Journal

Smoke Golem

Peter Kachtik — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:06:19 +0000

Crescent Beard

Peter Kachtik — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:33:22 +0000

Couldn't sleep. Did a drawing.

Lady Spy

Peter Kachtik — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 06:46:10 +0000

A new post for a new year!

My girlfriend wanted me to make a cartoon version of her, so I turned her into a 1940's spy. Enjoy.

Flash Demonstration

Peter Kachtik — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 05:47:08 +0000

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

Peter Kachtik — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:30:58 +0000

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:

Character Concept

Peter Kachtik — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:23:59 +0000

Character in process

Peter Kachtik — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:18:42 +0000

Golem & Glass

Peter Kachtik — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:36:50 +0000

A more posed composition with the steam golem & a glass version of the Blender monkey.

Steam Golem

Peter Kachtik — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 16:46:13 +0000

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

Peter Kachtik — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:19:41 +0000

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.