Because cloudbees are too hard to take care of.

2011-09-28T21:44:00.005-04:00

Some new things from work. This character started as the cranky old man and ended up as the perky brunette. I think our modeler was tired of poking the vertices of burly dudes and wanted to poke some lady verts instead NO FRANK DON'T HIT ME I'M JOKING

Also, I'm usually left to my own devices when it comes to the dummy text while concepting the GUI. You'd think they'd learn not to trust me with such a MONUMENTAL task.

Also, when it comes to my free time, uh... I don't have free time! I've been at Animation Mentor for three months now, and it's absolutely incredible. I love it. I've just started on Class 2 this week, Psychology of Body Mechanics! I put up all my assignments here: http://gearrat.blogspot.com/

2011-06-25T04:03:00.003-04:00

I have never:

1. Painted a blue skintone.

2. PAINTED A BLUE SKINTONE.

3. Painted a white thing with another color.

So I borrowed Mass Effect's asari aliens to help me do both.

I like drawing faces a lot, which is why they usually have the most detail, etc. Must stop doing that!

2011-06-03T01:15:00.005-04:00

Just a few today. Animation Mentor starts up soon and I'm so excited for it I think I might puke.

Some 2D WIP stuff!

Click for full view, as always.

National Gallery. My brother takes pictures and sometimes I paint from them.

... I wonder if you can actually paint inside the National Gallery?

A friend and I are batting around ideas for a TF2 map. I really love some of the inaccessible areas in TF2, which usually hold things like mysterious figures in front of fireplaces, remote control frogs, wooden cows, computers, seeeeecret briefcases and the like, so I wanted to think about that tiny corner of the world for a little bit.

Y-yes, that fireproof suit does belong to who you think it does.

2010-10-05T23:32:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, when I've been handed a rig, I make it do silly things to get a better idea of how it "drives".

Model, texture and rig are both by Frank Orellana. Sound clip is from "Satisfaction" by Benny Benassi.

2010-09-27T20:32:00.003-04:00

Back on the blog boat.

I've started drawing random people downtown. It gives me an excuse to get out of the house and eat delicious downtown foods, but I'm the sort of person who gets nervous when other people notice I'm looking at them. Time to invest in MIRROR LENSES YEAHH

And then some actual work related stuff.

2010-03-11T02:43:00.002-05:00

Wait wait, posting a painting before I go to bed.

(Yeah, I'm still awake. I can't sleep if I feel like I want to paint instead. This is detrimental to my sleep hygiene.)

Toes

2010-03-10T23:27:00.005-05:00

Actually, this is fairly old, but I forgot to put it up here. :( This is the gnome player avatar I designed for Bamboo Bunch. It's kind of become special to me in a weird way because I had a hard time designing this character. I was deliberately trying to avoid the "red cap, old man" image that everyone gets with gnomes, or the somewhat creepy tiny men in WoW. My somewhat embarrassing first attempts just made him look like the young spunky hero of a 90's Japanese RPG.

One of my superiors had suggested something more steampunky, all fantastical Victorian fashion with a good deal of brass and cogs and goggles. It made a kind of sense, because the gnomes were supposed to be the tech-savvy tinkerers of the world. I had some fun thinking about waistcoats and spats, and it looked sort of neat. But I couldn't help but think that it'd be kind of silly to work around metal all the time and wear fancier clothing that could get snagged and ruined. (It's possible I overthink this stuff.) Plus, while I felt like the fairy looked like a character that a little girl would want to play, I didn't feel that a little boy would want to play the gnome yet.

I was kind of stumped by this point. I knew that I wanted the gnome to be more squat and square-bodied, the opposite of the taller and skinnier fairy. I knew I wanted them to look practical, and I went through a dozen iterations of welding aprons and overalls and welding masks and heaven knows what else. I was getting kiiiinda frustrated, so I went weeping (not really) to my coworkers and they were like "Uhhh what if you did this more like this" and sent me back to my broom closet. I ended up liking what I got.

The gnome's final in-game appearance:

Well I say final, but none of his hairs were modeled yet.

I do not actually possess purple hair.

2010-02-17T02:38:00.002-05:00

That's just me being nuts with the color.

2010-02-02T01:04:00.001-05:00

I was feeling KIND OF BLUE.

This one is my new favorite. I decided to leave my other eye unfinished because it makes me look like a horror movie.

Things I've Noticed.

2010-01-27T00:29:00.000-05:00

I got a forehead like a dinner table, looooool.

2010-01-24T02:47:00.005-05:00

I told Tommy that I was going to do something a bit silly with today's portrait, but I was actually ONLY JOKING D: but then he took me seriously and said he'd do the same thing

SO THEN I HAD TO STEP UP TO THE PLATE

I kept moving my head. If I ever go back to Dr. Sketchy's, I am tipping the model so hard.

2010-01-22T02:02:00.005-05:00

About a half hour, chillaxing before bed, listening to history podcasts while I work. Time for a new angle on this mirror, I think. Gotta stop giving people views all the way up my nose. Say hello, boogers!

Lololol.

2010-01-21T00:47:00.003-05:00

New Year's res, remember this blog.

Trying to get better at painting, lately. I love doing 2D stylized art, but I've kind of ignored things like painting for awhile, so I'm trying to get back into it, especially because at work we've been having to do more realistic textures.

For starters, self portraits. I expect I will get very sick of looking at myself.

The first one, from yesterday:

The second one from today:

Oh my goodness, I look like a Chinese propoganda poster, haha.

I'm trying to loosen up my brush strokes, because I have this tendency to smooth everything until it looks sort of cel shaded, while also being economical. Tomorrow I'm putting a time limit on these, because I sort of just painted until I had to take a potty break. I will also try to stop being slack jawed.

Oh my lord, Posemaniacs. I like to do at least ten minutes of 10-30 second drawings, just to loosen up a little before I start anything.

Ahaha... I love this character, I really do. I use her in a friend's tabletop game, as a female robot version of Sun Wukong. It's not really her fault, as she was commissioned by a rather silly man who wanted a little sex appeal for his martial arts school's advertisements on the telly, and instead got more than he bargained for with Hou-Zi, who is generally disrespectful, immature, exceedingly arrogant, selfish, and if she could, she'd fling her own poo. Used as brushpen practice.

Sharks and ladies

2009-12-10T00:42:00.003-05:00

Oh man, recently I went with some friends to Dr. Sketchy's! Careful of that link, it's not... entirely safe for work. It's basically a place where artists can go and draw models that are far more interesting than the ones you typically get in school. It was actually the first time I've drawn a human from life in like... five years, so I was incredibly rusty, but I enjoyed myself.

These were my two favorites from the evening. I purposely went with a cartoonier style with these two pics, because the model was so cute and her outfits really seemed to lend themselves well to it.

... Yeah, I have nothing to say about that face to the left. I'm not sure what's going on there and I'm the one that drew it.

I do really want to go back to Dr. Sketchy's, but the problem is that it's always on a Monday night, when I typically want to get to bed early for the next day's work, and I live a good solid hour from Baltimore, driving.

Also, I am a tiny little suburbanite and Baltimore at night scares me a bit. Even when I went there with a group of friends, it was pretty scary. Then when we left Dr. Sketchy's, there was a POOL OF BLOOD on the sidewalk.

...

Seriously. A pool of blood. That area of Baltimore is supposed to be fairly safe, and a friend of mine who lives there said that sort of thing never happens. (I would sincerely hope not.) It makes me wish there was a similar sort of life drawing gathering in my area.

In less bloodied news, another friend of mine has been toiling away on a screenplay that he hopes to see animated on TV one day. It's an impressive bit of work, do go see it.

I'm really fond of the character named Naur, and did a fast concept for him:

On the right you can see what kinds of sharks and shapes I was generally thinking about, along with what I remembered of the character's reclusive personality and what would be appropriate for a simplified 2D character design that would not make the animator's wrists fall off in the deepest grips of carpal tunnel. I admit that it was my own wrists that I was thinking of, because some other friends of mine (I swear I am not trying to make myself sound popular) want to get started on animating it ourselves, even roughly. I partially want to do it to keep my hand in with 2D animation, since I've only done 3D lately, and partially because I really do hope he can pitch this to a network one day.

More art to come soon, I've been in a doodly mood lately.

2009-08-11T16:23:00.003-04:00

Aw, my poor neglected blog, c'mere for a hug.

Been working on a lot of stuff lately, but I can't post any of it until I get the OK. In the meantime, here's some character concepts for an MMO we're working on called Bamboo Bunch! It's for the young ones, so don't expect 25 man raids.

This is the redesigned player avatar fairy. Concept is me, colors are Helen Zhang.

Initially my first attempt at redesigning the fairy was pretty generic, more of the "girl with wings on" stuff you see like, everywhere. I did kind of like that I was angling for her dress to look as if it were made of flower petals, along with this larger petal on the back that was reminiscent of a bustle, like on Victorian-era dresses that make you look as if you've got a huge perky bottom. So when it was back to the drawing board, I kept that petal's overall shape, but made it into the two halves of a ladybug's shell. I put the antennae on her as a sort of lark at first, but it actually turned out to work pretty well, as larkish ideas sometimes do, as it gave her a kind of cute insect-ish look. The fairies in Bamboo Bunch are also avid gardeners, and gardens love their bugs.

P.S. The ladybug shells are harvested only from ladybugs that have died of natural causes.

Aaaand this is what she looks like in the game! Mostly. The hair's painted on because she was modeled bald so that we can have hair customization options, and at the time this screenshot was taken, none of the hairs were modeled yet. Oh, and in the final version, she does have her pretty sparkly wings. 3D model by Tommy Truong, textures are all Helen Zhang.

We also have a development blog over here with more neat stuff we've been adding to the game. Go check it out, it'll tickle us.

Day ... what is it now, 5?

2009-04-07T16:57:00.003-04:00

Whoops, forgetting to post things here! This one is actually two days old.

Hmm... think I'm less fond of this one than the others. It's a Peugeot 207, and I have no idea how they drive, but I want that car just because it's so gosh darn cute.

I'm working on some character designs for a Flash animation I want to do. Gotta remember to speedpaint -and- design!

2009-04-01T04:40:00.001-04:00

I think snails are awesome.

You know what's hard to paint? ROCKS.

I should possibly work on rocks tomorrow. With the way I handled working on plants, don't be surprised if I end up posting a picture of a quarry.

Day 3

2009-03-30T02:42:00.003-04:00

This was another two-dayer. That's me in a cafe in London, having my first English breakfast.

I know it's very unfinished, but man, my own face is freaking me out! In the actual photo I'm making this very intense stare and it's giving me the willies. I wouldn't be having this problem if I wasn't looking at the camera.

It's my "don't interrupt me for a photo when I'm eating" face.

Edit: Whoa, this looks completely different on a better monitor. For one, that bus is totally eye searing.

This thing again

2009-03-28T02:04:00.003-04:00

OH I BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT. You thought so, didn't you? Oooooh, you can stuff it!

Actually I was working on this one for two nights. (I've never really used Painter before, and I was fighting it the whole way.) This is from a photo I took in Monet's Garden over in Giverny, since I was feeling guilty about painting other people's photos yesterday.

Remember how I complained about being horrible at plants? Well I'm still horrible! When I did the Kodkod, I said to myself "I'm gonna just paint a freaking tree tomorrow." And then I decided to paint Monet's Garden, which isn't so much a freaking tree as a wall of freaking trees.

It's a beautiful location though. http://giverny.org/gardens/

So here's a thing.

2009-03-26T01:58:00.003-04:00

It occurred to me that I don't paint enough. I'm trying this thing someone suggested to me, which is finding a photo on Google Image Search, and then painting from it (also from life). I'm seeing how long I can stick to this, but I want to try to do this for the rest of April at the VERY least.

Tonight's result (click for full size, though it's small anyway):

The Kodkod is the smallest cat in the Americas, apparently. It's very cute. It had a (VERY CUTE) segment on Planet Earth where it ate moths. Watch and groan at David Attenborough's puns!

I think tomorrow's subject will be a tree... I'm not great at painting masses of leaves!

Texturing maggots

2009-03-24T17:08:00.003-04:00

Oh, textures. I did these over my summer internship at Legendary Studios, along with smaller artistic responsibilities. Sadly I don't personally own 3dsMax, so I can't show what these look like -on- the objects, so these two are a bucket of primer and some antifreeze.

Global Game Jam

2009-02-03T22:01:00.004-05:00

Oh man, we finished the GGJ this Sunday, and it was awesome. Well, it was tiring, but it was awesome.

This is our game, it is also awesome.

Please note that it's meant to be a two player game, but if you really wanna control both birds, you can. It's just super hard. Open it in Flash Player if you can, not a browser, because it'll look strange if you do. It'll run fine, just look strange.

I think we forgot to include the controls in the documentation because we wrote it in like the last MINUTE before the deadline, so the blue jay (I made that blue jay!) controls with WASD and the cardinal with the arrow keys.

Our actual idea was to have the tether break if any of those obstacles (the apples, the biplane, etc.) hit it, and when it broke it would cause a game over, so that the two players are competing for points but they're also collaborating to keep the game going. The code didn't work out in time though, saaad. The obstacles will take off points though, so avoid them anyway!

Trunkbirds eat space barnacles

2008-12-16T19:06:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-12-15T15:09:00.003-05:00

This is a short little in-progress clip of my senior project. Modeling and rigging was done by a friend (http://www.ekester.com).

Still working on it! Tirelessly!

Terrifying Senior Project Time!

2008-10-28T20:59:00.004-04:00

Oh, it's that wonderful time of year, yes indeed.

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!

2008-10-16T17:47:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-10-14T20:31:00.003-04:00

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v481/Zaphy/doodles/?action=view¤t=j43_project2.flv

I've never animated in Flash before. It was an... interesting experience.

INTERESTING

This is based off of Shel Silverstein's poem "Bear in There". I don't think it's complete yet, it needs sound and also less of the floaty text.

(I fail at embedding videos.)

Dana and Beans's Amazing Journey, 5

2008-03-25T22:49:00.002-04:00

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!

Dana and Beans's Amazing Journey, 4

2008-03-21T23:46:00.003-04:00

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*

Kupo

2008-03-21T01:49:00.004-04:00

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!

Dice Fight

2008-03-19T15:12:00.003-04:00

This is actually kind of an oldie, but I'm still fond of it.

I should note, the music isn't mine, it's by a Japanese electronica group called Capsule and their music is extremely awesome. They're on iTunes!

Dana and Beans's Amazing Journey, 3

2008-03-19T00:30:00.005-04:00

The next bit!

I'm trying something different in each installment. I'm not sure if I like the panels with or without the black ink border.

Beans, you jerk.

Walk Cycles

2008-03-16T20:07:00.005-04:00

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?

Dana and Beans's Amazing Journey, 1 and 2

2008-03-09T04:39:00.013-04:00

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'!

...MAN, watercolors are hard to scan!

Test post!

2008-03-07T22:41:00.001-05:00

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!