The eve of Christmas Eve

So it took me a lot of extra work, but I was able to make my own rigs to use in this month's competition. They're kind of strange and awkward looking, but they're my own and they work. Mostly... Some of the facial blend shapes I'm finding out now haven't translated so well. The arm IK doesn't work, but they have FK set up also. The Character Rigging for Production tutorial I went through seemed to be a bit excessive, I'll probably try to simplify it for next month.

So the actual animation for this month is coming along, finally. I probably wont finish it until the last possible moment. But at least I'll have something to submit. I'm not expecting a better rating than I got last month, though. With the Dominance War challenge delays and my repeated failures with fluid systems and pre-built rigs, I'm way behind my deadline goals. Hopefully January will be more fruitful.

DWV - Preliminary Competition Finished

Well, after being put off 24 hours, then 48 hours, then a week, the Dominance War V Preliminary Competition is finally finished. I think mine turned out pretty well, without a second to spare. I think my characters could have done with more than 6 seconds, but as that was the time limit, I had to stick to it.

You can check it out here:

http://www.vimeo.com/17859913

Hopefully I'll post it on my website, http://shauntm.com later.

Now I'm back to the 11 Second Club competition for this month. Unfortunately, there's no female rig but there's a female voice in the clip. So I've been trying to make my own. However, I've repeatedly failed at my female character modeling. I really have to do some face studies. I may end up just using the standard rigs. Maybe put a wig on one.

December Schedule

Alright, a week into December and I finally have my schedule worked out. I've got my own model coming along for the 11 Second Club challenge this month, and I'll have to make a female character once this one gets worked out. I'm definitely not Michelangelo of the 3D realm yet, but the characters should be animate-able.

The Dominance War V competition has been extended another week, which is great for me. I finally got everything to fit cleanly into the 6 second limit. The keyframes are all set, hopefully tweening wont take too long. I'm giving myself 3 days to do 144 frames, so I should be fine.

247

I'm pretty disappointed with my rating at the 11 Second Club. I think it's pretty obvious that I wasn't going to win, but I was hoping to make it into the upper half. Based on what I saw while I was rating, I should have. But it's kind of difficult to say where it should land if it's not in the top 10%, since the rating from 1.5 to 4 the lower half and 4 to 8 cover the upper half. It's clear a lot of people don't really pay much attention to their ratings. I got some good comments, and some of the work that was rated better than mine obviously wasn't finished.

But there's no other competition website that I know of, so I'll just keep trying. I've got some ideas for improving this month, but it might be a couple months before I can break into the upper end and not have to worry about falling in amongst the garbage. I think unless you're in the top 10%, you really can end up anywhere. I think a lot of people go through and give random 1-3 scores for stuff that isn't their own anyway. The top scorer only had 7.86 stars, out of 11 possible. It was really visually appealing, and well animated, so I'm glad it won. But still, less than 8 stars for the winner? I think maybe they need to rethink their rating system.

Ok, enough complaining. I'm having a lot of fun with the Dominance War V challenge, unfortunately I think I'm really pushing the 6 second limit and running a little too fast right now. I'll have to cut out a couple moves to get it flowing properly. I finished a blocking test on Saturday.

I finally got the two characters for my Dominance War V entry rigged. I used a pretty basic rigging tutorial, so I wont have the flexibility of a professional rig like the one set up for 'Max', the rig I used for the November challenge. Hopefully I don't run into any problems that can't be fixed with a little extra keying. It's only a 6 second scene and there will probably be a lot of movement. So little things will probably go unnoticed.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to go through the more advanced rigging tutorial before I start setting up the December challenge.

November Competition... Completed

I've finished my animation for the November competition, and you can see it here:

http://www.vimeo.com/17279991

I think it turned out well. I have to work on the walk cycle, and the lip syncing could use some more polish. But I think I chose some strong poses and am off to a good start. This is the first project I've actually finished since graduating. It helped that the rig and audio was provided.

I'm looking forward to giving it another shot next month. Right now I need to focus on rigging up the Dominance War V characters. I only have a week to do 6 seconds of animation! This was 17 seconds and I had a whole month. I've learned a lot this month, though, so hopefully I can speed up the process a bit. This challenge is only warm-up anyway. The real challenge doesn't start until next year, I think.

Animation underway

I've started this months challenge for the 11 second club's audio clip. Thanks to the site, I was able to download some fully rigged dummy models to block in my animation. If time gets tight, I may rig up some models of my own. But these are really well done. I could probably reverse engineer something like them if I really get ambitious, but it wouldn't be as good.

So for the next couple weeks, I'll just by playing with my new virtual dolls.

Rigging

Rigging is going to be a pain. This tutorial gets way more advanced into it than any rigging tutorial I've done before. And there's a lot of new stuff to deal with because this character is bigger. Hopefully I can finish it by Wednesday.

I'm going to jump right into the animation challenge they post up on 11secondclub.com tomorrow. So finishing up this dinosaur will just be a part time thing.

Import/Export

He's all detailed, textured, and ready to go. Unfortunately the export/import instructions aren't quite working out. The ZBrush used in the tutorial must be an older version, and I haven't quite figured out how it translates into 3.5. I think I have a workable solution, but it definitely doesn't turn out as clean as I'd like.

It's ready to rig up and animate though. Hopefully I can have the rig finished tomorrow, animate on Saturday and render on Sunday. Then start the animation challenge at 11secondclub.com on Monday!

Blocking

I've finished the base mesh for my dinosaur. Took about twice as long as I expected, a time frame that I'll project onto the rest of the sections. So I sound be finished with the whole project by the end of November.

The next step will be sculpting in ZBrush, and then texturing in ZBrush. I figure 4 days for the sculpting, so I'll hopefully post the detailed model on Friday.

Walk the Dinosaur

I'm running through a tutorial from my 3D World magazine a couple years late. It used ZBrush, so at the time I just kind of ignored it. But now that I'm getting more comfortable with the ZBrush interface, I think this will be a really great project for me.

It runs through the entire pipeline. Modeling, Detailing, Texturing, Rigging, Animating, and Rendering. It will take a while, maybe 3 weeks. But I think it's do-able and will get me a finished and animated project. After this, hopefully I can get the time down to 2 weeks. Maybe even a week for small models.

I haven't done rigging and animating in a long time, and the last time I started texturing something I gave up halfway through... This will be a true test for me. If I can't finish this, I probably shouldn't continue pursuing a career as a 3D Artist.

I'll post an image when I'm done with the modeling portion.

Digital Painting

I finished my first digital painting today. It turned out ok, but not quite as professional looking as I thought it would. Just my first though, I definitely have a better idea about what I need to work on now.

I was going to make a full web comic, but after working out a story and storyboard I realized it would take way too much time to make it high enough quality.

This week I'll work on a 3D character. Hopefully focusing on a single character will allow me to put enough detail into it that I can have something worth putting in my portfolio. My problem is definitely starting too much projects and not finishing them. Which means I'm less skilled with the finishing touches. Not good for my development. So I'm going to do smaller projects and finish them. At least that's my goal.

What the hell am I doing?

Well, it's been kind of a while since I made any kind of post. Partially because I can't finish any projects... Everytime I start something I think of some reason to put it on hold.

I think I'm a little too ambitious... I wanted to bust out a 2 minute 30 second animation in one month. By myself, only working on weekdays. I think even if I had finished it, I wouldn't have been able to show anybody.

So I'm going to aim a little lower. I'll try to do some 10 - 15 second short advertisements to put in my portfolio. Hopefully, this will help me land some freelance work with some of the companies in the area.

This will give me more time to develop my skills in other areas. I do need to work on animating in maya, so I think I'll take some pre-built stuff, rig it up and animate it. Shouldn't be too hard to find good objects, since I'm constantly downloading stuff.

Right now I'm working on ZBrush. Here's my first sculpted head. Pretty good for a first.

Monthly Update

Things have been progressing, slowly. I've set a new deadline for my project as 12 days from now. That's ambitious, but it'll keep me going. If I have to push it back a couple weeks it wont be a big problem.

The biggest snags have come from computer problems. Maya and 3DS Max 2010 are sold together, but apparently cause some problems when loaded together on the same computer. Lame. I seem to have gotten around the errors but it took some time.

Maya is kind of laggy even though the polycount of my objects is staying below 10,000, and I don't have more than one object a scene yet. So there must be some setting that needs to be adjusted.

I'll be finishing up my main character's body today, then tomorrow I'll start making clothing and hair. My biggest problem is getting the area around the eyes to look right. Eyelids have a lot of creases.

Long time

Wow, it's been a really long time. I didn't do too much while waiting for my computer, so wasn't much to write about. Now I've got thing set up and it's seems to be working properly, finally. almost 2 months after I originally ordered it.

I've gone through all my 3D projects and decided to re-work some of them. Hopefully I can make some improvements, knowing more now than I did when I made my projects in college.

I did some hand drawing work too. Today I went through my Anatomy for Artists book and drew some of the models. I haven't decided yet if it's important to learn all the names of the bones and stuff.

Still behind

Finally got my computer sent back. I need to make up a new schedule for this week, since I got basically nothing done again today.

Snags

More problems... The computer ended up crashing again this morning. So I'll send it back for repairs. Until then, it's back to my old system for a couple weeks.

Wasted another day running some tests and trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I should have just sent it back to them on Monday. I guess they'll pay for shipping. Aside from being hard to reach, the guys from CyberPowerPC aren't so bad. Just don't think you'll get a hold of anybody on a Saturday(even though they list hours).

I suppose I should do more stuff independent from the computer tomorrow. I've got a good dvd on stylized figure drawing that I'm looking forward to. I think it'll help my 3D work.

Today's experiment...failed.

Self-Diagnostics

I finally got in touch with the tech support guys at CyberPowerPC. I was worried I would have to send my whole system back to them and get a refund, but the guy told me if I could isolate the problem, they will just send me the part I need for repairs.

So it could be one of three things, they said. A RAM stick, the video card, or the motherboard. The motherboard being the most serious problem, RAM being a pretty quick and easy fix. The problem with running the tests, is I have to wait 5-6 hours between each test so that the computer has time to cool down. The system never had any problems booting up and staying on after I had it warmed up.

Right now I'm still testing the RAM, which seems to be the culprit. I took out two of the three sticks, booted up, blue screened. I took out that last stick and put in a different one, booted up, clean. I put in the final stick(so now I have two of the three in), booted up, clean. I think I've found the problem, but I should do a couple more tests to make sure. So hopefully I'll be done with all this mess by 9pm tonight.

Behind

Endless computer problems... But if I really focus today, I'll only be two days behind schedule. Time for a grueling pace on meager rations!

Setbacks

Of course, as soon as I get everything planed out and organized, I have technical problems. This morning my computer wouldn't even boot up for 5 minutes before giving me the BSOD(Blue Screen of Death) and restarting. I called tech support, but didn't get a response for 6 hours(and after 3 messages). So I just reinstalled Windows 7. Everything seems to be running smoothly, but everything was running smoothly last night until I booted up this morning, and I hadn't installed anything weird between those times.

Tech support finally got back to me, and said it was probably caused by installing a 32 bit program on my 64 bit system. So much stuff isn't compatible with the 64 bit version of Windows. I really hate that, but with a high-speed processor like mine I'm really wasting a lot if I go down to a 32 bit OS(Operating System). So I'll be more careful this time around and make sure I only install stuff that will work on my 64 bit system. I'm pretty most of my programs are ok. Because I had them both on my 64 bit vista system in Korea. But there were a couple new ones I only tried out on my 32 bit system here.

I don't fully understand the difference between 64 and 32 bit systems. 64 bit is faster, somehow, because of it's ability to process more information at once. With an i7 processor and a solid state hard drive, my system is pretty quick. That quickness doesn't do me much good if the BSOD keeps popping up though.

Soo... slightly behind schedule. I was supposed to have my tutorial videos done by 1pm today, it's 3 and I've done nothing. But I think it's safe to get maya loaded up, so maybe I can get it done before dinner.

New Computer

The new computer is up and running. We had a little stutter this morning, but I think it was just having trouble booting the external hard drive on startup. So I'll make sure to keep the external drive off when I turn the system on. It's so much faster than my other computer, I haven't even seen the limits of my processor or video card yet. I have the 30" monitor next to my 23". The 23" is really just for video tutorials while I work on the 30".

I've got a nice schedule for tutorials and a project set up over the next two weeks. Next week I'll go through a bunch of maya tutorials, one a day, and the following week I'll set up a scene. It might take me a bit longer than a week to do the project, but the tutorials should be easy to finish on time. I'll probably be able to figure out by the first day if the project is going to take me longer, then I can just double the time. It's been so long since I've finished a project though, I think I just need to get one done. Even if it doesn't turn out well, I make too many excuses otherwise. So I'll just get it done and assess my situation after that.

I started a free trial to netflix. Seems like I wont be continuing with it though. There's no way to switch the audio tracks when watching online. That's a deal breaker, since I mainly got it for watching anime series on my computer. Unfortunately, it defaults to the English dub. Which annoys me. Customer service was friendly but clueless.

Not so much

So, I didn't get so much done today and yesterday. I sorted through some files, got a few more programs set up, and did a couple basics things. Nothing too impressive. This weekend I wont get much done because I have a lot of friends in town.

I'm still not sure which program to use for animation... They all have strengths and weakness. The main weakness of Toon Boom is complete lack of lesson material... Otherwise it might turn out to be a pretty useful program. I did some work in flash today, but it turned out pretty badly. There just doesn't seem to be something that has all the right tools combined. I guess that's just something animators deal with. I just need to pick one and stick to it. I'm sure this glossing through of the multitude of programs available isn't helping much.

Finished Early

I got my illustrator tutorial finished early, so I'm going to go back and review Flash and Illustrator today. Tomorrow I'll get into the Photoshop tutorial. It's not as long as the Illustrator one, but it's long enough that it could take 2 or 3 days.

I'm not sure how much work I'll get done this weekend. A couple of friends of mine from out of town are coming, so I'll hang out with them.

I called to make some modifications to my computer, since it was already late, so it will probably get here next week Friday.

Illustrator

I've finished my flash tutorial and started on illustrator. It's a long one, 13 hours of video. Not the best lecturer in the world, but I think there's a lot to this program so I need to stay focused. I'll do about 4 hours a day, maybe finishing tomorrow. Then I'll start on photoshop.

I bought a couple more artbooks online. One from CLAMP, the guys who did Chobits and xxxHolic. Another from an independent artist called zeiva. Not really sure how to pronounce that, but it's pretty interesting artwork. There are couple step-by-step illustrations in the book, that will hopefully give me some insight into their process.

The video card for my computer is back-ordered, so that wont ship out until Thursday. It was supposed to ship out on Monday, so I called them and asked about it. I wish they had given me some kind of e-mail notification. So I wont get it until next week, which is disappointing. I'm really getting frustrated with this older computer, but I guess it can do as much as I need it to do.

I got another package of books I shipped myself from Korea. This one was quite a bit more banged up than the last one, so I'm worried about the next batch... I'm waiting on 4 more, that will probably come at the end of this month or the middle of next month. I suppose there wasn't a whole lot of uniquely important stuff in my shipments, but still. I'd rather not lose stuff to the bowels of the Atlantic Ocean.

Source Material

I went to Barnes & Noble this morning and picked up a bunch of magazines. I got a couple comic collections, one Japanese/Korean(Yen Plus) and one American(Heavy Metal). Not too impressed with the American stuff, and the comic I read out of Yen Plus was hard to follow. I digital art magazine called 'ImagineFX'. It's British, so it's expensive, but it came with a resource CD that has some tutorial videos and texture pictures and such.

If anyone needed proof that I'm a nerd, here's a collection of my toys. Most of the stuff on the bottom was bought either in Korea or Japan. The couple things on the top are from Harvey Birdman. The two things in unopened boxes are from Hellsing. Actually, those two things aren't very nice. So I'm hoping that keeping them in the boxes will give them some kind of sellable value. Everything else I'm pretty satisfied with, it's all high quality stuff.

Time to get some work done. I hope to finish my introduction to Flash tutorials today.

Friday

Going to bed early on a Friday night. I got all of *nothing* done today. I tried to do some cleaning, but got distracted by digging through old stuff. I forced myself to sit down and go through at least one chapter of my flash tutorials. Not exactly any new information though.

They're taking their sweet time building my computer in California. The website said the build process would take 5-10 days, today is the 9th and there's no updates yet on the website. It better be done on time, it takes like 30 minutes to put something like that together and I can't imagine they're having a ton of business in this economy. If they finish it on time(Monday) it'll be here Friday and I can finally get up to speed on everything. I can't expect anything out of this machine, it's 4 years old.

Anyway, I'll try to get some work done tomorrow. I haven't left the house in a week and a half... Cabin fever hasn't set in yet, but I'm expecting it at any moment.

Flash

Flash isn't as bad as I remember it. I'm not doing much with ActionScript 3.0 yet, so we'll see how that goes. I haven't done any programing in flash since 2.0, and it's been completely overhauled. After I go through some of these basics videos, I'll get into that. Right now I'm just concerned with drawing and simple animation, so I can get a couple projects finished.

Didn't start work as early as I would have liked to again today. Not sure how to fix that at this point... There's so many things that break up my work day, I'll just have to schedule around them.

Rescheduling

Well, due to many external factors I'm changing direction a bit this month. Next month I was planning to do all kind of Flash based animation projects, but I've decided to get started on that stuff right away.

I think it will be good to start drawing more frequently. But I'll have to modify my 3 month schedule, a lot. I'll get started on my 2D programs, pushing the 3D work to next month.

On schedule

Ok, after my general ineffectiveness last week, I'm back on schedule for this week. I just have about 50 more pages in my 'Half Life 2 Mods for Dummies' book. It's going smoothly, just a couple fixable glitches popped up, but nothing serious. I should be able to make some of my own interesting levels by tomorrow.

I need to work on getting up more easily. Maybe more exercise would help. I didn't get started on actual work until about 10:30 today. I should try push that to 10 or 9:30.

Week 1 - Fail

Well, I had a lot of stuff going on. A lot of stuff to get set up. A lot of organization. A lot of set-backs. So I'm counting week one as a failure. If I catch up next week, great. But I have to keep going. I can't try to make up for all the work I missed this week or I'll just end up further behind.

Today I got everything moved around. My computer is no longer in my room, neither is my drafting table. They're both set up just outside my room. This little area will be kind of like my office. I think it's better this way, so I don't have to worry about overnight renders.

Next week's agenda: Half-Life 2 mod.

Should be a good week. No foreseeable distractions. I'll have a little more cleaning and organizing to get done, but for the most part I've got everything set up and ready to go.

Windows 7 on an old computer

I just installed Windows 7 on my old desktop computer. It needed a little cleaning up, and Windows XP doesn't make it easy to reformat your hard drive... So I downloaded a trial of Windows 7. The interface is great, but I think my computer is a little too slow for it. It took most of the day to get everything configured and all the programs loaded up. So I didn't get much done yesterday. The past couple days have lost a lot of time because of setup. I suppose there will always be something in the way, so I just have to push through it.

I got a book by Michiyo Hayano. It's a manga-style retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Pretty much the standard story but with cute pictures. My girlfriend really likes the drawing style, and I do to, so I got it to do some practice with that.

Today I've got a lot to catch up on. The simple city I was supposed to build in Maya is way behind. I didn't have a working copy of Maya on this computer until 6pm last night, and then I had a bunch of other stuff to install and didn't get any work done.

So, today's plan:

Finish the buildings for my city.
Finish chapter 3 of the Genki Japanese book.
Do some weight lifting.

Reasonable goals. I'll post tomorrow about success/failure

It begins

I'm finally back in the US and ready to get to work. That doesn't mean find a job. I have a lot of work to do before I can even start looking. To become an animator, you need to have a portfolio/demo reel. I haven't finished a project since college, so my portfolio is filled with unrelated works and my demo reel would just be embarrassing. So I'm going to stick to a plan and get some projects done before I head out to look for employment. I'll use this blog to keep a record of my work.

I got back from Korea last week Wednesday, so I've been in the country a whole week! I spent a few days with my sisters in Madison, now I'm back in my hometown. It took a few days to get everything set up, and I'm still waiting on a new computer. I bought a real nice system. One of the intel i7 processors and a ATI 5850 HD video card. Should serve me better than this beast I'm working on now, but it wont be ready for a couple weeks. I just got a new monitor, a ViewSonic VP2365wb. It's one of the IPS panels, that is supposed to have better color reproduction and a stronger viewing angle than standard TN. We'll see how it works out, if I like it I'll get a second as my secondary monitor. If I don't like it, I'll get a dell as my primary monitor and use this ViewSonic as a secondary.

This week's 3D project, a basic city. I've got it all planned out, about 30 blocks of buildings. I'm a little behind, I was supposed to have the skyscrapers and small businesses finished yesterday. I'll hunker down and get those set up after breakfast. Then I can start working on the parks and other ornamentation.

I've been working on some anime style drawing. I'd really like to make a nice little comic, so I'll keep working on it as a side project. I think keeping up with my hand-drawn stuff is important, to show off my creativity to future employers.

Aside from my work, I'll be trying to build up my Japanese language ability. The Japanese are the ones busting out the really high quality, artistic, and thought provoking animations, so I really need to keep up to date with what they're doing. The best way to do that, learn the language. Both of the big English anime magazines stopped publishing while I was in Korea, lame. But knowing Japanese will put me ahead of that anyway, since I wont have to wait for translations.

Also, I need to think about my health. I'm living with my parents, who keep plenty of unhealthy food stocked. I'll have to cut back on snacking and really work on my discipline. It's much easier if the food just isn't around, but I can't force them to change their habits when I'm living in their house. There's some exercise equipment in the basement, so I'll try to take advantage of that. I think being healthier will give me more energy. And more energy can lead to stronger mental processes and the ability to put in more work hours.

This blog is going to be a culmination of all these things I'm doing to try and become a serious, professional animator. Time to get out the big brush!