More Fire Work

I have the fire layer completed. Worked well enough using entirely computer generated fire although next time I would probably use filmed fire elements as well to add variety-but manipulating real flame footage to match the movement of walking figures is tedious.

I also added a fire light layer--at first I wasnt going to worry about shadows as I assumed that the light from one fire would obscure the shadows generated by another fire source as there are several on the figure but after running a test it looks better with some shadow.
I didnt bother animating the lights so they would not only flicker but move as well.

Getting close so I hope to have this finished by the end of the year.

Return to the Firing Line

I started to experiment with computer generated fire again. This was the first thing I tried out when I was introduced to computer graphics some years back.
At the time I was amazed by the default fire-but assumed it wouldnt look so good when rendered as an animation-especially on fast moving objects.

While looking at using real fire and filming it for another animation project, I revisited my Lava Demon test animation from early 2009 and started to add fluid fire to it.
The results havent been bad so I am working on that, and hopefully will have it finished by new year or earlier.

Here is a photo of the fire (building it flame by flame) on the figure(with it rendered invisible).

You can just see the outline of the mouth and eyes and fingers.




It will be layered onto the animation of the figure I did almost 2 years ago.

Digital Update

I didnt care for the results I was getting with my comic so I am going to use computer generated elements to assist in creating panels-which means putting it aside..again.

But I have my walk complete for an animation project and now I concentrate on the next phase-which is animating fire. It will be my first cg animated fire skeleton.
You can find stills from my experiments in older posts--this is a bit more complicated and I hope to get better results.
Doesnt really serve a purpose other than to look neat.

Happy Halloween.

Comic sketches

Working on a comic.
Here is a sample drawing. I use 8 x 11 paper to do the roughs then will use an 11 x 17 for the final one, assuming I dont get distracted and shelve it. I want to have continuity between faces so the final versions would use some kind of reference--perhaps even a cg model since I can turn them in different angles or alter facial expressions.

More walk cycles

No image this month.
Still working on walk cycles in computer graphics for a particular project I hope I will take to completion. I hate leaving this blog with no entries each month so this is my sorry attempt at fulfilling my goal.

I believe more interesting entries will be coming.
:)

Walk practice

WIP: creating a walk in animation using motion capture and altering it to climb a slope.

Book Art

When I wrote a novel some years ago I painted a cover for it. I was unsure about my painting abilities so I did things in an unorthodox way--I made sculptures of certain painting elements-photographed them-had them made into slides-and then painted over the projection onto cardboard. I think i could have just used photographs without needing to project them.
The painting ultimately was ok but kind of crude. I was looking to imitated 1970s movie posters but I didnt have the painting experience for it. However, with CGI I can come closer to that, or even make photorealistic elements. A case in point is this depiction shown-notice the claws matching the ones on the cover.. This was a self published book--it is now pretty much out of circulation and few copies exist. Trying to find a traditional publisher for it but Arabian Nights is a hard sell, at least among unagented channels.

I may eventually do a complete new cover with all cg elements.