- i taught i taw a putty tat -

steam train

Not having worked a lot with 3D during the summer I decided it was time to a little brush up.

- here are a couple of wire frame renders of the final result-

-"The Joint Tree"-

The idea came during a rigging class in the spring where the term joint tree came up. The mental image was there immediately, so I quickly drew a sketch, and now finally got a finished image. Done in Illustrator.

- another piece of Illustrator-summer work -

- Ollie the Owl&Willie the (book)worm -

I used Illustrator for this one

week 23

Exam week

for the exam we had to make a translation from some 2D artwork into 3D. Build the low-poly model in Maya, then bring the model into Mudbox to get a high poly version, or a normal map that then could be applied to the low poly version. The final result could have been a lot better had my planning been just a little bit better. But since I was a bit insecure as to how much time was needed for Mudboxing I ended up planning to much time for this part of the assignment, leaving less time to create a proper base mesh.

-model with normal map applied-

- low-poly version-

Week 22

Concept development with Peter Chan.

This was a truly great week. A ton of new information to take in. But with a totally committed and very positive person to teach us the week went by to quickly.

We were each given two random pictures or images that should be used as a foundation for creating one character, one creature and one environment that all should fit together, into one "moment" as the final outcome of the week.

On top on all this Peter tried to get all of us to step out of our own comfort zone, meaning we should try to design/draw in a manner we where not to familiar with.

- And this is really hard, I tried to use more details in my design, since I usually keep my characters relative simple, but in the end the final result wasn't that far away from what I would call my own style or comfort zone.

In general I wasn't that pleased with the outcome, but I just have to see it as part of a process - and then if I can find the time during the summer break, maybe I'll go back for a short revisit.

-sketch for the final moment-

-sketches of the character-

-different thumbnails-

Week 21

- a couple of sketches I did of our two French teachers, Paolo and Daniel-

Digital Painting

We where introduced to both digital painting(or matte painting), in for instance Photoshop and camera projections in Maya, that being a way to use a matte painting in a 3D environment. Both subjects really interesting but unfortunately it didn't seem to be that well planned and with all that new information in just one week it turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment to me.

I had really been looking forward to this week, so hopefully this is not the last time that digital painting is on the schedule.

Week 18-20

Animation & Rigging with André Bergs

We started out with one week of animation - in order to get a better understanding of how a proper rig should work, and just made a couple of small animation exercises; bouncing ball, tentacle, tentacle playing with ball and for the grand finale we animated to a piece of music. Animating a character to our own little bit of music - and in the end it was all put together.

For the rigging we could choose between a standard character to rig or we could use or own. In order to keep it a bit simpler for myself I chose the standard character, which I think was a good idea - since there where more than enough (minor) problems.

And lots of new things to take in, gimball lock, rotation order(Switzerland&the axis of evil) and remembering to keep a decent naming convention on all the joints and controllers - to avoid getting to confused.

- I did manage to complete the basic rig, and I also had the time to ad some rotation-correction-joints in both arms. The IK/FK switch for the arms I didn't get around to.

-a sketch of our teacher-

-some screen shots of the rig-

RenderBird

- During this week I had a brief encounter with the most illusive render bird...it only appears on your desk, while...rendering -