Patrick Smith and the Credit Crisis...

No, he didn't cause it. At least, to the best of my knowledge he didn't. He has however made some amazing films over the years that are now available on YouTube. Here's a really good one: You can find more of em here. Check em out. I met him a few years ago at a film festival and he was really nice as well. Keep up the great work, Patrick. So about that Credit Crisis, I came across the really well done motion graphics piece and just wanted to share because of what a great instructional animation it is on a very complicated concept. Why no updates lately? Cause I've been too busy:) The shot from the last post is about done, I'm waiting on the final mop and I've done a couple of more shots since then. There's another collaboration in the works that I'd love to talk about but it's just not far enough along yet. Until next time.

3d-ification...ACTIVATE

It's been an interesting process going from 2d to 3d. I'm pretty good on the initial pass at 3dizing my shot. Surprisingly, the 2d pass translated well even though he's moving through space. Haven't made as quick progress as I would like as I've been working on finalizing the shot following this one (which thankfully is done*). This should be a fun sequence once it's done. Moving on to linear. * When I say "done", I mean "artist done"

Another day, another wip...

Here's a quick update on the shot. Moving into 3dizing it and hope to have that pretty far along by Friday. Been doing some polish on the shot before and after this as well aiming for approval. It was a long weekend in Louisiana which was a nice escape. My mother-in-laws computer had a virus that took my best computer ninja skills to vanquish. Hopefully, that's all set. Back to it!

030_020_020 2d Wip

Squirrely had to take a side seat to Henry this week. I'm working through my next shot on Garden City. Had a bunch of stuff come up the last few days so I haven't got quite as far as I'd hoped to, but it's coming along. Still very rough, but that's what WIP means, no? It's been a bugger working things out with the camera doing all kinds of crazy (can't complain too much there though...I did the layout...) Dave put together an up to date in progress version of the film this week and it's great to see it starting to come together. I love this part of the film making progress - from reel to real:) We'll prolly be letting that link fly here before too long to get an early "screen test". If you're interested, check back soon:)

Squirrely Starts his Obstacle Course...

I'm trying a new workflow for animating - doing it in 2d first. Animation Mentor had a webinar last month that Jason Ryan lectured and this was his workflow and I wanted to give it a go. This is the first day of animation on Squirrely's obstacle course test. I worked on the key poses yesterday along with "3dizing" my set from my drawing. I'm still playing with how it's gonna end up. Still a lot to go, but it's coming along. If you got any idears or see things amiss, critique away. Bokser is done with his freelancing, so it'll be back to Garden City next week for the most part. I'll try to get some more progress on Squirrely during the weekend, but it's looking kinda full.

Real quick...

So this is Squirrely's next test. In the long tradition of Scrat. I'm gonna try and do some of the Animation Mentor exercises by myself and get some friend's feedback (as I can't afford AM at the moment). This will be my "Obstacle Course" one.

Tribute to an artist friend...

He only asked me to do this ages ago, bout time I made good. This is my friend Mark Evitts, an amazing master of the strings.

Squirrely Runs in Place

Did a quick test of Squirrely to test the rig. Nothing fancy. Pretty happy with the rig so far. I'll be changing some of my characters sets, cleaning up repeated and dead nodes and locking things down in general. Maya's doing some weird stuff with mental ray on the scene file. I may just pull the SSS shader and use a reg shader for the release version. Also, wow is Maya more stable on XP than OSX....such a shame:( Note - if you care to actually see the cycle better, you should be able to download it at the Vimeo site. They sure do make adding video easy...

Things I've been learning...

Waiting on the computer do do some reinstalling and had a few minutes to write...

• Maya doesn't like OSX - Well, that or OSX doesn't like Maya. Crashes. Mel Scripts not working, good times in general. Also Flipbook, my 2d animation software, crashed on me after 45 minutes of work. That coupled with all my Maya crashes brought me to looking into Bootcamp...
• Time Machine is Neat - The ease of use of apple's backup system is a thing of beauty. One, it's simple to maintain. Two, it makes reinstalling the OS a piece of cake. I had to do that to partition my Macbook Pro's drive for a windows partition (see first item from today).
• Slipstreaming - Bootcamp requires a Windows XP install cd with service pack two. I have two initial release copies, but didn't have a SP2 one. So, I made one via a process called slipstreaming. If you ever wanna bootcamp it, might be a good link to keep handy.
• Maintaining computers is a pain - Sometimes I wonder if they're worth the hassle. Justin has been having his own hassles over on his blog. I've been trying to walk my mother-in-law through some of her own issues a state away - looking like a nasty virus has taken hold but that'll prolly have to wait a few weeks for my wife and I to make a trip.
• The Jury is out on macs - The jury is still out for me on whether or not I wanna permanently get my mac on. On the one hand, the user experience is a thing of elegance and ease. On the other, my main apps crashing all the time is not. WHY does apple insist on overpricing their hardware? They could have such a bigger market share if they'd at least get competitive. On a whim I took a look at the mac pro's today...upgrading from 2g to 8g of ram = $1500....a jaunt over to crucial.com = $399. Seriously. Who on earth does that make sense to? Lower the price of your hardware or release the OS so peeps can stop hackintoshing it. For now I'll keep straddling the fence with my new 20gig partition of windows, but I can't see justifying the purchase of another mac down the road compared to what I can build or buy a comparable pc for.

Looks like the reinstall is about done, back to it....

Beautiful Docu-mercial -entary...

If you think oragami is pretty sweet and love film making you just can't go wrong watching this little gem. Happy Monday!

Squirrely's Face Wishes you a happy New Year...

And so do I for that matter. Speaking of him, he's pretty much done. I'm gonna do some animation tests with him over the next couple of weeks and then I plan on releasing him to the wild and see what others do with him. This is a range of motion test on his facial rig which isn't as robust as I'd like but will have to do in the meantime. It's been a great year. Lots of change, but change isn't a bad thing. I've got idears of what to make of the new one, but more on that some other time. For now, hope you had a good new year and set some good goals for yourselves. Blessings!

Some Old Midway stuff...

Here's some old work from Midway. I'm assuming they don't care as Mortal Kombat has shipped and the other project is canceled. Most of my fam wasn't really sure did what I did at work all day - this is a good taste of it. If anyone at Midway does care, lemme know and I'll yank em.

• Canceled project - This is a facial animation test from a canceled Midway project. They wanted a couple of quick dialogue tests, so I did em. The animation isn't the best, I didn't get to spend a lot of time on them. Just putting the rig through it's paces. I also did the facial rigging and weighting.
• Mortal Kombat Facial Rig - This is a range of motion video from the prototype facial rig for Mortal Kombat vs. DC. I created the poses for the rig to drive and did the facial weighting pass. It's a joint based rig whose architecture was set in place by my coworker and friend Scott Englert. Subsequent rigging work on characters was done by Tony Lewellen and his team.

Site updates...

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. I sure did though my belly is full of chex mix and chocolate covered pecans... Oh, and I'm a big fan of what may or may not be a trend. I got a couple of Blue Ray DVDs for presents but don't have a Blue Ray player yet. However, they both came with digital copies downloadable via iTunes with an unlock code. I'm wondering if this is the standard or just an anomaly shared by the Dark Knight and a little robot that could named Wall-E. Hoping it's a trend:) Projects pages updated:

• Garden City
• Mortal Kombat vs. DC
• Ballers: Chosen One
• The Wheelman

Progress on Garden City is coming along just dandy.

Been a while...

It's been way too long since I've made a concerted effort to draw more and actually followed through on it. Plan on changing that. This is a 20 minute photoshop pastel of our cat. Man, I need to practice. There's only so much time in life and lately I don't feel like I've been the best steward of mine. That's something else I plan on changing. That'll be my present to myself. Also, this is absolutely amazing...

For my friends...

Almost all of my friends at Midway today were let go. I'm still shell shocked about it. They are all talented animators and artists and would be asset at any studio. Any one hiring folks should look em up on Linked in or the link if I have it here:

• Scott Englert
• Mike Peterson
• Randy Stranton
• Roger Berrones
• Nick Carter
• James Gentile
• Justin Muir
• Tony Lewellen
• Matt Taylor
• Phil Kourie
• Chris Torres

This is the list as I know it so far, if I find out more were let go, I'll add em. My thoughts are with you guys.

Lessons....

Finally wrapped my first sequence on Garden City. Don't know when I'll be able to show it but it was a lot of fun to do. Also the first bit of full body animation I've done in some time so it took a bit to get back into the swing of things. When I went to start my next shot on Garden City only to find the updated set made my layout pass of Henry dance his way into the shower. Understandably, gonna have to fix that. However, while I was waiting for the updated set, I stumbled across some great info and inspirational work via the ole' Google Reader:

• Visual Comedy 101 - Carlos Baena had some edutainment gold on his blog in the form of a series of vids staring the ever humorous "Bean" on what constitutes visual comedy. Check it out here.
• More Gobelins awesome-ness - Here's my visual fav and the making off is embedded below. All of them can be seen here.
• From the Maker of "Simon's Cat" - More hillarity...

On an Animbatical...

Last Thursday was my last day at Midway Games. I had a great run there over the past 3 and a half years and have made many what I expect to be lifelong friends. Looking back, I consider myself fortunate to have worked on so many shipped titles - Ballers 2, Stranglehold, Blacksite, Ballers 3, Blitz, and most recently Wheelman and MKvsDC which will be shipping before too long. I also was able to work on some other projects in a protoype/helping role. My time at the company was mainly spent working on pushing the facial animation pipeline with my friend Scott Englert and overseeing production in that facet of those projects and doing some motion capture cleanup, vehicle rigging/animation, dynamics and even some cloth in the down times. It was a difficult decision to leave as the company treated me very well and I had been able to work remotely for the past 8 months or so from Houston. However, my passion for animation lies in full body keyframe work rather than just focusing on the face and my opportunities to do that were limited. It was time for a break. A chance to seek out opportunities that would afford the exercising of those passions. What might you ask is an "Animbatical"? Well, I think I made it up to be honest but the intention was a sabatical of sorts for an animator. Over the next several months, I'm going to be working on "Garden City" - a film being directed by a very good friend David Bokser. We've been plugging along on it for a while now and it's time to get 'er done. I'm also going to be doing some animation exercises, working on some short film ideas and hopefully finishing Squirrely and Olaf and looking for some freelance or short term on site work if opportunities come along. If you hear of anything, lemme know:)

The Chestnut Tree...

I've been wanting to see this film for a while having heard about it a year ago or so. It's no wonder it's gotten so much acclaim. Take a look at a delightful little film:

"Get over here!"

No I had nothing to do with this screenshot. Yes, I'd like to be Batman.

Scorpion kept using his signature move to keep me in the brutal crucible that was the Mortal Kombat production pipeline. Weeks of very long hours and plenty of weekends work makes for crispy cogs in the game-making machine. However, it is done (at least my portion) and though I learned lots of good lessons during production I can't really talk about them yet, so.... Thankfully, I'm off on a little comp time and I plan on enjoying it and pursuing normalcy again. That begins with:

• Fitness - It's amazing how fast this remarkable thing we call the human body can go from being in shape to "yea-I-know-we-ran-4-miles-no-sweat-two-months-ago-but-I-don't-wanna-do-that-anymore". It gets worse the older you get. Yay. However, like the apostle Paul declared I shall "beat my body and make it my own" once more.
• Back to the basics - The joy of just animating faces has run it's course and I need some more exercise for those animation muscles. I'm working on my first shot for Bokser's Garden City (all done with layout!)
• Politics - This election cycle and the insipid stupidity of this whole two-faced financial crisis blame game has burned me out. The press for the most part has not been doing it's job and I'd rather animate or read a book than try to do their jobs for them. The debate last night was just painful. I've cleared out my Google reader of political readings - Animation, friends, tech and some theology is good enough for now.
• Christmas Card - I gotta get started on it. Asap. :)

Oh a very, VERY cool little tool that Bokser came across is a service called Dropbox. We're using it to keep assets up to date on Garden City and I'm using it to send files between my PC and mac easy peasy. Watch the little video. It's free and very cool.

Okta-Awesome!

This is a fantastic short. AND. They have a great making of vid here. Check out the rest of the site for some more great artwork. I'm continually impressed by the work coming out of the Gobelin's school.