making things awesome

At the moment I am finishing the look of Timmy, I constantly feel it is not quit finished but I think I will never be completely satisfied.
So I will spend one more week on the texturing and than I will start rigging the character.
After completing Timmy I will start on Kathy but I guess I will be spending some extra time on whatever kind of rigging.
I also want a nice facial rig so I have to dive deep into things to make it work.

Also I bought a new computer, it is assembled as we speak and it will be the best awesome machine I will ever lay my fingers on.
Unfortunately it will be a windows machine but for 3D I have no other option.
It will have 2 times 10 cores so 40 threads and a great videocard, some solid state drives and all the good stuff that comes with it.

I will post a picture as soon as I have the thing:D

For now I will leave you with some stills of the revised Timmy.
I btw will use the cage deformer to drive a higher dense mesh of the jacket, I don't trust those displacement maps.
I redid the boots, tweaked the head some more, gave him more hair and some other minor things.

anamatic_v4

Sooo it has been a while, again...

I have tweaked the anamatic a bit cuz the ending was not quit what I had in mind.
I solved this and I am ok with this version for now.
Soooo I must show it to some people still and am doing this slowly.
I hope to have those comments within the next 2 weeks and than I will see what I will do with them.

Also I made some changes in the timmy benson model, I tweaked the eyes some more and am texturing the model with better textures.
After that I will get into rigging the puppet from scratch and get some nice facial rig setup or whatnot.

So lots to do!

anamatic_v3

I made it through last weekend, after pushing myself not to watch stupid yet awesome youtube vids.
The first complete version of the anamatic is done.
That is step 1 in a thousand but hey another step closer.
It was hard to find nice ways to tell the story and I am certain this will not be the last version.
Next weekend I will add music to make an atmosphere and start to delete and add shots/time/awesome camera moves etc.
So that will be fun, I am glad to have a rough sketch and now be able to view it as a whole.

After that when I think the idea comes across I will view it with some other people to get their opinion and do absolutely nothing with that:D
Noooo, it will be good to get some perspective.

Aight, closing up, see ya.

Nick

anamatic_V2

Sooo, a week straight into the anamatic and I am still bussy:D
I am at about 4 and a half minutes so I am getting SH!T done.
It is cool to watch the anamatic as it is, I am happy with it so far.
The shots are really cool, they look super nice.

So these are some of the shots, it works super nice to watch them all in one sequence, you directly find out if it works or not.
Sooo, I have got an hour left today and tomorrow I want to get really far with it all.

Mooooore to come.

story almost done/ start anamatic

So again it has been a while, I was involved in a commercial so I had February to get shit done.
This is the end result.
https://vimeo.com/88043427

Continuing, as the title displays I have rewritten a big part of my story, I wasn't completely happy with it soooo
whats new.
But this time it is quit ok, still some things to polish but I get the vibe and I am glad to get a good feeling about it.
It is dark, very dark but that is what I like for this short.
It will be slow pased and eventually take up about 8 minutes or so I guess.
Maybe a bit more..

So after the story bit I started to get my head around the way I would start with the anamatic.
I mean, the scenes and all must be named correctly and neat so that took me some time but in the long run this will definitely pay off.

So I made a scene in after effect to neat up my sjjjjit and give me a sense of where I am scene wise.

The animation is not really there, it is more a timing thing, most people would do a storyboard first but since I have my assets almost done I can do this instead, the story flow is in my head and no other people are involved so that is less communication hazard for me:D

Sooo, I have this week of so I hope to make some real progress on this.

Aight, see ya!

starting with the previz

Previz is about to begin, I fist finished the look of a flyover scene and now I am connecting my first 5 shots as one complete long shot.

So from now on I will post probably more previews than "final renders".

Also I fell in love with a new plugin called cm nodes, it makes texture generation more natural and keeps things organized, node based hence the name.
So download that plugin at cmstuff.com, it is awesome.
It is still a work in progress so there is still no good vray compatibility but it is on its way.

Cheers!

preppppin

Last christmassssss, whohohooo...
Well those bells sounded a while agoohoho but yeah, happy new year and what not to all of you.
I had an immense amount of free time which I fcuz did not use completely to my advantage but hey, I rested, watched a lot of movies and got fatter with all those nice meals:D
Sooo back to the program.
I mainly worked on getting my scenes ready to previz.
And that is almost done sooo I guess another month or so and I will be ready to previz this hell.

Also whenever I go to sleep and wake up I always walk through the story in my head and since I was/am not completely happy about certain things I am getting closer every day.
I am making the story and not only the part I will be showing in the short.
There will be something what happens before and after and that also makes the story viable.
But sometimes I doubt about things you will not know when the story will be told.

But yeah, time enough, I have enough work to do before I get into this drama...
These are all things I can fix, the main story line and flow of it stay the same.

So back to what I was doing, making things ready to roll previz wise.
Most of my scenes are done and are waiting to be used but there are some scenes like some forest scenes that I have to make.
Today I made a first step into that.

These are not to big of files unlike the village, that one is the biggest to date.

I also made a transition between the village and forest, soooo when going out of the village it just flows on.

I also worked on my mill scene, still not getting there but it is ready for previz.

Lighting is also a lot of finding out, I have an HDRI and let that one influence the fog and I have a directional light as moonlight, slightly and the lightposts are area lights>>object lighting.
Sooo that can take a huge amount of time tweaking and I am still not happy.
What I do like is the brownish look, I did not like to have it all blue, it is to obvious.
And this will perhaps give it some more unique feel.

 What to do next, what not fcuz, a shitload...
But slowly I am getting there.