Flash Demonstration
Sat, April 2, 2011 at 12:47AM This Friday I did a brief demonstration of Flash-based character animation at the Austin School of Film. In preparation, I designed a generic character (seen below) and animated him in a basic walk-cycle and a brief fight with some sort of scary monster thing. They're short and pretty basic, but they proved useful for illustrating many of the basic principles of animating characters using Flash puppets. Enjoy.
Character Design:

Walk Cycle:
Monster Scene:
Revised Character & Random Rumination
Tue, March 1, 2011 at 3:30AM Random Rumination:
The frustrating thing about practice is that you don't practice for 1 hour and get 0.1% better, and then 2 hours and get 0.2% better. Instead, you practice for 50 hours and get no better at all and then during the 51st hour you have a minor epiphany and get 10% better all at once...and then stay that way until the next epiphany comes after 20, or 30, or 50 hours more practice.
Revised Character:
Steam Golem
Mon, January 10, 2011 at 10:46AM Spent the weekend working on another 3D character and turn around. It's slow going right now because for every new thing I want to do in Blender I have to spend hours watching online tutorials or reading pages of how-to's. For this model I had to learn UV Unwrapping and and delve a little deeper into the arcane subject of armature rigging. I think I'm starting to hit my stride, though...at least, until I wade into the morass of node editing or 3D animation...
3D model turn-around
Thu, January 6, 2011 at 11:19AM Yikes! Almost a month since my last post! Bad, blogger, bad!
So, a recent work project got me fiddling with Blender, the open-source 3D rendering program, again. In my spare time I decided to work on my character modelling skills. This is my first pass at a full-body 3D character (at least as far as I can remember).
I'm not terribly happy with it, stylistically speaking, but it was fun to work on and I learned a lot, so I'm hopeful that my next try will be more interesting.


