Just when I thought I couldn’t diversify my skills any further, I’ve been given the project to develope and manage Big Jump Production’s content management system, or CMS, for short.
Well, I couldn’t be happier. What’s going to happen with my plans for 3D, and even 2D work? For now, they will creep into the background, not to be forgotten, for sure.
In the meantime, my past few years experience using the WordPress blogging platform will evolving into setting up much larger and more complex structures. The framework for all of this will be built using Drupal. I must say, I am both very excited and also terrified by the road ahead. But this is where I thrive. Scared silly but having fun. The same was true of my first foray into the world of 3D. It’s not worth doing if there wasn’t a real chance of failure. So far my impression of Drupal is that it quite simply rocks. I’ll save the details for a future post, and leave it at that.
So to all that follow this blog, no worries, I am still happily working in the animation industry with folks I respect and admire.
Having setup the ability to blog from the iPhone, I thought it would be fun to try it out while taking a break from animating at the studio. Although it can be frustrating trying to text with thumbs as big as mine, it’s amazing that I now posses the ability to post from anywhere. If I only splurged and got the 3Gs, maybe I could be editing my demo reel too 
Ever since returning to work, I have had to put all 3D projects on hold. Since I devote all my time to animating “The Secret World of Benjamin Bear” with my fellow animators at Big Jump Productions here in Ottawa, I thought I should at least show my visitors what my new work looks like.
The animation for Benjamin Bear is a hybrid style of Flash symbol manipulation and traditional frame-by-frame drawn animation. The characters are designed as a 16 point turn around with most elements on their own layers, especially the elements of the face. So if 16 points of rotation aren’t enough, you can always keyframe individual elements into a new pose easily. The designs look traditional and are well done.
Rather than attempting to animate the limbs on a character using rigid parts that hinge around fixed pivot points, animators draw them as they should appear in the key poses. Even the inbetweens are drawn in most cases, but not always. From there they lay down a new layer and create a completely cleaned up limb in the exact pose and with the correct volume required. The use of Wacom Cintiq tablets helps greatly in this.
I have almost 5 minutes of footage to sort through. Once I have rendered it all out and edited it down to about 2 minutes, I will compile a new 2D animation demo reel. So check back in a few days (I have a deadline for Monday, so this weekend is off-limits for anything but work work).
UPDATE: Sept 16
Okay, it’s been quite busy with all the work to be done on this show. The good news is that there is an ever growing pool of scene to choose from for this 2 min demo reel. I am organizing the work as I go for easy retrieval later. So when I get some time, It won’t take long to throw some footage on a timeline and render something out. Stay tooned
Here’s a colour preview using just shader materials. I’ve started the UV mapping though, so it’ll be nice to brush some texture into her hair.
I finished the head, added hands and feet. I noticed that when I duplicated the half-model to complete the missing left side, her head looked a bit wide. I’ll be fixing that then moving onto UV mapping. This is fun! Thanks José.
Seen here with temporary simple shader materials …
And with the wireframe overlaid …
I have been chomping at the bit to start this project, titled “GG1″.
The last image is viewed using Maya’s polygon smooth preview feature (as of Maya 2008 – just press 1,2 & 3 on the keyboard), so the model isn’t as high-res as it appears, but it does help to highlight whether or not you’re on the right track.
Also, GG1′s UV’s aren’t set up yet, I just assigned materials to the appropriate faces, just for fun. A proper UV map will come later.
Thanks to José Pou for the use of his character.
While researching some of the many free character rigs from Highend3d.com, I came across “Blake”. After an hour or so of playing around with his controls, my son came up to me and asked if I could make him look scared. So after much direction from a 5 1/2 year old, I came up with the above pictured pose.
I will be exporing several different rigs while I decide upon which way I would like to rig my own character, Mr. Hap. I might even take Blake for a spin and submit an entry into this months 11 Second Club Competition.
Thanks again to Alistair Murphy for his help and feedback during this project. With his suggestions I went back into the UV layout and condensed everything into just one map instead of the previous two maps. I think I will still stick with a 256×256 texture for now. The first round of animations will only have Mr. Hap walking, running and otherwise doing full-body actions. There won’t be a need for any closeups of the head just yet. Even so, I made sure to give the head much more texture space than the rest of the body.
So, what’s next? Rigging, my friends, rigging.
