After so long, I finally uploaded my photos from my Yunnan Trip last year. The trip is really good. The views and scenery in China is astonishing and breathtaking. The grandeur of the mountain and the sweeping plains is really something to behold. On the other hand, I witness the really poor region of china where people still engage in agricultural economy. The children there do not have proper education and spend their life in the fields. Even for those that do go to school, they probably have to walk a few hours a day to get to the nearest school. It is a interesting experience I had in that trip. Anyway, as usual, I ramble too much. Enjoy the photos

The new term has started !! We will have more 3D this term and less 2D classes. Probably the only 2d classes are classical animation and life drawing. I would actually miss doing composition which i quite like. I will miss doing 2D stuff as we dive deeper into 3D but oh well, I will still be doing drawing on my own in my free time.

Anyway, we will be learning more modeling, animation and texturing. In addition, we will be touching on lighting at the later part of the term. For modeling we probably have learn all the tools necessary for it and we just need to keep modeling to increase our speed of modeling and quality of output. Our lecturer Nigel say the chief requirement of a modeler is to be able to translate 2d design into 3d design so our sense of form and volume must be strong. We are doing speed modeling in class where within 3 hours we will try to model something based on a design given to us by Nigel.

At the moment, I am actually thinking everyday about my demo reel. I should be heading towards a technical director role, maybe character TD or effects TD, depending on which one i will enjoy more. I will be meeting my animation teacher, Magic next week to discuss on it and I hope I can start as soon as possible before even term 3. This will give me more time to start focusing on what skills and technique I need to learn and really make a good demo reel which will ensure my a good job in the future.

Next week will be an interesting week. On tuesday, we will be going to the aquarium on a research field trip for an animation shot. We will be animating a beluga swimming and we are supposed to go to the aquarium to observe them. This will be interesting and I will be posting pictures next week

Anyway here is the  speed modeling practice. It is sort of a mutant chicken design…

I meant to post this before the end of December but my ISP is giving me so problems. My internet connection is like a tortoise. I finally found the answer to my problem. My ISP’s DNS server is garbage and I have to use a external DNS server called OpenDNS. If you are a telus user and you find you are getting ridiculously slow speed, try using OpenDNS’s servers.

Okie, all the fine now I am continuing my practice of anatomy by drawing from Bridgman’s Life Drawing Book. In case you don’t know who George Bridgman is, he is the teacher of Frank Reilly who is regarded as one of the best art teacher in America during his time. Well Bridgman’s books has been recommended and used by many artist since his time til now in the 21st century. To cut things short, if you want to learn life drawing, get his books !!

Well not much new works this week. My drawing hand has been rather lethargic this week. Only did some wolf studies to prepare for a painting I am doing for Farlandworld. The wolf studies is from photo referenecs. The picture i am doing is about a creature called wolf-spider, hence the studies. The one at the bottom is the sketch of the wolf spider which has a wolf head with spider body and eyes. Hope to have more pictures this coming week

For the last week, I have been exploring Sidefx Houdini. I have to say, I am hooked onto it. I am usually not a fanboy for any software but this piece of software is really a beauty by itself. The way it handles the process of creating 3D images is very distinct and unique, very differerent from rest of the other 3D software which more or less have similar functionality, just having different interfaces. Houdini is totally based on procedural paradigm. It is not just simply a node based software but it is like an operating system for 3D. They provide you with all the building blocks and you can create anything with them, much like playing with Lego. What is so fantastic is that each block can communicate and reference another block from any network. (Houdini have networks which are like a universe where you can construct stuff and keep your building block in a neat way) This really means there are limitless possibilities that you can connect your blocks and give them behaviors and rules.

Within this first week, I learned quite abit about Houdini but I feel I only touch the tip, no the first atom of the tip of the iceberg. I hope to use Houdini possibly in my demo reel. (depending whether I will go into visual effects or not) The good thing is Sidefx recently announced the Apprentice HD version which cost only 99 dollars. The only restriction is that you can only use it for non-commercial purposes and the max size for batch rendering is HD size, which in my opinion is good enough for a demo reel.  Well, i see whether I can buy one license and use it in my demo reel.

Sidefx’s website

I found a link site today which provide connection to alot of awesome artists. I am not sure of the origin of the site but it is a good collection of inspiration. It mainly deals with the field of concept art though it does have a category for 3D and traditional art. If any time you are short of inspiration, a trip to any of the artist showcased here will surely bring ur sugar level up.

Link

Term 1 has just swept by in a blink of an eye. Within in 2 months we covered quite a bit of materials and i learned tremendously. From life drawing to character design, modeling to texturing. I feel I learn more stuff in this 2 months than in my last year of self learning. Anyway, here are some of my stuff.

First up, modeling. This is the last assignment for 3D modeling and we are supposed to do up some biorobotic character. I design a dinorobot thingy which have robotic arms and legs. Its central torso is also robotic and it houses a few fighter pods which gatling gun mounted on it. Dont mind the ridiculous pose it is in

Next up is composition. Majority of the compositional works are done on paper. Only the last one is done digitally. Here the teacher pass us a paragraph from a novel and we are supposed to pick a scene and do up a composition on it. I still find it difficult to apply color to my drawing as shown. I am still not proficient in shading digitally and I find my work have a sense of incompleteness to it. Well more practice !

Next up is sculpture. This one is pretty exciting for me because this is my first time at it. We are supposed to do up any thing we desire as long it is half body. I basically design a alien looking character which some sort of tentacles at his head. I must say, the process of sculpting is so involved and hands on that it feels pretty good doing it. You have a great sense of directness but of cos a great deal of control is needed. I believe i did a good job considering it is my first try. Anyway the color you see on the picture is done digitally. I am still in the process of coloring it with acrylic (with little success though).

All right. This last one (above right picture) is not part of the school stuff. It is just a picture i did for someone who is designing a d20 game setting called Farland. This particular picture is for their bestiary page, and for a creature called Aldran Giant. Interesting project and I guess I will continue doing more picture for him. It is good practice for me.

I just heard from my brother that there will be a Shannara movie in the making. It got me quite excited. I like Terry Brook’s Shannara series and has always hoped for his books to be make into movies. Finally, the filmmaker has seen the potential in his story and make my dream come true. For all those non-fantasy book reader, Shannara is a on-going series of books written by Terry Brooks based in a fantasy world setting called Shannara. There has been many stories based in the world, spanning many generations of characters. This world is sort of a post-apocalyptic world where Man’s dabbling in Science has brought about a world catastrophe that wiped out most traces of science. Man are left with virtually no technological advancement. However at the same time, magic, which has faded off when Man began to be more scientific-going, started to surface again. This is a short summary of the setting of these books. Well the book being made into the movie is Brook’s second book, Elfstone of Shannara, which is one of my favourite book. Anyway, here is the link to an interview with the scriptwriter.

LINK

Here are some of my assignments I have done in the last few weeks. First up is a 3D model of a unicorn I did for 3D modeling lesson. I will not touch it for now but I intend to use it as my next project to learn mudbox. I will sculpt it and define more details in mudbox.

The next two images are digital painting I did for two different lessons. The landscape one is for a photoshop lesson where the lecturer ask us to practice digital painting. I randomly found a landscape picture from google and tried to paint it in photoshop. I can say it is my first time jumping into colour in digital painting and I find it so much more difficult than painting in grayscale. When I try to pick a color which i think is the correct value, I would realise that I am so wrong when i lay it down. The effect that color has all its neighbouring color is something I need to learn to see and take note of. I also encounter difficulty creating correct edge relationship to make the landscape look real and interesting.

The other one is a painting I did for History of Animation. My lecturer ask us to design what we think Mickey Mouse should look like in our own style. Me, being a lover of realist art, went for a more realistic style. In the end, it look like a character from the Redwall books.

I just want to post some random sketches that I did during my last meeting with the ConceptArt Sketchgroup. I met an old member of the group, Jimmy, a concept artist at Rainmaker Animation. He is going to Singapore for holiday/sketch tour. I gave him some tips and recommendation on where to go to sketch and places to eat. Coincidentally, most of the sketchgroup members are Asian. I find it kind of ironic since we are in Canada !! Anyway, enough crap.