Solomon Fix

This is a color pre-viz done by the art team based on my original pencil drawing:

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Behold the majesty of an imperfect Ned. Like I said before, I have a beautifully rendered Ned sitting on my computer, but I’m not going to show it to you yet…it will only inflate the ego of my animation team and they need to be kept down. You see, I have to maintain my reputation as “The Man” and if I selflessly encourage them, empower them, give them a hint that they could make it without me, all hell will break loose.

So the above image is a concoction of the original model they sent to me for notes, and then there are the notes I drew on the picture in Photoshop. These modelers at RedEye are so good that they turned around my notes in less than 24 hours. You’re probably not a big shot like me so you don’t know that that’s really fast for “the biz”.

Speaking of The [Read more…]

Here’s the most recent wrong Chipmonk. He has some hair and lighting issues, the team is still trying to crack his hair lighting and stuff. I’m only showing you the chipmonk because he’s the least finished of all the characters…the other ones look really cool.

Why am I doing this? Mostly to make the team look bad. Humiliating 3D artists is good for their life development. Speaking of humiliating life development, I walked into the Frederator break-room today and there is Jeff DeGrandis gouging the top of a chocolate chip muffin, leaving the less-tasty bottom for someone else. I picked up the muffin bottom and looked at it up close…and there was one of his sickening knuckle-hairs sitting on the pastry. This is the kind of thing that we have to go through being on the same floor with Jeff DeGrandis.

This is a new pass focusing on just the chipmonk’s shape. One of the tough parts of 3D is that rendering takes a lot of time especially when a character has hair, bouncing light sources etc. By the time a short stretches into the 7 minute area, you’ve got a pretty unwieldy project.

Most entertainment projects aren’t a whole lot of “fun” work. I got into animation because I liked making critters come to life, not realizing that I was going to go through 15 years of hell learning how to do that. While the Redeye-animation boys build these models, they aren’t doing any of the “fun” work of moving the character around animating, making it come to life. Nope, they are rigging models, shaving polygons, building rigs, testing lighting etc.

See the little kid above the chipmonk? His name is “Ned”…he’s the real little boy in the short. We spent [Read more…]

This is a first pass at the Chipmonk model for my Solomon Fix short.

I love the sculpt and expression of the mouth, but I thought the blood-shot eyes made the little guy look not so little. Because there are actual monsters in this short, I can’t have the most horrifying thing be a chipmonk. The hair has some strange light-sourcing on it so we’re looking at that too. But there he is, The Chipmonk. We’ll use this model for both chipmonks since they are twin brothers.

My goal is for the drawing to really play into the model and the sweeping gesture of the line-work is still present in the 3D chipmonk. Success! It’s a lot like inking a pencil drawing, you don’t want to lose the gesture of the cartoon in your clean-up…(for more comic inking tips check out this article I wrote on inking my comic). There was a time [Read more…]