Archive for December 2007
I'm working on animating a turnaround for Duncan's head. Its a good exercise that'll really test my drawing construction abilities. I gotta say, its been difficult so far. But rewarding. I find it similar to modeling actually. You look at something from a certain view and then go in and fix the mistakes.
I have more drawings of the rear 3/4 and rear views, and I'm working on breakdowns. I hope to post an animation of the turnaround by the end of the week. If it takes me longer than that to work it out I'll go insane!
This image is already out of date. Sorry about that, my latest are at work otherwise I'd scan them in. Some changes I made after this was to make his snout a tad longer in the side view, widen his head a bit in the front to make it conform to a sphere as well as the underside of the muzzle in the front view was made to match the 3/4 view. Other than it just tiny adjustments here and there. I hope this turns out as well as I see it in my head. I'm excited to see it finished.
John K is at it again. Inspiring the animators of the future to improve their construction in their drawings. Take look at his latest post:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/12/toy-construction-2-advanced.html
He asks us to draw one of his well sculpted toys from many different angles to improve spatial understanding with simpler construction forms. Its a great idea, I tried a few drawings during my break time and now looking at them again I see many mistakes. But seeing these mistakes now will help me in my future drawings. The areas I seemed to have trouble with are perspective (especially in that up shot) and angles in the underlying forms. I'll try to improve in those areas in future assignments.
Here are some sketches of me at the age of about 6 with my new pal at the time, my dog Duncan. I'd like to refine these design and get them into workable, animatable characters at some point. So expect more sketches in time.
Two great artists that I work with are graciously offering up their time and their knowledge to help some of the rest of us become better artist. Mike Defeo is coaching some of us modelers who want to do a sculpture, then Danny Williams is going to help us transfer that maquette into the digital realm and clean it up and make it workable.
The first step in sculpting anything, of course, is coming up with an idea to sculpt. Sounds simple doesn't it? Well, I chose to come up with my own design instead of sculpting another artist idea. So that simple plan is taking a bit of time. I'm narrowing in on what I want to sculpt though. Here is the rough sketch of what I want to do.
Its a little Spaceman Spiff inspired action shot. If you can't tell, a evil tentacled alien has our would be hero on the ropes, taunting him by holding his weapon just out of reach.
Now that I have the basic characters, placement, and pose laid out, I need to narrow in on a final design for both characters. Here is the design I think I'll go with for the space adventurer.
And here is pretty much what the alien land-dwelling octopus will look like.
Now I have to do a final design with all the elements pulled together in their final poses. Then I can begin work on planning out the armature for the sculpt. I'll try my best to document the entire process.