WIP – Talliano
When I say work in progress (wip), the only work so far is the idea for a picture, and now this post to try and encourage myself to work on it.
I was dreaming the other night, or maybe I was just day dreaming in bed, but I came up with the idea for a picture I would like to work on.
The image that formed in my mind was of a creature reaching out of dark water, (clawed) hand reaching towards the sky.
The creature had hair of wavering tentailed-like hair. Less of the snakes like the classic Medusa, but rather more like eels, watery and smooth.
His body seemed rather smooth, but his arms had small scales on the outer facing sides of them.
His face was containing all the classic facial features, but they were irregular in appearance.
I hope to slowly work more on defining the image in my head, and then even more slowly start to create it.
While I picture the scene as a 2d image, I suspect I will work on it using 3d tools, as these are what I prefer, and also means I can concentrate more on the composition of the objects in the scene at first, and then at a later stage focus on the staging and actual composition of the scene itself.
Wish me luck, as can be seen from my post history, it has been a long time since I have attempted any work.
Topics: Image, Work In Progress | No Comments »
Pictures no longer moving
Ok, done some more playing around with blender.
Since the last clip, I have changed the lights. I reduced the energy of the yellow light by half, and added a white light, which doesn’t cast any shadows. This makes the shadows a little lighter, and takes a little yellow out of the room.
I have worked out what was wrong with the textures in the picture frames, so now as the scene moves, the pictures inside the frames don’t move. That was weirding me out!
After the door closes, and the light switch changes colour, there was some flicking of colours for a few frames. I tracked down those rough keys and removed them, so now the lights drop, and the shadows drop on the same frame rather than bouncing back and forward for about 3 or 4 frames.
That’s all the changes I can think of. I was going to do more, but had a friend come around and installed a new graphics card in my machine, and then set it up to run three heads, so that took a bit of time.
Either way, what i have is now up on YouTube, and presented below 🙂
Topics: Animation, Art Hour, Previz, Work In Progress | No Comments »
Moving Pictures
Did a little more work last night.
Had a couple goals. I wanted to fix the error where the camera went to far to the left near the beginning of the animation, and I wanted to add a picture frame.
Below is the result;
Did it work?
Well the camera doesn’t go off scene anymore, but the camera action isn’t very consistant. Some parts of it are very slow, while other pats are quick and slightly jerky, so I think I may drop the entire set of camera movments and start from scratch at some stage.
As for the photo frames. Well since I haven’t done the tutorial on basic modelling in Blender yet, they seem to be ok. They meet the shape I had in my mind. My said she plans on sketching a couple portrait pics, so that is why I made them that shape. From the test texture I have on them though, it seems I have more playing around with the settings to get them right, as they seem to move when the camera moves.
What are my next tasks?
Well I have to have another play with the picture frame textures, I may re-do the camera movements, and I want to play more with the lighting, as there is a flash of light after the switch goes off, so I must have missed a key in the lighting, also I want to make the dark scene more noticeable but not by just making it darker, so I am thinking a different shade of colour for the dark scene.
Stay tuned 🙂
Topics: Animation, Art Hour, Previz, Work In Progress | No Comments »
Missed a few sessions
I’ve been bad.
I’ve heard my alarm go off, but I’ve ignored it and missed a few Art Hour sessions.
Today I have gotten back into it.
I decided to do some more work on my little robot toy project I have been laying around with. I set myself a few tasks to see if I could get them done. The tasks were,
1: Texture, add some wall paper to the wall.
2: Light, watching my video at night it seemed ok, but when I watched it on the TV during the day it seemed way to dark, so I wanted to up the light level.
3: Timing, when I was scrubbing up and down the timeline the robot seemed to jump ok, but when played back at the correct frame-rate (24fps in my case) he jumped way to slow.
4: Glowing eyes, when he can’t get through the door, his eyes glowed brighter. This wasn’t two obvious. To enhance this, I made it so as well as getting brighter, they also turned red briefly, just to draw attention to them.
5: Camera movement, there is no movement of the camera in my little scene, so I had better work on that.
With my five objectives, I set to work. Number one on the list was texture. My wife drew me a quick (2D) wallpaper pattern for the room, and the task was to apply this. I tried it a few days ago and things went quite weird. The problem being the two planes which I am using for walls had been created, duplicated, stretched, rotated, and basically played around with quite a lot when I was deciding what type of scene I was looking for. Now with a plain yellowish material they seemed fine, but as soon as I applied a texture to them all of a sudden the patterns were different sizes and different orientations on each wall. Not what I had planned, after all if the guy putting wallpaper up in you room put the up different ways and it was different size pattern on each wall, you’d be pretty mad, unless it lucked out and just looked good. My luck wasn’t that good. I did a little playing, but in the end I just decided the quickest way to fix all the modifications I had done was to delete one wall, duplicate the other wall and give it a quick single axis and slide into position.
Moving on, I decided to work on light. I just upped the lighting level on both the bright and dark scene. This caused the problem where the scene which was suppose to be dark was throwing some pretty heavy shadows, and it was very obvious that I was using the same light source. To quickly fix this, I just turned off the shadows on that light source for the dark scene.
Timing was my next concern. I wasn’t to worried about this, but it just couldn’t be as slow as it was. For this I just went into the graph editor a few times and scaled down on the x-axies. Once I got a speed I was happy with, I just did a few duplications to make more hops.
Eyes glowing more was a simple operation. I just keyed in some colour changes for the eyes at the correct time, and now his eyes are a little more obvious after he bumps into the door.
Camera movement was last on my list. I didn’t really have any set desire for the camera itself, so I just had it follow him and get a little closer, more as a proof that I could make the camera move more than anything.
So here is the results of this session…
What did I think?
Well I’m happier with his bouncing, though it’s still not great. The colour/light seems better during the day. The wallpaper works and is on the walls. The eyes bring a little more attention to them. As for the camera movement, well it nearly works. Unfortunately during part of the scene the camera moves two far to the left for the actual scene, and the wall comes to an end, so I will have to either have less camera movement, or I will need to extend the wall a little more that direction. Either way, I had fun, and I’m working on Blender 🙂
Topics: Animation, Art Hour, Previz, Talk, Work In Progress | No Comments »
The Robot that could
Art hour lasted a little longer than an hour this evening. That is good, I am getting into it.
Todays scene has the robot from last time, but this time he is in a room, a man (stick figure) walks across (slides) the room, out the door, before our little chap gets into action.
I am still doing nearly all my work in object mode, so soon it is time to go looking for some more tutorials, and start doing some modeling rather than just using primitive objects for all of my work.
The result is below (ok, will be in a few minutes, still rendering out currently).
OK, that took longer than expected, had to try a few different formats to not lose all of the quality due to compression, but here it is…
Next, it needs some texture for the wallpaper.
Topics: Animation, Art Hour, Work In Progress | No Comments »
Art Hour begins
I have a problem, and I’m willing to admit it. The problem is motivation, and more importantly my complete lack of it.
It is not that I don’t have the tools to make wonderful stuff, as I do. Its not that I can’t learn how to do things, I can.
The problem is that I can never make myself put any effort into doing anything.
I want to become good at blender, but I spent less that 2 hours all of last year working on blender.
There is no way I’ll ever get good at blender, or for that matter anything, if I only put in 2 hrs effort a year.
So, based with this problem, I am trying a new approach.
The new approach is Just Do It. Kind of sounds like a Nike ad doesn’t it?
I have decided that every evening, at the same time if possible, I’m going to have an Art Hour. To start with Art Hour will probably just be 5 or 10 minutes to get myself into it, but I hope to work my way up to an hour (or more) every evening.
Yesterday evening I was tired, and couldn’t be bothered (same old excuse I used all last year), but I decided that Art Hour must go on. I sat and watched a few tutorials.
This evening Art Hour was delayed a little, but in the end I managed to get myself going, and I actually spent nearly an hour on it, which makes me half way through my progress for last year.
So, as my first post about Art Hour, I should put something up, so here is what I did this hour (year).
Just a simple Robot which wobbles across the screen. It was mostly taken from the animation I did last time, but now I have worked out how to add materials, colour, etc.
While I was playing with blender, my wife decided to get into Art Hour, and using a tablet and GIMP came up with this…
She says its not finished, but our Art Hour ended for the night 🙂
Topics: Animation, Art Hour, Image, Talk | No Comments »
Still alive
One would think I have disapeared off the face of the planent/Internet, but I haven’t, i’m still alive.
This evenig I decided to do some sketching with the tablet and GIMP.
Now I really can’t sketch to save my life, so pratice is probably a good idea, but posting my work isn’t.
But i’m trying to prove I still exist, so what the heck…
Was thinking a Rodent, but then again maybe a cat
It started as just scribbling lines until I could see something, then I decided maybe I saw a rodent in there, but now looking at it, maybe it was a cat.
Either way, you now have to believe me when I say I cabn’t sketch to save myself 🙂
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WIP version 001
Ok,
I haven’t done anything new today. Its my lunchtime, and I haven’t had lunch yet, and it is approaching time to return to work.
All I have done is dropped the video clip onto YouTube so I could post it here.
I used to use a different video player, but when it comes down to it, YouTube is pretty universal, and if you can’t see it on YouTube, odds are you wouldn’t have been able to see it on the other player anyhow.
I haven’t bothered with a download link this time, after all, there really is no point 🙂
Topics: Animation, Work In Progress | No Comments »
I did something
Ok,
I’ve got a confession. I really want to be good at 3D, but I just don’t put any effort into it.
You probably think this means I just do the odd thing now and then, but no, it actually means I do nothing.
I haven’t touched a 3D package since November last year apart from today.
I spend a few minutes with blender. I opened it up, realised it had been two years since I had actually looked at blender, and that I had forgotten everything I had learned from the course last year. To top it off, I couldn’t remember any of the blender commands, so it took me like the first 5 minutes to remember how to rotate the screen again, and make a new box (it starts with a box).
Once I had that figured, moving around the screen, making boxes, and moving them around in 3D space again, I added another box, parented them to the first box, had them rotate around in circles as the time line advanced, and then added three more boxes.
The end result was terrible. It was supposed to be, and I suppose it was, a very simple robot that wobbled and moved through the screen, while some of its knobs rotated on its chest.
Even though, I was happy, it was the first thing I had done in 10 months, and it was the first thing I had done in blender in 2 years.
I forgot to add lights, so there was just the default. I didn’t add any textures, and I even forgot to point the camera at the scene. So it was just by blind chance (and because the first box was in frame) that any of the actual animation was in the camera at all. It then proceeded to move out of camera, with shadows all over it, but I was still happy, because it was more than I had done for ages.
I will post it. Not because it is good, not because I want people to tell me what I did wrong (trust me, I know my errors), but because it is something, and something is better than nothing.
I can’t post it right now, as I am about to start something (no, not more 3D), and it was done on a different computer than I am posting on now, but I will post it.
I am thinking maybe next time I will make a car, just as simple, just as basic, and then maybe put them both in the same scene, and maybe I will even remember about the camera.
This may happen, but it took me 10 months to post this much, so you never know.
either way, I AM BACK! (maybe)
Topics: Talk | No Comments »
Passed
I said there wasn’t going to be much posted here until sometime next year. If you didn’t believe me, I bet you believe me now though.
But onto a different, and slightly more on topic subject. I passed my 3D animation course, and last night had my graduation in the town hall.
My wife took a quick photo of me with a camera phone, something to remember it buy until the official photos show up.
posted it below.
My Graduation Photo (unofficial)
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