Apologies to all for my lack of posts lately ; ), but I have not had the time to work on my animation. My plan is to get it finished within a month. I spent a bit of time working on the main character this weekend. I have attached a pic. I’m fairly happy with him. There may be some changes but for now I will be working with this. My plan for next week is to rig the character, start placing him in the different scenes and make a previz using one still from each shot.
So I have built a good load of props and sets with a bit more of each to do. My plan right now is to build the rest of the sets and get the initial lighting done. Once I have done this I will set up all of the cameras for the shots, get the lighting right and build any further props I need. I had a first go at the main character (roughly threw material on him and stuck in the bedroom. Image attached There is a bit of work to do in all areas, lighting, props, character refinement etc.. but I am generally happy with the direction and atmosphere of it so far. The thing that would worry me at the moment is the render time. With a deadline of about 5 weeks I’m going to have to work something out but that is a problem for about 2 weeks from now.
Here are some extremely rough storyboards I scribbled together for my upcoming short. I cant get my scanner working so I had to take photos of them with my phone, adding to the production value. 
I am starting to make a 3-5 minute short animation. It is about a lonely guy who takes matters into his own hands to protect himself in anticipation of when the robots take over the world. My plan is to learn vray as I do this and better my character modelling, rigging and weighting skills. The sets will be sparse as I will strive to make all models and materials layered and detailed. I hope to make good progress on the piece this week alone and will update the blog during the week.
I have not posted in a while. But here is a couple of gifs I made a couple of weeks ago part of my weekly competition with a work colleague. They are basic but I find them a good way to try out a something of interest, creative or technical.
With this one I was looking into sketch and toon in C4D.
https://dribbble.com/shots/2009296-corn?list=following&offset=3
With this I took a look at mixing 3d renders and 2d graphics.
https://dribbble.com/shots/2011009-Where-is-the-love?list=following&offset=2
https://dribbble.com/shots/1989126-evel-knievel?list=following&offset=0
I started a weekly GIF competition with a workmate. We are going to have a theme each week. He picked evel knievel. I used sketch n toon in C4D. Its ok. I’ll get a better one up next week. I’ve started learning vray for an animation I will soon be making so will hopefully get a vray image render up this week.
This is another one I did for a pitch with James Kelly.
https://dribbble.com/shots/1991910-Corporate-animation?list=following&offset=0
I just want to give a thanks to everyone who is following this blog for their support. Thanks Dan.
I wanted to do something with the hair renderer. So … made some hair. It can be frustrating trying to manipulate sometimes and I found every haircut needed a specific solution. For some I’d use dynamics and let it fall, while others were just styled on the first frame.
Since I was looking into metal materials and there is a load of robots around at the moment, I thought I would make some of my own.
I was trying to get more of an understanding of metal materials. The hdri you use when making metals hugely influences the final result. This is a chrome with a dark, indoor hdri. I layered up some bump maps to get the texture on the metal incl. the deeper textures on the back.
For this image I was looking into replicating knitted wool. I got this result unwrapping the UV’s + using a material texture and using the hair object. I was looking at a tutorial that replicated wool by building it using the cloner but it didn’t seem necessary here, maybe if I was going in much closer on the subject.
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