A series of sketches I did a while ago that I hope to turn into an illustrative motion piece. My inspiration for this was to focus on composition within a frame and to see what type of shapes are interesting. Also, I’ve been pushing myself to experiment with different styles in an effort to keep developing as an artist. Oh, and for fun too.
3 weeks before the opening game and we need an animation that not only brands Pixel Farm but shows the relationship between Pixel Farm and the Twins. Can we do it? YES! And we did, and this is what is the result from those 3 weeks of quick milestone turnarounds, little exercise, and a lot of consumption of Chinese food.
This plays 40 minutes before the game starts, on the big screen. So if you go to a Twins game, look out for it! Enjoy!
At Pixel Farm, we recently completed the in-game graphics for the Twins’ new baseball stadium (Target Field). Since I was working on MonsterQuest as this project was in production, I only had a chance to work on one of several animations: the homerun situational graphic.
I worked on the end part where the ball collides with the text and everything shatters, using particles instancing & keyframe animation to achieve the effect. The main challenge of this project was figuring out the timing for the slow motion. To do this we animated a moderately paced timing, and changed the “by frame” at render time to get more or less frames. Because of this extended sub-frame sampling, we had to sub-frame sample our particles too, which took a really long time to simulate. But after all of that, we created something of insanity…and everyone felt great about it.
We wrapped up production for The History Channel’s MonsterQuest TV series recently at Pixel Farm, creating cg elements for 9 episodes over a course of 5 months, starting back in October 2009. It was around 1-2 minutes of animation per episode, depending on the content of the show.
This particular piece is called The Creature Holodeck which plays early in the show, describing the creature through V.O. and motion.
Here is my submission for The Challenge. The topic was Winter. I chose to mimic micro photography with showing a small section of ice found in a cave or something.
Another two week illustration for the Minneapolis Art Community. The topic was an 8-bit re-design of a character. I chose Scott O’Connor from Kabuki Quantum Fighter, a Nintendo game.
Not sure if I correctly placed the Japanese text, or if it’s even written correctly. It should read the title of the game on the right, and my name on the left.
Here’s another spot for Pioneer that was finished early July, and has recently started airing.
I animated the “Standability” section and the final hero shot of the Corn Bin building and transforming into the coffee mug. One of my co-workers figured out a efficient way to change rotation direction on the cubes using mel scripting and custom attributes. All you would need to do is translate it in a direction and it would rotate 90 degrees per grid unit. Without this the project would not have been possible within the deadline, since each cube basically needed to be individually animated.
For example, my workflow for the corn bin was to animate one cube or a row of cubes, copy, paste, offset timing, followed by manual refinement of each cube based on where the camera was. Particles, dynamic sims, etc were just not giving us the result needed, so we went with the most straight forward approach. It was a lot of grunt work, but a good learning experience for pipelining / animation efficiency.
Hello! More professional work, and I’m really excited about this one!
For this, I built a new model shoe for New Balance and animate it in the same style as their previous commercials. They sent us the sole in CAD format which was converted in Maya to geometry. I took that into 3ds Max, cleaned it up a bit and separated the pieces out for animation. For the top, I used the CAD sole as my template for rough proportions and photographs / reference of the real shoe they sent us, breaking up all the parts I think would need to be animated.
I had to tweak the top part quite a bit before approval, in which I finalized the UVS and exported back into Maya. From there I used a combination of blendshapes and bend deformers with basic rotation and translation animation of the shoe. As I was animating we referenced my scene so we could texture / light / render simultaneously. It was about a 3 week turnaround, and I gotta say, it went pretty smoothly and had tons of fun!
Ah, finally some personal stuff! Here are animation tests for the characters of my next animated short: Ninja… Squirrel?!
These are mostly for motion timing / flow and acting. There are obvious intersections with cloth and skinning that will be addressed on a per shot basis (although skinning has been fixed now). These also have allowed me to set up my render layers and make master character files so that I don’t have to worry about render layer setup once my shots are done, for the characters at least.
