolutely, vomit-inducingly, pant messingly terrible!

I then dragged my sorry ass into Cinema 4D and made a much betterer one, check the hizzle out of this bizzle!

Much better ayeee?

Research research research!

Gosh darn it research is boring, though I've found a pretty early ident from CBBC, 1995 I think, though I can't find the actual date anywhere on the internet's huge cache of useless information, maybe I should stop writing on here and do more typingup of research, maybe I should figure out how to animate my dinosaur pose-to-pose, maybe I should stop asking questons, no one likes being bombarded yeah?

Here's an image from that crazy metal doggy ident, if you remember it then join me in an old-age toast, though I recently decided that my mental state hadn't done much actual progression since those hazy Crash Bandicoot playing - Booby obsessed days of year 6!

Not that i play on Crash Bandicoot and Love boobies nowadays, and by saying this I am lying through my tightly bared, chocolate milkshake-coated teeth!

Anywayyy, check out the ident and think of me as I bumble down to work to be whipped for several hours as I shove Bottles of german coke into hideously decrepid fridges and try to figure out what old people would like Lottery-wise, because they have absolutley no clue what they are doing most of the time!

And listen to Strapping Young Lad, they are without a doubt the best band ever and measure 100,000,000 on a scale of 1-10!

The metal doggy has a D in his sights!

You there! Leave that logo alone!

WEW! Children's BBC! is teh shizz!

My Dinosaur is already a schwicked ghetto tag!

Finished dino guy!

I've re-done the line worrrrk!

No longer is my dino guy outlined in black, but thanks to Illustrator's (baffling) colour palette I've made him look 100,000,000,000,000,000 times cooler!

BeeeeeeEEEEeeeeee!

Awh check the hecklebert out of this bit bee!

He's well cool!

If you see the end of this video comment and tell me how it ends 'cos it won't show me because it's an absolute biblewart!

My favourite Esting (I think...)

I love the 8-bit style of this one and the retro-ness, but I have one main bripe, and that's how the E4 logo is implemented, It's just slapped on at the end with no real thought whatsoever, A better reveal would have made it epically amazingtron!

My second favourite Esting!

I really think this Esting, the style and colours are well cool,

as well as the idea of sucking crazy dudes into a pipe

and turning them into E4 logos is inSAnE!

Pac man Likes to be poorly rendered!

I like the idea of this Esting, but can't get over the fact that 7

seconds in he just rolls about!

I think the reveal of the logo is pretty cool but I'd have started from

a different angle so it wasn't as obvious that the maze was the E4 logo!

I most certainly have chosen my fave colour sir!

Check him out! He's well cool isn't he?!

I thought orange and purple weren't seen together very often (they may clash, I dunno about that kind of thing, better off asking that ridiculous moron Victoria B for fashion tips...) So here he is in all his Jurassic glory!

Bless.

Check out my awesome storyboards!!!

These are the stroyboards for my E4 ident, The first thing you see is a crazy dinosaur stomping through a city, people flee in terror from his destruction, the camera cuts to a close up zoom of a guy's face with the dino reflected in his eyes, before getting stomped on!

Then a giant E4 logo pops out of a buliding and quickly sets about burning off the dino's skin, to which the city folk all jump around and celebrate E4's amazing vaporisation powers!