My new class is 2D Ani­ma­tion.  I’ve learned some basics before, but this takes it a lit­tle fur­ther and the final project will be a short sequence of a char­ac­ter called Trip­ping Tim (model sheets in con­cepts) who saves his grand­mother by slip­ping on a banana peel.  My last assign­ment was a bounc­ing ball.  I know the quality’s poor.

Feel­ing so shut off from the art com­mu­nity has been eat­ing away at me for sev­eral months now.  There are so many things that I want to do.  I want to go full time in school, but I can never find the means to do so.  I want to get out there and get expo­sure (which could also bring in money to help pay for full time), but at the same time I worry that I’m sim­ply not that good enough.  That’s what pre­vented me from enter­ing work in a juried art show a cou­ple months ago.  I feel like I have very lit­tle to show for myself.  Ian says that I should just do it, and he’s right.  I won’t know if I’m good enough if I don’t put my work out there.  I’ve come up with sort of a loose plan of things I need, and will try my hard­est, to do.

• Enter the Emerg­ing Artists con­test for Visual Over­ture.  I have one month before the dead­line to get my sub­mis­sions together, and if I’m of the win­ners, I’ll get fea­tured in the magazine.
• Enter other juried shows as they come up.  No spe­cific ones, yet.
• Join the NWAA.  I’m putting it off until after the first two, but it’s worth a shot.
• Children’s book?  Ian’s idea.  I know I can do the illus­tra­tions, but I don’t know about writ­ing it.  I told him if he writes it, I’ll illus­trate it.  I still wouldn’t know what to do with it after that, but I guess I can fig­ure that out.
• ACM Sig­graph 2011 in Van­cou­ver.  Sig­graph is a huge con­ven­tion for com­puter graph­ics, and every­one in the indus­try goes there, includ­ing the big names in fea­ture ani­ma­tion.  It’s a great oppor­tu­nity to meet other peo­ple in the field and see how it’s going to change.

After read­ing a bit of the book I have for my cur­rent class, I feel like work­ing on my comic again.  I think I know what’s wrong with it, and I have a bet­ter idea to fix it.  The biggest prob­lem is with the con­flict.  It’s there, but there isn’t enough of it, and there needs to be a cen­tral point of con­flict that the char­ac­ters have in com­mon.  Right now, they all have goals, but noth­ing that really uni­fies them.  I think I’m look­ing in the wrong place for the con­flict.  Before, Dierdre’s main quest was find­ing her father, but there’s another char­ac­ter in the story that played a much minor role who would fit bet­ter.  I’m just not sure how to go about it yet.

One new pic­ture added to con­cepts.  Orvil the cat.  :)  He’s a heav­ily edited ver­sion of a char­ac­ter I made orig­i­nally for another class, but trashed for Anna’s bet­ter design and per­son­al­ity.  Hope­fully the class I’m tak­ing now will help me give a decent per­son­al­ity to a fairly flat character.

I posted some final shots of the room in a new gallery.  It didn’t turn out so bad, though it’s not as detailed as I’d have liked.  It looks can­dle lit, which was one of my goals.  I’m going to play around with the pro­gram some more, maybe make some scenes from my story.  I think it’d neat to have mod­els of the envi­ron­ments where I can actu­ally explore it instead of just mul­ti­ple 2D drawings.

Work­ing with light­ing in the pro­gram.  It’s dif­fi­cult, but not for the rea­sons you’d expect.  It just takes so long for the lights to ren­der, espe­cially when you throw shad­ows into the mix.  I’m still play­ing with it, but this is what I have thus far.  It was enough to fool Ian into think­ing it was a photo, but it’s nowhere near perfect.  :)

Learn­ing how to apply mate­ri­als to objects in 3ds max.  My first attempt was using most of the mate­ri­als the pro­gram pro­vides.  Even­tu­ally, I got a lit­tle wiser and start­ing going around the house tak­ing pic­tures of var­i­ous wood sur­faces and some of the walls.  I don’t think I’ll ever use the wood mate­r­ial in the pro­gram again.  It just looks very, very fake.  Here’s the end result.  I’m still work­ing on more objects for the room, but it’s look­ing pretty good thus far.

I’ve been pretty busy for the past week.  I’m get­ting bet­ter with 3ds Max, and work­ing on some more per­sonal stuff on the side.  This is what I’m cur­rently work­ing on.  The first two are dif­fer­ent views of a room I’m cre­at­ing for my 3D mod­el­ing class.  The third is a pic­ture I’m work­ing on of my rogue.

I think I’m start­ing to get the hang of the pro­gram.  I’m mak­ing a room for Sleep­ing Beauty.  Loft­ing has become one of my favorite tools.

Well, my ani­ma­tion class is done, and I’ve since moved on to my first 3D class.  As of yet, it hasn’t been quite as demand­ing of my time, but the new pro­gram is very over­whelm­ing for some­one like me who’s never used it before.  The book for it looks like it could also dou­ble as a very deadly pro­jec­tile weapon.  Still, it’s kind of excit­ing ren­der­ing mun­dane objects.

I’ve got a cou­ple pic­tures I’ve been work­ing on.  My most recent is another pic­ture of my rogue, which will hope­fully have a lot more detail than the last.  I was also work­ing on a pic­ture of Dier­dre and Trance going to see Eleri, but I just can’t get the back­ground to look right.

Ani­ma­tion done for one of my classes using Anna.  Just a sim­ple walk sequence.