Rats

I've got a pet rat. She's all spheres and cubes. Easy to find rhythm in a rat, and they have features that make it easy to see how different shapes fit together.

When good cards go bad

The story is the jacks take the queens away, and this is a moment in the battle when one King loses his Queen, and the other saves his. It's rather oddly shaped, so I cut it in half to see the parts better. I overplayed the curves, but tried to maintain the "playing card" emphasis in shape, design and color. Interaction between all six cards was key, and drove most of my decisions. Just ignore the feet on the King of Spades...

Bored.

Roughs of what I sit around doing while others are making me wait. Don't get excited about it, the tangents are still in step.
Two guys juggling sounds pretty simple. After all, it's a repeater, right? Well, kinda. It's constantly throwing and catching, mostly everything is in "figure eights." To break up the pattern a little bit, I modified a vibration formula- you make two patterns of action, and then you interleave them together in different combinations. It's an old trick. Tracking the pins was the challenge. I decided to animate them the old fashioned way too. The cheat would be to use a script or expressions for the rotation. Nothing in nature is going to act that perfectly. The thumbnails for the motion of the pins, if you're into how I got them to move with the spin in Maya.

Crap from my sketchbook

Quick gestures from life (mostly on the bus in Los Angeles) and watching the girls play lacrosse at the school.

Visual FX

Some of the kind of thing I've been working on lately- blood splatter, artificial props, wire removal, and other VFX stuff. This is After Effects. Red Giant makes some of the best plug-ins for After Effects on the market, and they are reasonable. Check them out. Probably the most essential are Trapcode and Knoll light factory- they'll make working efficiency skyrocket.

Work In Progress

Back in Maya again, experimenting with some of the devices and charts I've picked up from some very classic early cartoons. Mostly from the work of Friz Freleng and Tex Avery. Most of these curves are still linear or step. I've still got about 130 or so frames to animate, some things to refine (especially facial), and then cleanup. I've actually found a way to use some of the blur frame 2d idea in Maya (see rat animation below), but I'm not going to use it here. I'm thinking about using a motion blur on some of the fastest movements and see what it looks like. This piece is cartoony without all the squash and stretch. And I should tell you, there is a naked lady... I've been exposed to too much Benny Hill lately.

Aerials of Los Angeles

Pictures I took of LA

Aerials of Los Angeles

Finally got a guy I know to take me and a couple of friends up in his helicopter. Scary thing is, I work with these crazies...
Edited about an hour and a half into five minutes or so. You'll see some views of Hollywood and LA mostly- the dried up river bed and some mountains. A lot of it was like looking down at a model, about 900 feet up.

I needed a way for this rat to zip around looking for whatever before he snatches this piece of cheese from the trap. First instinct is to inbetween it the "regular" way- using exaggerated squash and stretch frames and a couple of other tricks. But you run into problems immediately. There is not enough time for anticipation, the turn takes too long, you can't read the accent before the transition, you don't get the zipping around visual... So Tex Avery back in the day was experimenting with a three drawing run with blur frames, and he had a character who zipped from one pose to the next. This idea was later built upon and evolved- Chuck Jones had his distorted version of transitional inbetweens (probably one of the more famous). So I spent a couple of weeks dissecting Tex Avery's formula- 5 frame virtual hold on the accent with a cushion back, using three blurs (combining the anticipation, the inbetweens, and the follow through).