santy's blog

Moved on!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 18 May 2016 04:48:00 +0000

It's been 3 years since I last wrote on this blog and a lot has happened!

However, I decided to move on from blogger and start using GitHub Pages + Jekyll to host my new website.

This new website will be a continuation of this blog, for a new stage of my life.

See you there!

STUDIO.COOP

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 07:57:00 +0000

Hello summer!

Time has come for another post! I’m sure some of you are eager to know what is exactly happening, all the facebook posts and the emails you have been getting from me. We will get there, don’t worry. There is some time in between that I want to fill.

As all of you know this year started in Ecuador and I had a blast, much better than the last time, it felt like a new experience in a way. Many of my childhood friends came back during our “winter” and we all managed to strengthen old friendships. It’s so cool to see how everyone is finding their own way to walk on, it is inspiring.

Once my parents got healthy again we started traveling. We went to Costa Rica and Medellin and it was great being with them! I really was afraid they wouldn’t recover to be the same travel junkies they have always been and I can’t be happier to have though wrong. They are rocking life as they always have!

A very special friend of mine from Germany came to visit me for a while and I had the pleasure to show her around a lot of special places where I hold sentimental value. We had an awesome time traveling together in Ecuador and created a really wonderful bond. I can’t wait to see her back again in Germany!

Times were great as was work; I got really deep into Google Apps Script, a necessary evil for us in order to get as many things possible done in the shortest time, building on top of Google apps. I had to discipline myself, as it is not easy at first to get work done when one is working alone remotely... I eventually got used to it and was already prepared for what was about to come...

my workplace in Guayaquil with all my friends motivating me in the background

Mid May came in very fast and it was time to continue my adventure, this time it is LA. I came earlier than expected and had some time to wait until Marcus LeVere (my Co-Founder) and Hanna came in. Hanna Radek came from Germany to help us out setting up Madding Crowd! (Kind of like our first short term employee). Marcus picked us up and showed us what would be our home and office for the next three months. It is a wonderful apartment in Brentwood with a beautiful view to the Santa Monica Mountains! We are all flatmates now, Marcus, Sara (Marcus’ wife), Hanna and me.

And I gotta say… LA is pretty awesome! The weather never seems to disappoint us and the amount of sun… It is fantastic. We are all riding our bicycles everywhere and meeting a lot of awesome people in the industry. The first week we got to grill with Don Parker, founder of Shotgun and a lot of really cool Pixomondo and industry people we have met on all different places. Every week that passes we get to network and know more and more really friendly folks.

We also did a short road trip up north with Hanna to San Francisco! What an epic city… I fell in love with it, at the point where I would someday really like to live up there…

Back on work matters, we are now three people working full time at Madding Crowd and it has evolved. We are now becoming a Cooperative Company! Apart from offering a fair profit-share to the people in our industry, we were always thinking about democratizing decisions at a corporate level. We don’t believe the future should remain only in our hands, the crowd will always be smarter and we want them to take their own decisions. The nature of a cooperative just made sense and people seem to understand right away what we are up to as soon as they even read the new name.

Madding Crowd has evolved to studio.coop!

Of course Madding Crowd is held deep within us and it will always remain as our beloved codename. The first ones that supported us are our Madding Crowd and we would love to grant them special privileges in the future. Thanks for believing in us guys and keeping us motivated with comments and likes on facebook. If you are interested on still being part of our dear Madding Crowd, join here!

our workplace

our awesome team

Our view from our workplace/home

I want to also invite you to take a look at our first Pitch! A short film I am developing called Love Experiments that is about our endless quest to find the love of our life. Please check out the Pitch at studio.coop, leave us comments (you have to join studio.coop to be able to comment), follow the pitch and if you can, enrol!

Also join us at the private Google+ Community of Love Experiments if you want to have an insider’s look at its development!

We will be having a “Birds of a Feather” event at Siggraph about studio.coop which we are planning to even live-stream for everyone that can’t be there. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn in order to keep updated. We can’t wait to show the world what we are up to, and only you guys can help make it possible!

Challenging times are coming as the first production evolves and new pitches start to emerge, the next post will be after Siggraph, stay tuned!

Cheers from sunny California,

santy.

2013 starts with Madding Crowd

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:19:00 +0000

2013 has started and I hope you are doing great!

It was New Year's Resolution time two months ago and I didn't get to post mine... It's been delayed since I've been waiting for the right moment to do this blog post, but anyways, here it comes... during this year I want to get really fit and keep it that way! I sit way too much on my computer so it’s time to do some sport! The Camino has helped me gain the starting condition, now I only have to enhance it! Now two months have passed and I'm on fire!

My year has started great! I've been very busy creating something unique and with a lot of sentimental value to me…

Yes, we are making it real! After the Camino, I had a great skype session with a fellow colleague and friend of mine Marcus LeVere who had read my thesis. We have similar ideals and both saw the potential on working together to bring it to life. Therefore we agreed to not have a "job" and work on it full-time!

We have been working on all the bits and pieces of Madding Crowd since November, living with very little, but really happy to build something that will benefit the entire industry. We just launched v0.2 and have started to invite our friends in. If you are eager to get early access and find out what we are up to click on the logo above for a pleasant surprise...

Our goal is to make Madding Crowd self-sustainable in the future, but we still need to steer it in the direction we want. We have learned a lot while developing it and hit some big barriers for whom we had to find our own way around. But for all those kind of things you can visit the Madding Crowd blog.

One of the many benefits of working at Madding Crowd is the location independence that I now have. Since everything can be managed and developed online, I took it very seriously and started work-traveling, becoming a bit of a nomad. It has been a fantastic experience!

I spent the first month working in Chicago at my best friend's place. I really like that city and we had an epic time, even spent my birthday there!

my workplace with the perfect motivation, 312 beers and Audrey Hepburn

It's really awesome to have your best friend as flatmate! We had a lot of fun and the weather was actually quite nice since I was coming from 25cm of snow in Zurich at my brother's place... I heard things don't look as nice recently.

After a great time in Chicago, I had to say goodbye earlier and head to Guayaquil-Ecuador to to the place I grew up. My parents were not feeling very well, my dad broke his Achilles tendon and my mom got herself a lumbago... Good thing I am actually able to work from everywhere!

Thankfully, they are both doing great back again and I'm still in Guayaquil, but not for much longer. The adventure continues in May, but more on that on the next blog post!

Be sure to stay tuned, there are many things to come with Madding Crowd maturing. It's great to see our little baby grow, kind of scary too though.

Best 12 of 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:41:00 +0000

Year after year... Every 365 days are full of surprises and eye candy from storytellers all around the world.

This post to celebrate this year's openly available best short films that inspired me all along and to wish you all a Merry Christmas and an even better year to come!

The Best 12 Animated Short Films I have seen in 2012!!!
(no real order and <10min)

"Partly Cloudy" (Pixar)

"Stuck In The Sound - Let's Go" by Alexis Beaumont & Rémi Godin

"I, pet goat II" (Heliofant)

"The Song for Rain" by Yawen Zheng

"Little Boat" by Nelson Boles

"Coyote Falls" (Warner Bros Animation)

"Sketchy Duel" (Birdboxstudio)

"A quoi ca sert l'amour?" by Louis Clichy(Cube)

"F L U X" by Candas Sisman

"8BITS" by Valere Amirault, Jean Delaunay, Sarah Laufer and Benjamin Mattern

"LoveLikeFire - William" by Zack Keller & Ed Skudder

"The Little Matchgirl" (Disney)

Graduation, Studies in Germany and some walking

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:51:00 +0000

Many things have happened in all the time that has passed...
First of all,

I GRADUATED!!!

After four years of intensive learning (yeah right) I got my Bachelor of Engineering in Audiovisual Media from the Stuttgart Media University! And yes… thank you mom for pretty much pushing me to get an engineering degree. I bet she is really proud of me now! But I am really thankful to her, since my technical background has come really in handy and has given me a huge advantage now that I specialize in Computer Animation. I still got to do what I love to do, but now I even know what is involved behind it…

It was an incredible time! I would always repeat everything what happened if I had to choose again! Studying in Germany and at the Stuttgart Media University is awesome for many reasons

• People are incredibly friendly and dedicated!
• The program is really broad (it involves all Media types) but gives you a solid base knowledge on them and a lot of free time which you can use to specialize in the Media you like.
• While not all of them, faculty is really experienced and open to help you out. I was even fortunate enough to actually build friendships with a few.
• It has great exchange opportunities to go abroad and specialize in deep in whatever you want. (Singapore FTW!)
• University does not cost, so you can spend that money traveling, widening your horizons.
• You can drink beer already with 16 so forget about no alcohol on college. (we could even buy beers at university)
• Parties? Germans students do know how to have fun!!!
• Stuttgart is a small city (500k+) but big enough to offer a wide variety of entertainment. Plus, the FMX is held in Stuttgart too! If you are doing something with CG, it is a great place to be around.

Those are really just a few of all the reasons why I loved studying there… thank you Germany, thanks for making it possible for everyone to study in your beautiful country. You will always have my gratitude and appreciation!

The last months of University were really cool! I had to only write my Thesis since all my credits from Singapore got transferred. It was therefore a rather chilled semester. It was the semester where I got to really delight myself in a peaceful student life enjoying all the benefits of great friendships at a great place. It was definitely the best ending for this chapter!

Now you might wonder what on earth I wrote my Thesis about… Well it wasn’t any animation or heavy duty techy stuff… It was probably the last time I could go crazy and try to go experimental pushing certain limits, so I spent three months putting in words a dream I have of the future of the Computer Graphics Industry.

My Thesis is called:

“Concept of an Open Online Production Community-Studio”

Abstract

This Bachelor Thesis presents the concept of an Open Online Production Community-Studio. The Community-Studio, called Madding Crowd, is conceived as a non-profit organisation, dedicated to bring independent film projects to life through crowd collaboration in a virtual studio open to anyone interested.

For the creation of this virtual studio, the way existing normal production studios and online communities work is analysed and these features are then transferred and adapted to fit a state of the art open online facility which can be accessed by anyone, everywhere, anytime.

(click on the Madding Crowd logo if you want to read it!)

It was really fun coming out with all the ideas that form Madding Crowd and it felt really great to go crazy and do something outside of the box that could potentially benefit all artists in the industry. I look forward to hear from you if you get to read it! Don’t hesitate to contact me.

After sitting on a chair in front of my computer for the last 4 years I also decided to go out for a walk. So three days after I finished writing my Thesis I found myself at Irun in Spain on my own, walking the northern St. James Way (Camino de Santiago). With my small backpack I walked for about 1000km through the entire Spanish coast till the End of the World, Finisterre.

An incredible journey full of adventures, experiences, bonding with nature and wonderful people that took over a month under immense heat, rain, sweat, cold, mountains, tendinitis, pain, sun, beaches, sleeping bag, stars, birds, stories… I could go on and on about it, I really loved it! It was by far the biggest physical challenge I have had and a big pause in my life where I got to live a completely different one, the one of a pilgrim. It was amazing!

After the “short” walk I weighted 6kg less and had cleared my mind completely since I had a LOT of time to think about my life and what comes next. When I came back many things happened that changed the course of my life. But more on that at a later point… let’s just say,

things are getting a little bit mad…

openRecentFile tool

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 00:43:00 +0000

Summary:

Have you ever wanted to open the most recent playblast, rendered image, texture, reference, etc you have done, without having to manually search for in your project directory in order to open it?

This little tool helps you to accomplish this right out of maya! Go crazy and implement it to whatever comes to your mind.

Should work on any OS as well!

Files:

openRecentFile.zip

Usage:

Assign the following Python command:

import openRecentFile
openRecentFile.openRecentFile(yourFileFolder='yourDesiredFolder',mostRecentNr=0)
# 'yourDesiredFolder' points to the folder within your maya project
# 0 means the latest one, the higher the number the less recent the file will be

to any hotkey or shelf button you want.

Tip: You can add a dropdown menu to your shelf icon to open not only the most recent file, but previous ones as well.

Credits:

Thanks to Edward Zhou for being too lazy to open his recent playblasts manually... ;)

Back to being a student!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:24:00 +0000

Holaaa! Long time nothing new on this blog, well… I’ve been quite busy and lazy at the same time to update this. But now, as a reward you will get a big one! As it’s supposed to be!!

Exactly one year ago (gosh I can’t believe how fast time goes) I started the Jedi Academy Internship program in Singapore. An incredible experience! We were a total of 14 interns carefully chosen for the different needs of the company. All of them exceptionally cool and crazy people that were ready for everything! We all came from different backgrounds but became friends amazingly quick. It was really a lot of fun to be and work with them! We were not together all the time, since we were in different departments, but had the chance to work two small Intern projects during the program. Unfortunately, you won’t get to see them… I’m sorry guys, I wish I could. But we made our recruiter Vincent Chua proud, that’s for sure.

Jedi Academy 2011

My internship lasted a total of 6 months and I was assigned to be a rigging and animation support for the next Animated Feature being developed in Singapore. If I had expectations of how I would have wanted my internship semester to be, this experience actually blew them all away… There are no words to describe it, it was just incredible!

The Signature Building

I arrived at a growing division that detached from ILM in order to realize a very cool new Lucasfilm IP. Surrounded by amazingly friendly people with incredible talent that contributed to a really awesome working atmosphere, it was an incredible field to learn and have fun! University only taught me the basics, then it was up to me to become better and get more knowledge, but once I got this working experience, it all grew exponentially. I have never learnt so much in such a short time. Having that amazing team of colleagues willing to help you out and answer all questions on one’s heart desire, every challenge could be taken and accomplished. Thanks guys!

The new Lucasfilm Boyband! Created after a night singing Karaoke!

(thanks Helen for the awesome pic)

I started helping out the riggers translating some tools from MEL to Python (getting my hands at Python for the first time). Once I kind of got comfortable with it I started scripting animation tools, and a lot of them! Since it was a forming division, there was a lot still to do! It was really fun and I felt really productive, having a whole team of animators using the tools I created on a daily basis. Since I was specializing entirely on animation tools I slowly got into helping out animating some characters as well. It was awesome! While animating, new ideas came to my mind for animation tools to improve the workflow and I started scripting and animating at the same time. And that’s when I saw what I was really made for. I loved to work like that, scripting and animating was the perfect balance for me and gave my days a lot of diversity, which I really liked.

Lucasfilm lunch times!!!

Being at Lucasfilm brought me a lot of happiness. I met incredible people and made very awesome friends, learnt a freaking lots about scripting and animating while having an incredible time, as well. They really treated me like family and I felt really comfortable working with them. I was able to take part in a lot of In-House talks and courses to deepen our knowledge on different topics and the Lucasfilm Singapore partys… That’s something really unforgettable! But what happens in Lucasfilm stays in Lucasfilm ;)

Lucasfilm Halloween party (Interns have to shave of their hair, let their selves a braid and dress like the padawans they are... naaah just kidding, though some crazy ones do... ;)

It was an incredible experience in and outside of the company and I’m really thankful to have had the opportunity to be part of this amazing team, I’m sure the feature is gonna rock and that you guys are gonna love it!

What happened after that? Well I had to go back to school! I would have loved to stay, but my mom would have literally killed me if I would have dropped university! But I have a good feeling that I might be seeing them again very soon. ;)

After one and a half years in Singapore, I finally flew off back to Stuttgart for a couple of days, were I could meet for the last time with all my University friends together(now a lot of them have graduated and moved to different parts of the world) I even got a surprise welcome party! =D It was only for 10 days, but it was as awesome as in the old times!

Then I went home to Ecuador, after a two year absence, it was about time to see my family and my high school friends again. Many things had changed, but I suppose it’s just like that in life, things won’t stay always the same. It got me a little hard… But it reminded me to enjoy the moments I currently live the most, while I still have them… It was a very chilled time, but necessary since I had not had even a month off since I started Arthur.

Meanwhile, gotita. got a Daily Deviation award at deviantArt.com. It’s my first independent animated film, so it made me really happy to be recognized with it. It makes all the work even more worthwhile.

Arthur also won as the best animated short film in the “Festival de Adrenalina Audiovisual” in Guayaquil. We really should have sent Arthur to more festivals, no one of us Arthurians really took the time to do that since we were too busy making something out of ourselves. Mark already graduated and is currently working full time as a Game Artist at Deck13 in Frankfurt, Hannes is working as an FX Trainee at Pixomondo in Stuttgart while writing his Thesis and Steffi is also writing her Thesis about Ikinema with another friend of ours.

And what about me? I’m just enjoying the last student life I probably got… Without really knowing it all the credits I did in Singapore were accepted at my home University, that meant that I was suddenly over the limit and I don’t have any more classes to attend to. I only had to write my internship report and a small research that had to be done during the internship semester. Until those were revised, I could not officially start my thesis in order to graduate. I wrote them as soon as I got back to Stuttgart and then took the advice of all my friends at work seriously. They told me to travel and enjoy the time I had left as a student the most! There would be enough time for the working life afterwards. So after being almost 3 months in Ecuador with my family I came back to Stuttgart, wrote all pending things and did a little Eurotrip with a childhood friend of mine, visited another childhood friend in New Orleans and then traveled with my parents for three weeks through the national Parks in Utah. Probably the last time I can dedicate them so much time to travel, since things might change once work starts… So yes, I’m trying to take out the most of my time, as usual ;) It’s just that this time it’s in a slightly different way.

I came back just in time for the FMX! Which was of course really cool as always! Lots of incredible talks, screenings and party! And since it’s not so crowded you really get to know a lot of people. It was really great to see Heather and Chris again from the Lucasfilm times! =D They reminded me of a really awesome place where I want to go back.

Time to finish my studies and write my Thesis, which I wont go on about right now, unless you want to spend another half an hour reading n_n But I'm really excited about it!

Until next time, may the force be with you!

Prost,

santy.

Arthur

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:15:00 +0000

Everyone has a beginning, and this was mine. Our first animated short film

Short Film done during the Summer semester 2010(March-June) at the Stuttgart Media University(Hochschule der Medien).
Premiere was on the 1st of July 2010 at the Medianight.

All done with my good friends:
- Mark Hacker (Modelling, Texturing, Lighting)
- Stefanie Hiller (Modelling, Texturing, Storyboard, Character Design, Animation)
- Hannes Krieger (Modelling, Texturing, Lighting, Water Simulation, Compositing)
- Merten Lindorf (Sound design and Music)

As for me, I did mainly the character modelling, rigging, layout and animation

We had only one semester of previous knowledge working with Maya before this and on that semester we had only one class of 90 minutes a week. To decide to make a short film with 7 locations in such a short time and with very little experience? We are just nuts n_n but we like it that way! haha

Software used: Autodesk Maya, rendered with Mental Ray, Realflow, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere.

hope it's decent enough and that you guys can enjoy it

cheers,

santy.

animation demo reel summer 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sun, 29 May 2011 05:05:00 +0000

my student animation demo reel Summer 2011. All of them class assignments and university projects.

Arthur and Droppy rigs created by me
Morphy created by Josh Burton
Other rigs provided by Davide Benvenuti for the Character Animation classes.

goodbye NTU - ADM

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sat, 21 May 2011 17:16:00 +0000

yes... today I officially moved out of NTU... It's quite sad, after spending there almost a year and having such a great time! I made awesome friends, met some great talents and learned a lot myself. A very productive year. I would recommend it to anyone who is currently pursuing a degree and not only in animation. You get in touch with lots of very interesting people with different cultures, perceptions, languages, behaviors, there is really a huge amount of different things involved in an exchange. Especially if you go to a place that can be very different from what one calls "home".

A lot of things have happened and I wanted to update you all.

I started my internship already 2 weeks ago, and I managed to finish my final Assignment 1 week ago... That was freaking crazy!!! I was already working on the internship but still had to work overnight on stuffs for school.. so I just managed to sleep 8 hours in over 80 hours of on mode. I was a walking zombie! I shouldn't have started another chapter in my life without having the last one closed... one just shouldn't go ahead of things, or else one has to do really unhealthy things. It was sickening... but eventually I finished all of them so here they come.

Digital Painting 2

For Digital Painting 2 my Assignment was to do a camera projection, since Martin Constable(my professor) wanted me to go beyond Photoshop. This piece was really fun to paint since I could be very loose and paint fast. I preferred to spend my time learning Nuke. I had no experience at all in it before doing this so it was quite a challenge. Now I feel comfortable with it and really like the program too. I got to play with as many nodes as I could and tried to learn the most out of this. I also learned a lot of the possibilities it brings but also about some limitations certain very fancy nodes have. Especially when messing around with semi-transparent layers due to the style of the painting...

Thanks a lot Martin for all you have taught me since Digital Painting 1, and for always challenging me in fun ways!

Character Animation 2

It was very nice to work with Junyi Lee and Ryan Tan on this, we all put a lot of time in our shots and had some very pleasant animating sessions.
The shots of this animation I did are now actually rendered(very fast though). But those will come in my next animation reel that is almost done, and this time, with music ;)

I cannot publish a compilation of all the works we did this semester since the exercises with only the head with lipsync cannot be publicly shown. I don't know if you guys noticed but the old ones are not to be seen anymore either. It happened that the rig we got to do exercises with was not a publicly open one... So we had to remove all animations from the web. I'm sorry guys.

It was a really cool semester with Davide Benvenuti again as our mentor, he is a really good professor. He will never beautify what he sees, so his opinions will always be sincere. It may take some time to get used to hear a senior animator talking how bad our animations look like and all we have to fix, but that's the best way to learn in my opinion, especially for animation. I am very thankful I had the opportunity to be his student. Ringrazio il mio amico!

Pre-Production

Our(Daniel Lee and me) collaboration FYP project was presented last week to all the animation faculty in ADM. With a lot of concept art, character designs, models, techniques... There was a lot to show. and it was well received. We got the definitive green light. Hans Bacher also agreed to be our Mentor. We really look forward to work and learn a lot with him! You can check his Blog out. He has done quite some awesome stuff for many animated masterpieces, including a lot of very influential work for the Golden 90's of Disney, and has written the book Dream Worlds(for the ones who perhaps know about it). So we will try now our best to meet his high standards and expectations!

More to come in a future blog we are doing for the project in itself. We have to do that in order to keep both universities informed of our progress. We have already developed our pipeline, a step that was more complicated than usual since we won't be working on the same place for many months. So we actually have our Project folder Synced in our computers.

That was it... the last post of all the things I got to do in ADM. With this, chapter closed. Now to focus on our final student Shortfilm and for the next months most of all on my internship. That is by the way in Lucasfilm Singapore n_n I'll be an intern in the animated Feature department for the next 6 months. I can't really say much more about it, but I'm really enjoying it till now!

cheers,

santy.

Finals

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:42:00 +0000

Yesterday was the last day of class... now all the final assignments have to be done and I'm quite busy at the moment since I gotta finish them before my internship starts on the 9th of may. n_n

Therefore this post will go right to the point.

ANIMATION!

DIGITAL PAINTING!

This is the plate I planned and drew to do the camera projection

Nuke is quite nice btw, I got the hang of it now and am almost done with this one.

PRE-PRODUCTION!

Well this is a tough one to document on a personal Blog, so we are soon opening a Blog for our project where everything will be documented. =) Since it's a co-production we have to document it so that both Universities can stay updated on the progress

Basically what we have done is Look Development and Concept art, here one painting I did:

I only did one because I was more busy with the technical stuff, here one render test with our NPR

This is only one test of several I did so far, I tried to simulate depth of field with this method. The focus would be first on the green tree, then goes to the orange one, goes behind both and then comes back to the macro section where everything blows up haha. It is interesting, but confusing. So we have decided to bury this method for simulating DoF and advance with traditional alternatives. Keeping the look there.

The character design is ready too btw, we both decided on the final one after Daniel literally drew hundreds of different fly's! So we began modelling as well to have something to present on the 12th.

You see an eye rig? Correct, while the model is still not finalized, its actually still instanced, the eyes where pretty much done so I decided to begin rigging them. Since its the only way to facially express himself they gotta be damn flexible. and it is by far the most complex eye rig I have done so far. But works quite good and is really easy to animate.

Since we want a very cartoony style of animation it they had to be fully deformable as well.

The eyelids actually follow the eye movement as well. And by how much percent it follows is completely user defined, and even keyable. n_n

I love rigging creatures, there is always fun challenges involved!

We also had a 2 day acting workshop with Bob Feldman. Super fun! Quite useful too, I gotta include some things I learned to my animations in the future. Here a picture with an awesome team of friends.

and well that's it folks, I gotta sleep and continue work tomorrow.

all the best,

santy.

last month in ADM...

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:16:00 +0000

yes...in about a month my exchange at NTU ends, quite crazy... But this post won't be about that I just wanted it to remember me that I have to enjoy it the most! =D

Be ready for a very long post, even longer than the last one! haha but very informative and with a lot of WIP. So grab a cup of coffee or teh peng(a mixture of tea and milk here that I have come to like a lot) and let's start!

So you may be eager to know if the interview for the internship went well I suppose… well I’m only telling you that I even got a second interview after the first one. n_n And that I will be staying a little bit longer than expected in Singapore. ;) More information on that in the future.

I can’t really hide my excitement right? Waaah santy stop writing about it! Back to University work! The Character animation post last time was a little weak so this time I will make it up for you. Some of it is very embarrassing haha but yeah it’s WIP and the result at the end will hopefully fulfill all our expectations.

So after deciding the track we tried to change the story a little bit and make it our own. We also decided that having 3 inactive characters out of 7 during the whole clip would be useless. We decided to replace them and give special attributes. And here a turntable I did to present you all our characters!

Characters in order of appearance: Boss, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange, Mr. White, Mr. Pink and Mr. Blonde

The ones I was in charge of doing were the Boss, Mr. Orange and Mr. Brown. It was really fun to do them. It was quite funny too when my friends were asking me what I was doing while I was making Mr. Brown. =P

The Human characters were done with only one rig. We are using the Morphy rig made by Josh Burton. Very powerful rig, I have not come across any impediments for our animation either, though it is slow as hell when you place 4 in one scene, but yeah we have to deal with that.

So as for our story, here our animatic:

It is horribly primitive and confusing! haha but time is short and we had the picture clear in our heads, so we didn’t bother to make it more understandable and went right to layout.

After this we began the blocking, fixing the problems we had with the layout. The sorting of shots for each one of us happened automatically, simply the one who was free started with the next few shots. In the end we were accidentally happy with the shots each one of us ended with. I'm in charge of all the shots that you will see in color.

After this we did the second blocking pass, fixing here and there, and extending our blocking.

And the last blocking pass adjusting timing(there are still problems) which we will fix on the next passes that will be already splined, so this was the end of our blocking.

I also got by accident to to the tween Machine pluggin... Why didn't anyone tell me about it earlier? I came to it about 3 days ago and tried it out on the blocking of Mr. Pink's close up. And wow... I like it! it's really so useful at the blocking stage! In betweens are done much faster and threfore I had more fun and did more! The cool thing I find is that one can go much deeper in detail with the timming and in between poses, keeping the whole thing in flow, without already beeing in spline mode. But the rules of animation have to be very clear for you since it's a very technical pluggin and it may be a little weird at the beginning thinking in percentages but sticking to spacing and timing, but once you get it... Yeah, you will feel it once you tried it. I can't wait till I do the next animation and I have to block it out! Too bad I discovered it too late, else my blocking would have looked much better and fluid. But I won't change the irregular blocking that I already did, since I did it already thinking in splines, so everything should look ok when I spline it up.

I also did a quick rendertest for our animation, lighting it up!

Oki this is getting really long and it was only one course of the ones I'm taking... But don't worry the others are not that extensive.

For Digital Painting 2 I'm currently learning Nuke. I will have to do a camera projection of the last matte painting I'm currently doing. It will be stylized again though, since I'm planning to use it as look development for our FYP. So no more photo-real stuff this sem, I'm sorry. So in order to paint it I gotta see how this thing gets done! I'm doing that right after I finish this post.

Pre-Production dor our FYP is advancing as well. We are mainly trying different styles and levels of abstraction so everything will look different and this are all early concepts.

As you see I approach character design in a very different way lately. I develop the silhouette first, then if I think it's woth it we take it to colour. I find it a very effective, especially if you are working right away digitally and not on paper. Try it out, it may work better for you too.

But we were not really only working on that. We were also concerned about transporting a stylized style to 3D. So I decided to give it a try last weekend. I remembered there was a specific style I liked a lot that could use a lot of the advanges of 3D but make it still look painterly.

It looks easy right? but it's a pain in the butt to do it in Maya! I have not tried it in Lightwave, but I don't think they will have magic sliders like in the video. We tried really hard to do it on Maya in order to use it for the Arthur production one year ago but we didn't succeed... Well, this time was different, it took me about 2 days to come with all the out of the box thinking in order to make it possible.And since it is not shader based we can keep using all of mayas shaders and even make it work in very big scenes without much work.

This was the first 2 sec render test I did. It took per frame about 5 seconds to render. But that is with the motion blur in maya enabled and with quite high settings. I also tried it out with a motion vector pass of it and works wonders. Some ideas how to handle depth of field are also thought out and it seems very feasible, even to use it in production.
I would love to have more time to do more tests and continue developing this faster but there is a lot of other stuff I got to do at the same time. Plus there is a life I still gotta continue. n_n

By the way, now that we talked a little about Arthur, my two good friends Hannes Krieger and Mark Hacker, that did Arthur with me, are making their second production back in Germany. This time they are doing VFX, so if you are curious about what the other Arthurians are doing go check their website out!
http://ca.hdm-stuttgart.de/index.php/wip-produktionsblog.html?grp=vfx2011
I know it is in German... Nevertheless I'm trying to convince them to do it in English, so if you are interested help me out and drop them a message saying that you would really like to understand too =D

Ok I think we have reached half of the post now, so I might as well continue. Just kidding n_n I've got some Nuke tutorials to watch.

I hope you could take something good out of this post! Thank you for reading! It's always nice to know there are people interested.

cheers,

santy.

long time no see!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Hello everyone!

Long time no see! But a lot has happened since then that I wanted to share it with ya!

First some great news, as you may have already seen I managed to "finish" my demo Reel(it's hard to say the word finished for demo Reels) before recess week in order to send a specific application for an Internship. And guess what? Today I got a call from them; they are interviewing me on Friday so keep your fingers crossed! I'm really excited about this opportunity!!! May the force guide me well on this journey! n_n

Recess week was awesome! I learned how to dive and did my Open Water License on Pulau Dayang in Malaysia. It's quite an amazing experience, especially when we descended more than 12 meters and the sky was suddenly gone. It really felt like being in another world... Different pressure, different vegetation, different "sky", no gravity feel and connected to a machine that while breathing sounds like Darth Vader and while exhaling you hear and see all the air bubbles, that keep you alive, striving for the surface. It's definitely an enriching experience!

Nevertheless, while we were enjoying the sea and the hidden world underneath a terrible catastrophe occurred in Japan. I know you have already read this many times before but I think it is necessary to continue it. It's not only at the beginning when people need help. This battle is uncalled, really tough and a very long one. I had the luck of visiting this wonderful country and my memories of it and its people are delightful. So I would like to encourage you all to help, help this nation that has always inspired and motivated us one way or another.

This program of artist donations was founded by Dice Tsutsumi, Japanese art director at Pixar. You can contribute directly to this program through Give2Asia. Or do it through your local Red Cross or another organization of your trust. The important thing is your help! I personally did it through this one.

Back to more pleasant topics although I don't know if it should be called that, I just realized that in two more months my exchange programme will be over... It has been such a great time and it just flies away so fast. But it is not time to think a lot about that yet. I just really need to enjoy this last months to the fullest =D So here the news from the University side.

Some very good news is that our coproduction FYP/Studio production between Daniel Lee(NTU) and myself(HdM) has been approved from both universities! So we may be the first ones (I've never heard of something similar) to do a student coproduction in animation. We will work one semester here in Singapore and one semester back in Stuttgart. It was not easy to get the approval and we will both have to make some sacrifices, but we hope, with our example, to foment the exchange of students in animation programs as well. This industry is so global… why not start to make it global at University level already?

Our story got already approved by our preproduction professor Hans Bacher and now we are dealing with the storytelling. The best way to bring it on the big screen! We are also researching different styles and making a lot of very rough concept art. Which I will be sharing here, at least my part. This is the first concept I did as a Digital Painting assignment.

Early concept

Let me emphasize, it is a very early concept so huge amounts of it will change, radically. Nevertheless you can already see we want to go to the more abstract and less CG look. Our story is about a little bug n_n and that will be it for the moment.

For character animation we (this time is group work! Ryan Tan and Junyi Lee are working with me) are preparing our last animation, in which we picked this 90 second audio file from a life action movie.

Did you recognize the movie? The clip is from Reservoir Dogs! And we will have to animate it as originally as possible and give it certain twist. We have done more than just picking the clip but if I continue this post will be endless. So more to it next week.

That’s all folks,

may the force be with us!

cheers,

santy.

survived

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:19:00 +0000

Yeah... and feeling much better now. I'm still coughing a little bit but its oki. I don't have any fever anymore and can laugh again without much coughing. What about the 600 frames animation? It had still to be done, thats for sure so here it comes...

Don't be too harsh on me... I find it actually ok. Considering the short amount of time and me coughing every minute with headache for a few days. Should I put it in the reel? I have to finish it till friday, so a newer post will be coming with my first demo reel! It's a strange feeling to show all the work one considers his best, everything is so relative... Lets see how it goes.

There will be news on Digital Painting and Preproduction next week. This week I was focusing on animating and the applications for the internship.

see you guys around,

santy.

Still alive

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:07:00 +0000

I'm pretty sick at the moment, caught some cold because of the lab... It's freezing in here! But I'm still alive and work has still to be done.

here the more polished animations you saw last week:

(Head videos that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

I'll let them like that for the moment, I have a more pressuring animation to do. Here is a very rough blocking of the 600 frames assignment. I hope it's not too catastrophic... I'm splinning and refining at the moment, but thought this would be more interesting to see.

That was it for the moment, I gotta continue working and refining the new one now. I hope you guys had a great Valentine with your special ones.

Oh I almost forgot, we finally have green light from this universities to do a Final Year Project collaboration between my home University and NTU!!! I will be working with Daniel Lee, a very good friend of mine. More details to come on later posts.

coughing cheers,

santy.

rough times!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:34:00 +0000

They want to take away our lives! haha I still can't believe it... Today we had Character Animation 2 again and guess what... We have to animate an entire character singing a song and acting. In principle sounds okay, but we have to do over 600 frames in 2 weeks!!! That means we have to do over 25 seconds of "finished" animation... Plus correct the old animations, go to university and do assignments for other courses as well... I don't know how we are expected to deliver good work in such a short time... but I will try my best.

I hope also that I can make this good enough for my reel. Because this will be the last animation piece I do before starting my Reel and sending it off for an Internship. Yep, I have to do an Internship for one whole Semester for my University back in Germany. It's a compulsory part of my studies over there.
So if anyone reading this is interested in recruiting me for 6 months, please don't hesitate to contact me! I'm very flexible with location since I can do the internship in whichever place I want around the world. =)

Back to university, I did mostly Character Animation, so here the revised version of the old animation

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

I don't feel that happy with this one I don't know why, somehow the body is missing. If I don't have the body it's difficult to not overact this head, since you don't really have anything to drag the attention of the spectator. Anyways my Prof. found it better than the old one but I will still try to do some kind of magic to this one.

The following one is one of the new ones

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

I spend some time with this one and it can be seen. I am pretty happy with it and my Prof. didn't have any mayor complains about it. Some little fixes only.

The last one for this week

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

This was a very peculiar piece. I did this in less than 4 hours trying a different approach. I blocked everything and setted up the timing, without really focusing on lipsync or anything specific. I treated it as a whole to test it out and surprisingly I had something very usable right after I splined my blocking... It had never happened to me, I guess I'm learning little by little where to put my keys right. This is not really very far from the result right away after the blocking. But still it's overacted I know, although I don't think its thaaat bad to overact this line but well, now that I saw it a few times, I will pull it down and give it a little bit of love.

For the other classes I'm sorry but there is still nothing very tangible for Digital Painting 2 or Preproduction for this week, just a bunch of ideas I have to polish.

That's all folks, I gotta get some sleep. Rough times are approaching and I need to get some good healthy sleep for that.

cheers from the battlefield,

santy.

Happy Chinese New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:38:00 +0000

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!
I hope the rabbit treats you well this year! We were yesterday downtown watching all the fireworks here in Singapore, really a nice experience. It's funny to be a foreigner and celebrate different traditions. We ended up wishing happy new year even between "westerns"!

Holidays were really nice! After an intensive Semester at NTU it was really relaxing to be away from the computer for a few weeks. My entire family came and we spent the time together traveling to Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. All the things I should have visited as an exchange student but were not possible because of lack of time during the semester! and yes I didn't take any computer, what a relief... only an Ipod so I could stay at least connected and draw a Christmas card for everyone!

Have you tried the app "Brushes"? Its kind of neat, although I prefer to paint with a pen than with the finger. But it works for painting on the go. I really hope you had a great Christmas and an awesome start in the new year, beeing it chinese new year or the usual new year for us!

Back to university. A new semester has started! Its already the second week and new Assignments are arriving. This semester is gonna be pretty fun. I chose Digital Painting 2 with Martin Conastable, Caracter Animation 2 with Davide Benvenuti and Preproduction with Hans Bacher. All very experienced and good people in their fields and from which I hope to learn a lot.

Digital Painting 2 started with a warm up Assignment. A set extension of a filmed footage Martin gave us.

given footage, all he told us was to keep an 16:9 aspect ratio

planned the composition and started

Began from the top onwards. Perspective was a challenge.

went to the ground and details


more details

finished extension

I was quite happy with the result since I only had less than 3 days to work on it.

For Character Animation 2 we started lip syncing. That's really fun!

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

of course it's not perfect, I over-acted him a little bit, he has too many expressions for that small phrase. I will revise it this week and post a newer version with another lip syncing Assignment I gotta do for next week.

For Pre-Production we haven't done that much. It's basically brainstorming for now. I am developing the story for my next short film, that will be the final one as a student... Oh my... that sounds sad... Well I'm not graduating yet, but we only have one semester to produce that short film in my University back in Germany and I don't think that is enough to keep up with the world class productions other University's produce. All of them have at least one year to work on them! So I'm beginning now(at least with Pre-Production), after all 3 and a half months are really extremely short for a 3D shortfilm. So wish me luck n_n. One thing is for sure, I'll do everything I can to not disappoint you all!

Another cool thing that happened this week was that Melvin Tan, head animator at Blue Sky studios, came to NTU to give a speech. It was really interesting and inspiring! It's just mind blowing to see how they push all the poses to the extreme, things I would not have thought would look good. But actually at 24 frames per second, pushing poses to the extreme for a few frames just gives it the little extra 2D kick to make them incredible! Im seriously trying that stuff out. He also saw my animations of Character Animation 1 and gave me a good feedback! Hell Yeah! Now I'm really motivated to keep getting better!

That was it for the first week. There is lots to come in the following weeks so stay tuned,

motivated cheers,

santy.

Best 10 of 2010!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 04:34:00 +0000

Another year is coming to it's end... and I really wanted to say Merry Christmas and an amazing Happy New Year to everyone! Let the next one be even better for all of us!

And now, to celebrate the end of the year and to be motivated for the next one!

The Best 10 Animated Short Films I have seen in 2010!!!(subjective, less than 10min long and no real order n_n)

"French Roast" by Fabrice O. Jouberts(The Pumpkin Factory)

"Anchored" by Lindsey Olivares

"Thought of You" by Ryan Woodward

"Dot" by Sumo Science(Aardman Animations)

"Blockhead - The Music Scene" by Anthony Francisco Schepperd

"The Lady and The Reaper" by Javer Recio Gracia(Kandor Moon)

"Banana" by Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud(Universal Pictures)

"Meet Buck" by Denis Bouyer, Yann De Preval, Vincent E Sousa, Laurent Monneron(Team Cerf)

"Meet Meline" by Sebastien Laban & Virginie Goyons

"Rebel With a Cause" by Kristian Labusga

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do! There were many other great productions I saw this year, these were just my favourites n_n

Good art deserves to be shared!

I gotta go now, I still need to buy some presents and tomorrow... Here we come Indonesia!!!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year folks!

Kung Fu Panda Holiday Special(Dreamworks Animation)

santy.

finished!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:15:00 +0000

wow... that went fast... and that was stressful! especially in the end...

But everything went fine, I did the best I could I the amount of time given and am quite satisfied with the results of this semester =)

so here they come!

As you have seen, I finished "gotita." for the Animation Seminar course, what a relief... I really hope you liked i! Having a short film project is like having a never-ending submission that is poking you all the time on the same spot. But it is fun! =D I'm somehow starting to believe we are all passionate masochists… At least for the moment n_n

As promised the Production Focus of “gotita.”:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/gotita_Production_Focus.pdf

I put a lot of “behind the scenes” and “making of” there, but didn’t want to put 12 pages on this blog, so for all the people interested on how it was done, or just want to see some WIP just download the *.pdf

I also did an Icon for “gotita.”, so as a present to all of you guys that followed I give you a cute little pinkish droppy Icon =)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/Icon_gotita.ico

thanks again for all the support!

Rigging for Animation was a stone in my shoe… we had around one month to do this dragon rig but of course I could not spend the entire month rigging and not do anything for “gotita.” or Character Animation. Good rigs take time! Especially for a Reel, or if one wants to focus on developing new tools for animaion. In the end I spent only 5 days doing this rig, and only 1 night of those for the skinning so bare with the crappy skin.(and crappy video that was really rushed)

*Please if you do not really know how 3D works I would strongly advise you to skip this part and continue with Character Animation, it could get too specific and boring. =P

The Rig is pretty much basic, has everything it should have, of course I didn’t do Blendshapes for the head nor corrective Shapes, didn’t really have time for them. But one thing I really put a lot of effort was on developing the, what I call, “IKHybrid”.

From experience it is always a struggle to make the IK’s look alive as if they would be following the body movement, that’s why I preferred mostly to animate in FK. But FK can get really painful too sometimes as some movements require much more work to get done as with IK, are not as user friendly and you cannot lock it to a certain position. There is already IK/FK seamless switching, but you would still have to deal with one of them at a time.

So what if I could mix the best of each system? Keep the user friendliness of IK while still following the bodys movement and having a seamless locking of the IK if needed? That’s when the thought of the IKHybrid came to my mind. And after a lot of though and countless attempts I finally got the script right. It ended up not being as difficult as I was expecting it. n_n One usually overcomplicates things. It is like a parenting based on offsets in which the IK is parented at the same time to as many controllers as you want, making it follow the entire body or locking on the spot seamlessly.

I really should script more, it is fun too! A good alternative after lots of animating.

I am planning on developing a tool to automate all the scripting next semester if I have time. If you are interesting in having it let me know, it could motivate me. My Character Animation and Rigging Professor already want it!

Character Animation is done as well! I had to refine (in some cases redo) each animation already done and animate a quadruped’s Walk- and Runcycle and a final Acting scene with a Human, a Ball and a Quadruped. The stressing part of it was that our professor moved the deadline two days earlier so it got pretty rushed in the end haha

It’s interesting how it developed from the old ones… I think I have learned a lot, Everything goes much faster too =)

And now Digital Painting

I never knew I would end up doing things like these n_n

The last PSD was 950MB big and original res 4500x4500 at 300DPI

I hope you enjoyed seeing the progress during this semester! It was a tough but very fruitful one. Looking forward to the next one full of new works and suprises. =D

Thank you again for following!

yours,

santy.

P.S. I will do a last post before going on holidays, with a big Christmas surprise!

gotita.

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:00:00 +0000

At last... it's raining!

I hope you enjoy!

Vimeo:

Youtube:

Production Focus to come in the following weeks(when all the Final Assignments are done).
So keep tuned!

Thanks again to everyone that gave me their feedback! =D You were the best!

cheers,

santy.

P.S. The other deadlines are killing me T_T but it feels damn good to finally show you guys this!

To grunge, or not to grunge...

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:01:00 +0000

To grunge...

or not to grunge...

that's the question!

Feedback greatly appreciated

2 more weeks to go!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 09:16:00 +0000

Hello again folks!

At last I found some time in the train to update the blog and tell you how I've been doing n_n. So sorry this comes a little late but after japan there was a lot to catch up.

First let me tell you a little bit about my trip, japan was awesome! Especially Kyoto! It was really as I was imagining it, all the small streets, the temples everywhere, the houses with the curved ceilings... Wow I really liked the city a lot! Tokyo was much more industrial and waaay too big for me, even Though I grew up in a 3,5 million city. I missed a real downtown there, many places in the city don't really look different from each other... But it was still very interesting to be there as a tourist. I even slept in a capsule hotel for 2 nights =D and it was not that bad as everyone thinks it is. haha The only problem when visiting Japan is that one should go there knowing at least a little bit of kanji... Japanese really don't know how to speak English... but then again, that's part of the adventure =D it was a great trip!

Back again to my university work, it is unbelievable that in less than 3 weeks the semester is ending, time rushes so fast... =( But then again, a lot has happened and there is still a lot to happen in 3 weeks and the next semester!

For digital painting I had to finish the "Valentine" concept art I was doing, here the progress week by week until the last image..

week 2:

week 3:

week 4:

yep that's how it ended, week 1 is in the older post. I hope you like it =P it was really fun to do! Now we are working on the end assignment due by the first week of December. I'm planning to do a kind of fantasy picture, here the first WIP

I won't tell you guys how it is going to look in the end, because not even I have a clear picture of it hehe it will be a small surprise, hopefully a good one XD

For rigging we got the final assignment as well, we have to rig a dragon! The model is pretty cool.

It's really fun to work with it although the geometry is very high-res, so we have to skin in a self made low-res model and use a wrap deformer, let's see how that turns out. But the idea of giving a dragon a way to move and give him life is really motivating! So for the moment Neial will be paused.

For character animation there has been a lot going on. First I had to animate the ball with two feet playing a little bit of football, this is what it ended up doing n_n

Then after that some kind of sport with the human rig, I decided to be a little bit more adventurous and decided to animate someone throwing a shot put...and that rig was so not meant to be turned that much... Haha it was a real pain were I had to reposition the feet frame by frame in order to achieve something acceptable.. It was the second time I used reference for animating. Still have to correct many things but here it is

The last thing we had to do was dancing! That was really fun to do! I wanted to test out my dancing skills and tried an own dance... Don't ask for the reference video because I didn't film myself doing it haha, but there were many rehearsals!

It's of course still not final, we have to give by mid December all our animations polished out, then I'll go through all animations and polish them out. I will post everything when time comes ;) till then, bare with my crappy animations, I have to put more time on other things like "gotita".

So how is "gotita" doing? Pretty good, rendered the last shot last night. =D now I'm focusing on correcting some frames, matching particles and correcting colors while working at the same time in the credits and the sounds. The whole shortfilm is exactly 30 seconds long plus credits as planned n_n had some problems with the last shot but I think they should be fixed now. I can't talk more specifically about it since I want the short to be a surprise for everyone =) but here I leave you three stills in full resolution of the short, they may look a bit different in the end but you can make yourselves a good idea how it looks like!

Hope you enjoyed them!

santy.

P.S. On another topic, have you seen Harry Potter 7 Pt.1 yet? Please go and see it if you haven't. At last a movie worthy of a Harry Potter book! I really liked it a lot. They took the right amount of time, money and talent to do a really good movie in my opinion. =) but then again, I'm a Harry Potter fan. But you should really go. It's worth the look!

Gotita

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:10:00 +0000

Holaaa!

3 more weeks have gone by and many things have happened in between. Can you believe that half of the first Semester has already gone by? So here I am again to keep you all up to date.

I will be going to Japan todaaaaaaaaaay!!! I’m so excited about it; since I was little I’ve always wanted to go there and now is the day. We have a week free in university in which we should “work” haha but I really needed a break. We decided 2 weeks ago with a friend and booked yesterday the hostel in our first stop, Kyoto, then Tokyo and then another place that is still not fixed.

Since the recess week was coming I tried to push all the Assignments I had a little further. So that I could at least be free in Japan. I don’t want to be doing stuff there and even less in a 10” Netbook =P.

For Digital Painting we didn’t do that much, a little playing with color correction and beauty:

n_n I always wanted to enhance Megan Fox’s beauty

After that we had to think of a concept for the mid Term Assignment that is as important as the end Assignment. I chose to do a Concept Art of Valentine. We have still three weeks after Japan to finish it but we are supposed to show our progress so why not showing it here as well?

For the first week I had to choose the theme and decide what to do. On the second week mood boards, gathering source images and starting layout, and this is how far it came till there.

I hope the end result comes out the way I want =P I’ll try to paint him as realistic as possible.

For Rigging we learned about dynamics and how to add them to a rig in order to save some time animating secondary movements. Useful for some things but not really for others. But now I’m starting the Neial character I developed 2 Semesters ago in Stuttgart, I really look forward to do him n_n

Here the Character design:

For Character Animation we had to use Ballie and do a short sequence of interaction between 2 of them. We had to put camera, tell a small story and Animate. We had 2 weeks to do that and this is how it looked like in.

The first:

And the second week after revision:

Then I had to do a Walk cycle and a Run cycle with the Human Rig and this is how it ended:

There is still a lot to improve, especially in the run cycle. We hadn’t had any theory on walk nor run cycles before and neither did I look to references. But now that we got a class explaining the motion in them I can improve them a lot more =) Lets see when I have the time to do that, but I definitely want to!

So now the thing that has had me the most occupied… and it is called

“Gotita”

Concept art

Gotita is a new short film I have to do for Animation Seminar on my own. Yes on my own… no Group work allowed haha. They want the students to undergo the entire production pipeline.

I can’t say much of the story but it is about a little Raindrop that doesn’t want to fall…

Since its already mid Semester I wanted to use the same strategy as we did for Arthur. That is to finish the first shot with the entire production pipeline involved by now. And yes… here it is, I hope you like it and I’m open to any kind of criticism good or bad n_n But please if it’s bad, be constructive ;)

I hope you enjoyed reading and seeing all the stuff, see you next time!

Santy.

P.S. I have some good news! We Arthurians were asked by Tobias Pehböck a friend of Austria if they could use the Arthur Rig, which I had to build for our shortfilm Arthur, for a TV Production for Kids they are doing as a University project. We all agreed and now Arthur will be starring internationally. I look forward to see Arthur alive again. =) It really made my week!

First Month in ADM(Art Design and Media School of NTU)

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:26:00 +0000

Hello again!

A month has passed already since I started studying in NTU and I can't believe it went so fast... It’s incredible how fast time passes when one has so much to do! Class has been great and life here too. I’m making a lot of new friends and the Locals are very nice! Weather is bliss! I really don’t miss the cold weather in Germany… although it is freezing here in all the labs! And I can’t really work that much at home since I have only a 10” Netbook with me =D But it’s ok, I gotta live with that.

There has been time for everything, new friends, sports, party and work. Each week they send Assignments for each course and I’m really not used to that. In our university we just had to attend classes and do the final assignments. Here each week is like a final assignment! It’s a lot of workload but its fun and one can manage some free time too.

I’m getting special Assignments for Character Animation and Rigging for Animation since we are beginning with the basics. It’s really nice that the teacher actually cares about you improving and sends special assignments so that one doesn’t get bored only animating balls. But it is still very rewarding going to class to reinforce knowledge, especially when one has learned everything the hard way all by himself. It’s nice to have an experienced teacher showing you what you had to kind of deduce n_n. Here are my first 2 assignments for Character Animation 1.

Assignment 1:

The Bouncing balls from different materials. I know the Stretch doesn’t really follow the line of action but the rig wasn’t really good. I had to modify it to even make it squash and stretchable.

Assignment 2 & 3:

I had a little issue with this one… Assignment 2 was to originally do a walk- and a runcycle but my thumb drive got stolen with the animation I had done… So yeah… I had to repeat those and do a mooncycle too, a lot of work and I didn’t have much motivation repeating them…

For rigging I rigged the character for the short film I have to do for Animation Seminar. I finished it today, can’t wait to start animating! =D The story is already done and soon I will begin making the look for it. Ill post more on it when I have something to show.

Digital Painting is also fun too, We are still kind of doing more compositing than any other thing but well, Digital Painting can be seen as compositing too. We were masking hair, using layer blends, clipping, matching colors, just experimenting with the tools most digital painters use.

So that was it, it has been really fun and look forward to all the things that are still to come. I hope you enjoyed your stay n_n

Have a great time,

santy.

Bienvenidos!

noreply@blogger.com (Santiago Montesdeoca) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Hello Everybody!

Welcome to my Blog! I hope you enjoy your stay and can take out the most of this! I promise I’ll try to keep up everything updated although it’s hard to keep up sometimes. But I’ll do my best n_n

It’ll be a long journey, a journey full of new experiences, adventures, places, people, work, playblasts, inspiration, short films, films, key frames, concepts, storyboards, well… everything that makes this Industry so amazing.

What am I aspiring? I want to do Animated Films! Bring impossible stories to life and trying to reach the spectators in the best way possible! That’s my passion.

Now I'm focusing more in Character Development (Animator/Character TD/Character Design) but never leave Story Development behind, creating great ideas for shorts that I would love to do someday.

I have already done our first short Film with 3 very talented friends (Hannes Krieger, Mark Hacker and Stefanie Hiller) in Stuttgart called “Arthur”. It’s already finished and we are very proud of our job, having had only one semester with one class of Maya before… We learned a LOT and had a great time doing it. More to come when we publish it for the world to see. :D

I’m currently in Singapore starting 2 very valuable exchange semesters and majoring in Computer Animation. I officially Study at the Stuttgart Media University (Hochschule der Medien). The major is called Audiovisual Media and is a bachelor of engineering, but as the study was really broad I decided to specialize on Computer Animation it at least in Exchange. =D And why not somewhere totally different?

Singapore is great! I really like it here, I’ve met very nice Singaporeans and class is fun! I take Characer Animation 1, Rigging for Animation, Digital Painting and Animation Seminar in which I have to do my next short film! =D I’m really looking forward to it! I’ll keep you updated ;)

So much for now, enjoy your life and take the best out of it

Cheers,

santy.