Last "Squirrely" update for a bit...

Gonna wait till after I've got his face rigged for any more postings. I used The Setup Machine 2 to rig him up and it worked great. Painting weighting has gone pretty quick and it's a nice way to quickly test the posing and make modeling changes accordingly. There have been several since the rotation render. He's already a lot of fun to pose around. I'm thinkin hard about picking up The Face Machine and giving it a go, the sample rig has a lot of flexibilty though I'm not sure how it will fare with a snout.

I finally got some notes from Bokser on my shot shot so I'll get started on that when I can.

Work has been some long hours trying to finish up a project for shipping this fall so progress on Mr. Blue might be spotty.

I'm taking name suggestions for "Squirrely" if anyone has any idears.

Squirrely has a Tail and Other Things...

My buddy Dave (who has a new website by the way) introduced me to a fellow worker of his who has had some great traditional and cg animation experience. He gave me some good suggestions for tweaking "Squirrely's" design. The most important being the transformation of the slightly-inflated-balloon-beaver-tail to something more of squirrelish semblance. Crazy thing is the guy went to a high school in the same town and same district I did - just a few years earlier. It's a small world sometimes...

Some neato stuff hit the net this week:

• Pixar's "Up" Character designs - Couple of characters are up. The attention to detail on the scouts gear is specially great. Even from the little bits I've seen about the film, it has great story potential.
  
  
• Great little read on Facial Animation - Check it out. Written by Shawn Kelly from Animation Mentor. Being that facial animation is pretty much the vast majority of what I do at work, I particularly found it insightful. Facial animation is gravy, not the meat of a good performance.
  
  
• Princess and the Frog trailer - As excited as I am about Keane's maiden voyage into CG via Rapunzel, it's about time Disney got back to traditional animation. Can't wait to see more.
  
  
• Very creative little flash game - This is a fun little diversion from a talented flash animator named Nacho Rodriguez. I ran across another of his surreal shorts this week as well.
  

Little more progress on the little Squirrel that could...

Pretty much all that's left is giving him a tongue and figuring how I'm gonna do a bushy tail. I'd prefer not to go the fur route...we'll see....

Chip off the old block...of polys...

Started blocking out Squirrely a couple of days ago and put some more time into him tonight in ole' Silo. That's not his real name, but it works for now. My modeling skills needed some exercise anyway while I wait on some crits from Bokser for my latest blocking on a shot.

I'm sleepy and it's midnight. That is all.

Lunch Doodles...

Slow day...and I need to practice:)

"Particularly" Blessed...

Had a few minutes, so I sketched up a little self expression. This about sums up how I feel today. And no, it isn't because the new flavor in the company slushy machine is Pina Colada...

...though that is pretty tasty...:)

Tiko Project is on sale for preorder!

Holy moly and I'm behind on writing stuff on here. Lots been going on, thus I've not had time to write about it:) I'll try and catch up when I get some time.

However, the important thing here is that the Tiko project that I worked on for FAR TOO LONG is about ready to ship and is on presale. My college debt fund gets a little help everytime Tiko gets invited to a new home and even more so with those "custom invites" (hint...hint). One of my other animator friends Keith Osborn helped out on the animation portion for Tiko and my buddy from college and fellow facial animator at work Scott Englert did a piece that'll be on the DVD called "Bassimator." It was a lot of fun to make but I'm very glad it's done. Check it out and see if you might like a copy....

...Tiko will thank you (quite literally if you happen you get a custom message version and have him thank you on it...;)

Here's the LINK

Out.

Olaf needed a body

So I spent this evening on giving him one...much to do still, but making good progress. It was a good excuse to play with the new Silo 2 beta which, I must say, rocks the Casbah!

The Ca...troll..ogre-thingy in the Hat

His hat is pretty close to done (sans texturing). I've been staying late at work late the past week cause my carpool friend has had to be around. It's been good time to focus on Olaf here. Next, I think I'm gonna start blocking out his body. However, this weekend, I've gotta do another promotional thing with Tiko. For that, a Hawaiian shirt is in order...Aloha.

Other than that, this weekend will be comprised of getting ready for a trip to OKC next week and my cousin and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner on Sunday. For that, I'm making some of my creamy pesto pasta and some home made ice cream. Should be fun.

Out.

Not as much progress as I wanted...

But still got a good ways in. More importantly, I learned how to properly use Silo's topology brush...wow. Talk about sweet. Here's Olaf's template hat. I wanna get some feed back from Cory before I really get into details. Hopefully we can touch base later today (it's almost 1am now).

Today was a pretty good day, I got up and went for a nice little 4 mile jog in some nasty humidity. After I worked out, I headed to church, then headed to Texas Roadhouse for lunch cause I felt like some steak. I used to eat at one in Savannah, and they just put one in about 3 blocks from my apartment complex, so I thought I'd give this one a shot to see if it was as good as I remembered.

It was.

After that I headed to the bike store cause my buddy said they were having a sale. We've been riding bikes together some and he'd been harping on me to get some real biker shorts. Now, as I was growing up, biker shorts just meant spandex. However, he told me that they have actual padding in the shorts (kinda like a mini pillow woven into the tight-tastic material). So, I picked up a pair and some shades on sale (half off, baby!) and headed to the grocery store. When I finally got home, I decided my new shorts needed a trial run and listened to that stupid little voice again for another 17 mile trek. The humidity was gone by then and it was actually a really nice ride. This evening has pretty much been hanging out with Olaf and my attempted "sewing" attempts for his hat.

Much to do.

But for now, it's bed time.

Time for bed Olaf....

After I got in this evening, I spent a bit of time relaxing, then got back to working on getting Olaf some bug protection for those speedy motorcycle rides. For the most part, I think they're there (but there's always room for improvements). Tomorrow...or later today rather....I'm gonna work on his hat so he doesn't get sunburned!

Good day so far...

Started off this mornin' with at 17 mile ride. I had no intention of going that far, that stupid little voice just kept saying, "Just a little bit further before you turn around....just a little more." Ah, well. Beautiful weather out.

Did a few tweaks on Olaf this afternoon and did a quick planning concept from which to do his hat and goggles. I love this character, he's gonna be so much fun to animate.

Gotta head out...

Little update...

Worked till about 2 last night on Olaf trying to really capture Cory's tweaks. I think it's alot closer but still have some tweaking to do.

However, it's a beautiful day out, and time for a bike ride...

Be back later.

Minor Olaf Updateage...

Cory was kind enough to take a look at the latest tweaks and do a paint over with this fixes. Hopefully this weekend will see his head done intact with hat and goggles...can't wait to get started:)

Olaf Day 2

Made some good progress tonight...just plucking along. I hope to have the head at least rudimentary done by this weekend.

Time for bed...

Starting Olaf...

First things first, I started Olaf this weekend. I started off by installing Lightwave 9 since I hadn't had a chance to play with it while I was finishing the last gig (done in 8.5 and didn't wanna jinx things). I'm enjoying it. The new edge tools are great and I love the new 4+point sub-d's. Bout time. I think I'm still gonna pick up Silo which I've been playing with at work in my downtime. It's a great mix of Maya and Lightwave modeling to me and is hard to beat for $100.

Anyways...so, on Saturday afternoon, I started by taking a hard look at Cory's drawings and trying to get a feel for what that would look like in 3d. Illustrators tend to not worry so much about staying "on model" when they do their illustrations. They're more concerned with the single image then a consistent moving one, so I tried to pick out the key facial landmarks I could. I did some of my own quick studies to try and get a hand on it, drew some quick modeling images and started up. I spent most of last night on starting to model while also refamiliarizing myself with modeling again. I've not really done any serious modeling in some time...especially character modeling. I looked at it this morning before heading to church and saw the utter crap that it was and decided to start over when I got home. After church, I picked up some modeling clay and spent a good bit of this afternoon experimenting with Olaf's head "in the round".

When I was satisfied I had a better understanding (and convinced of the feableness of my sculpting abilities), I started again. The above image is where I'm at. LONG way to go, but can't wait to have this character ready to move around. He's gonna be a ball to animate.

Many thanks again to Cory for letting me give him a CG breath of life:)

Fantastico!

Holy cheerios, Batman! I'm DONE with my freelance gig. I'm burning the DVD's for the client now. Whoo hoo! It'll be a bit till I can update my site cause well, that hard drive crash I had a few weeks back took out all of my web source work. So, now that this is done, I have to get another hard drive to start unpacking my backups onto to see if what I've lost forever, and what I've got sitting in an archive somewhere.

Good times.

As soon as the client get's the DVD ready for sale, I'll post a link cause I know you'll wanna help Tiko pay for his pear eating addiction;)