11 Second Club (September 2010)

After doing last months competition, I decided to start using Maya again. I stopped using it because i found it hard to use Cinema 4D at the same time, as I kept getting all the controls mixed up when I was switching between the software. During the last competition I had to model, rig, texture and animate the characters, as well as doing the environment. The 11 Second Club website provides rigs that you download and then that gives you a month to animate. Unfortunately they don't have any Cinema 4D rigs so that's why I've started using Maya. I have no idea how to rig a character in Maya so that's something I'll have to learn when I go back to college (tomorrow). I was hoping to  finish this months competition before tomorrow as I didnt want to be in the middle of an animation while starting a new course. I doubt I'll get it finished today but I'm going to try and get most of it done. So far I have animated the main movements for the first character. Here's some pictures of the viewport.

This is the model of the house I am using. I didn't add too much detail as most of it wont be shown in the animation. 

I just duplicated the house for the background because I don't have much time left before the deadline. I started 2 weeks late so I've had to rush a lot of the environment. I'm planning on using a lot of depth of field behind the characters so hopefully I'll get away with using identical houses in the background:)

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

I finally finished my animation for 11 Second Club's August competition! :D

I'm not completely happy with the way it turned out because I had to rush a lot of the rigging and the morphs for the mouths, so a lot of it looks a bit weird and unfinished. Here's some screens of the finished animation. My internets really slow at the minute so I can't upload the video but I'll paste a link when I put it up. 

ODD STUFF

I found a couple of things that I started working on but then forgot about so I've put them up and hopefully I'll finish them one day :)








I can't actually remember why I drew this - I think it was possibly for final show. I'm not even sure if it is finished or not but I might do something with it someday.

This is the Alien and his Robot. I drew this because I was planning on modeling a character in Cinema 4D but I think I just forgot about it and did something else instead:)

When I get some time I'll definitely try and finish these.

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

Did some really fast modeling today and got the Grandson and Granny characters finished! Still have to rig them though - oh no! :(

: )

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

Not much of an update - I started again with the head and added some hair :)

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

Here I've started modeling the head. I'm not sure if I like the way it's looking, but I'll keep modeling it and see how it turns out.

C4D CAFE SWISS ARMY KNIFE CHALLENGE

The competitions finished and I came 3rd. I enjoyed the challenge and I'm going to focus on character animation for a while now, as I haven't done much lately :)

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

I've just properly started the 11secondclub.com August competition! I really wanted to do some character designs for this but since I've had to start a week late, I've had to go straight to modeling the characters. Once I have the characters set up and ready to animate, I might do some storyboards if I have time. I'm not really sure what my animation's going to be about, but after listening to the audio clip, I have decided to base it on a granny and her grandson.

I've started with the grandson...

I modeled the shoes separately and then moved them to the right place. I'll connect everything to one mesh when I finish, but I've left them as a separate object for now as I'll add more detail to them later.

I've just finished modeling the main shape of the shirt. I made it using a Clothilde tab and then removed the tab and edited it from there. 

( I think his wrists are too thin :P )

I cheated a bit with the hands, and re-used the hands I modeled for my rabbit character to save some time :)

C4D CAFE SWISS ARMY KNIFE CHALLENGE

Just finished my Swiss Army Knife for the C4DCafe challenge. I wanted to spend a bit more time getting a better render, but I've ran out of time so here's the finished images...

I'm quite happy with the end result and this was definately good practice for realistic modeling. I experimented with some different lighting techniques to try and get a better render too. I'm going to keep checking C4DCafe.com for new challenges as it is a good way to build up work for my portfolio, and also because you don't have to think of an idea and do development etc. for it. You can just make something without too much planning going into it.

MAXWELL

I was 10 hours away from the end of the super long render in Maxwell, and my computer crashed :O

It was when I was rendering my swiss army knife model at the same time and my mac started going crazy so I had to restart. I'm going to wait until I finish this C4D challenge before trying to render again:(

C4D CAFE SWISS ARMY KNIFE CHALLENGE

Just a quick update. Started adding textures and environment:)

11 SECOND CLUB (AUGUST 2010)

www.11secondclub.com has a competition on at the start of every month where they give you an 11 second piece of audio and you have to animate to it. I was too late for the July competition so I'm going to do the August one instead. At the minute I'm still doing the C4DCafe Swiss Army Knife Challenge so I'm going to wait until the deadline on Friday to start this competition. I quickly drew one of the characters that I thought I could use for this animation just so I had an idea down. 

I never model people in Cinema 4D so it'll be fun to try something different. I'm not sure what's going to happen in the animation yet but I'll do some storyboards and model sheets before animating.

C4D CAFE SWISS ARMY KNIFE COMPETITION

I keep checking C4DCafe.com to see what competitions are on. They usually have one on every few weeks which require you to make a model or an animation on a specific subject. The current competition is to model a Swiss Army Knife.

"For this challenge we want you to model a Swiss Army knife. We want to see some really detailed modeling for this challenge. This should be a lot of fun as there are many different tools that you can include in your knife. If you want to go a bit wacky and add things you wouldn't expect to find then we're cool with that e.g. a bazooka. Judging will be on modeling detail but we do expect you to apply materials to your knife."

As this is another chance to do some more realistic modeling, I've decided to give it a go. The deadline is in 6 days so I've still got a bit more time to finish it. Here are some images of what it looks like so far...

 I went a bit over the top with the gadgets but I thought it would be a bit boring to just model a basic knife. The picture on the screen looks quite bad so I'll probably change that sometime before the deadline on Friday.

I did one render where I textured it a bit. It's not the textures I'll be using in the final image but I just did it so I could see how it might look.

Acoustic Guitar

I modeled my acoustic guitar because I wanted to get some practice modeling real things, instead of cartoons all the time:)
I modeled it in Cinema 4D and it took about 6 hours to render!! (I think my macs getting slower and
slower :/)

So here's the final render of it. Because of the time it took, I only rendered two, but I'm planning on adding it to my portfolio so I'll do a few more eventually.

I'm really starting to dislike Cinema 4D's render engine because of its slightly cartoon-like renders. It's not as noticeable in the second render, but I think it stands out quite a lot in the one above. I'm going to start looking for a new render engine.

 

I found a render engine called Maxwell. It renders images extremely realistically but it takes days for one render, so for me it could only ever be any good for still images. As a test I took this model and rendered it using a Maxwell. So far it has taken 72.53 hours to render 56%!!!

This is it so far...

It started off very noisy but it's starting to smooth out now. Some parts are starting to look more realistic but I'm a bit worried that it's blue. I'm not sure if that's going to change colour when it finishes rendering. I'm using the demo so that's why there's a watermark in the middle but I'm hoping I can get away with getting rid of it in Photoshop. I was quite surprised that it hasn't slowed my computer down at all, so it hasn't been a problem using other software at the same time. If this render turns out well, I think it would be a really good render engine to have for still images, especially for my portfolio. There's still 54.26 hours left so I'll update this when it's finished.

BUNNY RABBIT #2

I've just got back from Ibiza and I took a sketchbook with me!

So I was drawing a character and it turned out to be a rabbit. I was a bit disappointed because I've recently animated a rabbit for college, and it would have been good to do something different, but I'm still quite happy with it. (He looks nothing like the other rabbit anyway :P)

Here's some of the pages of my sketchbook:)

I've scanned in the model sheet and started modeling him in Cinema 4D. 

 

(I did a quick morph too but it'll get deleted anyway because I haven't finished modeling the rabbit.)

INTRODUCTION

As this is my first post on my new blog I thought I'd just explain what I'm doing. I've still got my blog that I started last year on FD Animation but I've decided to scrap it as it was really badly organized and didn't make a lot of sense.

So I've started this blog to show what stuff I'm doing now. It's still the summer holidays so at the minute I'm trying to do as much animation and illustration as I can before going back to college in September.

I'm doing several things at once so hopefully this blog wont be all over the place. I'm going to try my best to keep this blog tidy, obviously so it's readable, but also because I'm going to use it a lot for my PPD next year.

Yep...so I'm gonna put some work up now :D