Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Hotdog animation

Just finished this funny animation of a hotdog. I got the idea while playing with particles and blobmesh in 3dsmax (the mustard). Hope you like ;)


Sunday, August 19, 2012

My first job as animator

This summer I applied for a student job at Nobel Biocare, a company that makes medical software and tools. They needed a few animators to create some promo spots for their products.
I've been working there for 4 weeks now and it's been awesome so far. Great people, great environment, learning so much (some of my co-workers are DAE alumnis). It has also been a good introduction to the real world thing, I mean we have to actually do meetings and deal with the marketing guys who say what can and can't be done, getting critics from others, working together, dealing with deadlines... that kind of stuff you don't get when working alone. So yeah, great stuff :p

Here's a sortof demo reel I put together to show them:


Cartoony Character: Pipi the Eskimo

The project I am most proud of this year: my cartoony character Pipi the Eskimo ! Although the short film turned out to be worthless, I spent a lot of time finetuning the character itself. He is fully custom rigged. I had a great time creating this guy and learned a LOT along the way. Please take a look :)


"Jonathan and the Marginal Triangle"

Something I forgot about: this was my final exam project for Preproduction in January. We had to design 7 characters that matched the description of 7 real suspects in a newspaper article about a very odd murder here in Belgium... They had to be very realistic but I had a hard time getting rid of my usual drawing style :)







A Crabby Day

I found this in a box that must have been dating from the beginning years of computer animation...
Hahah, just a little joke animation I made for my friend Dylan using the CAT system in 3dsMax. This was also about the only free work I managed to do this year outside of school.. oh dear >.<


Something Fishy: short film in progress

Here is a work in progress of my animation short. I doubt i will ever finish it. Simply too ambitious and impossible to get where i'd want it to be with my current experience. I ran into so much problems, but probably learned a lot from it too. I do feel sad about it. I had hoped to make a really cool little short but alas. Better next time :)

Although on a positive note I have to say this semester I have been bitten by the animation bug or something cause I'm getting really interested in animation and rigging and that kind of stuff. Kinda feel that this is the way i want to go..?


Character Viewer

Had some fun creating this character viewer in unity that allows you to take a closer look at, in this case, my monkey character for Purify. You can rotate around him using the arrows, zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, or put it on auto-rotate. You can choose to play different animations, with or without his weapon, and you have the ability to pause the animation and move the camera around the pose to take a screenshot or something.



Take a look!

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Gold Rush

I made this game in the Unity game engine by myself. Developing my previous game in Unity left me with some experience, making it a bit easier and more fun this time around :).



Click here to play!

For those of you who don't know, Unity is actually a very user friendly type of game editor more than just an engine. With a few simple steps you can get a small game running. It makes use of C# and javascript for scripting stuff. It also has a big community with lots of tutorials, and it's free, so anyone who's interested in designing games but doesn't know where to start, this might be a good place :).


Darwin 2.0

This is a school project that lasted the whole last year. First I designed a character that would fit in a post apocalyptic world somewhere in the far future. I then recreated this character in 3D, first highpoly, sculpting it in zbrush, and then lowpoly using normal maps so that it could be of use in a game engine.

 


In the second semester I had to make a matte painting with my character in it as part of a trailer to show off our post apoc universe. This was done using Photoshop, Fusion and Premiere. Sadly we had very little time to learn the new software.




Purify

Let's start off with a new video game: Purify by Treehouse Games.
This game I produced together with my good friends Dylan, Marcia and Yannick within about 4 months from concept to finalization (sortof). Dylan and I were the artists of the team and were responsible for creating the visuals (models, textures, animations, UI, as well as co-designing the game).
We participated in the Microsoft Imagine Cup challenge and ended up in the second round.
I have to say the whole project was one heck of a ride for all of us. We learned so much and had a great time as well (there were ofcourse also very stressful moments but man, did we laugh).

Why not take a look at our fine trailer produced by Dylan, voiced by me :p



Here you can see some of the animations I worked on. I was mainly responsible for the tailless monkey character.

Back from the grave

It seems keeping a blog is more difficult than I thought... kinda neglected it over the past few months. But I managed to crawl out of my grave and decided to dig this feller back up as well.

Sooooooooooo.... lots of stuff happened in the meantime. I guess the biggest reason for my disappearance is that I didn't really have the 'jazz' for creating art stuff so much this year, compared to last year. I spent a great deal of time developing my guitar playing on my own and definitely saw great progress. Also I spent more time with my friends getting to know them better (i.e going out and having fun), which is something I didn't do a lot last year. I kinda feel like I'm finding myself again. Of course all that great stuff comes with a price: less time for Art.

Now, it's not all lost, don't be afraid :). I've decided to throw myself back into the game, and I'll show you some of the stuff I've worked on in following posts.