Oh my Barnes

 I took this sketch from Jason Barnes and made it my own, stylized and converted it to fit the theme of my short.  I am rather concerned about the challenge of Maya hair for this guy's curly locks.  I've got experience with ndynamics, but have very little power over hair and fur.  The short hairs for the legs and face were sculpted in zbrush.  Turns out however, with the use of this brush and particular alpha, I will be able to put fur on my rats without using Maya fur... this is a breakthrough for me. 

 

Still working on a lot of the pieces, but it's coming together.

The Funky Fur

Some assets I've been working on for my short, The Squeakeasy (working title). It's a mixed media cartoon about an incident that goes down in a bar called Dirty's Funky Fur. This is Maya and After Effects, very basic light effects with some particles. I've got a lot of the set put together, going to get some characters modeled and rigged here shortly. Probably should have thrown a color correction layer on the video, it is a little darker than I thought after the upload- guess you'll have to wait to see it better in the final :).

Get Your Gun

My own play on an old Broadway musical bill. Probably I should feed my horse ;)

a day out of exile

Time for something new.

Pole Dancing Rats, y'all

More sketches to build up the bible for my short, The Squeakeasy. Some will end up as layouts. Looking for a color scheme that is very specific- so far, no luck.

Squeakeasy Shots

Some pre-vis drawings for my short, in varying stages of disarray.

Wardrobe Malfunction

Various passes tweaking the attributes for the uniform for my Shoeless Joe character rig. The first playblast shows the nCloth with basic attributes applied to it. The initial uniform mesh was first bound to the skeleton, just like the body skin, and the weights were copied from the original mesh onto the uniform mesh. At least then, you can pose the character however you want, and the uniform mesh moves with the rest of the rig. After binding skin, make the uniform mesh nCloth in the usual way. The belt was skinned the the main hip joint, and set as a passive collider, which in hindsight may be a mistake on my part. I'm thinking later trying skinning just the buckle to the main hip, making it a passive collider, and then making the waist portion of the belt nCloth as well.

The referenced rig in the scene. From here, I referenced a workflow borrowed from a gentleman who is absolutely brilliant, Duncan. If you frequent the Autodesk forum AREA, you can see his blog post regarding nCloth workflow for animation here: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/basic_cloth_on_character_setup. Basically, you connect your original mesh to the posed nCloth and make a rest shape, which will pull back the stretched mesh in simulation. After that, you paint weights on the cloth mesh under a couple of different attributes, depending on how you want that part of the mesh to behave. It's trial and error as it goes.

Maybe time to cache everything out and finally inbetween and cleanup this piece- I can't believe I let it stay this way for so long. After the animation is clean, it will be easier here to diagnose problems with the cloth, and key the attributes necessary to make it look a little more natural.

Pimp My Flash

Some of the newer assets for my portfolio site, www.pacificasauer.com. Still ironing it out, but I've finally figured out enough of the script to make most of it work (thanks to a lot of reading).Wanted to give an interface that incorporated the entire scope of my work- from the classical to the digital, so I included a little bit of everything.The lunchbox and monitor for "Work-in-Progress" video.Wish I had an old broadcast safe monitor like this one, though.Couldn't live without my Wacom and stylus.Haha, my drawing board is next to my bed... one of the only things I would need to take with me if I had an emergency and had to go.

Risky Baseball - Joe's Rig Test

Joe's rig test. I owe the walk cycle charts and timing to Eric Larson and Milt Kahl, so I wish you'd appreciate it when it comes around. I modified it a little, but basically, it is the same strut of arrogance and overconfidence that Casey, from Casey at the Bat (1947) had walking to the plate. Joe's bat's name is Black Betsy. Video below, rig is absolutely raw at this state, with no corrective blendshapes or PSD's. In case you wonder why he is in his shorts, the uniform is nCloth, and while I have some settings arranged, the model's rig test was to be bare to see weighting problems easier. The tangents are still in linear, and I sped up the end in the interest of time, but it's looking really good for good ol' Joe that he'll get to play baseball again.
Think he's proud enough?