Tuesday, December 29, 2009

OUT WITH THE OLD




After six years my old tablet finally kicked the bucket. Since it was right around Christmas I decided it was high time to get a new one. I had my eye on Wacom's Intuous and now that I own one... man, is it nice!

I painted this green fellow during a "let's try out the new tablet" session. The Intuous has way more levels of Pressure Sensitivity than my old one did which results in more control (Apparently technology moves forward over a span of six years)! I'm really excited to use this new tablet on future projects.

~Chris

Thursday, December 24, 2009

SHAPE BOX

One exercise I really enjoy doing is creating a box, filling it with random shapes, and then seeing what they evolve into.

~Chris

LINE ART

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

11 Second Club, December 2009







Here's a fun piece I've been working on for the 11 Second Club's Dec. 2009 competition. I've been studying up on storyboarding recently and I wanted to put my knowledge to the test.

I would have just embedded the videos here on the page except they get cut off by my blog's layout and I can't figure out how to modify it. I really like this template, too, so I stubbornly don't want to change it.

~Chris

Monday, December 21, 2009

Poor Posture

Reference is useful

I've been trying to visualize a character of mine for a while now. He's a young boy and the setting is the late 1800s. I got a book from the Library called "Children's Clothing of the 1800s" which helped out immensely. The image on the left is drawn from the book, and the image on the right is my treatment of the character.

~Chris

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Old favourites revisted

In my quest to create a new design portfolio I've gone back to some designs I did a few years ago for a game we were working on in India. I really enjoyed drawing the characters back then, but I wanted to see what else I could do with them from a fresh perspective. These are all new drawings. I was watching some great design videos on youtube by a guy named Jason Chan and I really liked how he put three or four characters side by side, all slightly contrasting one another. I still have some rendering work to do on the left-hand side character but I wanted to post this, as I'm pretty happy with it so far.

This is all drawn directly into Photoshop on a Wacom Tablet.

~Chris

Friday, October 16, 2009

Daily Character Design: Office Fish





Okay, I cheated today. I already had this character banked away but I hadn't developed him past a certain point.

~Chris

Friday, October 09, 2009

Friday, October 02, 2009

More Thin Man Design Exploration

I realized, after modelling the head of this guy, that I was in the clutches of a wave of excitement and that I was getting ahead of myself. I had to take a step back and remember my priorities so now I'm exploring the construction of this guy and trying to come up with the most appealing combination of shapes. There's still lots more exploration to be done but I like where these are heading.

More to come!

~Chris

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Homeless Wizard WIP

A little further along. I had to play around with some different layer types to be able to see my colours accurately but still have the light values underneath. In the end the Hard Light option was the best.

More to come.

~Chris

Thin Man









I'm trying to translate this character design into 3D. So far the head has been a fun modeling challenge. Since the energy of the character's face is emenating from the tip of the nose I started there and extruded back to create the rest of the head. It was my first attempt at this method and so far I really like it. The hair is a separate piece of geo. I'm probably going to have to come up with a different name for the character though as the Thin Man is the name of that really creepy and really cool monster from Pan's Labyrinth that has its eyes in its hands.

I hope to post some more progress soon.

~Chris

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Another Homeless Wizard


Pencil and Photoshop.

I'm working on some character designs for my portfolio. Somehow I came upon the idea of, "What if homeless people were actually Wizards?" and am now exploring some possibilities. This guy was my favourite from the first batch so I'm going to paint him up nice and post some WIP's along the way.

~Chris

Monday, September 21, 2009

Drawing The Festival



Some drawings I did while attending the presentations at SPARK Animation '09!

~Chris

Monday, September 14, 2009

Zeke's Pad at the Elan Awards


http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/9950

I was a Lead Animator on Zeke's Pad so I'm really excited to hear that it took home some lofty awards, including Best Animated Television Production!

~Chris

One of those "An Actor Is Talking About Animation" segments

Except, unlike most of them, this one is actually watchable.



~Chris

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Wolf and Bulldog



So I was doing all this crazy action analysis a while ago of a weight lifter and I've since started developing this idea around a weight lifting competition. The character designs are starting down the Anthropomorphised Animal route which has me really excited. I'm envisioning something really wacky with a heavy inspiration from Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery. I'm working on an animatic at the moment and I'll post it once it's in a state that I'm happy to start receiving feedback on.

~Chris

Friday, September 04, 2009

Sergio Walk Cycle WIP


Started off with a couple quick thumbnails to illustrate the basic mood I wanted to capture in the posing. You can see how the idea was really rough with the thumbnail at the far left, and how I took time to tighten up the pose with the subsequent thumbnails. Also, it's a good idea to draw the pose from profile so that the angle of the character's body is being taken into account.


With my idea fleshed out in thumbnail form I start right in with the blocking. I approach my animation in a very systematic way, first blocking in the Keys, then moving on to Extremes, then Breakdowns. I keep my Tangents set to "Clamped" and "Stepped" while I'm blocking so that I don't get distracted by any fluid movement. All of the attention should be on the poses and their relationship to one another. Once I'm satisfied with my blocking, I change the Tangent settings and my curves in the Graph Editor to "Linear" (I've always gone straight to Spline in the past, but I'm trying something new this time).

So now everything is Linear, with offsets added only to the hands and head (The overlap of the head is bugging me. I need to work on that).

The feet always require the most attention in a walk cycle. The part of the cycle that I think is the most crucial to get right is the push-off from the toe when the foot is extended at the back of the stride. I try to get this working first before touching anything else.

I'll continue working on this cycle because I really like how it's looking so far and I'll update the Work In Progress as I go. I hope that somewhere, somebody is reading this and finding it useful.

~Chris

Monday, August 31, 2009

Posing Exercise #1


I wanted to practice conveying weight in this pose because I hate seeing poses that lack any sense of gravity and balance and I want to make damn sure that they aren't creeping into my work. This is the Sergio character from Strut Your Reel, I just made some small adjustments somewhere along the way but all copyrights to their respective owners.

I hadn't touched this character in some time but a friend of mine was asking me some questions about the rig which forced me to open it up and poke around. I think I'm going to animate something with this character because I remember really enjoying the rig in the past. But that's going to have to come at another time as I have some other, more pressing fish to fry at the present moment. I have some action analysis notes to post, as well as the current Work In Progress that the aforementioned action analysis has spawned. Not to mention the ongoing search for work. Hoo-ray.

~Chris

Friday, August 28, 2009

LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS




My fiance has been in Japan sice last April. I was there for six weeks which really helped to break up her away time into a couple more managable chunks. This last stretch has been about two months so far, with one month still to go. I don't know how people managed in long distance relationships before there was all this crazy communication technology. Emails, video chat, you name it. It's like she's just in another room until the chat ends and I'm forced to face the bitter reality of a lonely existence with no one to share all of life's little pleasures with. Only one more month to go. I can do this.

~Chris

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

GETTING CAUGHT UP










I've got lots of new drawings in my sketchbook to post so I'm slowly going to get caught up.

~Chris

ILLUSTRATION GIG

When I was working in India I started illustrating this children's book. I moved back to Canada in the middle of the book's production and continued illustrating it from my Mom's kitchen table and then from my buddy's place in Vancouver while I looked for my own apartment. Once I had my apartment the illustrations were finished there. So this was really a multi-continental experience. It took up most of my waking hours for several, several months and I'm pleased to see that it's now on its way to bookshelves around the World.

~Chris

Thursday, August 06, 2009

NINJAS ARE WAY COOL


There's a really awesome rig floating around in different animation circles affectionately known as Norman. For my money, Norman is the shizznit.

I've retro-fitted Norman a few times for some 11 Second Club submissions in the past but none of those retro-fittings even come close to this latest one. I put a lot of work into it and I learned a heck of a lot of technical stuff that I wasn't aware of before.

I also got to model a Katana which turned out great! Well, to be honest it's not a true Katana. It's kind of a mix between a Katana and a Ninja-to. Oh man , I've been geeking out over this retro-fitting for like two weeks.

Now that he's all finished I'm going to animate some scenarios because I seriously want to see this guy in action!

~Chris

Sunday, August 02, 2009