Monday, February 6, 2012

New cg animation

Finally got this sucker done
As a learning experiment it was a major pain in the ass but now that its over I can get to things less tedious.
The idea behind it is that its a mutated astronaut who encounters some kind of anomaly near Saturn.
The final shot was my favorite and added to give it a better send off.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Celebrity heads


I also finally got to completing the first stages of some new sculpture heads. A few of these have been sitting under my computer table for well over a year. I decided to branch into a larger scale in an effort to get a likeness better, then reduce the scale of the sculpture to my regular size of around 1/6th. I wont say who the heads are supposed to be yet since I need to mold, cast and paint them. I'll wait until I can be sure the likeness works when I add the realistic eye and hair effects to it. I have seen some excellent portrait heads get ruined by bad painting. The top two heads are of a pair of horror movie actors who frequently worked together. The other male head on the second row is an oscar winner--I did the head ten years ago but the likeness wasnt quite right. You can find the completed original sculpture somewhere back in the archives---I used the head on a sword and sorcery inspired sculpture. A couple of years ago I came across a truly outstanding portrait sculptor who did a perfect likeness of the same actor--he had access to screen captures which I did not have at the time--but I vowed to come close to matching that sculpture when I refashioned my own, using the same clay head form ten years ago(since they often survive the molding process). The final two heads are actually of the same person--an actress I have never seen in a movie but turned up in online photo sites. She is one of those people who tends to look different in different photos and i had a terrible time locking down her likeness. Women are generally harder to do than men I think, but I did the best I could and am glad to have it in the mold stage. I have another few heads that I need to re-work(one of the downsides of being self-taught is not having the right amount of discipline when starting a sculpture--my heads tended to have slightly misaligned features because I never approached them like one would a drawing--when in fact it is very useful to mark a sculpture like you would a 2d image--getting the nose and eye and mouth placement so you dont need to go back and make corrections(which I have had to do way too often). These heads will mark the new generation of my figure sculptures--assuming I dont get distracted. They have been the lowest priority of all my art pursuits.

The new book cover


I mentioned several posts back I had put out an Arabian Nights novel several years ago and was planning to redo the cover. Well, I did it faster than I expected. I released the book in a new revised (and cheaper) edition as well as electronic versions. Will I sell any? I dont know but I do think the cover is a vast improvement over the original. Ironically I simply went back to the source models (although two are badly smashed up I still had photos of them) and used them as the main subjects in the cover and abandoned the painting style. The printed version has excellent sharpness-I was really impressed how well it looked in the proof. I hope to get a second book ready soon as it was rather satisfying working on this.

We're back


It has been a busy summer and fall. I am in the middle of rendering an animation which is taking weeks (for something that is approx a minute in length it is taking me 2 months--I need a second computer for rendering if I keep this up). My last post mentioned I was hoping to be done with it by the end of april. It was not to be! Far from it. In fact I was close to shelving it entirely. 2 years wasted. I ended up needing to upgrade my computer and discovering that much of the computer crashing I had encountered with the project may have been due to my system not being 64 bit, so I was able to resume working on the animation. It has been very slow getting it to the final stage as I added a few extra things (such as the spaceship above) but I have been able to work on other things as it has been rendering.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Animation doldrums

I could have missed an entry this month but eh--here is one anyway.
I have overshot my self-imposed schedule but as the shot I am doing is three times as long as the first it is taking a while longer.
If i cant get it all finished and rendered by the end of this coming month then I will..
I will consider giving myself some kind of suspenseful ultimatum to supercharge my motivation.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Second animation project in progress





Decided to go back and continue an animation that I started in 2009 but shelved due to a software glitch. Since it seems to be corrected I am continuing with it. *Hopefully* I can get it completed within the month.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Fiery Demon Animation


Here's the updated version of my first cg animation. I added fire to the figure and smoke to the background.
I used entirely computer generated fire--next time I will use real fire footage as the results will likely be much better.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u43jvSzJXs