This is a pencil sketch and Flash linework of a rough character idea.
He is one of the urban sprites, or modern fairies or whatever I decide to call these guys. I have some characters rolling around that make of parts of city life that you don’t see. Similar to how fairy folk and goblins and sprites made up the unseen world in different ages, these folk fill in the dark corners in this age.
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This is an animateable character model and rig. The rig features IK/FK arms, reverse foot leg setup and custom shoulder, spine, neck and head animation controls.
Here are a few short Flash clips. Some are just animation passes, others exhibit some of the actionscript I teach.
Wandering through Florence one night we saw this from the road:
I took a gang of shots and even attempted to bracket my shots and create a HDR image.(more on that later) We came back the next day and saw that the show was in town and proceeded to find the gallery because it looked like this would be dope!
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We spent an afternoon in Florence @ the Galleria dell’Accademia and I spent most of that time sketching Michelangelo’s David. Great afternoon. We met a family there, a young girl with her parents. The father was an architect. Originally, he came out of school as an engineer, but went back to follow his passion of being an architect later in life. He had a great story of following your passion and seemed to be at peace there with his daughter and patient wife who kinda hung around on the sidelines.
He and his daughter were there sketching and observing as I was. Curiosity got the best of both of us and eventually we were near enough to see what we both were doing. The daughter, about 8 years old, struck up a conversation with me and I showed her my sketches and she showed me her sketchbook. She was quite good. There were even some images in there that she and her father did together. They would pass the sketchbook back and forth until they had created a character or scene. How cool is that! Sounds like great fun and I would love to be able to share something like that with my child some day.
At one point we were the last folk in the gallery, just us and David.
I was enamored with this abbey upon first sight. I drew this from the high school shoolyard in Orvieto. Walking through the city that morning, I saw a gate open. My curiosity got me to peek around, seeing as how I was sure that would be a great vantage point to sketch from that day. I spent a bit of time making this sketch and some photos. This was the last sketch in my sketchbook. And I nearly lost the whole thing! Major tragedy to lose a empty sketchbook, let alone a filled one! I pulled a new sketchbook out of my bag and thought I put the filled one away. I left the schoolyard feeling all good, and continued on my way.
** Note: this will be broken up with images and occasional bits of humor soon **
This post will attempt to explain some of the key points of texture mapping polygonal objects in Maya 8.5. This approach would be one you would use as a beginning 3d artist or as part of a production team that does not have some sort of 3d paint solution
I think it is useful to point out that this technique will inherently cause a bit of stretching of the texture over certain faces of the polygons. It is necessary to unitize your UVs to alleviate that sort of stretching. There will also be some seams with this method. Both of these points we will attempt to minimize by working intellegently. In regards to the seams, you as the modeler and texturer must try to find a way to minimize their visibilty, or use them as logical breaks in the surface you are modeling.
These sketches explore character development.
This sketch also explores using value to represent form, using a more painterly approach.
I modeled this version of the Batmobile for Warner Brothers as concept art for a proposed Batman series. I was given design drawings and modeled, lit, and rendered this turntable in Maya.
I was a technical assistant for this simulation ride film for Legoland. I setup the scenes for render and also edited some animation on a couple of shots.
