Drawing Jam Update - Colbie Smulders

Here's another drawing jam update. This time it's of canadian actress Colbie Smulders.

All drawing jam posts contain artwork that I've done using inspiration from Tara's drawing jam blog. You can find it here: http://tarasdrawingjam.blogspot.ca/

Bouncy Face Smash

Our latest assignment was to animate a little guy running up to and kicking a soccer ball.

I learned a good few things from this assignment but I think I'll start by detailing some of the technicalities.

This animation (and the stair stepper) was made entirely using 3DS Max. I used the Mental Ray renderer with all global illumination and final gathering turned off. This eliminates shadow flickering in the animation caused by the final gather solution and prevents the increased render time from the global illumination.

I opted instead for manual lighting which was very basic in this scene, simply because the focus was on animation and because I've already been sitting here 4 hours after class has ended. Doing so meant that there would be no flickering (because final gather was turned off) and render time was lessened considerably (apparently the mental ray ambient occlusion map is less demanding than global illumination).

All of the materials that I wanted to have ambient occlusion had an instance of the mental ray ambient occlusion map attached to the ambient color slot. To allow this, the ambient and diffuse colors have to be unlocked from each other. I then added an omni light in the scene that produced only ambient lighting (no diffuse, no specular) and turned the intensity down to about 0.5. The sun is just a simple targeted spot light with an intensity of around 1. Also! in the ambient occlusion map, the "light" color was changed to a deep, warm yellow and the "dark" was a dark burgundy. This added an overall warm tone to the scene. The highlights are never stark white and the shadows are a deep red instead of straight black.

...for those that were interested.

As far as things learned go (looking at it again a day later), bright green is a BAD color to use for a ground. Heck, even a medium gray would've worked better.

Number 2 is that I need to save a LOT more often. What I have posted is my second attempt because I lost everything in my first attempt because of a program crash.

A reiteration of what we've learned before is that a sense of weight comes from holds at the low positions and extra time to move upwards, in effect lessening the time it takes to fall, over the span of the motion. The angle of the hips really helps the effect as well although it's much harder to implement.

Western Town Layout

One of our assignments from last semester involved making an animatic for a western-themed short film for which we had to design backgrounds and animate a few sequences for. Well we continued on with that project as a refresher to Flash by taking one of the backgrounds we drew and cleaned it up. I chose this one  that I had used for a 3/4 walk cycle.

Here's the original drawing:

...and the finished piece. With a subtle pan.

Ball With A Skirt

We're starting to deal with drapery in our animation class now and as an intro to dealing with cloth, we had to animate a simple ball moving up and down while wearing a skirt.

One of the challenges we were given for this assignment was to refrain from turning on the light in our light table, preventing us from seeing the drawings beneath the one we were drawing on. This was to get us back in the practice of flipping where you hold sheets of paper between your fingers and "flip" them back and forth to simulate the animation. Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFFq_-XCfq4.

It's a good way of seeing if the animation is working the way you want it to without having to take the time scanning and compiling one frame at a time.

Anyway, Here's what I cam up with:

Stairmaster

So we're in the beginning of a new school year and I'm now in my second and last year of animation.

One of our classes is 3D animation and we received our first assignment which was to animate a little ball guy walking up a flight of stairs. This was my first 3D walk cycle.

Summer Drawings

Summer's nearing an end VERY quickly and proved to be very unproductive as far as art has gone... in my case.

I've had very little time for drawing but I managed to get set up for caricatures in different places around town. These are only a few of the ones I've done. There might be more if I can remember where I've saved them.