Category: Animation

As always, click to embiggen. If you’re thinking, “That looks familiar,” that’s because like the last rendered image I posted, this one is taken from “I See The Earth!” This one’s embellished little more than the last one, in that I added a road and a couple vehicles. Taking each element in turn:

• The ground is taken from NASA’s CGI moon kit, so is in theory accurate, but the scale I’m sure is all wrong. It acts weird when the camera pans, which I assume has something to do with the displacement.
• I was too lazy to properly texture the road, but decided this was retro-futuristic so could get away with it just being made of Space Metal™. Never mind the lack of off-ramps.
• The stars aren’t right, but unless your name is Neil I doubt you care.
• Roads need cars, so I created the green one. I didn’t like how it came out, so I went looking for other inspiration and found an old Tonka Toys Mini Futuristic Turbo Rocket Space Car. It’s being driven by a Red Sox fan at much higher than the speed limit.
• I got frustrated with texturing the front-most structure, so decided to try an experiment, printing out the UV map and using a lightbox to do hand coloring on a separate sheet of paper, which I then scanned back in. That’s what the more organic texture is made from. The boxes are vector, because fountain pen lines weren’t cutting it.
• There’s an animated version of this I’m not posting. The still below is from a frame or two after the image above, except closer and with the camera following the red car. The lunar landscape looks much better all blurred out.

So that’s how I spent a good number of my January off hours.

Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother.

Small victories– I’ve been following the goings-on at The 11 Second Club for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve actually gotten an entry finished to the point where I felt it could be submitted. Of course, as soon as I submitted the thing I immediately saw a couple issues that should be addressed, but it’s too late now. I expect it’ll get hammered in comments/voting, but at least I finished something for a change. At any rate, take a look if you’re so inclined…

June 2010 11 Second Club Entry, “It didn’t make the noise”

One last thing– the notes on the source audio were a little vague this time. This comes from the current season of Doctor Who, “The Time of Angels.”

Animated sequence illustrating Fibonacci, Golden Ratio, etc. Nothing earth-shaking if you’ve been exposed to this stuff before, but very pretty.

As promised, the last exercise from my recent animation course. Just ignore the zeroes in the corner– that’s a frame counter I forgot to turn off. The motion blur seems to screw with it’s ability to actually count. It could probably still use some work, but for the most part I’m happy with it.

Running and kicking a ball!

For whatever it’s worth…for the last several weeks I’ve been taking part in the Animation Personal Trainer program, and the following are two of the four exercises I had assigned. I think they’re self-explanatory. I haven’t decided whether I want to post the walk cycle or not (does the world really need another walk cycle on the web?), but the last I’ll probably post once it’s done. I haven’t gotten feedback on it yet, and it needs some polishing before it goes out into the world.

• Jumping on a box!
• Pounding a table!