Weekly Blog: December 7th-11th

The final blog entry!

Okay, so here is my sketch:


It's basically a bunny. I was inspired to sketch this because at my movie theatre, we received a new poster for Alice in Wonderland coming in March, so that made the think of the white rabbit from the story.


This is a really cute short story from the guys at Pixar. It's a small short until Cars 2 comes out. All that Pixar does is amazing, but I was inspired by the lighting in this short. I don't like Mater so much, but this short is really cute.

My final entry is for Disney's new animated move The Princess and the Frog. I haven't seen a traditional style Disney movie in a while, and this one is really well done. It's not as realistic as a Pixar, but it is very nostalgic growing up to movies like the Lion King. The music numbers are breathtaking, and if you have time to see it, I would recommend it just for the gorgeous animation.

Weekly Blog: November 30th - December 4th

Okay, I lightened up the image, so here is the render of the shoe.







This is a coca cola commercial from a few years ago, but it's playing again at our theatre. It's a little bit fuzzy, but it looks great on TV. The animation is amazing, and the humor in the commercial is great. It's a great advertisement.



While looking at animations, I came across this Wall-E promo animation from pixar. I had never seen it before, it but it is so cute! The best part about pixar is how well they can bring a character to life.

Weekly Blog: November 23-27th

This first entry is a close up sketch of the zipper on the Zippur shoe. I spent a lot of this weekend trying to figure out how to animate the zipper, but I'll need to ask for help. I'm trying to animate the zipper along a spline, but when I path deform the zipper, the spline changes and moves in weird directions.

While looking around for inspiring zipper things, I came across this image from Boingboing.net
This zipper dress is inspiring because it's made entirely out of zippers, so it can be changed and shortened or lengthened with whatever you feel like wearing.

This was another really inspiring piece from this website with other cool zipper things:

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/09/07/17-cool-zipper-inspired-designs/

It's a hightop shoe that can change into a flip flop. It's so amazing and inspiring for the type of shoe that our group is making.

Weekly Blog: November 16 - 20th

My first entry this week is a first render of my shoe model for the group project. The bottom is basically a canvas shoe with an changeable top. Here are two examples of the shoe.

This is a music video of Michael Jackson's song Black or White. Professor Castillo mentioned it in class on Friday, so I decided to look it up for inspiration. The scene changes from one place to another, and this is similar to the idea that we had for the project.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon with animated movies over the last few months. No matter how good a movie looks, (this one looks great) it seems to always be compared to Pixar. They are the kings of animated storytelling, but it's interesting that movie reviewers always say that they are never as good as Pixar. Anyway, a new computer animated movie came out this weekend called Planet 51. It thought that it was funny and enjoyable, though you might not remember it like you will a pixar movie. Working with 3d environments, it makes me appreciate how much time an effort are put into these movies. It's basically the story of an astronaut to lands on a planet that is already inhabited by aliens who believe that the universe is only 500 miles long. Some parts are pretty good, though there are a lot of cliches.

Weekly Blog: November 9th - 13th

This week has been so stressful. First with premiere not working, and now that I'm trying to model for our group project, it's not going well at all.

Anyway, here are my blog entries for this week.

This is a movie poster for the new blockbuster 2012. The story is that the myan calander predicted the end of the world in 2012, but no one really cares about the story. The world blows up with spectacular special effects. I was inspired by this because of the incredible effects in the movie. They really do look amazing.

For our group project, we are planning on doing a shoe with interchangable designs for one shoe. One of my tasks is to model the shoe, so when I looked online I found this tutorial on box modeling a shoe. There were a few using nurbs, but they did it with some kind of plugin that I don't have.

http://www.gabrieleprotti.com/PAGES/tutorial/scarpa/makingoftheshoe.htm

This is my sketch this week. It is the basic idea of the shoe. The body would be one color, and the top would be connected with a zipper so that you could interchange the top design.

Assignment 0.7 - Animation

Here is the first output of my animation. It's a spiritual animation.

This is my first attempt at animation. I really tried hard on it, but I've had a lot of frustrations my first time out. It's 300 frames long like the assignment, so it's only 10 seconds long. It does have sound; the song is a piece by Andres Segovia. My idea that I tried to represent was walking through fog. That is a very spiritual experience for me.

Also, I hate to admit it but I've head many headaches with this assignment. First, premiere couldn't download onto my computer, so I had to install it on another one and transfer. Secondly, when I tried to put music to my animation on premiere, it would only render it out as an audio file for some reason. So, for now I had to make it on Windows movie maker, but with a converter it is in avi format. It was so frustrating; I just want to smash my computer to pieces. I like the way the animation turned out thought for being 10 seconds long.

Weekly Blog: November 2nd - 6th

First off this week is my sketch. While thinking of animations, I though of rabbit jumping through the air. And, I also thought that it would be fun to do in cubism style. So, this is my quick rabbit cubism sketch of a rabbit jumping.

The new interpretation of Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" is an odd one. If you see it for nothing else, it is a great example of Live Motion Capture animation. It is incredible the detail of all of the characters and their expressions. It's actually pretty scary how realistic they look. I was working on Saturday, and a little girl and her mother came in. She had to get a refund, because the movie was too scary for her. It's stunning to look at, and the new technology is very inspirational.

If anyone needs to find tutorial books for 3ds max or any other programs go to

http://elibrary.unm.edu/

Click the Library Catalog Tab and enter the name of the program. For example, I entered in 3ds max and it came up with help books on the subject. Any of the searches that have [electronic resource] will give you the books online that you can read anytime. They were pretty helpful.

Weekly Blog: October 26th-30th

Hope that everyone had a safe Halloween. I had to work, so I didn't do much. Though, being inspired by Halloween, I thought of the jack-o-lantern and the way that light shines through the pumpkin to reveal it's face or image. So, my sketch this week is of a sad jack-o-lantern. It's not the best sketch, but I wanted to try shading and light with the pumpkin.

My next entry is an amazing artist on deviant art that I found through google when I was looking up images of pumpkin carvings. The guys username is Revelation-Six and his stuff is really amazing.
This is one of his carvings from 2007 of the late John Wayne. The detail and the way the light shines through is amazing.

Working at a theatre, it's easy to see movies that have just come out. I didn't see all of it, but one I saw the end of was Astro Boy. Based on the classic Japanese anime, it is sort of a kiddy version of the series. The animation was beautiful though even if parts of the story were so predictable. I watched the way the camera moved, and it didn't move very much. It did move for some action sequences when it followed Astro as he flew away off screen, and another particular shot I remember is when the floating city is crashing down, the camera pulls back from the city and has Astro's friends looking at the chaos. It was strange to watch a movie trying to notice these things, but it was much more interesting than the story was sadly.

Astro Boy poster from shockya.com

Assignment 6: 3Ds Max Light Fixture

Four different views of my lighting fixture. Revised my light since I first posted. It looks better now with the dangling strings down the center, and now I just have to put it on a cd for friday.

Weekly Blog: October 19th-23rd

I'm really glad that the dealine for the next assignment was delayed to this Friday instead of the 23rd. I've been able to spend a good amount of time this weekend working on my light.

My sketch this week is of a Kobalt, from a board game I'm playing right now with my dad and cousin. It's called Descent, and it is sort of a rip off of Dungeons and Dragons (okay, an overt rip off, but what dungeon crawler isn't.) I think of this monster as sort of a mini-hulk, although in the game they are very weak.

These are renderings of my first light fixture that I attempted for Assignment 6. It looks okay, but I think my next light is a lot better. I'm not turning this in for my assignment, but I thought that it's a good blog entry for my progress in 3ds.

My final entry this week is an inspirational lighting fixture that I found when I was looking online. It is from this site: http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/09/12/airluce-devastatingly-modern-lighting/
This light reminded me of a jellyfish in that the way the light reflects from the center and lights up all of the legs. I had no idea that there were such interesting lights out there.

Weekly Blog: October 12th-16th

Over the weekend, I've been trying to model with 3ds, and here are two of my attempts before I try to model my lighting fixture for the next assignment.

This is my very first modeling attempt. I really don't know what it is, so I don't expect you to know either. I was just trying to play with shadows and basic shapes without becoming too frustrated.

This is my next attempt at modeling. I followed a tutorial from this site.

http://www.escalight.com/tutorials/3dsmax-tutorials/modeling-a-snail-part-1.html

Though it was using an older version of 3Ds max, so I had to find some of the tools that they were explaining. It didn't turn out that bad, though it was troubling trying to apply the texture.

I still have to add the pupils to the slug. The turtorial only shows how to model the slug, and not to add textures or anything beyond modeling the thing.

This is a sketch of Max and Carol from Where the Wild Things Are. The new movie came out this weekend, so I was inspired to do the sketch. The movie was really great, and I paid more attention to the lighting in the movie. The light was amazing. It was also interesting to me the way they did the special effects. The wild things were played by people in suits, but their faces were animated. Their techniques were amazing, and it's worthwile to see the movie.

Weekly Blog: October 5th-9th

This is a sketch of a guy watching a movie in a theatre. I tried a new perspective on the guys head, because we are starting 3Ds max next week indepth. I can say for once I'm glad that I'm a pc user, just for the fact that I only have to download 3Ds max and nothing else to make it work.





Speaking of modeling and rendering, this amazing joker render is from a site called creative uncut. It has galleries from recent video games, and this render is from Arkham Asylum. You can find the website here: http://www.creativeuncut.com/index.html I don't want to do animations for video games (I want to work with movies), but I found this artwork for Arkham Asylum really amazing.

Since we are actually starting 3Ds max, I decided to look up some tutorials for it.

http://www.3dstudiomaxtutorials.com/

The name pretty much says it. No, I didn't make up the name of the website, that is the correct url. It has some nice tutorials, but it seems like you need to have some prior experience with the program.

http://www.maxbasics.com/

I think that this website is good for beginners like I am with the program. It has some pretty basic tutorials with is good for someone with no experience except messing aroud with it over a weekend.

Assignment 5: Red Blue Chair

This assignment was to model the Red and Blue chair using Sketchup. Here are three different views of my model. This was my first time working with any kind of 3d program, and while it had its issues, (I had to use Ctrl z a whole lot) it was pretty easy to work with once to get the hang of it. What really helped me was creating lots of layers and locking lots of layers.

Weekly Blog: September 28th - October 2nd

This weeks sketch is of a praying mantis. I was inspired to sketch one when I was going to work this week. I found one on my car's tire (trying to blend in). I had to knock it off with a stick so I wouldn't run over it.

I was really inspired by the presentation this week. I never knew that Albuquerque had a branch of Sony Pictures Animation, and it would be amazing to work for a company like that. That being said, I found some really inspiring animations this week.



This is an animation that my French teacher actually showed us. It is by aniboom.com, and I love the style of the animation. The colors are amazing, but what really caught my attention was the lighting. It is really stunning.



This 3d model of an alien is from an artist named Peter Zoppi who works in Los Angeles. His stuff is really amazing, and his kind of modeling and animation is exactly what I want to do in my career. This website is http://www.zopfx.com/index.html.

Weekly Blog: September 21st-25th

This weeks sketch was inspired by the Sony Pictures Animation reel that Professor Castillo showed us on Wednesday. The Watchmen was very inspiring to me as a comic and a movie, and the way they rendered Dr. Manhattan in the movie was particularly inspiring to me. My sketch this week is one of Dr. Manhattan, and I hope to one day be able to render him in three dimensions and not just two. As you can probably tell, I'm not that great of a sketch artist, but hopefully I can improve by doing these sketches!

Now, I'll admit that I don't watch the Disney channel very much, but this weekend they had a presentation of "Meet the Robinsons" from a few years ago. I had never seen the movie, so I watched it from a new perspective. I didn't watch for the story, as much as now I can start to see how they made and animated the movie with 3d modeling. It was interesting watching it though, because near the end, the sun was so bright that the whole movie was washed out. I could barely see the the characters anymore. I never had much interest in watching it, but now I can see the movie from a new angle. The movie was very cheesy, but it was interesting to see the kinds of things you can do with animation currently (or, a few years ago).


(this movie poster is from http://virtue4.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/walt-disney/)

I found my third entry this week looking around on google images. Since we will be starting 3d modeling in sketchup, I decided to look on google for random 3d models. This guy has pretty cool concept art and amazingly detailed models of people to leather jackets. Here is the url:

http://www.koreyba.net/

Week of September 14th-18th

My first entry this week is my sketch. It's basically a tiger but from a high perspective. I was trying to play with texture in the sketch with the tigers fur. Texture is a very important element to try and make an image realistic. I'm trying to become more detail-oriented in my sketches.




My next entry is a video off of youtube about a new game for the nintendo ds called "Scribblenauts." The reason this game is so inspiring to me is the premise: "Make Anything, Solve Everything." Basically, you can type almost any word into to game, and it'll appear and help you solve puzzles. In the video, it shows three ways to solve a puzzle envolving knocking down bottles. I love this game because it let's you be as creative as you want to be. It's amazing for a video game to be so open to let the player summon almost anything they want. It really lets your imagination go wild, and it's amazing that a video game on such a small console has such a large premise.



My last entry for this week is kind of a cheesy one, but it shows what kind of things can be done with movies now a days. I work in a movie theatre, so this weeked I watched a small part of the new kids movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." The movie itself was cute, but what inspired me was how they could show all of the food so amazingly. My ultimate dream in my career is to be an animator, and this movie showcases what an average animated movie can do. It's not a Pixar movie, but it shows that even though it was not made by Pixar, it can still be very creative and look good. Someday I hope to help make movies like this, but in the meantime it's fun to watch a movie like this.


I got this movie poster from impawards.com

Weekly Blog: September 7th - 11th

This week's sketch is a worm/dragon type of monster. Usually with my sketches, they come from one point and the ideas come to me as I'm sketching. The left monster's eyebrow was originally an uppercase T from the title of the New York Times that I saw. I flipped it, and made eyebrows.

This is a picture of a dragon in a dungeon basically. I was trying to play with the light coming in through the window, and now I think that I should go back and make the contrast higher between the light.

This is my interpretation of a Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings. This is an old picture of mine, and it make me realize that I want to get better at shading and the texture of my images. I like the image, but it makes me realize looking back on it that I need to improve.

Oh, and I made all of these images myself. The nazgul of course isn't my idea or character, but the pictures were all drawn and made by me.

Assignment 3

Here are my four images for Assignment 3 using Adobe Illustrator.

Assignment 2: Haptic Modeling

Here are my six best images of my haptic models.

1. Rhythm

2. Structure

3. Rhythm

4. Structure

5. Melody



6. Rhythm