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.

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.

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

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.