Here’s a short personal project I’ve been working on. It’s a short dialogue piece I animated using Long Winter Studios’ excellent ‘Tom‘ character.
I had a great time animating this one, and had some great help from my old colleagues (thanks Mariano!) as I progressed through it.
Huge thanks goes to Oasim Karmieh for whacking together a nice shader and light setup for me to render with Viewport 2.0.
After years of talking about it, I’m finally teaming up with a few of my friends (who are also my epic co-workers here in Dublin) to work on our own animated project after-hours in work. They are: Matt Bugeja, Glen Southern, Oasim Karmieh, Paddy Finn, Ibrah Chaffardet, Liam Neville and Cormac Phelan.
It’s going to be a series of short-shorts about a fly and his pal. We’re currently working on the Christmas episode which is due to be released in a few weeks, but in the meantime we’re trying to get a following by setting up the website and a facebook page etc.
We’ll be releasing a ton of ‘behind-the-scenes’ type material over the coming weeks, and some insight into our studio over here, how we work – from starting with a cube to the final model, to the texturing, rigging, animation and composting stages, together with a few competitions to win some of the artwork etc.
I created the ‘teaser poster’ for the shorts that we’re currently using to promote it. Introducing: ‘Froot Fly’:
Our website is over at FrootFlyShorts.com where we have a wallpaper of the above image, and also a Facebook page: Froot Fly shorts – Facebook page where we’ll be announcing the competitions and posting daily about our progress on the shorts.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, and we look forward to be sharing the adventures with you.
Cheers!
For the last two weeks, the 11secondclub.com have held a mini-challenge based on the theme ‘Sport’s Swing’. Since I’ve just purchased the fantastic Kenny Roy lecture on ‘Cartoony Animation’ I decided to try something in a ‘Cartoony’ approach. (Kenny’s lecture was full of those fantastic ‘Ah-ha!’ moments, and his delivery was really clear – I highly advise you guys check out his tutorials).
I began looking around for some inspiration, and found a pretty lovely short by Goofy called ‘How to play Baseball’. It was full of great little gems, so I decided to use him as my inspiration for my shot:
http://vimeo.com/26918115
I’m quite happy with how he turned out. I tried to really push the Norman rig as much as I could (Mod by F.C. Kiral – Cool Sports Norman), by really pushing the poses, but there’s a few poses here and there that I think, looking at it now, I’ve pushed a little bit too much, so I will go back and address them. It was a good exercise, and I learned a great deal, also getting some really great feedback from the folks on the forum.
As for the render – still trying to get my head around it. Been reading up on some great tutorials, and it’s starting to make some sense. For Normal, I’ve faked the back lighting, and used the Illuminati script for the Global Illumination effect.
If you want to see my ‘Work in Progress’ on this, you can check out the different stages of the animation click this link: 11 Second Club, Mini Challenge Thread
Here’s the Challenge Blogpost on the 11secondclub Blog: Give it some Swing
I shall post an update when I’ve corrected some Issues I have with the piece.
I submitted this animation for the awesome folks at Anim Dalies for some feedback, and they’ve just given me some awesome review of my shot, which I’ll be addressing over the next few days. To read the feedback, check it out here: Iestyn Roberts – Cartoony Baseball Swing, Anim Dailies
I’m starting to render out a few of my shots, while working on my demo reel. Since rendering is something that I’m relatively new at, I’ve started small, and rendered out my simple walk cycle:
I followed a couple of tutorials to get the rendering effect, mainly Georgi Zahariev’s and Ciaran Dempsey – faking the Rim light by using the ramp node, and Sampler Info node – really lovely results, with minimal rendering times. As for the light, I simply used the Illuminati rig, which I’m quite happy with – due to my current lack of Rendering knowledge. So hopefully, the next render will be a bit more ambitious! Learning is fun!