Blog

Finding a job…

2009-09-08T16:49:26+00:00

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)

2009-09-02T11:41:18+00:00

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

2009-08-27T20:34:08+00:00

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

2009-07-21T08:52:34+00:00

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

2009-05-25T23:12:25+00:00

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.

2009-05-04T21:53:18+00:00

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

And More Hats…

2009-05-01T19:43:16+00:00

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

2009-04-28T15:20:02+00:00

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

2009-04-21T10:25:52+00:00

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)

2009-02-18T13:12:17+00:00

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!