Kat's Sketchbook

Portfolio

I’ve grav­i­tat­ing away from this web­site and toss­ing most of my stuff up on tum­blr and deviantart. I’m prob­a­bly going to get a new domain and start work­ing on my portfolio.

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Head Modeling

Work­ing in 3ds Max is always a frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence for me, but I sup­pose if I weren’t strug­gling with a pro­gram not doing what I want, I’d just com­plain that my pen­cil and paper suck. Any­way, this is round 2 for head mod­el­ing. I don’t think I ever posted the atroc­ity that was round 1. Round 1 was full body, though. I did bet­ter with this one, but it still looks … wrong. It also looks noth­ing like Christo­pher Walken, which is what the car­i­ca­ture I drew as a ref­er­ence was based off of. I’m work­ing on a lip sync ani­ma­tion using the Mor­pher mod­i­fier.

I’m already using what I’ve picked up from cre­at­ing that head to make Kaia. She’s still in the mod­el­ing stage, though.

Tags: 3d, 3ds max, model
Category 3D Models |

Convertible Tablets

I’m fairly new to con­vert­ible tablets.  I spent a lot of time look­ing at the iPad and other tablets com­ing into the mar­ket and won­der­ing why the devel­op­ers didn’t see the poten­tial these things had for art.  With just a lit­tle more juice and pres­sure sen­si­tiv­ity, you could essen­tially have a mini-portable Cintiq.  What I didn’t real­ize is that these things already exist, and they’ve been around for a while.

Options are pretty lim­ited when it comes to these tablets, but that really isn’t sur­pris­ing.  Most peo­ple don’t need a lap­top with a pen­abled touch­screen, espe­cially when it costs over $1000.  I nar­rowed my pos­si­bil­i­ties down to three.  If you have a Mac­book (which I don’t), you can spend an extra $800 to get it con­verted into a Mod­book.  There’s also the Lenovo X220T, which has a key­board attached and a decently sized hard drive.  The one I went with is the Asus Eee Slate EP121.  It has a smaller hard drive and shorter bat­tery life than the Lenovo, but I’ve seen it in action next to a Cintiq.

My first impres­sions of it after a week are fairly pos­i­tive.  It’s every­thing I had expected it to be.  Once the Wacom pen dri­vers are installed (which, admit­tedly, are a pain in the butt to find) and the pen is con­fig­ured, the lines and pres­sure sen­si­tiv­ity are almost as good as my Intuos 4.  I’ve heard that with the Axiotron pen, it’s even bet­ter.  There’s a lit­tle lag in Pho­to­shop when using the larger brushes, but I get that on my desk­top, too.  Unfor­tu­nately, I’m start­ing to have prob­lems with blue screen prob­lems when the tablet boots up.  Thus far, I haven’t heard any­thing back from Asus on this, and with the Asus Slate dis­con­tin­ued and the Sam­sung Slate on the hori­zon, I’m start­ing to won­der if I should send the Asus back.

My Hal­loween short is off to a good start.  The script is writ­ten and the sto­ry­boards are almost fin­ished.  The more I look at it, though, the more I real­ize I’m prob­a­bly not going to be able to fin­ish this before Hal­loween.  I guess I’ll work as best as I can, and if I can’t fin­ish it, I can save it for next year.

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Idents and Lip Syncing

Dig­i­tal com­posit­ing is fun. I spent the past month try­ing to find my way around After Effects, and now I’m think­ing about my projects in a slightly dif­fer­ent way. I came out of it with two dif­fer­ent idents. The first I made as my final project, using a com­bi­na­tion of Flash, Pho­to­shop, and After­ef­fects plus a lit­tle Sound­booth magic. 43 sec­onds is a lit­tle long for a YouTube chan­nel, so I came up with the sec­ond one. It still needs some tweak­ing. I know the logo doesn’t stay on screen long enough to read it.

My short, Jun­gle Cat, only has two more scenes left before its fin­ished. Hope­fully, I’ll have some free time this week. I really want to fin­ish it, so I can move on to the Hal­loween short (which I need to start soon if I want to fin­ish it in Octo­ber). I’ve learned quite a bit from work­ing in Flash, but it’s start­ing to wear me down. I don’t really like the style as much, and I feel so restricted when I ani­mate with it. It cre­ates nice, clean draw­ings, but I’m eager to make some­thing that breathes a lit­tle more.

I’ve been want­ing to redo my lip sync project as tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion to really push the expres­sions fur­ther, and I think I might drag out ye olde light­board on nights when I don’t have access to my desk­top to work on that. I’ve been draw­ing quick sketches of Kaia, try­ing to redesign her for ani­ma­tion. I’ve stuck to doing very sim­pli­fied and dwarfed car­toon char­ac­ters up to this point, but I want to try my hand at doing a more real­is­ti­cally pro­por­tioned char­ac­ter with a lit­tle more detail. I’m still work­ing on her body and her pro­file (drew the eye in a weird place), but she looks a lot bet­ter than she did.

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Practice Sketch … er … Monday?

It seems I can never remem­ber to update unless I have classes. I’ve been get­ting absorbed in my projects, Molly and another 5 minute short called Jun­gle Cat. (I really should just write down my ideas instead of imme­di­ately draw­ing stuff for them. I’ve got too much work.) Any­way, here are some prac­tice sketches. I found a fig­ure draw­ing web­site (http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/figuredrawing.php) where you can set it to dis­play images for set peri­ods of time for ges­ture draw­ing prac­tice. It’s very helpful.

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