Seabiscuits

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I can't use the excuse that I've been super busy with work. More like, moderately busy with work and visiting family and friends. I'm excited to be starting a couple new projects soon. One project will be a 'traditionally animated' short film for Duncan Studio.  A pencil, giant stacks of paper, and some very talented animators and artists...... I can't wait.  Here is a random drawing I did on my recent flight to Indiana.  I have no idea why I drew these 3, but there's got to be a story there.

Figure drawing class - July 18

Well, it was good to be back, drawing in a classroom setting. The charcoal drawings were quick 30 second poses, and the pencils were 5-10 min poses.  If you want to draw better and there is a figure drawing class open in your area, I highly recommend going.  I knew I should be going pretty regularly, but I always found some excuse not to. By the way, this is a just a portion of the drawings, there are plenty of crappy ones, too.

I forget the exact quote, but Glen Keane or Art Babbit, someone said,
 "Every animator has at least a hundred bad drawings in them. Once you get them out, you can start making the good ones."

*Perhaps someone can help me out with the exact quote?

Dance Thumbnails

I've been studying a lot of dances recently for additional game animations. Here are some thumbnails I drew while trying to figure one of the dances out.

Tigers' Dance Animations

There are many 'emotes' in the game. If you feel like screaming there is a scream animation. If you feel like practicing Kung-Fu, there is a kung fu animation. If you feel happy, there is a happy animation. And if you feel like dancing....

Gorilla boss

More Loadbar Animations

A couple more loadbar animations from the kfpw. Viper was the most challenging to break apart into pieces to re-use. She changes shape so often and her body is always tapering in or out. But I will say, Viper was the most fun to animate.

Loadbar Animations

To keep players entertained while waiting for kfpw to load, we created a series of loadbar animations with the 'furious five' characters. We had a unique challenge of making these animations fairly long, but keeping the file size very, very small. So, we roughed these out to get the performance right with the brush tool. Then made 5 or 6 shapes to describe the monkey's main body parts (head, tail, chest, leg/arm, foot) and then re-used, overlapped and skewed the same body parts over and over again until the whole body was filled in. Since Flash allows you to instance the same symbol (movie clip or graphic)as many times as you want without adding to the file size, we were able to keep the files small, allowing them to load quickly.

Here is monkey

Croc Boss

One of the many cool villains in kfpw is the Croc.  Here is one of the croc boss entrances I animated in one of the mini-games, followed by the rough animations I did before filling in the the character shapes. The red lines are tracking my arcs on the sword and a few other parts of the character. 

More to come...

Kung Fu Panda World is Alive!

I've been animating for the past 9 months on this game.
www.kungfupandaworld.com
It's a massive multiplayer online (MMO) game for kids based on the Kung Fu Panda movie from Dreamworks.  It has been a lot of fun and I'm excited to see it up and running.  Our in-house animation team got to animate a huge variety of characters on this game(mostly in-world): Characters with 2 legs, 4 legs, no legs, wings, huge gorillas and tiny chopsticks fighting over a dumpling. Great experience and great game. If you have some free time, go there and check it out. Wander around, practice some kung fu, fight some croc minions or play some mini games.

One of the animators that I work with developed some really useful tools for the 'flash character animation pipeline'.  He's now allowing anyone to download and try them out for free. I can't say enough about how helpful his tools were while working on the game. 
Autotweener
Art Brushes in Flash (new)

I'll try to put together some of my work from the game so I can post it here on the blog.   You can, of course, see the finished animations in the game, but I also have lots of thumbnail sketches and roughed out animations that I'd like to post.

By the way, I snapped this photo a couple of weekends ago at Dreamworks while checking out a special screening for "How To Train Your Dragon". I wasn't sure what to think from the watching trailer, but I must say it was really well done with top-notch animation.  I recommend.

A House

I found this drawing in an old sketchbook and really liked it, specially since I don't do a lot building/structural drawings.  I remember wanting to develop it further, maybe recreate it in 3D, or something.  Anyway, it's just a quick doodle, so I decided to add some color for now. 

It's funny how you can look back on something with fresh eyes and have a completely different appreciation for it.  It's like I don't remember drawing it, so I'm looking at it completely objectively.

Busy

Thank you for the great comments everyone has been leaving lately.  There have been some questions about my materials I use to draw or software to animate.  So, I'd like to answer some of them.  I animate in Flash for 2D and Maya for 3D, with the exception of the occasional animation in After Effects or Nuke.  I almost always draw quick, people, observational sketches with a pen. I have a nice Faber Castell 'S' PITT pen.  If I'm drawing from my imagination, then I almost always use a medium-hard pencil  H's or F's.  If I like the drawing, I will sometimes refine it with a soft 4-6B pencil.  If I add color, I usually scan in my drawing, set the drawing layer (in Photoshop or Illustrator) to 'multiply' blend mode and add color on layers below that.

This is an illustration I made for an insurance company a few years ago.  I was going through some old files and stumbled on it. It seems to give the sense of busy, which is what I am right now.  It's an animated gif that I created in photoshop.  Basically you feed 5 or 6 versions of a drawing into photoshop and it loops them.

Venice Beach Art Wall

A couple of weekends ago, I rode down to Venice Beach to draw.  I found a nice spot to sit and watch the graffiti guys working on the Art Wall.

History Channel!

The History Channel has some new programs we've been enjoying at home.  Here are a couple of characters from 'Pawn Stars' and 'Pickers'

Ludwig and his elephant

Getty People

After a long Christmas break, the quest continues, as I try to dust the cobwebs off. Here are some people that held still long enough for me to draw them. The highlight of the day was the guy wearing heels and carrying his wife's purse.

Hand Gestures at the CTN-X

I attended the CTN-X animation expo this weekend. With all of the great panel discussions going on, it was a perfect time to draw and watch the hand gestures of the different speakers. it seems most people have similar hand/arm movements, but the subtle differences in the tension in the fingers reveal the unique personalities.

Football Sunday

They didn't broadcast the Colts game here on the west coast, so I was stuck watching a couple of teams that I didn't have much interest in. So I started drawing...

Disney Animation Boot Camp

Not long before March 25, 2002, when Disney announced they were cutting their 2D animation department, they had a 2D Animation Boot Camp for new talent. This is not to be taken lightly. Disney put the recruits up in a dorm in Monterey, CA. They were taught by some of the Disney greats, including Walt Stanchfield. A co-worker of mine was selected to be one of these new talents back in 1997 when he was in college. He shared with me his stories and his official boot camp binder.

Pretty damn cool.

This is a huge binder, loaded with great advice and techniques for beginning animation artists. I can't imagine how cool this might have been to be a part of. This is the same year Disney put out Hercules. This is also 5 years before they gave 2D the axe and 10 years before they resurrected it from the dead again. I don't have the time to scan the whole thing (though I wish I could), but I wanted to at least scan a small sample to share with any of the animation fans out there.



I have no idea if they still do this sort of thing for their new3D animators, but I doubt it.

Oil Pumps

Costco Folks