Internship

Not much time to animate lately, but it's for a very good reason. I've been accepted into an internship with an instructor from AAU. It's not animation related at this point, but will be in the future, and honestly, it feels great to be working with a team again. Working in a vacuum is rather difficult for me, and having other people I can bounce ideas off of really helps me.

I checked my last post, and realized that I have done much more work on my Jim Dialogue animation than what I posted. I've got Jim locked down almost 100%, and I'm currently building the models to flesh out the scene - he's not talking to no one, after all! I'm attempting to model them after the characters that Jim adventures with, but if that proves too time consuming, I may take a few shortcuts, for the sake of getting this animation out and done with.

Enough talk, here's the clip:




I'm not sure when I'll have time to animate more personal stuff, and as I'm under an NDA, I won't be able to post any internship-related animation, but I'll drop in from time to time just to keep the blog alive. Perhaps I'll turn this into a general art blog, and post sketches and other drawings. We'll see how well blogger handles that.

More Jim

Just a small update - I continue work on my Jim pieces, though the walk cycle is progressing at a much better pace than the dialogue. Here's how it looks right now. Getting close!




I already feel wanderlust for a new piece, something longer, and actual film, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea if a single line of dialogue is slowing me down. Must keep working!

Jim stands for...

Just a small update - work continues on the Jim Dialogue piece, and I've started a walk cycle with my Jim Model as well, just to keep my brain exercised. Here's a playblast of the dialogue:




and here's an in-progress of the walk:

More more more

Always working on something, as I always say. I felt like I couldn't look at the viking animation anymore and decided to shelve it for now. Of course, that's not to say that I won't revisit it in a month's time (and probably look at all my keys and just think "What was I doing?") but for now, I needed another thing to look at.

So! There is a particular little scene that's been rolling around in my brain for a long time, and I'm taking this chance to finally get it out and into Maya. If you are familiar with webcomics, you've no doubt heard of Penny Arcade. They've worked together with Wizards of the Coast to help promote the newest version of Dungeons and Dragons by playing real games and recording everything and releasing it as a podcast. Oh, the nerdity! It makes me so happy to hear them roll their d20's. Anyways, one of the player characters to spawn from this union is a REAL character, going by the awesome moniker Jim Darkmagic, of the New Hampshire Darkmagics.

A coward, a jerk, a potent wizard with a budding fan base, Jim is hilarious in any situation. There is a particular quote from one of the podcasts that I've picked out, and I'm attempting to animate the short scene. I've already done a passing job of modding Norman to create Jim, and time and patience allowing, I'll be doing two other characters as well. A bit much work for a short scene, but if this is successful, I imagine that other animations based off the scenes in the podcast will follow shortly.

Here's what I have so far:



Jim Darkmagic and all related characters are, of course, property of Penny Arcade.