Abstraction

The past week has been fairly traumatic brain-cell wise. We've just started the wheels rolling on a major project at school, and by Friday I was out of it. I took some time off to chill on Saturday, and then today's been about trying to get stuff done for the project...

To help cool down the mush in my skull, I did a couple of digital abstracts in Open Canvas 1.1. I was on the BlueSky Challenge Blog the other day and one of the challenges was to do an abstract. I guess the idea stuck in my brain. Although I've also been reading Life with Pablo, which is about the ten years that Francoise Gilot spent with Pablo Picaso. So old Pab has been in my brain lately too.




These were pretty fun to do, so I might do some more soon if I can. I took a lot of inspiration from Andrew (Andriod) Jones for the first one. It also followed a theme that I've enjoyed doing in the past; sharp circles.
The second one was inspired by a the colour of a picture I took a while ago. Also had a bit of Andriod in there as well with the 'buildings'.

Comments are welcome as always!

Lates!

Kicking off the New Year

This post is mainly for my Dad (who is a Drummer/musician), but everyone else will probably enjoy this video too. So Dad, IF you manage to access my blog again, I hope that you get a kick (buh dum bum) out of this video!


More art coming soon!!


Happy Christmas to all, and to all a Happy New Year!

Destroy YouTube

Please excuse the fact that this is only 3 seconds long. I'll upload a longer version in another post.

So...I manage to get a decent looking render out of Maya, works fine. It's an .avi compressed with DviX. No problems.

I want to shove YouTube. Like...push it. You know, playground styles. I've tried a bunch of times to upload the clip you see above. Apparently, this one was a total fluke, since I tried to upload the same file with more keys. Didn't take. I even had a crack at uploading a simple turntable test of the hand model I did. And that's totally buggered. I don't get it.

If anyone reading this has had similar issues with uploading to YouTube, and has found a solution, please leave me a comment. I'd love to be able to show some of the animation that I've done so far, as well as being able to showcase my models better by including video with images. Bleh. I want to get this sorted so I can show people stuff!

Anywho, I won't go into any details about the character at the moment, since I plan on uploading some renders soon. There are a few little texturing things that I didn't manage to sneak in on time for the project hand in, so I'm still going to be doing some minor tweaks here and there. Expect more in another post...

It's late and I'm pissed off with YouTube, so I'm probably going to go to bed now.

Night all



P.S. Why can't you loop a YouTube video? Sheesh.

Pocoyo!

Hey hey!

Wanna drop a quick line about a show that I've just this very day been made aware of! It's possibly the best pre-school show on the tele, although I don't watch pre-school shows...or television...but this gets my vote!

The show is wonderfully animated and the character designs are simple, clear, and utterly effective! Please, please, please pass on the word about this wonderful series to everyone you know!

Check out the Official Site and Official Blog for a few full episodes and some great behind-the-scenes material!

Unluckily enough for me, I stopped watching the tele a couple of years ago, and so I don't know how many channels air Pocoyo at the moment. I know that YTV airs it here in Canada, but beyond that you'd have to look for yourself. It has been sold in over 100 countries around the world though, so wherever you live, there's a great big chance that you can watch it on tv tomorrow!

You CAN find a fair number of Pocoyo episodes on YouTube, but If you can watch it on tele where you live, that'd probably help the creators out a bit more :D



Off you go then!


P.S. Pato and Pocoyo are my favorite characters ;)

GI Joe...mel script!

*GI_Joe Mel script used for Global Illumination/Ambient Occlusion

Back from the grave!

This past week has been a trifle strange. I've had a cyst on the back of my right wrist for years and it's almost never caused me any trouble. At the start of this week I noticed that my wrist was a bit sore after spending time on the computer, and then the next day it was worse, and the next worse still. I had to take Wednesday off to see my doctor. I have to get it removed now, but that'll take plastic surgery, which is going to take a while to set up. Today has been a great day though, since I can really only feel any pain when I turn my wrist to an extreme angle. Otherwise I'm nearly back to normal pace for typing and mouse movements. I was expecting weeks and weeks of agony, but here's hoping that that was the worst of it for now.

On to the images! They're from a work in progress. Our assignment is to model a weapon and 3 game assets/props. I'm also working on a character model that's currently in the texturing stage. I'll have images of him in a seperate post once I'm done (hopefully this week). I'm planning on modeling a seperate weapon of my own design to go along with my character. I'll probably do that over the christmas break. For now he's going to get this model so he can at least shoot at stuff :) Oh, and sorry about the lack of cooler images. The Uzi model is pretty low poly, coming in at 418 Tris. Our limit is 1500 Tris, so I could still up the poly count to make it a bit smoother in certain areas. Still, I'm glad that I accomplished this in so few polys. Also, it only took about 2 hours or so to do from start to finish today, which is awesome because it would've taken me a couple more hours to model a few weeks ago! Yay for learning!

So once I texture this sucker I'll throw up some more pictures. Oh, and I'll toss in a wireframe shaded pass too so you can see how I modeled it :D

Until next time!

Andreas Deja on German Talkshow

Wowza!

I found this over at Cartoon Brew; a hilarious interview with Andreas Deja, the great Disney animator! The kicker is that it's entirely in German (which is also the hilarious part). But! Andreas does a characature of the host on the spot and shows a couple of scar drawings too! Check it out!

Also, the friggin' stage moves around! How cool is that?!

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Hopefully in the next few days I'm going to upload some doodles as well as some new stuff from Maya. I'm having some trouble getting my animation onto YouTube properly, so any delay will be mainly technical.

Take care and enjoy the video!

P.S. This post is totally for you Mitch :D




Addendum:

Simpsons Movie Trailer

The Del Carmens

Howdy dowdy folks!

No art today. I know I know, all 2 of you YEARN for my scribbles. Alas, I'm in more of an inspiration-seeking mood today.

So, because I can't seem to settle down and actually do work, I decided to take some time and do what used to occupy a great deal of my time; searching for art on the net.

One of my first stops became the last, and I've spent a good deal of time roving around familiar territory. That territory happens to belong to one Ronnie Del Carmen of the Del Carmen animation artist trio.

Ronnie's Blog is overflowing with inspiration, in both visual and literary form. I highly recommend checking it out. With any luck, one day I'll be as kind and truthful a guy as he is, and maybe even as great an artist!

Here's a quick link to his blog: Ronnie Del Carmen Blog

Also check out his younger brother Louie's blog Random Annomalies

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a site or blog for Rick Del Carmen, so if you know of one, please leave a comment!


That's all for now!