Finding a job…

Tuesday, 8th September 2009

After 6 months I suddenly find that my routine no longer involves firing up Maya in every spare minute and instead I’m looking for jobs. It’s no way as much fun, but it makes a change. I’m moving house again in a couple of weeks and until then I have to work down my hitlist of places I’d like to work. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to get a full-time position or an internship (or anything at all for that matter!) yet, but I guess I’m about to find out. I’ve had some feedback about my reel from the ever-wise Binky at the Mograph forums. It was sound advice but I’ll have to put off fixing the reel until things have settled down a bit. I just hope that someone out there will watch the reel and see how much effort I’ve put into making some of my little ideas come true.

Oh, and I’ve saved my blog, Painting Polygons from obsolesence by adding my reel there as well. Hopefully will post some more stuff on PP soon.

Finished! (well, almost)

Wednesday, 2nd September 2009

After 2 weeks of modelling I’ve finally got myself my very own Fiat 500 2007. It looks sweeeeeeet. Now to render (argh) and cut my showreel. God it feels good to finish this little chap.

Modelling a Fiat 500

Thursday, 27th August 2009

For the past week and a half I’ve been modelling a Fiat 500 as the final piece for my showreel. Cars are pretty difficult things to get right, and the Fiat 500 is an even more difficult car to get right. With sports cars the sleek aerodynamic lines run throughout the car and they look a lot like when you suck ice cream off a spoon and leave a polyp of matter behind. OK, so that’s a weird simile, but the point is that the Fiat is not particularly aerodynamic looking - but it is full of lines and angles that are hard to get right. And I’m a perfectionist in this case. Almost there, though, and once I am, I’ll put together my showreel and start sending it off. After 6 months of work I hope it’s worth the effort.

Inspiration

Tuesday, 21st July 2009

How many blog posts start off with the words ‘it’s been a while’ I wonder? Well, it has, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about blogging. It’s just that I’ve been too busy making stuff. Having finished a couple more animations since I last blogged, I’m now working on a silly little piece involving pointy headed wizards summoning other dimensions. Yes, it is a lot of fun. It’s one of those animations that grew from the smallest nugget of inspiration - a stray jpeg floating around image aggregator blog Fffound. I’d post it here, but that’d spoil the surprise. I have, however, just stumbled across Robert G Bartholot’s site for the third or fourth time and decided that I should give props to the guy who makes images that make me go mmmm. I hope he doesn’t mind that I post this image here. It’s out of sheer admiration that I do it.

The Terminal Man

Monday, 25th May 2009

The last week or two has been a bit hectic, but I’ve managed to complete one short project - Demo-Graphics - and have begun another one. The current project takes as it’s inspiration the cover of a secondhand book I picked up in a church in Cambridge. The book is called The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton, and far from being interested in the story (which I’m sure I’ll enjoy nonetheless), it was the cover illustration I was attracted by. There’s a little window in the jacket, through which you can see an illustration much like my reproduction to the left. The book was published in 1973 and it has quite a bold, simple illustrative style. I’m going to try and translate that into a short animation, maybe incorporating the original font.

Hats Off…. almost.

Monday, 4th May 2009

Modelling finished, bar the inevitable tweaks. 9 hats, 10 days, about 30 computer crashes. Now, let’s get them spinning.

And More Hats…

Friday, 1st May 2009

I had a sneaky suspicion that this project was going too smoothly. Then perfectionism kicked in and I started seeing all the things I’d missed. For the best part of this week, I’ve been chipping away at the mountain that is dynamics, while giving myself a break every so often to do some texturing. It’s nice to whip out the Wacom every couple of hours and scribble away. The sombrero pictured here has been fun to texture. At least my PC doesn’t crash when I’m drawing I’ve still got a few hats to model yet. There goes the weekend (though I’m secretly happy to stay inside and geek out).

Hats

Tuesday, 28th April 2009

My latest project is a short animation of some spinning hats. I’ve been working with dynamics, ncloth and hair in Maya to process the spinning motion of the fez and mortarboard, both of which have tassles that need to react to inertia and gravity. It’s been quite a learning curve, and the steepest part of that is remembering the order in which to select and assign attributes to objects. It seems impossible, for instance, to assign hair to a polygonal mesh and then make that mesh an ncloth. You have to do it the other way round. Making objects spin has also been more difficult than you’d expect. I had anticipated that if I animated each hat spinning on it’s own pivot point that I’d run into trouble after just a couple of rotations - Maya doesn’t like animating this method and seems to get a bit wound up, as do the objects. So I’ve constrained each hat to a locator using an aim constraint, and each locator is orbiting a nurbs circle motion path. A few more hats to model and then I’ll start texturing. Such fun! 

Picket

Tuesday, 21st April 2009

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a bite-size animation, which today I’ve almost finished. It’s an overhead shot of a picket fence maze in a field of lush grass. The camera pulls out to reveal the picket fences are falling over and spelling out the words ‘Save Our Souls’.

Once again, I’ve worked on the project from concept to completion, and come across lots of learning opportunities in the meantime. Due to the size of the scene (I created it to scale) the render times were quite long, but minimising them is a valuable skill and one that I’m better at now. I tested a few ways of creating a large amount of grass - using fur seemed to be the best option. I’m also getting a bit more adept at using compositing packages. The final result will be part of a showreel I hope to produce in a couple of months.

Robots (still)

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

Still working on this robot. He’s taking forever.

Update 24/02: Robot is finished - you can see him here.

Right, I’m going on holiday to Venezuela and Colombia now. Back soon!

Making Robots

Wednesday, 11th February 2009

Been spending the last week tracking HD footage, matchmoving, doing concept art and modelling. I’m making a robot! Just thought it’d be a good idea to refresh my skills a little. I’ve also been blogging over at Painting Polygons seeing as my mind is in digital mode at the moment. The picture to the left shows my robot in a state of extreme disrepair. I had to take it all apart and put it back together again.

Schnee!

Monday, 2nd February 2009

I’m excited! Not just because of the snow, which I explored thoroughly first thing this morning, but because I’m finalising the concept behind my next project. I’ve been thinking of ways to incorporate my CG skills with my art practice for some time now, and the pieces are beginning to fall into place. It’ll be quite a job to put a proposal together before I go on holiday on the 26th (Venezuela and Colombia for 3 weeks!), but hopefully it’ll be worth it. Good times!

The Interminable Card Game

Friday, 30th January 2009

I’ve been looking into the possibility of an artist residency at Cambridge University, which may or may not materialise, but as part of the proposal I started to unearth an old project. One of those that never got resolved and still excites me.

The basic idea is based around a card game I played a few years ago in which a stalemate occurred. Four players, each collecting a series of cards, take turns picking cards from a central pile and either includes them in their hand or passes them on. We were each waiting for a key card to complete our hand and win the game. The problem was that there was a missing card. The absence of this card meant that the game couldn’t be resolved and a few key cards were being passed between the four of us repeatedly, in a loop. This loop intrigues me - how this missing information handicaps the game and results in a locked situation.

I’m looking again at this scenario in conjunction with economic theories, game theory, post-structuralist philosophy and creativity. It strikes me that the game provides a case-study/analog/metaphor for the effects of ‘missing information’ on a dynamic system. It prompts associations with creativity and the idea of a chase, a lack or a surplus. It also hints at an investigation into equilibrium, markets and systems. I could go on forever explaining the ideas that I get from this locked card game, and I think that’s the point - chasing this missing card is like chasing my own tail. Fun but without resolve. Production without finality. That missing card is like my oracle, but she’s only whispering at the moment.

Go go go!

Thursday, 22nd January 2009

The first post of the new year comes after a few weeks of concentrated activity. Once again, I’ve been working through long lists of things to do, including wrapping up the Fruits of Conversation project.

I’ve been in touch with people who’d like to buy prints, distributing free souvenir prints to participants, writing up my activity report for the Arts Council (including the painstaking and painful process of assessing the budget) and editing the footage taken at the exhibition workshops. Alongside this I’ve been pencilling in some long-term aims for this year and chasing up some of the opportunities that came about as a result of the exhibition. There are a few interesting developments, including a possible collaboration with The Oxford Muse, more involvement with Cambridge University and a couple of residencies that I think the project - or one of it’s type - would work well within. And on top of all that, I’ve been catching up with normal life - distributing handmade thankyou presents, wedding presents and making myriad arrangements to catch up with all those people I haven’t caught up with since last year.

The show closes

Saturday, 20th December 2008

Today is the last day of the exhibition and I’m looking forward to packing the work away and having some time to reflect on the experience. The past three days have seen visitor numbers decline to about 10 a day, which has been disappointing, but understandable given that everyone is preparing for Christmas. But I’m still getting people in, and more than the rumoured 8 a day that the South London Gallery gets (statistic courtesy of a friend curating in London).
What’s really interesting is that my visitors have been very varied but have not included any of the people who I delivered promotional chutney to, and very few of the people who sponsored or provided promotional material for the project. Whether or not this is indicative of a lack of mutual support amongst arts organisations or whether it’s just the time of year, I don’t know. In some ways, though, it’s good that the people who benefitted from the project weren’t necessarily those who had a stake in it.