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.

More updates once I develop this…

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!

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Kurt Angell

Producers
Bill Kruse
Paul Sadeghi

Design + Animation
Amanda Nelson

CG Modeling + Texturing
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

FX Animation
Rich Haesemeyer
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo

Lighting + Rendering
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Compositing
Amanda Nelson
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo

End-Tag Animation & FX
Kurt Angel
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist

Music + Sound Design + Mix
Ken Chastain

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.

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Modeling + Texturing
Matt Pearson
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist

CG Rigging + Animation + FX + Lighting + Compositing
Rich Haesemeyer
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo

Sound Design + Mix
Ken Chastain
Jesse Marks

The final animation I worked on for the show. I reused & altered the sasquatch I created for the first episode, and added a younger version.

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Character Modeling + Texturing + Rigging + Character FX (Fur) + Animation + Lighting + Compositing
Joe Russo

CG Environment
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Additional Animation (Background Sasquatch)
Amanda Nelson

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Character Modeling + Texturing
Matt Pearson
Jim Van Den Bogart

Character Rigging + Character FX (Fur)
Joe Russo

Animation + CG Environment
Amanda Nelson

Lighting + Compositing
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Character Modeling + Texturing
Billy Thiex

Character Rigging + CG Environment + FX (Smoke) + Animation + Lighting + Compositing
Joe Russo

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Character Modeling + Texturing
Jim Van Den Bogart

Character Rigging + Character FX (Fur & Dynamic Wings) + CG Environment + Animation + Lighting + Compositing
Joe Russo

This particular piece is called The Creature Holodeck which plays early in the show, describing the creature through V.O. and motion.

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Character Modeling + Texturing + Rigging + Character FX (Fur) + CG Environment + Animation + Lighting + Compositing
Joe Russo

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 something for the revived Minneapolis Art Community. The topic was self-portrait.

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.

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Modeling + Rigging + Lighting + Compositing
Tom Doeden
Rich Haesemeyer
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist

Animation
Rich Haesemeyer
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo
Eric Schulist
Paul Wilson

Transfer + Color
Dave Sweet

Morning

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!

Pixel Farm Credits

CG Modeling + Rigging + Animation
Joe Russo

Texturing + Lighting + Compositing
Eric Schulist

Steve Glutton

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.

Enjoy!