Rakuen

This is my second attempt at figure drawing. I had one real figure drawing session last winter, but this was all images from online

Great site for figure drawing poses: characterdesigns.com

[update: 11/1/09]

Showed my cousin some of these drawings and she said that when I try too hard, it shows. The lines seem hesitant and uncertain. She liked the fourth, fifth, and seventh drawings which were done a lot faster and showed much more confidence. Those drawings were less perfect and were exaggerated at times but style showed through them, and that helps the bottom line.

Second Attempt at Calarts Open Show Animation

This is my second attempt at recreating and learning from the 2008 CalArts Open Show. His was done in After Effects (I couldnt recreate Shatter...) but I did this in Blender. The point is to learn animation in Blender.

I still need to put an ending on this and render a higher quality version. Then I have a small story idea with this circle as a main character.

Here is the original: link

Here is my first attempt: link

Throwback of the Day

I used to take the bus everyday last winter to art class. I started carrying a small sketchbook and studying fast sketching [see it here] and finally wasn't afraid of drawing complex visual fields.

Here's something from the vault:

Sketches (10-26)

Between classes from 3-4 outside of NJIT. Everyone was smoking:

My brother playing online games:

My mom cooking:

Fear and Faith

I never posted my short film from last semester. It's more like what I could do with the time I was given (and my skill level).

Sketches

I had about 20 pages of sketches I was feeling pretty good about but none of them will be shown here today. Instead, here are some quick life drawings from the past few days.

Bartender chillin at the Pub in NJIT. Yankees lost that day.

My brother:
My mom in the kitchen:

We had a small family gathering. We usually have dinner at my aunt's house every year. This is my grandmother:

Pictures of Calarts

interesting find: http://www.photo.calarts.edu/

Completed 608 Ball Bearing Tutorial

Finally finished this pretty serious engineery Blender tutorial to create a Ball Bearing. I should have done one of these earlier. I learned so many modeling tricks like aligning vertices up to a point or cutting a mesh, or making bevels, or making curves by hand, and using blender's mesh tools.

Definitely worth a go: link

All this technical stuff is kinda fun (curse of being the son of an engineer, I suppose), but at the end of the day I do believe it will come through in my animation.

[update: added materials!]

Animating the Calarts 2008 Open Show intro in Blender

We finally started animation but we're learning how to use Blender, not how to animate. It's a funny thing because when you think CG and CG animation, you think of Pixar. But those guys literally have 100s people working on one shot and several thousand controls on each character to make it look as believable as it does.

I've been re-watching all the Pixar films in chronological order as soon as I started this class. As we learned more about the CG world more and more of Toy Story 1 and 2 made sense. I started understanding how they did it. But that's where it stops.

I have no clue how they make Mr Incredible's eyebrows look so good, or how they simulated water in that shot where Reme tumbles down the sewers in Ratatouille. It appears there is tremendous amounts of technological rah rah in CG. It is not a child's play thing.

As far as my learning animation goes, I need to keep it simple just to get my hands dirty. The other day, I found this video for the 2008 Calarts Open Show. I thought stealing his idea would be the perfect assignment to get into animation in Blender without doing real character animation.

Here's my first shot (more like 5th.. let's just say it took me all day to get this far):

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Wii Classic Controller

I thought my controller for my midterm was so bad that I'm working on a new one. This is just to model for a wii classic controller. Of course, it's still a work in progress, but it's hella better than the midterm controller.

[updated: 10-24-09]

- I need to redo this with the new precision stuff i've learned (which would take care of that stupid indent in the middle of this controller.)

Past attempts and reference image:

Learn to Draw by Yourself

"We're not teaching them how to draw. We really expect them to be able to draw when they come here. What we're trying to teach them is what to do with that drawing. How to make it impactful. How to tell the story to the viewer when they look at it"

- Frank Terry, Director of the Animation Program at CalArts

In-class render for midterm exam

We had a practical portion in our 3D Modeling and Animation class. We had to pick from an hourglass, a game controller, a tomato tree, and some others to model without reference. I chose a game controller.

At first I wanted to make a NES style controller but could not remember exactly what it looked like as I started modeling it. So I decided to explore and be creative (in an exam...).

I ended up wasting lots of time rounding the edges on the controler, directional pad and start button and spent no time on the materials or lighting. The professor yelled out 15 minutes and I knew my model sucked.

After I handed it in, I looked up Nintendo controller and found that my model was a mix between an NES and SNES controller. Great...

I fixed it up a little right before this post:

Here's an update:

Realistic Render for class

NOTE: not sure why Google's not linking to larger versions of my last few images...

The first half of the semester in 3D Modeling and Animation was spent learning the software to capture real life just like the first step in a traditional drawing class would be to draw through observation. We were instructed to find a still life and model it proportionately.

For our midterm project we had to choose a scene like a kitchen or a room and model it as realistically as possible. The assignment was to make the render as true to the reference image as possible. The test would be to compare the two images and point out the differences.

Here is my reference image:

And here are my renders building up to that reference image:

Final Render:

Comparison:

Made some adjustments after handing it in:

Another comparison: