My little planet is growing. It's no more a badly lighted default mantra material sphere with low poly golf ball in the background. It's a paper-like displaced badass with procedural galore written all over it.
Jokes aside, I am please of the direction my project is going to. Everything you see in that screen has been created procedurally and because of the style I am using, the production and animation of the assets shouldn't take too long. That's why on this first term I am focusing on lighting and shading with the Mantra renderer.
As I'm approaching the third and (hopefully) final year of my computer animation course, I am starting to fill my sleepless nights with thought of my Majort, the project on which I will work on troughout most of the year. After many concepts, storyboards and proposals I decided to go solo and produce a fast paced project about birth, life and death of a small planet, hopefully improving my VFX skills trying to nail that formula for visuals that make people go for a combination of "Ohhh", "Awww" and "Whoa". I'll keep you updated.
Here is a showreel featuring a short and hopefully not boring selection of some of the things I've worked on during my first 2 years of University. It is by no means anything spectacular, but I feel confident about the amount of things I've learned and can only look forward to more. Let's keep being awesome.
At this point, you probably got that I love cubes. Another thing that makes me feel all fuzzy inside are synaesthetic experiences. When I had to choose what to tackle for this University project, things went naturally in this direction.
QBeat is a music video I created with Houdini. All the animation you see in the video is procedurally generated by the awesome audio track from BIT.TRIP RUNNER. The Houdini asset I built samples a few frequencies ranges from the music and use the resulting data to make cool things happen. Neat.
The entire project was a stab in the dark as I never used Houdini before and what was I jumping in wasn't exactly the simplest thing to start with. But in the end I am happy with the result.
I assume everyone remembers about So Fancy!, right? And I assume the very same people are wondering where did that short go. Well, it was successfully rendered and submitted after a few brave sleepless nights, yet there are still a few little issues I had to compromise with due to deadlines. And lighting was quite rushed, too.
Arr, sailors! Grab 'yer grog and weigh in, we're talking about Pirate Beavers here. I've granted BlackJack an animatic for his own story made of adventure, treasure maps and... well, you'll see.
Also, I finished his maquette! Jeez, he should be a fearful pirate, but he's so damn cute! :3 Expect a mass toy production. Or maybe not.
This was quite fun to make, and I must say it doesn't look like an unholy blob at all. And yes, the protein shake was delicious. Dark moments when I tried to glue him to the base, having his legs cracking off under the weight of his awesomeness - "Oh, now he got two peg legs" (Cit.) - But as I say, live and learn. Here are some work in progress shots:
I've been creating the maquette for my character design assigment those days, and even if I was quite scared not having any proper experience with sculpting, I must say the entire thing is so damn fun and the time just flew while making a mess with plastiline. Actually, I've got so good at it that I made a tutorial about it - a tutorial about manly maquettes. Click on the image for a larger version. Enjoy.
I started working on webcomic just to get my toughts stop for a bit. It's called "Jeremy & Brain" and it's about a boy who can apparently talk to his brain, and all the tricks and mental masturbation that the latter pulls on the poor guy. You can read it on its own blog.
In case you've been wondering, nope, the comic is not about me. Well... maybe just a little, but let's be honest here - It's about every one of us!
I just love beavers. I can't do much about that - it may be because of their smart expression, or my childhood spent among friends who were obsessed by them (true story). That's why this character came to life almost by himself, and thanks to some nice homemade by poppa italian food, my brain gave birth to BlackJack!
BlackJack is a pirate beaver that travels the sea in order to find the most precious wood on Earth. He just loves chewing up wood. And he got a wooden leg. And travel on a wooden ship. You can imagine which consequences are born beacuse of that. Oh, and he loves apple cider, too.
