DigitaLeon

Great Composition

2012-01-29T17:50:00.002-05:00

Now this is the final composition for another class. Compositing is a very powerful tool, and if used wisely, there's truly no limit to what could be created. I used a few clips here and there, and the challenge was to add effects into them. They were comprised of mostly either 2D or 3D elements, composited into the individual clips, and then the clips were edited together.

Z-Depth

2012-01-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

If you've been in any math class, I'm sure you'd remember the grid were you plot points, X coordinates go left and right, Y, goes up and down. Then, there's the Z, which goes toward and away from you. So the challenge of this project was to create the feeling of depth in an environment. As if you were traveling into it, I of course, opted to paint all of the visuals myself in photoshop for necessary practice, because I could have used images from the internet instead. I wanted to give the feeling of going into another world, from a room with a broken wall, into a lush forest which leads to temple deep within. I really like how this turned out, and I'd definitely use something like this in any animated series that I'd do, because it truly creates the feeling of depth in the environment.

To push it even further, I could have animated elements layered and really broaden the horizons.

Walk + Panning Background

2012-01-29T15:00:00.000-05:00

Here's the completed walk cycle, and also a background I painted in photoshop to add into the project. You know, it's always great to have the character's environment to be clearly defined. Having the environment clearly defined, really brings a new element of life and depth into any animation. The quality of my animation has surely improved, I remember the first walk cycle I had to do and it was okay at the time. However, it was very jittery and inconsistent, this one, is so much more consistent and I kind of like the result.

New walk cycle!!

2012-01-10T13:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a new walk cycle done for digital ink and paint. It's still kind of rough, but much better than the last attempt. At some point I want to add the inbetweens so that the motion is a lot more smoother than were it's at now. Next I've got to make a background and have the walk cycle play over a panning background. So that should be fun.

Another short animation for the same course! A head turn, I did this before the walk cycle and it was earlier in the course. Seeing it now, there's a lot of things about it I would definitely fix and do it again.

Mother Brain

2012-01-04T10:22:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year! This is my first post of the new year and I know I've been quite lazy with the posting here. However, here is my latest sculpt attempt in zbrush, another powerful tool that I want to learn. I really love the creative process in zbrush, really gives you all you need in order to just create something

This rather random shape is what I started off with, and after around 8 hours later of sculpting, I ended up with the Mother Brain.

Environment Animation

2011-12-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

A short animation and some renders of the environment completed for advanced software. I think I'm going to be using Maya a lot more often, it was a bit frustrating at first learning this program all over again. However, once I got used to the changes, I was able to use the program a lot less frustratingly. It's not perfect, and I know I've still got a lot to learn about this, but it was a great learning experience.

Advanced Software: Environmental Sketch

2011-11-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a doozy, I'm just coming back from a short camping trip that was a whole lot of fun and I needless to say, did not end up sleeping the whole night. And so I return to my cave and I find that I must turn this image up there into an environment. I loved the idea it's so great to be able to let loose and be creative. So after staring at a screen for a few hours and many sketches later....

I made some cuts and changes to the architecture, I was at this point going for a castle appeal.

Im going along and adding more detail. Got to have a nice little pond in there. :p

Here's the final version of the concept. I honestly feel that there's some details that could be left out, but after about 7-8 hours, I needed to upload this to the class. Oh yeah, did I mention that this will have to be modeled out in 3D? All in Maya, which I haven't used since high school? Well this will definitely be a huge refresher on Maya. I'll keep an update on my progress....

3d Character Animation: Final

2011-11-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

Here's the final animation for my 3D character animation class. Yes, more classwork! So much it can drive you crazy! Well it's a learning experience, which I'll be taking to any project I'll work on. This class really made 3d animation a lot easier to grasp and there's so many different techniques for getting the same thing done. It's really choosing the one which will be truly beneficial is what comes with experience.

Final Ident

2011-11-02T20:00:00.000-04:00

This here is the final for my Intro to digital composition class. It was a very short and fun class, I've learned a few new things about after effects which is what this was made with. It was too hard to work with, I started off with just a single image in photoshop, which is the bubble and then used that as a sprite for the particles, so that every particle rendered looks like the bubble I made in photoshop.

To Early For halloween

2011-10-22T20:00:00.000-04:00

Just in time for all the candy purchases for the Halloween jolly old good, ohhh who am I kidding? This is some disturbing stuff! Imagine the great depths I had to go into in order to complete this one. It was a lot of fun though, I enjoyed every moment of creating this..and so, it's Aliiiiiivee!! It's aliveeeeeee!!! Muahaha..*cough*

Storyboarding

2011-10-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

Storyboard idea for a short 3d animation we are currently working on. Lot's of fun! I just hope that I will be able to achieve it all, after all I've never really worked on a full fledged 3D animation, just short clips and practice here and there, but this is it, folks..The whole process from beginning to end.

3D Animation: Lifting Weight

2011-10-15T20:00:00.000-04:00

A short 3D animation completed for my class. Along the lines of keeping the weight of a prop in mind when animating a character. Very fun and interesting challenge, because I have to basically act through the character that the sphere is heavy. And so, of course the weight would end up being a little too much for him to handle.

Misty Forest WIP

2011-10-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

A quick snapshot of a painting I'm working on in photoshop. There's a lot of details I'm gonna need to work on, especially for the trees. I was just speed painting and I just thought of a misty forest area with and opening to show sunlight and those sun rays.

Zbrush Sculpting

2011-10-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Three Billies

2011-10-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun one. The goal was to make the videos overlap, and play in order sequentially and play out as one clip. Wasn't too difficult in this case, just by changing the layer modes and brightness to each layer. Aaaand Boom! You've got an perpetual self cloning machine! :)

Motion-Text Animation

2011-10-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

Here's another motion graphics I had to make and I'm really starting to like working with After Effects. It's a very powerful compositing application that delivers a freedom of creativity. This time around it took me a while to really get an idea of what I wanted the animation to be about. So I pretty much wrote a short poem, although I didn't get to use the whole thing. I wanted to get an idea of how the text will be moving about on screen so I created the text layers and used an text animation preset and modified it so that it would fade in.

I wanted there to be clouds, everything is better with clouds and I was wondering if I could do it in short time. Then I remembered I could use photoshop; so I painted the clouds in photoshop, using a soft brush and low flow settings, some clouds was just a single cloud, others were larger groups of clouds, with alpha transparencies.

Import them in AE and make them 3D layers so I can move them around in 3D space. It was a bit tedious getting the different cloud layers and other elements to align with the 3D camera. I saw a tip that mentioned that to solve that, all you need to do is to link the layer to something in the camera's view, or the camera itself and then, make it a 3D layer, then break the link to the object, and move it to where you want it. That way, it's not flying off to some random place in 3D space. This was fun and it really challanged what I could do with after effects in a short time. There will be more..believe that.

Intro To Digital Compositing

2011-10-04T20:00:00.000-04:00

Some new classes up this week, and they are going to be a lot of fun hard work to complete. Here's a clip for my Intro to Digital Compositing. It's supposed to be a 10 second clip on any kind of destination, I was thinking very rustic ruins so I ended up using those images for my ideas of a destination. I kind of like it, I know I could do better but after being stumped for a while, this came together quite nicely. Not very much of an intro, because After Effects is one of my favorite programs it really excites me that this whole class we'll be making some intros, and even a sting for the final project. I'm really looking forward to that! Finally my own station!

2011-10-03T23:33:00.000-04:00

Hey There! I know I've been missing for some time again! Well fret no more, here I am with a new short animation I worked on for my Advanced 2D animation class. I know I might be my own worst critic, but I feel that it could have been a lot better with more time.

Here's a short animation clip. This is a study of how a walk cycle can show the difference in emotion the character portrays. This guy looks real happy!

Here's the next study. He doesn't look too happy.

Enchanted Forest

2011-08-19T11:54:00.001-04:00

Finally going to update! I've been chipping away at another class project for advanced 3d textures. Very fun class, one that actually gave us the freedom to model any scene I can imagine from scratch. One look, I'm sure you'd be able to where I got inspirations from. If you've played any Zelda in the past. : P

Sonic Anniversary Poster

2011-06-29T10:08:00.000-04:00

This poster was for Sonic's 20 yr Anniversary, even though I'm sure it's a bit late. I did the line work and colors in manga studio. So this made it one of the first drawings I've made on that program and I'm starting to really like it. It's really simple to ink the sketches, and get a very clean result. So the idea just came to me, and it wanted it to look like Sonic is speeding through these two high performance cars, like nothing. Very fun stuff, I'll try to do some more, based on many other video game characters.

How to: 3D Lip Synch!

2011-06-19T13:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a short How To, I hope could be of help to someone who'd be interesting in learning how to set up a 3D model for lip synching, or any kind of dialogue animation in 3Ds Max. I'm sure that this could be useful in other 3D applications as well. This is kind of what you can end up with:

When you've completed a 3D model that you want to to be able to animate with facial expressions, and have a character's mouth animate along with a dialogue. One way that you can achieve that kind of animation is with the use of a Morpher modifier. I'm going to explain the process of setting one up, don't worry, it's very simple!

This is an example of a completed head model, it could be textured or not, it's entirely up to you. From this point, you won't be able to do much animating to it's facial expressions or do an lip sync. Why? That's because you have to apply a morpher modifier on the the main head model. Next, you'll be making copies of this head model...

The amount of copies you make, depend on how many mouth targets, and facial expressions you'll be needing for your animation. One for a smile, another for sad, another for narrow lips, another for open mouth, lower lips up, lower lips down, etc. The amount of positions you'll make entirely depends on what you'll need for your animation. Don't be afraid to do a lot, with the morph modifier, you can also animate the eyes blinking, the eyebrows in up and down positions and more.

Once your done making your copies, and altering them for to make each expression. You have to set them up in the morpher modifier for the main model. See the glowy area in the picture above? That's where you will go one by one, selecting each of the copies you made earlier. If you look closely, you'll see there's one for a smile, narrow, frown, upper lip up, etc. etc. Each of those are the key positions that you'll be using! Here's the fun part!

Using those key positions, you can turn on auto-key, and begin animating! Just like that! You can mix two different key positions to create a plethora of different expressions an mouth movements, that are sometimes silly, and totally not what you expected.

If you have an audio dialogue that you want your animation to sync up with. You can import the audio into the timeline, and use the scrubber to slowly play the sound, and listen to each word in the dialogue as you go along, and try to match up each mouth position with the words being said. You'll have to keep in mind the different mouth targets for each word. I really suggest, that you keep a mirror in front of you as you work, to try and match up how your lips move when certain words are spoken. Then, use the mouth targets to animate each phoneme. I hope this short how to, could be helpful to someone! If there's any questions about this or anything let me know!

Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School at Marvelous Mustache Factory

2011-05-20T10:27:00.000-04:00

Super Obvious Secrets That I Wish They’d Teach In Art School at Marvelous Mustache Factory

A must read for me, okay, maybe anyone who's interested in the life of an artist. I know I've got much to learn...

Intermediate 2D Final

2011-05-17T19:20:00.000-04:00

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T10:57:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, I hope everyone finds the time to enjoy this day, whether you're on the hunt for those hidden eggs, or in church. Happy Easter! Here's a little Easter joke for ya'. Why did the Easter egg hide? He was a little chicken! Ha ha, okay that was bad...Well at least I tried. :)

Here are some animation tests which I have completed for an intermediate animation class. I do wish I had more time to dabble with my own animation, I do have one I'm working on, but I think it's quite too soon to show it yet. :p

Emotion Animation Test

Flour Sack Emotions

Memory Sketches

2011-04-06T08:52:00.000-04:00