Blog | Adam McMahon’s Experiments of the Cartoon Kind

The start of what shall prove to be a very long, but rewarding process of mapping out the human body through a digital ecorche. Made in Zbrush.

I’ve been playing around in Zbrush a lot this past week. The new release, Z4R2, is absolutely amazing. It feels like all the technical restrictions are now gone and I’m free to just have fun without worry about topology or stretching polygons and such. The work below is me just having fun designing in 3d. Once I got to the point where I liked what was there but just needed to start refining the model is basically where I stopped. I just wanted to get the concept out of my head, not spend hours polishing it up.

Click the image to see its full resolution.

Below, I am trying to make an expression sheet for this character, so there will be more to come.

After a pretty grueling project at work that’s been wearing down my artistic mojo for the past couple of months, I have suddenly been very inspired by the work going on in the Sculpting department at Blue Sky. There are a couple of amazing artists each creating incredibly appealing sculpts at this moment. Their work has me feeling so inspired that I want to try going back to clay… for the first time! Well, sorta. I’ve done some clay work in the past, but certainly nothing that I’d consider of any quality. Mostly just playing around here and there to satisfy my curiosity. This time I’ll have to be strict with myself and make sure I finish. If I don’t, please get after me! haha.

What I have to show so far is the initial sketch I did, I think on Thursday night. I made another, more complete drawing that the sculpt is actually based on, but I haven’t scanned it in yet. I’ll try to get that up soon. This is one of four guys that I have a short film planned for.

Then I took a couple of in progress pictures on the armature and after I laid some clay on it to start to rough in the volumes. Sorry for the flash bulb style photos. Its late and I don’t have much in the way of movable lighting at my place.

For those curious, I’m working with Super Sculpey: Firm. This stuff is so hard though that I feel like I’m wasting time just trying to get the clay malleable. Maybe there is some softer stuff I can mix in? I’ll check into it. Oh, and I ended up winding some smaller wire around the legs too like you see on the arms. It seems to help the clay stay in place on the armature as it has something more to grab onto. Once I got the volume of the chest on there I decided I had to move the elbows further away from the body. But that wasn’t too hard since I had used two wires for each arm. I had plenty to reshape the arms with.

That’s it for now! I’m pretty happy for a days work. This is totally been a blast to work on and my artistic mojo is back in full throttle… or bloom, or whatever it is that mojo does. It’ll be interesting to see how it feels working on it as I get into the details. I’ll keep the updates coming.

Thanks for checking in!

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Small update. I spent some time on it this morning refining the major volume of the torso and blocking in some facial features.

Playing around in Artrage. I love how the program has a built in “sloppyness” factor. Brush strokes, paint buildup, color smearing, it all shows up in this program. There will be no digital perfection coming out of this program, which is great!

If you are a Windows user, you might find this useful. I created an X-Sheet in the wonderfully simple, note taking program, Windows Journal. I think this program is intended for owners of a tablet PC, but if you have any kind of tablet or Cintiq you can make use of it.

Once you have the program installed (I think it comes with Windows 7, though I’m not sure of this), open up the file and you’ll have a template for an X-Sheet at your disposal. You can write/draw right overtop of the image using different colors or line thicknesses to differentiate your notes. Also, if you need to move your notes down a few frames, you can select the lines you wrote and move them on the fly. If you decide you want to work traditionally, you can then print out your notes and take them over to your animation table. This file is set up for an 8.5” x 14” page.

Download the file by clicking on the image below.

Click on this image to download the Window Journal file.

I created this because there doesn’t seem to be any one perfect 2d animation program to use at the moment. This means I tend to jump around from one program to another a lot. So why not have your plan for your animated sequence separate from the program? That way you are not tied to whatever program you started your 2d animation. Also, it seems that each program handles an X-sheet in their own unique way, usually looking more like a timeline in an editing program than a traditional X-Sheet. This way everything is standardized no matter which program you use, and your X-sheet, the plan for our entire animation, is accessible no matter which program you choose to use that day.

I have other X-sheets ready for printing that can be found by clicking on the “Resources” tab up near the top of the page if you’d rather stick to strict pencil and paper.

It started with one drawing and before I knew it I was roughing out an animation in Straight Ahead fashion. The sketches range from rough to super rough. I was having fun with this, I’ll probably come back to it and try to fill in all the micro expression changes to bring more clarity to the exchange going on here between our hero and the man off screen.

I need to figure out a better way to display these so you can frame through them rather than scrolling the page, which kind of ruins the effect. Any ideas?

**Update**

I took a rudimentary pass at timing this piece and exported to the quicktime below. I’m sure I’ll change the timing on it quite a bit from this point as I work on it, but this helps show the initial idea.

Hmm, maybe thats a bad post title…

Just having fun coming up with different characters in profile. Made in Artrage. Click the image to see the larger version.

In the past few weeks Fox has released a couple of animated sequences from Blue Sky Studios. The first was a new trailer for Rio, whose release date was recently changed to April 15, 2011. I modeled two of the characters seen in trailer, the bulldog, Luiz, and the cardinal, Pedro. Both characters were designed by Sang Jun Lee. Character leads for the animation were Pete Paquette for the bulldog and Paul Diaz for the cardinal.

The other sequence was a Scrat short hinting at the premise for the next Ice Age film, called Scrat’s Continental Crack-Up.