I animated!

Being long-term unemployed is a drain on a lot of things and a lot of video games played if your discipline is as suspect as mine can be.  This semester at my local community college I took an intro course into motion graphics, which was mostly Adobe After Effects with a smidgen of Maya dynamics/particles and Photoshop, and re-took the second level 3D modeling and animation course.  It seemed to work to keep me productive and learning.

Okay, deleted a stack of excuses and drivel twice now.  Let's try this again.

The MoGfx (ugly abbreviation, but you get it) class went decent enough for the first half of the semester with vector animations, Photoshop integration and puppet pins.  The latter was compositing video with sfx rendered in Maya... and was not my strong point and was very much a painful learning experience in the opposite.  So we shall never speak of that again.

My time management on this (The 3D modeling/animation class!) project was better than usual, but it drove home my weakness with painting weights and texturing.  I also don't like straight FK (forward kinetics) rigs (rig = skeletal structure and the joints) since they work exactly like claymation and pure IK (inverse kinetics) often have crazy issues with joints over-extending--this all makes no sense to most people, I know.  Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a rig I can work well with... I'll find it in a few years of practice.

My goal this time was experimentation within a moderate zone so I didn't break too much stuff.  Crashing and burning is easy for me in Maya.  The goal was to model something that reminded me of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca.  I got sort of close with him and only finished maybe half of her model for this low-mid poly range.

Issues:
-Need to burn down my Frankenstein rig and start anew
-His face is too flat
-His lower teeth had a control to animate it.  It broke at the 11th hour.
-That texture.  Inspired by Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers
-Jittery hands.  FK rig problem.  His drug wavering from his core (waist/lower back) made this arms wobble like that.  Was too hard to full de-animate it.
-The blendshapes for the facial animations needed more work
-Spent at least an entire night learning how to make an eye-rig.  He drunkenly stares forward the entire time.  Goddamnit!

Fun:
-Glass materials
-Lighting
-Decent camera jitter for once

To-do:
-New rig from scratch
-Practice low-poly modeling more
-Water dynamics
-Smoke/fluid dynamics for cigarettes and fire

Space Pirate Captain Himilaya Proctor

I still draw, I swear!  I do amateur (aka: learning the ropes still) 3D modeling too.  I just don't find most of my work worthy of posting is all.  A few things to my Instagram profile now and then even!--though their resizing algorithm is rather garbage for pencil drawings...

So as of late my usual wish-I-was-a-comic-book-artist styled work has been total fucking ass.  Something has caused  my brain and hand to be at civil war and refuse converse with the enemy and it's been both a creative dump and a frustrating mess with only one crumpled sheet of paper over a lost temper thankfully.  The rest is just leered at and imagined on fire as I laugh maniacally.  Somehow during a frustrating night I tried this rendering method and the warring factions of my brain and hand signed a cease-fire agreement for now.

Anyway, for the past two weeks I've only been able to render doodles like this for some reason.  Which is weird specifically because this exact style is the one I have NOT been able to do properly (okay, with a few decent exceptions numbering under 10, and I'm not kidding) with pencil since I started carrying a sketchbook with me 95% of the time 14 years ago.  Charcoal is easier to do this with since it's more controllable in its innate messiness and smoothness, but specifically my pencil shading and rendering skills have always been runner-up at best.  It's a brave new frustrating world on normal sketchbook paper (60# probably) and 2B/4B graphite with a kneaded gum eraser to dab away highlights.

The black outline was added because it looked too plain and trying to shade all that area in pencil would have been a giant smudgy mess the instant I closed the sketchpad.  Slightly tweaked the contrast as scanning, and adjusted a tiny spot on his right-lats from a spec of something on the scanner glass.