birdWhisperingBandit

so much to do and so little time (and putting things together to post takes time).

but here's this (:

back

I'm back at school and animating, etc. again! Will post more as project enter completion!

thugz

Made stuff for the Character Design Bi-Weekly today (topic: Thugs with ugly mugs)!

My mom's a first grade teacher and I go in at the beginning of every year to help her set up her classroom. Helping usually means playing with all the awesome toys :). I had tons of manipulatives at my disposal including pattern blocks, links, milk caps, stacking rings, buttons, and snap cubes (not to mention all the office supplies).





Drawing based on the first dude; he was my favorite.


Here's a thug for life. Cut him and he'll make you cry.
This guy was tons of fun to make. Ears and nose are made out of thin (bust strong) blue plastic from the cover of an old planner from high school. The rest is gold acrylic gouache (for his teeth!), black acrylic gouache, holbein ink, and of course 1 onion. Balancing on onion on your wrist, even with tape, is not as easy as it would seem.

if - caged

For the Illustration Friday topic "Caged".
I'd also like to start listing stuff on etsy, so I'm kicking it off this this one :).

possible painting

I got the itch to paint today so I snatched an egg from the fridge and had at in photoshop for about an hour until the light changed too much/I gave up. I'm moderately happy with it considering it's the first thing I've painted in quite some time.



Also for an hour I had a go at redrawing one of my guys from the meowmix post.


I also tried out some screen capture video stuff.
process of nightcat, =~18MB.

For those with mac os x, I found this sweet little auto screen capture program here for free. It's very bare bones and you edit the configuration file to change your settings instead of a windowed user interface. You just tell it how often to save, where to save, and what image quality you want and let the thing run - the only catch is you can't quit it like a regular application, you've got to kill the process instead. That's easy to do though so long as you remember you've got it running. I used the default of taking a screenshot every five seconds, batch resized them in photoshop to a width of 640px, and then imported them into frame by frame (also free). It was pretty easy to do and quality-wise came out pretty well :)

sktchs

napkins/engineering paper/sketchbook
mostly quick people watching from school/the bus.

meowmix

Hoping to develop some of these guys in the coming days.

I've been reading a lot of books lately. I just finished up one on Aubrey Beardsley and Kim Elam's Grid Systems and am about to start on her book on typography. I'm also working through a book on pre-revolutionary Russian graphic design and just picked up Gruppe on Color and The Art of Robots today from the library. Gruppe's book is really amazing. I've only just started it but right away started taking notes - there's so many good things he says in it! I'll likely be posting some of my favorite quotes when I'm done with it too, seeing as how it's out of print and pretty expensive to acquire.

as of late

Relatively recent miscellanea!



True story. Good luck trying to copy/paste pieces of money in photoshop too. Had to scan in with acrobat reader and the shift the hues before copying and then shift them back again after pasting.


3 unrelated images layered up in photoshop. Fun stuff.


Saw this dude in the student union on my way to the computer lab. Instead of doing whatever I was supposed to I had a new important mission. You just can't pass up purple polo w/ sweater vest.

if - double

For Illustration Friday, topic: double.
Kind of cool, kind of creepy. Happened upon some neat stuff in making this.

still life

This is the last post from the sophomore projects, I swear. The still life project was our last one, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was nice to get such a project to finish the year out with. Not to say this project was a walk in the park, but texturing is very different from animation, and shares so much with drawing and painting, areas I'm far more experienced and comfortable in.

This project was a short and simple one. We were given files of assets, plain models and some simple props/sets that we were free to slightly modify/fix and arrange into a composition to light and texture. I ended up using a total of 8 lights (6 spot, 2 directional), and it was my first time using raytracing. We had to create shaders networks for all our materials, and it was my first real time getting into that too and building them from the ground up. I tried to keep things simple and render times low (I think at the end it took about :48 seconds to render the frame with depth of field, but then again the computers we use are wicked fast). I worked to keep all my maps low. Everything is procedural except for the fruit and paper towel bump, which is a small tiling raster pattern that I painted. The outdoors, bananas, apple, and pears are 1024 maps, the orange, cherries, and grapes are all 512. My knowledge of photoshop was very handy on this project, though sometimes there's just no substitute for enhancing and painting noise patterns yourself.


Not many renders/paint overs ended up getting saved on this project, but here's a few I found.

Here is a video showing, quite literally, a day's work. A lot of frames were dropped with the screen capture while scrubbing through the day's saved renders, and the quality's not great enough to show the subtle changes in things, but it gives a nice overview of the progression regardless.

Reference was of particular use of this project. Most of it was high res fruit photos pulled from flickr, but a fair amount too was just reference for color, mood, and design aesthetic. These three were some of the ones I kept open a lot to keep my head straight and stay focused.