goodbye NTU - ADM

yes... today I officially moved out of NTU... It's quite sad, after spending there almost a year and having such a great time! I made awesome friends, met some great talents and learned a lot myself. A very productive year. I would recommend it to anyone who is currently pursuing a degree and not only in animation. You get in touch with lots of very interesting people with different cultures, perceptions, languages, behaviors, there is really a huge amount of different things involved in an exchange. Especially if you go to a place that can be very different from what one calls "home".

A lot of things have happened and I wanted to update you all.

I started my internship already 2 weeks ago, and I managed to finish my final Assignment 1 week ago... That was freaking crazy!!! I was already working on the internship but still had to work overnight on stuffs for school.. so I just managed to sleep 8 hours in over 80 hours of on mode. I was a walking zombie! I shouldn't have started another chapter in my life without having the last one closed... one just shouldn't go ahead of things, or else one has to do really unhealthy things. It was sickening... but eventually I finished all of them so here they come.


Digital Painting 2

For Digital Painting 2 my Assignment was to do a camera projection, since Martin Constable(my professor) wanted me to go beyond Photoshop. This piece was really fun to paint since I could be very loose and paint fast. I preferred to spend my time learning Nuke. I had no experience at all in it before doing this so it was quite a challenge. Now I feel comfortable with it and really like the program too. I got to play with as many nodes as I could and tried to learn the most out of this. I also learned a lot of the possibilities it brings but also about some limitations certain very fancy nodes have. Especially when messing around with semi-transparent layers due to the style of the painting...

Thanks a lot Martin for all you have taught me since Digital Painting 1, and for always challenging me in fun ways!


Character Animation 2

It was very nice to work with Junyi Lee and Ryan Tan on this, we all put a lot of time in our shots and had some very pleasant animating sessions.
The shots of this animation I did are now actually rendered(very fast though). But those will come in my next animation reel that is almost done, and this time, with music ;) 

I cannot publish a compilation of all the works we did this semester since the exercises with only the head with lipsync cannot be publicly shown. I don't know if you guys noticed but the old ones are not to be seen anymore either. It happened that the rig we got to do exercises with was not a publicly open one... So we had to remove all animations from the web. I'm sorry guys.

It was a really cool semester with Davide Benvenuti again as our mentor, he is a really good professor. He will never beautify what he sees, so his opinions will always be sincere. It may take some time to get used to hear a senior animator talking how bad our animations look like and all we have to fix, but that's the best way to learn in my opinion, especially for animation. I am very thankful I had the opportunity to be his student. Ringrazio il mio amico!


Pre-Production

Our(Daniel Lee and me) collaboration FYP project was presented last week to all the animation faculty in ADM. With a lot of concept art, character designs, models, techniques... There was a lot to show. and it was well received. We got the definitive green light. Hans Bacher also agreed to be our Mentor. We really look forward to work and learn a lot with him! You can check his Blog out. He has done quite some awesome stuff for many animated masterpieces, including a lot of very influential work for the Golden 90's of Disney, and has written the book Dream Worlds(for the ones who perhaps know about it). So we will try now our best to meet his high standards and expectations!

More to come in a future blog we are doing for the project in itself. We have to do that in order to keep both universities informed of our progress. We have already developed our pipeline, a step that was more complicated than usual since we won't be working on the same place for many months. So we actually have our Project folder Synced in our computers.


That was it... the last post of all the things I got to do in ADM. With this, chapter closed. Now to focus on our final student Shortfilm and for the next months most of all on my internship. That is by the way in Lucasfilm Singapore n_n I'll be an intern in the animated Feature department for the next 6 months. I can't really say much more about it, but I'm really enjoying it till now!

cheers,

santy.

Finals

Yesterday was the last day of class... now all the final assignments have to be done and I'm quite busy at the moment since I gotta finish them before my internship starts on the 9th of may. n_n

Therefore this post will go right to the point.

ANIMATION!

DIGITAL PAINTING!

This is the plate I planned and drew to do the camera projection

Nuke is quite nice btw, I got the hang of it now and am almost done with this one.


PRE-PRODUCTION!

Well this is a tough one to document on a personal Blog, so we are soon opening a Blog for our project where everything will be documented. =) Since it's a co-production we have to document it so that both Universities can stay updated on the progress

Basically what we have done is Look Development and Concept art, here one painting I did:

I only did one because I was more busy with the technical stuff, here one render test with our NPR

This is only one test of several I did so far, I tried to simulate depth of field with this method. The focus would be first on the green tree, then goes to the orange one, goes behind both and then comes back to the macro section where everything blows up haha. It is interesting, but confusing. So we have decided to bury this method for simulating DoF and advance with traditional alternatives. Keeping the look there.

The character design is ready too btw, we both decided on the final one after Daniel literally drew hundreds of different fly's! So we began modelling as well to have something to present on the 12th.

You see an eye rig? Correct, while the model is still not finalized, its actually still instanced, the eyes where pretty much done so I decided to begin rigging them. Since its the only way to facially express himself they gotta be damn flexible. and it is by far the most complex eye rig I have done so far. But works quite good and is really easy to animate.

Since we want a very cartoony style of animation it they had to be fully deformable as well.

The eyelids actually follow the eye movement as well. And by how much percent it follows is completely user defined, and even keyable. n_n

I love rigging creatures, there is always fun challenges involved!


We also had a 2 day acting workshop with Bob Feldman. Super fun! Quite useful too, I gotta include some things I learned to my animations in the future. Here a picture with an awesome team of friends.

and well that's it folks, I gotta sleep and continue work tomorrow.

all the best,

santy.

last month in ADM...

yes...in about a month my exchange at NTU ends, quite crazy... But this post won't be about that I just wanted it to remember me that I have to enjoy it the most! =D

Be ready for a very long post, even longer than the last one! haha but very informative and with a lot of WIP. So grab a cup of coffee or teh peng(a mixture of tea and milk here that I have come to like a lot) and let's start!

So you may be eager to know if the interview for the internship went well I suppose… well I’m only telling you that I even got a second interview after the first one. n_n And that I will be staying a little bit longer than expected in Singapore. ;) More information on that in the future.

I can’t really hide my excitement right? Waaah santy stop writing about it! Back to University work! The Character animation post last time was a little weak so this time I will make it up for you. Some of it is very embarrassing haha but yeah it’s WIP and the result at the end will hopefully fulfill all our expectations.

So after deciding the track we tried to change the story a little bit and make it our own. We also decided that having 3 inactive characters out of 7 during the whole clip would be useless. We decided to replace them and give special attributes. And here a turntable I did to present you all our characters!

Characters in order of appearance: Boss, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange, Mr. White, Mr. Pink and Mr. Blonde

The ones I was in charge of doing were the Boss, Mr. Orange and Mr. Brown. It was really fun to do them. It was quite funny too when my friends were asking me what I was doing while I was making Mr. Brown. =P

The Human characters were done with only one rig. We are using the Morphy rig made by Josh Burton. Very powerful rig, I have not come across any impediments for our animation either, though it is slow as hell when you place 4 in one scene, but yeah we have to deal with that.

So as for our story, here our animatic:

It is horribly primitive and confusing! haha but time is short and we had the picture clear in our heads, so we didn’t bother to make it more understandable and went right to layout.

After this we began the blocking, fixing the problems we had with the layout. The sorting of shots for each one of us happened automatically, simply the one who was free started with the next few shots. In the end we were accidentally happy with the shots each one of us ended with. I'm in charge of all the shots that you will see in color.

After this we did the second blocking pass, fixing here and there, and extending our blocking.

And the last blocking pass adjusting timing(there are still problems) which we will fix on the next passes that will be already splined, so this was the end of our blocking.

I also got by accident to to the tween Machine pluggin... Why didn't anyone tell me about it earlier? I came to it about 3 days ago and tried it out on the blocking of Mr. Pink's close up. And wow... I like it! it's really so useful at the blocking stage! In betweens are done much faster and threfore I had more fun and did more! The cool thing I find is that one can go much deeper in detail with the timming and in between poses, keeping the whole thing in flow, without already beeing in spline mode. But the rules of animation have to be very clear for you since it's a very technical pluggin and it may be a little weird at the beginning thinking in percentages but sticking to spacing and timing, but once you get it... Yeah, you will feel it once you tried it. I can't wait till I do the next animation and I have to block it out! Too bad I discovered it too late, else my blocking would have looked much better and fluid. But I won't change the irregular blocking that I already did, since I did it already thinking in splines, so everything should look ok when I spline it up.

I also did a quick rendertest for our animation, lighting it up!

 

Oki this is getting really long and it was only one course of the ones I'm taking... But don't worry the others are not that extensive.

For Digital Painting 2 I'm currently learning Nuke. I will have to do a camera projection of the last matte painting I'm currently doing. It will be stylized again though, since I'm planning to use it as look development for our FYP. So no more photo-real stuff this sem, I'm sorry.  So in order to paint it I gotta see how this thing gets done! I'm doing that right after I finish this post.

Pre-Production dor our FYP is advancing as well. We are mainly trying different styles and levels of abstraction so everything will look different and this are all early concepts.

As you see I approach character design in a very different way lately. I develop the silhouette first, then if I think it's woth it we take it to colour. I find it a very effective, especially if you are working right away digitally and not on paper. Try it out, it may work better for you too.


But we were not really only working on that. We were also concerned about transporting a stylized style to 3D. So I decided to give it a try last weekend. I remembered there was a specific style I liked a lot that could use a lot of the advanges of 3D but make it still look painterly.

It looks easy right? but it's a pain in the butt to do it in Maya! I have not tried it in Lightwave, but I don't think they will have magic sliders like in the video. We tried really hard to do it on Maya in order to use it for the Arthur production one year ago but we didn't succeed... Well, this time was different, it took me about 2 days to come with all the out of the box thinking in order to make it possible.And since it is not shader based we can keep using all of mayas shaders and even make it work in very big scenes without much work.

This was the first 2 sec render test I did. It took per frame about 5 seconds to render. But that is with the motion blur in maya enabled and with quite high settings. I also tried it out with a motion vector pass of it and works wonders. Some ideas how to handle depth of field are also thought out and it seems very feasible, even to use it in production.
I would love to have more time to do more tests and continue developing this faster but there is a lot of other stuff I got to do at the same time. Plus there is a life I still gotta continue. n_n


By the way, now that we talked a little about Arthur, my two good friends Hannes Krieger and Mark Hacker, that did Arthur with me, are making their second production back in Germany. This time they are doing VFX, so if you are curious about what the other Arthurians are doing go check their website out!
http://ca.hdm-stuttgart.de/index.php/wip-produktionsblog.html?grp=vfx2011
I know it is in German... Nevertheless I'm trying to convince them to do it in English, so if you are interested help me out and drop them a message saying that you would really like to understand too =D


Ok I think we have reached half of the post now, so I might as well continue. Just kidding n_n I've got some Nuke tutorials to watch.

I hope you could take something good out of this post! Thank you for reading! It's always nice to know there are people interested.

cheers,

santy.

long time no see!

Hello everyone!

Long time no see! But a lot has happened since then that I wanted to share it with ya!

First some great news, as you may have already seen I managed to "finish" my demo Reel(it's hard to say the word finished for demo Reels) before recess week in order to send a specific application for an Internship. And guess what? Today I got a call from them; they are interviewing me on Friday so keep your fingers crossed! I'm really excited about this opportunity!!! May the force guide me well on this journey! n_n

Recess week was awesome! I learned how to dive and did my Open Water License on Pulau Dayang in Malaysia. It's quite an amazing experience, especially when we descended more than 12 meters and the sky was suddenly gone. It really felt like being in another world... Different pressure, different vegetation, different "sky", no gravity feel and connected to a machine that while breathing sounds like Darth Vader and while exhaling you hear and see all the air bubbles, that keep you alive, striving for the surface. It's definitely an enriching experience!

Nevertheless, while we were enjoying the sea and the hidden world underneath a terrible catastrophe occurred in Japan. I know you have already read this many times before but I think it is necessary to continue it. It's not only at the beginning when people need help. This battle is uncalled, really tough and a very long one. I had the luck of visiting this wonderful country and my memories of it and its people are delightful. So I would like to encourage you all to help, help this nation that has always inspired and motivated us one way or another.

This program of artist donations was founded by Dice Tsutsumi, Japanese art director at Pixar. You can contribute directly to this program through Give2Asia. Or do it through your local Red Cross or another organization of your trust. The important thing is your help! I personally did it through this one.

Back to more pleasant topics although I don't know if it should be called that, I just realized that in two more months my exchange programme will be over... It has been such a great time and it just flies away so fast. But it is not time to think a lot about that yet. I just really need to enjoy this last months to the fullest =D So here the news from the University side.

Some very good news is that our coproduction FYP/Studio production between Daniel Lee(NTU) and myself(HdM) has been approved from both universities! So we may be the first ones (I've never heard of something similar) to do a student coproduction in animation. We will work one semester here in Singapore and one semester back in Stuttgart. It was not easy to get the approval and we will both have to make some sacrifices, but we hope, with our example, to foment the exchange of students in animation programs as well. This industry is so global… why not start to make it global at University level already?

Our story got already approved by our preproduction professor Hans Bacher and now we are dealing with the storytelling. The best way to bring it on the big screen! We are also researching different styles and making a lot of very rough concept art. Which I will be sharing here, at least my part. This is the first concept I did as a Digital Painting assignment.

Early concept

Let me emphasize, it is a very early concept so huge amounts of it will change, radically. Nevertheless you can already see we want to go to the more abstract and less CG look. Our story is about a little bug n_n and that will be it for the moment.

For character animation we (this time is group work! Ryan Tan and Junyi Lee are working with me) are preparing our last animation, in which we picked this 90 second audio file from a life action movie. 

Did you recognize the movie? The clip is from Reservoir Dogs! And we will have to animate it as originally as possible and give it certain twist. We have done more than just picking the clip but if I continue this post will be endless. So more to it next week.

That’s all folks,

may the force be with us!

cheers,

santy.

survived

Yeah... and feeling much better now. I'm still coughing a little bit but its oki. I don't have any fever anymore and can laugh again without much coughing. What about the 600 frames animation? It had still to be done, thats for sure so here it comes...

Don't be too harsh on me... I find it actually ok. Considering the short amount of time and me coughing every minute with headache for a few days. Should I put it in the reel? I have to finish it till friday, so a newer post will be coming with my first demo reel! It's a strange feeling to show all the work one considers his best, everything is so relative... Lets see how it goes.

There will be news on Digital Painting and Preproduction next week. This week I was focusing on animating and the applications for the internship.

see you guys around,

santy.

Still alive

I'm pretty sick at the moment, caught some cold because of the lab... It's freezing in here! But I'm still alive and work has still to be done.

here the more polished animations you saw last week:

(Head videos that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

I'll let them like that for the moment, I have a more pressuring animation to do. Here is a very rough blocking of the 600 frames assignment. I hope it's not too catastrophic... I'm splinning and refining at the moment, but thought this would be more interesting to see.

That was it for the moment, I gotta continue working and refining the new one now. I hope you guys had a great Valentine with your special ones.

Oh I almost forgot, we finally have green light from this universities to do a Final Year Project collaboration between my home University and NTU!!! I will be working with Daniel Lee, a very good friend of mine. More details to come on later posts.

coughing cheers,

santy.

rough times!

They want to take away our lives! haha I still can't believe it... Today we had Character Animation 2 again and guess what... We have to animate an entire character singing a song and acting. In principle sounds okay, but we have to do over 600 frames in 2 weeks!!! That means we have to do over 25 seconds of "finished" animation... Plus correct the old animations, go to university and do assignments for other courses as well... I don't know how we are expected to deliver good work in such a short time... but I will try my best.

I hope also that I can make this good enough for my reel. Because this will be the last animation piece I do before starting my Reel and sending it off for an Internship. Yep, I have to do an Internship for one whole Semester for my University back in Germany. It's a compulsory part of my studies over there.
So if anyone reading this is interested in recruiting me for 6 months, please don't hesitate to contact me! I'm very flexible with location since I can do the internship in whichever place I want around the world. =)


Back to university, I did mostly Character Animation, so here the revised version of the old animation

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

I don't feel that happy with this one I don't know why, somehow the body is missing. If I don't have the body it's difficult to not overact this head, since you don't really have anything to drag the attention of the spectator. Anyways my Prof. found it better than the old one but I will still try to do some kind of magic to this one.

The following one is one of the new ones

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that) 

I spend some time with this one and it can be seen. I am pretty happy with it and my Prof. didn't have any mayor complains about it. Some little fixes only.

The last one for this week

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

This was a very peculiar piece. I did this in less than 4 hours trying a different approach. I blocked everything and setted up the timing, without really focusing on lipsync or anything specific. I treated it as a whole to test it out and surprisingly I had something very usable right after I splined my blocking... It had never happened to me, I guess I'm learning little by little where to put my keys right. This is not really very far from the result right away after the blocking. But still it's overacted I know, although I don't think its thaaat bad to overact this line but well, now that I saw it a few times, I will pull it down and give it a little bit of love.


For the other classes I'm sorry but there is still nothing very tangible for Digital Painting 2 or Preproduction for this week, just a bunch of ideas I have to polish.


That's all folks, I gotta get some sleep. Rough times are approaching and I need to get some good healthy sleep for that.

cheers from the battlefield,

santy.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!
I hope the rabbit treats you well this year! We were yesterday downtown watching all the fireworks here in Singapore, really a nice experience. It's funny to be a foreigner and celebrate different traditions. We ended up wishing happy new year even between "westerns"!

Holidays were really nice! After an intensive Semester at NTU it was really relaxing to be away from the computer for a few weeks. My entire family came and we spent the time together traveling to Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. All the things I should have visited as an exchange student but were not possible because of lack of time during the semester! and yes I didn't take any computer, what a relief... only an Ipod so I could stay at least connected and draw a Christmas card for everyone!

Have you tried the app "Brushes"? Its kind of neat, although I prefer to paint with a pen than with the finger. But it works for painting on the go. I really hope you had a great Christmas and an awesome start in the new year, beeing it chinese new year or the usual new year for us!

Back to university. A new semester has started! Its already the second week and new Assignments are arriving. This semester is gonna be pretty fun. I chose Digital Painting 2 with Martin Conastable, Caracter Animation 2 with Davide Benvenuti and Preproduction with Hans Bacher. All very experienced and good people in their fields and from which I hope to learn a lot.

Digital Painting 2 started with a warm up Assignment. A set extension of a filmed footage Martin gave us.

given footage, all he told us was to keep an 16:9 aspect ratio

planned the composition and started

Began from the top onwards. Perspective was a challenge.

went to the ground and details

more details

finished extension

 I was quite happy with the result since I only had less than 3 days to work on it.


For Character Animation 2 we started lip syncing. That's really fun!

(Head video that I had to remove because the rig we got for the assignment is not a free one... sorry bout that)

of course it's not perfect, I over-acted him a little bit, he has too many expressions for that small phrase. I will revise it this week and post a newer version with another lip syncing Assignment I gotta do for next week.


For Pre-Production we haven't done that much. It's basically brainstorming for now. I am developing the story for my next short film, that will be the final one as a student... Oh my... that sounds sad... Well I'm not graduating yet, but we only have one semester to produce that short film in my University back in Germany and I don't think that is enough to keep up with the world class productions other University's produce. All of them have at least one year to work on them! So I'm beginning now(at least with Pre-Production), after all 3 and a half months are really extremely short for a 3D shortfilm. So wish me luck n_n. One thing is for sure, I'll do everything I can to not disappoint you all!


Another cool thing that happened this week was that Melvin Tan, head animator at Blue Sky studios, came to NTU to give a speech. It was really interesting and inspiring! It's just mind blowing to see how they push all the poses to the extreme, things I would not have thought would look good. But actually at 24 frames per second, pushing poses to the extreme for a few frames just gives it the little extra 2D kick to make them incredible! Im seriously trying that stuff out. He also saw my animations of Character Animation 1 and gave me a good feedback! Hell Yeah! Now I'm really motivated to keep getting better!

That was it for the first week. There is lots to come in the following weeks so stay tuned,

motivated cheers,

santy.

finished!

wow... that went fast... and that was stressful! especially in the end...

But everything went fine, I did the best I could I the amount of time given and am quite satisfied with the results of this semester =)

so here they come!


As you have seen, I finished "gotita." for the Animation Seminar course, what a relief... I really hope you liked i! Having a short film project is like having a never-ending submission that is poking you all the time on the same spot. But it is fun! =D I'm somehow starting to believe we are all passionate masochists… At least for the moment n_n

As promised the Production Focus of “gotita.”:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/gotita_Production_Focus.pdf

I put a lot of “behind the scenes” and “making of” there, but didn’t want to put 12 pages on this blog, so for all the people interested on how it was done, or just want to see some WIP just download the *.pdf

I also did an Icon for “gotita.”, so as a present to all of you guys that followed I give you a cute little pinkish droppy Icon =)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/Icon_gotita.ico

thanks again for all the support!

Rigging for Animation was a stone in my shoe… we had around one month to do this dragon rig but of course I could not spend the entire month rigging and not do anything for “gotita.” or Character Animation. Good rigs take time! Especially for a Reel, or if one wants to focus on developing new tools for animaion. In the end I spent only 5 days doing this rig, and only 1 night of those for the skinning so bare with the crappy skin.(and crappy video that was really rushed)

*Please if you do not really know how 3D works I would strongly advise you to skip this part and continue with Character Animation, it could get too specific and boring. =P

The Rig is pretty much basic, has everything it should have, of course I didn’t do Blendshapes for the head nor corrective Shapes, didn’t really have time for them. But one thing I really put a lot of effort was on developing the, what I call, “IKHybrid”. 

From experience it is always a struggle to make the IK’s look alive as if they would be following the body movement, that’s why I preferred mostly to animate in FK. But FK can get really painful too sometimes as some movements require much more work to get done as with IK, are not as user friendly and you cannot lock it to a certain position. There is already IK/FK seamless switching, but you would still have to deal with one of them at a time. 

So what if I could mix the best of each system? Keep the user friendliness of IK while still following the bodys movement and having a seamless locking of the IK if needed? That’s when the thought of the IKHybrid came to my mind. And after a lot of though and countless attempts I finally got the script right. It ended up not being as difficult as I was expecting it. n_n One usually overcomplicates things. It is like a parenting based on offsets in which the IK is parented at the same time to as many controllers as you want, making it follow the entire body or locking on the spot seamlessly.

I really should script more, it is fun too! A good alternative after lots of animating.

I am planning on developing a tool to automate all the scripting next semester if I have time. If you are interesting in having it let me know, it could motivate me. My Character Animation and Rigging Professor already want it!

Character Animation is done as well! I had to refine (in some cases redo) each animation already done and animate a quadruped’s Walk- and Runcycle and a final Acting scene with a Human, a Ball and a Quadruped. The stressing part of it was that our professor moved the deadline two days earlier so it got pretty rushed in the end haha

It’s interesting how it developed from the old ones… I think I have learned a lot, Everything goes much faster too =)

And now Digital Painting

I never knew I would end up doing things like these n_n

The last PSD was 950MB big and original res 4500x4500 at 300DPI

I hope you enjoyed seeing the progress during this semester! It was a tough but very fruitful one. Looking forward to the next one full of new works and suprises. =D

Thank you again for following!

yours,

santy.

P.S. I will do a last post before going on holidays, with a big Christmas surprise!

gotita.

At last... it's raining!

I hope you enjoy!

Vimeo:


Youtube:


Production Focus to come in the following weeks(when all the Final Assignments are done).
So keep tuned!

Thanks again to everyone that gave me their feedback! =D You were the best!

cheers,

santy.


P.S. The other deadlines are killing me T_T but it feels damn good to finally show you guys this!

To grunge, or not to grunge...

To grunge...

or not to grunge...

that's the question!


Feedback greatly appreciated

2 more weeks to go!

Hello again folks!

At last I found some time in the train to update the blog and tell you how I've been doing n_n. So sorry this comes a little late but after japan there was a lot to catch up.

First let me tell you a little bit about my trip, japan was awesome! Especially Kyoto! It was really as I was imagining it, all the small streets, the temples everywhere, the houses with the curved ceilings... Wow I really liked the city a lot! Tokyo was much more industrial and waaay too big for me, even Though I grew up in a 3,5 million city. I missed a real downtown there, many places in the city don't really look different from each other... But it was still very interesting to be there as a tourist. I even slept in a capsule hotel for 2 nights =D and it was not that bad as everyone thinks it is. haha   The only problem when visiting Japan is that one should go there knowing at least a little bit of kanji... Japanese really don't know how to speak English... but then again, that's part of the adventure =D it was a great trip!

Back again to my university work, it is unbelievable that in less than 3 weeks the semester is ending, time rushes so fast... =( But then again, a lot has happened and there is still a lot to happen in 3 weeks and the next semester!

For digital painting I had to finish the "Valentine" concept art I was doing, here the progress week by week until the last image..

week 2:

week 3:

week 4:

yep that's how it ended, week 1 is in the older post. I hope you like it =P it was really fun to do! Now we are working on the end assignment due by the first week of December. I'm planning to do a kind of fantasy picture, here the first WIP

I won't tell you guys how it is going to look in the end, because not even I have a clear picture of it hehe it will be a small surprise, hopefully a good one XD


For rigging we got the final assignment as well, we have to rig a dragon! The model is pretty cool.

It's really fun to work with it although the geometry is very high-res, so we have to skin in a self made low-res model and use a wrap deformer, let's see how that turns out. But the idea of giving a dragon a way to move and give him life is really motivating! So for the moment Neial will be paused.


For character animation there has been a lot going on. First I had to animate the ball with two feet playing a little bit of football, this is what it ended up doing n_n

Then after that some kind of sport with the human rig, I decided to be a little bit more adventurous and decided to animate someone throwing a shot put...and that rig was so not meant to be turned that much... Haha it was a real pain were I had to reposition the feet frame by frame in order to achieve something acceptable.. It was the second time I used reference for animating. Still have to correct many things but here it is

The last thing we had to do was dancing! That was really fun to do! I wanted to test out my dancing skills and tried an own dance... Don't ask for the reference video because I didn't film myself doing it haha, but there were many rehearsals!

It's of course still not final, we have to give by mid December all our animations polished out, then I'll go through all animations and polish them out. I will post everything when time comes ;) till then, bare with my crappy animations, I have to put more time on other things like "gotita".


So how is "gotita" doing? Pretty good, rendered the last shot last night. =D now I'm focusing on correcting some frames, matching particles and correcting colors while working at the same time in the credits and the sounds. The whole shortfilm is exactly 30 seconds long plus credits as planned  n_n had some problems with the last shot but I think they should be fixed now. I can't talk more specifically about it since I want the short to be a surprise for everyone =) but here I leave you three stills in full resolution of the short, they may look a bit different in the end but you can make yourselves a good idea how it looks like!

Hope you enjoyed them!

santy.


P.S. On another topic, have you seen Harry Potter 7 Pt.1 yet? Please go and see it if you haven't. At last a movie worthy of a Harry Potter book! I really liked it a lot. They took the right amount of time, money and talent to do a really good movie in my opinion. =) but then again, I'm a Harry Potter fan. But you should really go. It's worth the look!

Gotita

Holaaa!

3 more weeks have gone by and many things have happened in between. Can you believe that half of the first Semester has already gone by? So here I am again to keep you all up to date.

I will be going to Japan todaaaaaaaaaay!!! I’m so excited about it; since I was little I’ve always wanted to go there and now is the day. We have a week free in university in which we should “work” haha but I really needed a break. We decided 2 weeks ago with a friend and booked yesterday the hostel in our first stop, Kyoto, then Tokyo and then another place that is still not fixed.

Since the recess week was coming I tried to push all the Assignments I had a little further. So that I could at least be free in Japan. I don’t want to be doing stuff there and even less in a 10” Netbook =P. 

For Digital Painting we didn’t do that much, a little playing with color correction and beauty:

n_n I always wanted to enhance Megan Fox’s beauty 

 

After that we had to think of a concept for the mid Term Assignment that is as important as the end Assignment. I chose to do a Concept Art of Valentine. We have still three weeks after Japan to finish it but we are supposed to show our progress so why not showing it here as well? 

For the first week I had to choose the theme and decide what to do. On the second week mood boards, gathering source images and starting layout, and this is how far it came till there.

I hope the end result comes out the way I want =P I’ll try to paint him as realistic as possible. 

For Rigging we learned about dynamics and how to add them to a rig in order to save some time animating secondary movements. Useful for some things but not really for others. But now I’m starting the Neial character I developed 2 Semesters ago in Stuttgart, I really look forward to do him n_n

Here the Character design:

For Character Animation we had to use Ballie and do a short sequence of interaction between 2 of them. We had to put camera, tell a small story and Animate. We had 2 weeks to do that and this is how it looked like in.

The first:

And the second week after revision:

Then I had to do a Walk cycle and a Run cycle with the Human Rig and this is how it ended:

There is still a lot to improve, especially in the run cycle. We hadn’t had any theory on walk nor run cycles before and neither did I look to references. But now that we got a class explaining the motion in them I can improve them a lot more =) Lets see when I have the time to do that, but I definitely want to!

So now the thing that has had me the most occupied… and it is called 

“Gotita”

Concept art

Gotita is a new short film I have to do for Animation Seminar on my own. Yes on my own… no Group work allowed haha. They want the students to undergo the entire production pipeline. 

I can’t say much of the story but it is about a little Raindrop that doesn’t want to fall… 

Since its already mid Semester I wanted to use the same strategy as we did for Arthur. That is to finish the first shot with the entire production pipeline involved by now. And yes… here it is, I hope you like it and I’m open to any kind of criticism good or bad n_n But please if it’s bad, be constructive ;)

I hope you enjoyed reading and seeing all the stuff, see you next time!

Santy.

 P.S. I have some good news! We Arthurians were asked by Tobias Pehböck a friend of Austria if they could use the Arthur Rig, which I had to build for our shortfilm Arthur, for a TV Production for Kids they are doing as a University project. We all agreed and now Arthur will be starring internationally. I look forward to see Arthur alive again. =) It really made my week!

First Month in ADM(Art Design and Media School of NTU)

Hello again!

A month has passed already since I started studying in NTU and I can't believe it went so fast... It’s incredible how fast time passes when one has so much to do! Class has been great and life here too. I’m making a lot of new friends and the Locals are very nice! Weather is bliss! I really don’t miss the cold weather in Germany… although it is freezing here in all the labs! And I can’t really work that much at home since I have only a 10” Netbook with me =D But it’s ok, I gotta live with that.

There has been time for everything, new friends, sports, party and work. Each week they send Assignments for each course and I’m really not used to that. In our university we just had to attend classes and do the final assignments. Here each week is like a final assignment! It’s a lot of workload but its fun and one can manage some free time too. 

I’m getting special Assignments for Character Animation and Rigging for Animation since we are beginning with the basics. It’s really nice that the teacher actually cares about you improving and sends special assignments so that one doesn’t get bored only animating balls. But it is still very rewarding going to class to reinforce knowledge, especially when one has learned everything the hard way all by himself. It’s nice to have an experienced teacher showing you what you had to kind of deduce n_n. Here are my first 2 assignments for Character Animation 1.

Assignment 1:

 The Bouncing balls from different materials. I know the Stretch doesn’t really follow the line of action but the rig wasn’t really good. I had to modify it to even make it squash and stretchable.

Assignment 2 & 3:

I had a little issue with this one… Assignment 2 was to originally do a walk- and a runcycle but my thumb drive got stolen with the animation I had done… So yeah… I had to repeat those and do a mooncycle too, a lot of work and I didn’t have much motivation repeating them… 

For rigging I rigged the character for the short film I have to do for Animation Seminar. I finished it today, can’t wait to start animating! =D The story is already done and soon I will begin making the look for it. Ill post more on it when I have something to show.

Digital Painting is also fun too, We are still kind of doing more compositing than any other thing but well, Digital Painting can be seen as compositing too. We were masking hair, using layer blends, clipping, matching colors, just experimenting with the tools most digital painters use.

So that was it, it has been really fun and look forward to all the things that are still to come. I hope you enjoyed your stay n_n

Have a great time,

santy.