use

I might sooner or later use this blog again...
but not shure when...

Bremen

Oh, dear - I'm back in Bremen...

At the moment I am a bit lost in space and not doing a lot of creative stuff. But I found a job as a bike courier. Very exciting and sportive - even if it's cold and rainy outside, I still have lots of fun!

the youtube link

just in case the movie here dosn't work, here is the youtube link.
But Youtube did something strange during encoding... It added a black bar on the right side but not on the left or on both of them. Really strange!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Qk1I2rFQY

THE FINAL MOVIE and blablabla...

Ok, it's done finaly I uploaded the movie here and on youtube (oh, I forgott to upload it to aniboom)!! I hope some people will see it and comment on it.

I have mixed feelings about the movie. One one side it was the first movie project in 3dsMax, so I am already quite happy that there are some textures and it moves but on the other side was my script so much deeper and involved so much more that could have helped to understand what's going on.
I am quite ashame that I had to cut out nearly all of the live footage Jon and me shot in my flat, but the movie would have been far to long with it.
But I am still happy we did the shooting because it was fun and an also a piece of the project. It involved storyboarding, planning and getting the equipment, building up the set with the lights and the props and finaly the shooting.

Nevertheless I am somehow happy with what I achieved. At least it has a quality high enough that I don't have to be afraid to add it to my portfolio and to show it to people I wan't to work with.

...after all I had a great time here in Nottingham. I learnd a lot about me, some other people and got alot of inspiration through the teachers. Maybe not so much through the actuall teaching but through little discussions, some hints and recommedations for books and artists I could possibly look at. (Great thanks for showing me Edward Gorey and Jhonen Vasquez!!! They will definitifly stay in my life for longer and influence my style)

The library was always a great inspiration... My Nottingham life is very easy to describe. If I wasn't working at my Laptop on the project I was in WAV 105 working on the project. If I wasn't working on my project at all I was possibly in a lecture or a tutorial learning stuff usefull for the project so I tried the learned to apply to my works. But sometimes I was just straying around in the arts department of the library to do myself a favour and have glimpses to this or that book. (I also found three or four I took home and read) And there where also times I bought a lot of booze and switched my brain off for one or two days while laying half naked (its only the half of the truth ;-) ) in front on my laptop and watch tons of cartoons.
Hm...maybe I shouldn't write this in my final feedback paper for both of the universities... I will see... HAHAHA

RESTLESS LEG MANIAC

Damn, I still haven't uploaded my finished movie. But acctually I am not in a big hurry to do so as I told myself to step back for some days and don't sit in front of the screen for to long ;-)

I draw a new cartoon (by hand) and colored it on PC... OK once again screen, but coloring works quite fast. The work whith PC involved took less than an hour.

It's one of those cartoons for this medical magazin I work for so the topic is an illness called "the restless leg syndrom".
My initial ideas were also not this bad, but during my birthday party with a lot of beer and wine involved I came up with this idea.

I really like the character I created for this one - he looks like freaks shoould look somewho ;-) My first attempt was with an english tagline that was "YEAH, YEAH... MOVE YOUR LEGS!!!" but I think the people who read the magazine would prefer a german line so I changed it to "TRETEN, TRETEN...JA...JAHHH!!!" what basically means the same. (literally:"Step, step... yes...yesss!!!")

Oh it was so fun to draw it!

Tomorrow

Finally I am at the stage were I can say: "OK, tomorrow on the same time the movie will be uploaded somewhere and a link will be here in the Blog".

Its still not perfect but (nearly) the best I could do in the time given ;-)

I really like word plays... so here is one I found lately.

I've never red the books of Marquis de Sade because they are a bit too violent and sex orientated. (Only three or four pages of reading was enough) but I like the idea of connecting him with salade and a nice french dressing ;-)

scene 7 shot 01 - preview

I am not in the mood to write too much...

Nearly all scenes have benefited now from a 2nd animation pass where I animated the morph targets and custom attributes a bit. I am really happy to have spent very long in building the rig. Doing the animation is quite easy and fun but nevertheless it takes hours and hours - so my back and the eyes hurt a bit.

Layer

Good that I worked with layers right from the beginning on. Because now, while testing the character animation, I can hide with some clicks all the stuff other then tha main character and just do a quick rendering of it...

Haha... sometimes organisation really seems to pay off.
First I thought I am a kind of nerdy guy who just wants to be "cool" so he places all things on different layers, but now I see that my subconscious must have hade the feeling that it might become usefull - as it actually did ;-)

ohhh... the story

after a review of all scenes together (some without real animation but the right length) I have to admit that maybe nobody will get the point what the story is about.

Once again I seem to fail to translate the narrative Idea to the animation. Also I am not very happy with the timing of the whole stuff. I really tried hard and will keep going on but at the moment I am a bit down.

I am very curious how this is going to end. After all my approach was and still is a challenge to me and I should be happy about how much I allready did but somehow I wont become happy right now %-(

Maybe will Monday cheer my up a bit when I get some feedback...

P.S. The fish will not will - not this time!

AMAZING!

Something really amazing happened few minutes ago in 3dMax.

I needed a smaller version of Silly Billy and thought about scaling the mesh, Bones, controllers and all this stuff knowing it wouldn't work - but why not try at least...

And the wonder happened! It all works normaly and perfect - even the morphtargets and the textures are OK... WOW... I must have built a really good rig ;-)

my workspace during home animation

I felt like posting an picture of my workspace at home so everybody can imagine how it's going on. Normally I tend to get lost as soon as projects get more complex and I loose my track but NOT this time!

This time I am well organised. At the beginning of the project I felt a bit silly in spending this much effort in documentation and writing down a lot of stuff. But right now I am really happy I've done it because it helps me a lot...

Scene 4 - Preview

So, here it is, the first preview of an animated scene. Its not finished at all and there are quite a lot of mistakes in it but at least its a beginning ;-)

The sound is just a very rough placement without setting it to the right levels...

June

Damn... Now it's already june. Time passes sooooooo quickly.

In one week I planned to hand in my short movie - that means on the 9th of june.
I can't say that I have done nothing but I definitifely can say that I need to do much more.
Sometimes I wish I am a kind of 20 japanese workoholic mangaka & animators but even with a slightly split personality I never managed to become more than one physical person.

Here's a nice Screenshot ;-)

BLA BLA BLA...ish... ahh my brain hurts like a bread filled with chillies!

BUUURRRPPHHHHH...AHHHHHH... yeah it's over.

Neoangin

remember... evolution is easy with your shoes on!

THE BARRIER IN THE BRAIN

Ohhhh look! Nice, cool it moves like water...

Ok - maybe fast water but I wanted only to export 15f for testing reasons. I like the effect - it's booked for the film ;)

scene02/shot01 - update

It's a bit later and I am a bit more tired but also wiser...

Now I am nearly happy with the Background... I hope I dont need to pan around because the shot is built up in layers and is not a real 3d space but only textured spheres, some rough geometry in the background and some good geometry on the rock in the foreground ;-)

Sleepytime...

First BG Shot ever - scene02/shot01

Yupphhhhhiiiiii - here is the first shot for a background. Its atually the establishing shot at the beginning of the film where the camera enters the head and ends in the brain.

The cat is gonna jump in to the frame soon but not here 'cause its only an Image and not a film... hahaha...

But seriously - there are still a few problems with this shot.
1. Glow with Vpost does work on planes with alphamaps on it BUT if there is something behind the plain it also gets the glow (;-) ...get the glow in the flow, man... shut up... strange voice in my head! I have to work!)

2. In the left side of the frame are some overlapping planes also with alpha channels on them. First they rendered well but then in my infinite curiosity I did something and now the most forward plane is the brighest while the planes more in the back are darker.

3. The edge of the rock in the forground is very sharp 3d programm sharp - that's bad

... there are still more problems but at the moment ai cunnot rimemberrrr itshhh tooo baddd ahir quwallity in 105...

BUZZCAT - textured

Here is the cat...

I think I should add some more "features" to the texture to make the cat look more interesting as it is now.

At least the tail tip, the paws and the inner ear needs some more work from me... but NOT tomorrow!

I like the matt felty look of the violett skin right now. If it would be ultramarine blue I would say the cat is a new Ives Klein work - hahaha! But it needs to be violett as it is a colour representing somehow creativity to me...

... and then I spent some time playing around to achieve the transparent look I wanted. But yeah, it reaches to 90% what I had in my imagination - thats Ok, I can live with it.

Cats that sit in a glass houses shouldn't throw stones... but cats that are a kind of glass house... ähm ohm... what the hell do I know what they should do? I don't live in my brain!

I definitively can say, that I prefer Rigging to texturing. Texturing is stupid, boring and not very sadisfying...

SILLY BILLY - Textured

Ufffffhhhhh... its done!

Silly Billy has all the textures on it and I even got his eyes glowing as I wanted and without rendere intensiv attenuated lights in his eyballs but symply the 3dMax VideoPost function (thx Andy)

...oh, but I see right now that I forgot the lantern tip... bah... Tomorrow is unfortunately Background Day - so I don't work on the characters...