*UPDATE* I Would like to know who visits my blog. Please comment and I will link any great artist's site on my links. If I linked you before, please let me know as I never know who visits my blog despite getting lots of hits. It seems like I get loads from LA, Philly and Overseas in Europe.


Well I'm done texturing Obese Man and his Kitchen:



















Whaddya Think? :)

No new cgi stuff this week, it was spring break and I decided to ease off on it a little so my heart could settle down. Instead I will present storyboards to my short film, "Scare-Horn in: One Hallow's Nightmare." It was a class project I took way back in 2005 when I decided to take an extra class in storyboarding with Robert Gibbs of Pixar fame. Robert was a teacher of mine in 1999 and I loved the class so much that I decided to take it again. I then came up with this storyboard as the class halloween project.















Rob had me change the ending (the original one had Scare-Horn the pumpkin-headed guy become a mall santa and the little girl "Belle-Jingles" visited him and stabbed him there). Instead the ending was changed to where he was plotting his next kill while celebrating Christmas at his house. I liked Rob's suggestion because it brought the story full circle, showing Belle-Jingles was no different than Scare-Horn as she too was a monster of her own holiday as well.

Soon I got a job working at Namco and while it's fun doing work for them, I still wanted to do animation based on my own creations. While working at Namco full-time, I cranked out this animation based on the storyboards in Flash at a rate of 1-2 hours per day at home. The whole animation took 6 months worth of homework to do altogether. This was released November 2006



The animation was met with open arms from colleagues and internet viewers. It was rated 4 1/2 out of 5 stars on You Tube. It has had over 5,880 views as of this writing and this was without hype or advertisement. To me, something like this, that is loved without hype from mainstream sponsors, is a far greater reward than someone giving me a blank statement of compliments. I was more proud of this work thank my last project, a Star Wars fan film spoof (which had far more elaborate and refined animation):

..

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

Never again will I do a fan film. For some reason I got more of a satisfaction showing my own creations. The whole experience taught me that doing art that is more of an extension of yourself, rather than doing one of someone else's creation is a far more satisfying experience for me at least.

Next week, my 3d models textured and ready to go!

Just beginning UV texturing. It basically means I split my 3D as if it was an orange peal and I paint it with texture, color and detail it and I attempt to put it all back together again. A real tough process. Let me know how I'm doing, for now the color is flat.

Here's some kitchen furniture I modeled with Nurbs in Maya:












I also just completed "Obese Man" and I am ready to texture him this week. WISH ME LUCK!!! I'm so nervous as this is my first real attempt at texturing in Maya.

Here is an example of a front view expression sheet I use as a reference to create blend shapes for my character model's expressions. I will present a side view for reference later on. In case you don't know blend shapes are used to create "morphs" from one shape to the next so that the computer can "blend" each expression and make the transitions from one expression to another much smoother. Like stop-motion animated movies a number of heads are created to make say a character like Jack Skellington go from angry to sad. The only difference in 3d computer animation is not as many heads need to be created as the computer will calculate and generate between one extreme expression and to the next.






If you're interested here is my model all cleaned up and rounded for your viewing pleasure. I hope you like it: