I love vectors, secretly. When they want to be nice to me, anyway.
This is a weird recurring character of mine that I just call "trunkbird". He just kind of appeared in my head one day, along with his not-really-friend who is a penguin that wears a beret to cover up a bald spot on his head. I used them both in the first sound-synced animation project in school, and now trunkbird appears occasionally on doodles and on my business card, doing a little run cycle.
Monday, December 15, 2008
This is a short little in-progress clip of my senior project. Modeling and rigging was done by a friend (http://www.ekester.com).
I got the idea for this animation from this sort of half-awake, half-asleep dream I had involving a penguin wearing a really, really bad peacock costume. I wondered why a penguin would ever need to do that, and ... things went from there.
The storyboards look like this. (Click for full size)
In case anybody was curious, the notes I scribbled in the margins are for the modeler and rigger I'm collaborating with HEY EVAN YOU'RE AWESOME. (I have since added that one more scene.)
The penguin is here in greater detail.
He was actually a much more sympathetic character in the first draft of the story, but it was a lot harder to get to some kind of resolution. After unsuccessfully bouncing ideas off other people for MOOONTHS, it actually became much easier to put a story together if the penguin was more of a flakey sort of guy.
And of course, the poor peahen.
That last color shot is just an idea for now and probably will not be her final colors.
Yaaaay!
Thursday, October 16, 2008
So my school has this game development club, and we're currently coming up with ideas for enemies and characters. There's supposed to be these hordes of easily-defeated small goblins that the main character can just wade through, so these are a couple of fast sketches of what they might look like, cobbled together from my own thoughts and some ideas from other club members.
I'm going to hell for drawing that poor cat. Click the thumbnail to see the full version, as usual.
This business again. I do other things, I swear. I just need to get off my huge fat butt and scan them in.
I tried a few different things this time, with gouache and a different kind of watercolor paint. I'm not sure if I like the results, but I learned that I don't really like gouache!
This is what I do instead of working on an eight page paper.
Continuing the grapple with scanning watercolors. A lot of information was lost on the third panel, which makes me sad because I really liked it. *sadface*
Moogles are so darn cute. I think the Ivalice versions are my favorite, because they're basically tiny tiny furry engineers and there's nothing that isn't lovable about that.
I don't think I even have to say that I don't own them or Final Fantasy, but hey!
I'm learning how to use Aftereffects for things other than just compiling video clips. Walk cycles! Mind, this is supposed to be a -looping- animation, but since youtube doesn't seem to have a looping view option, you just get two seconds. :( If you're curious why I didn't just cut and paste the frames to stretch it out, it's because I used a thing called the Puppet tool. It takes your flat 2D image and sort of makes it a mesh, which allows for deformations like the bending of the feet there, or the swaying of the trunk. Now I'm sure there must be a way, but I have no clue right now if I can copy and paste puppet tool keyframes, because I can't even select them in the timeline...
The puppet tool can be a bugger, which is why I didn't make new frames. I'm told there's a way to anchor the feet to a specific place in the picture plane, which would've been a huge help, because without that the feet dip too far down or the toes twist backwards and do all kinds of silly business. Lots to learn.
He's also sliding a bit, isn't he? My teacher told me I can stop that by making the background stop moving whenever he puts his foot down. When I tried that, it looked really jerky and unnatural, so I just tried slowing it down a bit instead. I think I need to do a little more though, because he's still got a little of a gliding walk.
I do like the way his trunk sways though! How cute.
I'm not sure what he is. I made him up for a sound-syncing exercise for Intro to Animation class, years ago, and he sort of cropped up now and then in my sketchbooks. Then for this walk cycle assignment I said, well, I like long sticklegs, so he's perfect!
I call him a trunkbird.
Edit: ... I just realized that I could take the Quicktime movie into Aftereffects and just paste a bunch of them together to make it longer. Quicktime also adds an extra frame to the end which throws off the sound looping. Anyone know why it would do that?
This is actually something very silly I started in class one day. I started snickering uncontrollably as I was working on it, and decided to slap some color on it and make up a weird story. ... Except then I got curious about what would happen after they flew off, so I did another.
I was also running on about three hours of sleep, so that proooobably had something to do with it.
Anyway, I'm not sure where they're going or if they'll ever find happiness and unboredom, but here's the first two parts of their so-called Amazing Journey. (Click to view, huge images.) I should also note, the mysterious owner of the cookie planet is not my character, but a friend's. She's over there in the links list, under 'lyra'!
I am writing complete gibberish, pay no attention to it at all whatsoever tra la la la la mudspots in the spaghetti sauce, top hats are keen! Who wants jelly?
Mister Peppersauce, I have your order of fifty left socks with holes in the heels.
Hooray! For me for you and for your cottontail too!
