Innovations WIP - slap comp

glitchy glitchy yah yah

innovations progress...

I've been mucking around with the character, now the plan is churn out lots of render layers and see what I can stick together. Hopefully I'll end up with some sort of interesting moving portrait, inspired by the work of Egon Schiele, but utilizing the medium of experimental CG. Fantastic.

new textures applied to ramp shader for painterly effect

another ramp shader applied for shadowy outline

contour rendering for wireframe

playing around with deformers in maya

screenshot of cool glitch whilst editing image using f-spot

more glitches

glitches ain't shit

lecture notes 2

Schiele goes out with her mate Stella

Now that the Master Class project is complete, I have started making some decent progress on my Innovations. After a couple meetings with my tutor, I have decided to go down a more experimental route. Using the work of Egon Schiele as a starting point, my plan is to imagine how he would utilize today's technology. 

For hundreds of years painting was a medium used to try and accurately depict real life. It wasn't really until the invention of the camera that more expressionist artists appeared, who distorted the real world for emotional effect. I intend to draw parallels between painting and CG, a relatively young medium, which has I feel has not been exploited for all its potential as a platform for expressionism. It seems as if there has become a standard aesthetic that the majority of work tends to adhere to, imitating the Pixar style of clean, perfect animation. Using contemporary artists such as David O'Reillyand Mark Napier as inspiration, I want to play with the idea of things you are and aren't supposed to do, and break the rules. Intersecting meshes, low poly models, tangled vertices, faces deleted here and there. A show reel of beautiful chaos. HOWEVER, first I want to do it 'properly' and show the process of destruction, a kind of before and after, and argue which is more interesting as a piece of art.

 I thought about the features which I feel identifies Sheile's work as his own, in particular his portraiture. The subject is always distorted in some way, stretched and twisted, with limbs body parts bent and buckled, often depicted with harsh edges, and dark outlines. Sometimes entire parts are neglected, either not drawn or left uncoloured. This 'unfinished' look is something I plan to experiment with, maybe leaving patched of wireframe visible underneath the surface of the mesh.

So far, as a starting point, I have modeled a head based on Schiele's portrait of the artist Karl Zakovsek. I've slapped a couple ramp shaders on and used contour rendering for the lines. My next step is to texture it and basically muck around in ZBrush, maybe make some more models, see what happens and kind of play it by ear until it looks how I want it too. Might even animate it if I have time. Fun improvising!

clone tool ♥

Blue Zoo Animation Masterclass

I haven't done a blog in ageeeeessss. Any ways, for the last two weeks or so I have been working solidly on the master class project. The brief, which was set by Mike Wyatt from Blue Zoo, was to create four animations. The first was a 30 second 2D ident for the NCCA, which had to involve a character interacting with a ball that transformed into various objects of different weights. The other three were 10 second scenarios involving a character being revealed something the viewer can't see, and reacting to it.

For my 2D animation I wanted to go a kind of Peppa Pig-ish vibe, (except a bit more violent). I had this idea of a strange guy throwing animals around and thought it was funny enough to go with. I really enjoyed working in this cut-out style, and being in 2D I feel it really made me focus on getting the basic movements correct. I was also able to use a python script I wrote last year for Spies, the russian doll film, which helped swap between textures for the eyes and mouth.

For the 3D animations, I wanted the character to change emotional states by what was revealed in the box. In the first animation he goes from happy to distraught/shocked; the third one from sneaky to happy; and the third from happy to angry. This contrast helped to emphasize the exaggerated poses.

I feel I have learned so much from this project, especially being able to get feedback halfway through. Looking back at my original blocking I can see a huge improvement, both in timing and staging, particularly thinking about silhouettes. At first I was focusing too much on individual poses, rather than the shot as a whole. I feel this meant me timing was off, usually too fast-paced, and also not varied enough. A good example is the happy reaction, which initially had a big jump before the fist pump at the end. I spent a while getting the jump right, but realised it just didn't fit the scene. I deleted it, freeing up the action to slow down a bit in that section, and it suddenly read a lot better! Although it's not perfect, overall I am happy with the resulting work, and feel the knowledge gathered will be incredibly useful as I start properly animating my on my major project.

(It's also the first thing I've rendered in HD so full screen it, why the hell not?)