maandag 3 oktober 2016

getting shit done

So this time it went a bit faster then I anticipated. I finished the first run of most of the animations.
It is still gonna be a hell of a job to go over them once again and clean or polish them but it is good to be in this place.
Last weekend I finished the final scene and most of the time I look at the animatic I made to use as a guide but for this scene I made some other choices and I am very happy I did. The scene is a bit of a thriller and I imagine a nice audio atmosphere with the accompanied dread to fit the vibe.

So next week I'll start with replacing the head of the old rig with the new one and start from the beginning and work my way up from there. Also there are some things that need change for example the sled, I made a better one so it has also be replaced...darn!

Also I have neglected the beginning and mid piece of the animation for now, that will shape along over time I guess. So still a lot to do but every step is one more, just one thousand more...

zondag 14 augustus 2016

update

Soooo it has been a while but I that doesn't mean I haven't been busy.
Recently I had some freelance jobs I had to take care of and that is almost done. One more videoclip coming up soon.
Also here is a link to a commercial I made for kidsweek.

But back to the project!!! I am still animating and that will take some more time, cuz it is a lot.
Also I am not an animator, I try to do what works and I find that the workload is a bit to big for me and to slow of a progress but I will keep on trucking. It is so friggin much. So I thing hypothetical that I will be busy for a half year to get the first run ready and than I probably have to clean everything up and that will also take enough time.. helllll

But I still believe in this thing, even so much that I wrote a bigger story than the one I am animating.
Also my idea is to make it a real thing, a movie of some sorts.
This sounds big and it is but this is what I wanted to do with it eventually so I wrote a complete story that is dark as hell and I have a friend who will help me setting this up.
It wont be easy but it will be cool to try!

Also some music is being made by Mr Marvey at work and me, just for fun, some dark tunes that will be good for the soul:D

SO busy as ever!

Cheers

Nick

woensdag 6 april 2016

walk

So I had a week off and went into my project and spend most of my time finetuning my main character.
Thing such as the hair, the collar and the jacket dynamics had to be fixed. Thing I dislike is that the jacket sometimes gets to far away from the pants..so I guess I have to live with that, otherwise I am happy with the result.walkcycle Timmy Benson
Also I did about 2 scenes so not a lot but I try to be more methodical witch animation. I am no animator so I have to try things out, it is one big trial and error.



dinsdag 15 maart 2016

Timmy_v1000101010

Update on the hair, a bit more clump and some more hair, also redid the eyebrows, a bit more detail in that piece.
I made the hair a bit longer to get his age down a bit, in the render below I found him a bit to old looking.

Well, I guess you all understand that I am verry picky about my main character, it is still not 100 precent but today I redid the hair in another way, much faster and much more controlable.
So here is version 1794y29838aaaaaah

zaterdag 12 maart 2016

kathy_v3.0

So I was finishing the rig and look of Kathy cuz in about 3 weeks I have a week off and will focus on animating the new characters.

So I wanted to get my characters ready before that time.
No talk but an image of Kathy and that is all for now.

dinsdag 23 februari 2016

my dark creature

For the last 2 weeks I have been busy with my dark creature.
This creature will haunt Timmy in the short movie and I had a good idea of what it would look but never sat down and actually make it. So eventually I did and it worked out great for once, the inspiration I had was from an old magic the gathering card, it is called diabolic vision.

I bought the cards when I was 17 so 20 years ago just for the artwork and I am glad I did.
My drawings where ..ok but it really got me working in a way I like best and that is with atmosphere.
I love to work from my gut so to speak, things have to feel good. Also I love some inspiring music in the background to feed the mood.

Back to my "villain", it comes in 2 forms, one ordinary human character and a monstrous version. I fairly quickly modeled a head that matched my feel of the character and after that I had to make the monster version as wel. I have a hint that makes the connection between the 2 apparent.
I want to show the creature but that will majorly spoil some things and I don't know if I want to do that...

Also it took me quit some work to get the creature the way I wanted to. Since I had a base mesh I wanted to sculpt the detail into it in c4d, but how wrong I was, the baking in c4d sucks big time so I tried 3d coat. Since I had no experience with the software I decided to give it a go and I really liked it until the moment I had to bake the map out...it took me 3 days and no result without artifacts so that sucked big time.
People where very nice on the forum and it is probably my inexperience with the software.
So I tried it in zbrush and after some tweaking in the settings it gave me the desired result.

Creating the rig was no problem with the c4d's character rig but I had some issues with the weighting and that is just my inexperience as well I guess.
After some trial and error hours I got it where I needed it to be.
Also I bought Valkaari's delta mush, check it out here!
http://www.valkaari.com/?product=delta-mush
I can't wait to use it on my next character, this can be a huge timesaver.

So thats that for now.

Next up is the villain in it's human form.



zondag 7 februari 2016

octane testing

Hey Y'all,

Since I have finished a project as of yesterday I have time to finaly some time for octane.
It is a renderer working via the gpu so all my 40 threads are sittin here doing nothin.
But the reason I bought octane is to be red in the previous blogpost.

So I have experimented a bit and I must say I like it a lot.
It has some flaws but I the almost instant feedback gives me the creative freedom I was looking for.
Also I found out some small but nice things that you bump into when working with the renderer.
Such as using the focus target, you have to switch off automatic focus, small things but nice.
I experimented a bit with the render settings to make it faster and it is fairly straight forward, nothing to hard to find out, love it!
I love it solely becuz I have to do less and make, make nice things.
So what next, I had to tweak some things in the posemorph, I had 2 xpresso tags to drive those and one to point the eyes into a target gizmo.
I used a correction deformer to close the eyelids over the eyeball accordingly and it was driven by a posemorph and that posermorph was driven by a slider in the eyegizmo, so it had a bit lag, I took the xpresso and combined them into one tag and the lag went away, nice!

So from now on I will hopefully keep this thing going on a regular base.

Some renders from octane.
Also I used a sss skin from the octane library and hooked my face texture in it and tweaked some settings to get this nice skin.



This last thing was my first test with the renderer, just to see how it worked.
I also love the dirt shader, edges can be made scratchy within no time!

Cheers!!!

vrijdag 29 januari 2016

kickin it

Sooo, that's a long time ago since I posted something here.
There where some jobs that took my time and some personal issues.
Went on vacation to Thailand with my girlfriend and finishing up on another short and did some work for a new freelance collective I am part of.
So all those things are almost finished up and I can't wait to dive back into the WKTB world.

That being said doesn't mean I did not do anything...
There are some things that happened since then for example I was not happy with the deformations happening in the face of Timmy when animating so I downloaded some sort of a correct edge flowed head and sculpted it back to a new version of Timmy.
It made a huge difference and I added some more forehead so that I have more room for the eyebrows and give him more character and facial expression.
That worked out great and I used posemorphs for it all, I no longer use the interaction tag for the animation, it sounds great and I really thought that it was the holy grail but for this type of animation I was not getting the fast results that ordinary posemorphs gave me.
Also I made the eyelids move when the eyes are pointing to left or right, it makes it more fleshy and it adds some realism to it.

This is the new face of this little bad boy and I only lit it really fast and it is just the basic texturing.

Talking about rendering.
Since I hate the fact that Vray is slow as hell with development I bought octane render engine.
I thought why not give it a try and let's see how far that will bring me to good or great results.
Vray never was fast in the way I needed it to be.
I have a 20 core machine and I really need the instant feedback to get shit done and vray is promising us all vray RT for about 3 years now and I see some progress on that but 3 years since the first RT preview came to my light and I decided to give it a go.
I feel fucked over and therefore I will try octane for now to see if that engine gives me a better workflow.
And the first thing everyone knows when working with it is that the feedback is of the hook, love it and I can't wait to use it on the project.

So thats it for now, I am still kickin it and feel good.

Cheers