Google Art Project

This is the most amazing thing ever and I am so excited about it.

http://www.googleartproject.com

Google is mapping museums the same way they've mapped all the streets. You can walk through and see works of art in great detail. They've not mapped the entire National Gallery in London yet, so they've not made it to my favorite piece which is Meindert Hobbema's Avenue at Middelharnis, but I'm sure they'll get there eventually. This would have been a great tool to have when I took Art History. It was often hard to find works of art, and when you did, they were often a little black and white picture in a book. Check it out.

New Demo Reel

I figured it was time for a new demo reel. I put some of the recent stuff I've been working on, on it. There's no sound, my internet is so slow, it takes long enough to upload without it, and is superfluous anyway.






= Reel Breakdown =

Cave Girl - Responsible for Design; Modeling and UVing (Maya 2008); Rigging and Animating (3ds Max 2011)

Giraffe - Responsible for Modeling, UVing, Texture Mapping, Rigging and Animating (Maya 2008)

Pulse!! Game - In game animation, Responsible for Rigging and Animation (3ds Max 8); exporting to Gamebryo Game Engine

BaIt - Student film, Responsible for Bat rigging (Maya 8.0)

Cave Girl Running with Spear

I decided to animate my cave girl character running with a spear in hand, as I mentioned earlier. This started with research, with my mother-in-law and I running across the deck with a wooden curtain rod in hand LOL I'm thinking if the neighbors on the hill saw us, that they'd think we lost our minds.

It took me a few hours to get it polished up. I like it and Andy liked it too. He said she had character, which is great!

Next I'd like to animate my cave girl throwing the spear. And get around to modeling her saber tooth cat friend. There's just not enough hours in the day. I work on my art and it's bedtime before I know it.

Cave Girl Walk Cycle v.2

I did another walk cycle with the Cave Girl I modeled. This one I spent more time on than the first one, which was hastily thrown together just to see how the character was moving.

I'm going to do some more animation with her, a run cycle and maybe have her carrying and throwing a spear. That's my plan anyway.

Kitty!

I designed a saber-tooth cat to go with my cave girl. I'm going to model it soon, but I like it so much I decided to put the drawing of it I did on here. I went through about four iterations, some of the first ones looked too dog-like, and while a saber-tooth dog would be amusing, it wasn't quite what I was going for.

Cave Girl Model

I designed a cartoon-y cave girl last week. I modeled and UV'd it in Maya 2008, and then decided to get 3ds Max's free 30 day trial and I rigged and animated it in Max. I am going to work on it some more. I'd like to get the lighting better, as I know nothing about the proper render settings in Max, having only worked in Game Dev with Max, where everything was exported to Gamebryo. The movement is also a little stiff I think, but I'm tired and it's late so I'll work on it some more tomorrow or maybe the next day.

Tomorrow is the first day of school, except I'm not a student this time. I'm teaching a rigging class! I hope it will be fun...

Winchester .243 Model

I decided to model my beautiful .243 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight. Here are some renders:


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Click for the larger version. Available for sale at TurboSquid.

I never realized how complex the bolt was in it until I started looking closely at how it worked. And that explains why bolt action firearms are a fairly recent invention!

Drawings in Pencil

I drew a couple of pictures for my uncle-in-law and aunt-in-law for Christmas:





Click for larger.

Art and stuff

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I've written. I haven't worked all that much in Maya, I've been doing other creative stuff. I did play around with shaders the other day, animating them. I was trying to get a Len Lye type animation out of animating them, but it didn't quite turn out the same way. I decided if you stared at it long enough, you might just have a seizure ala Japanese Pokemon LOL and so that's why I've not posted it.

I'm thinking about getting back into traditional drawing, since I've not done any in a while. I'm also thinking about getting an MFA, but I don't know when I could start on it. That's really about all I have to write about at the moment.

Python Scripting in Maya

I haven't had a chance to work much with Python in Maya, so today I decided that I would try to write some kind of script in Python. Here it is:



Click on the image for a larger version. It's a very simple script, it just makes a joint chain, adds IK to it, and then makes sliders that control the IK Blend and twist. The only problem I had making it was that, as you may know, MEL and Python are case-sensitive like most programming languages and I had a capital letter where there should have been a lower case letter. It took me a while to find the problem LOL!

I think that I will try to alter the script to get some kind of iteration out of it, using for or while loops, etc. That will be my next goal, unless I decide to do something else first :)

Shark Attack!

Hehe...

As some of you may know, I'm currently seeking employment. This morning I received an email from Collision Studios. They wanted me to take a rigging and animation test and had sent me a shark model to do just that with. They said they send the test to all candidates. No better way to get me to work! I had it rigged in about two hours, if that, and started animating on it right away. I finished animating it about dinner time and decided to make a playblast of it and put it on my blog.



*model provided by/property of Collision Studios

Nothing Much Here

Okay, so I have to admit that I've not worked on anything in the last couple days. I've got my computer up and running and everything is back in order, but I've been busy getting things ready for hunting season which starts this weekend. I had intended to study some C++ today, but the day sorta got away from me.

Bad Drive

My hard drive died yesterday so it might be a few days before I post another update. I had to go buy a new drive and I'm still in the process of getting everything installed on the new drive.