My CG animated short is finally released to YouTube! Check it out below, and please like, comment, and share if you enjoy it!
The short was 2 months in the making as a personal challenge to see if it was possible to create a full CG short in that time period. To complete my goal within that time limit I had to animate 30 shots in 30 days (the fastest I've ever animated). In Animation Mentor we have several weeks just to animate one 10 second shot, so this was a great exercise in animation speed. As a result, I'm much faster now! I also learned more about every other stage of CG film production from storytelling, camera angles, layout, lighting, rendering, and (of course) a lot of animation things. I especially got a lot practice animating all that running (I didn't use any run cycles). In the end, it's not my most polished work (you can see my most polished work in my demo reel) but I'm happy with what I created in the time I allowed myself.
If I got to do it all over again, there are dozens of things I wouldn't do and dozens of things I would. But that's just hindsight being 20/20, so I'm going to leave this alone (except for maybe polishing up a shot or two for my reel) and am thinking up my next short! I won't start it until after I graduate from Animation Mentor (which will be soon, it's currently week 4 of my last 12 week class). I want to get my demo reel all together and sent out first. Then I can work on the next short to distract me while I wait to hopefully hear back from studios.
I figure I'll probably always be working on a short, even once I get into a studio. It's just a fun thing to do, getting to tell a full story and play all the roles in its creation. Though it would be nice to collaborate with a person or two (and would probably produce a nicer result, especially if they know about all the non-animation things that I'm still learning about). I highly suggest that every CG artist create a short of some sort, either by themselves or with friends. It doesn't have to be a 12 month production, it can be a short 2 month production like mine. That way you can learn what not to do and what you need to improve on in a short amount of time.
If you've made a short, or are currently making a short, mention it in the comments below!
I'm happy to announce that "The Monsters," a CG short film I've been working on for over over a month now, is going to be coming out sometime this month! I say "sometime" because I'm still working on it. I'm in the latter stages of animation, but still have plenty of work to do, never mind the lighting and rendering (I'm using image based lighting and final gather with Mental Ray, so each frame takes a decent amount of time). Anyway, here's the first promo poster!
It'll be about 2 and a half minutes to 3 minutes long and, as the poster says, is an action-comedy. I can't really say too much without giving it all away (3 minutes takes a long time to animate, but a short time to watch). However, I will say that the possible subtitle for the film is "The Bottle Battle." It should be fun! There's no dialogue, just a lot of physical humor due to some conflict between the characters. It's kind of like one of the old Road Runner or Sylvester and Tweety cartoons.
Work in Progress Screenshot from Maya
I'm not doing it for Animation Mentor or anything (though the characters are the AM rigs Monster Ball, Bird Ball, and Twig). It's a personal challenge I've set myself to see if (A) I can make a short all on my own, and (B) how fast I can do it. Which is why I'm using pre-existing rigs and several free props, along with the props and set that I made, to help speed it all up.
Work in Progress Screenshot from Maya
It's been quite a challenge so far, but I've learned/improved a lot at so many different things that it's been worth it. I've gotten a lot faster at animating, which is good since my last class gave us 11 weeks to make a 15 second 2 character dialogue. That's fine for school (and actually really good since you have the time to slow down and learn) but in a real production environment you have to work a lot faster than that, which is what I'm trying to train myself for here. And on top of that, it's just fun to be able to produce animation faster because you get it out of your head and onto the screen quicker.
Anyway, I'll keep this blog updated about the film's progress through the last few weeks. When it's finally released, you'll be able to find it on my YouTube channel.
Check out my new animation- a hand practice piece I did a few weeks ago. I did it while working on my AN05 Advanced Acting dialogue assignment because I was having trouble with the hand poses. It's based on webcam footage I filmed of myself making various hand gestures. Since I'm on break this week, I polished it up and rendered it out (using some of the lighting things I've learned from Digital Tutors). Doing this helped my hand animation skills a lot! I learned more about creating nice hand poses, getting into and out of those poses, and holding the poses while still keeping the hands "alive." I also thought it was interesting how the forearm and upper arm responded to the movements of the fingers/wrist.
Anyway, here's the animation! If you want to see my animations as soon as I upload them, subscribe to my YouTube channel.
I just finished Animation Mentor Class 5- Advanced Acting! All I have left is to take Class 6- Polish and Portfolio, and I'll be an AM graduate!
I considered putting my AN05 animation into a new demo reel (my current one is here), but decided to wait. I decided that because #1: I want to re-render all these shots since I've been learning more about lighting with Digital Tutors (I got 1 free month for entering the CG Student Awards). And #2: I'm going to start revising many of these shots in AN06 in just 1 week. So I decided I'll wait until the end of Class 6 to upload a new demo reel.
It'll be nice to be able to go back and rework these shots in AN06. I've learned so much the last few months that already several things stand out to me, especially in my AN02 and AN03 work. I may even get to make a whole new shot/sequence in AN06, depending on what my mentor decides. Either way, it should be fun, and I'll graduate with a great looking demo reel!
But that'll be about 13 weeks from now, so in the meantime, here's my progress reel! It's pure Maya 2013 playblast animation, no rendering, no extra music, etc. Again, if you want to see my prettier demo reel (with rendering and music, but minus my AN05 animation) you can see it here: http://youtu.be/ClDsJu92_88 .
I recently saw the trailer for Disneynature's "Bears," and ever since have been inspired to draw bears. They're such cool animals. They're massive creatures, and can be quite ferocious, but can also be so loving and kind. I'd love to animate one, because they also have a unique gait.
So since I'm so fascinated with bears right now, I decided to make a drawing tutorial on how to draw a brown bear's face in a 3/4th view. I've also collected a number of great bear artworks to help inspire your own bear drawings. Enjoy!
How to Draw a Brown Bear's Face- Easy Drawing Tutorial
Subscribe to me on YouTube for more drawing tutorials!
Today's drawing tutorials are a realistic a cute stylized puppy and a panting dog. The stylized one is perfect for beginners or kids, though the panting one isn't that difficult. It just takes a bit more attention to detail and the help of a photo reference. Be sure to check out my other dog art tutorials too!
Cute Puppy
1. Make a circle for the head and draw the center lines.
2. Draw the muzzle.
3. Add in the eyes and the top of the head.
4. Add the ears.
5. Add details.
6. Color. Don't forget a highlight on the nose!
Panting Dog
1. Make a circle for the head and draw the center line. The body is an oval shape.
2. Block out the muzzle, neck, and eye and ear placement.
3. Detail the muzzle and eyes.
4. Detail the bottom jaw and add the collar.
5. Detail the ears and neck.
6. Add some simple values and highlights.
The puppy was drawn in Flash and the panting dog was drawn in MyPaint.
Leave a comment if you have any questions! I hope this was helpful!
Just in case people who are following me on here aren't subscribed to me on YouTube, I thought I'd start uploading my art video tutorials here again, so they can see them. On top of that, I've made still image/written tutorials to accompany the videos, just in case you want to get the gist of them really quickly.
Most of my videos are recordings of me working through the artwork, so you might want to scrub through them to get a better idea of how the drawing was made. Image tutorials always make things look overly simple, which is why I think that video tutorials are generally better. But you have both to choose from here, so go with whichever you find most helpful! Click the images to see them at full size. And be sure to check out some of my other cat tutorials!
Cute Kitten
1. Make a circle for the head and draw the center line. The body is an oval shape.
2. Block out the muzzle and eye and ear placement.
3. Detail the muzzle and eyes.
4. Add in the fur and eyebrow ridges.
5. Detail the ears.
6. Add some simple values and a couple whiskers.
Grumpy Cat
1. Make a circle for the head and draw the center line.
2. Block out the muzzle, neck, and eye and ear placement.
3. Detail the mouth, nose, and eyes.
4. Add in the fur, eyebrow ridges, and lines to define the sides of the muzzle.
5. Detail the ears and neck.
6. Add some simple values.
Both of these were drawn in MyPaint.
Leave a comment if you have any questions! I hope these were helpful!
Ever wondered how to draw a realistic Arabian horse head? I show you how
to draw one quickly and easily in this new video tutorial! You can watch me go through, step-by-step, as I work from basic shapes to the final detailed image. I chose to draw an Arabian for this tutorial because of their beautiful, distinctive sloped muzzles. They're one of my favorite horse breeds!
The final drawing:
My final artwork:
Both versions of the artwork were created in MyPaint. The reference is here.
For years I had problems with QuickTime graying out my videos. It would make whites gray, blacks not as dark as they should be, and would dull all other colors. This is actually a gamma shift problem. After trying unsuccessfully to QuickTime compress a render of a black Audi in a dark room I finally was able to find a solution to this problem. I realized that lots of other people are probably still struggling with this too, so I made a tutorial video. It's actually really easy to fix. I probably do it in less than ten seconds now. Just click, click, click, click, and my video's ready to go. Anyway, enjoy the tutorial!
Hi, everyone! Today I'm going to talk about how to draw animals. This will be something of a general overview, because I plan on doing many more posts that focus on more specific things, like paws, eyes, etc. (I also don't plan to get into shading today). I'm planning next week to do a series of posts about how to draw dogs and other canines.
Art Type: Traditional or Digital
I'm Using: MyPaint and an Intuos 4
Examples of my drawings
I suggest that, even if you love drawing a single type of animal, you occasionally draw other types as well. I usually just draw canines and felines, but I find drawing a giraffe or walrus once in a while to be a fun change. It also helps to keep me a more versatile artist. You should also try to stay away from just drawing animals' faces all the time (this is something I have to constantly remind myself). Art is so much more fun when you can work with full-body poses, and there are a lot of fun shapes in animals' bodies (I particularly love to draw paws). But enough talking, let's get to the how-to.
Get a good reference, not too small or blurry. Remember you can use Ctrl-+ to zoom in and Ctrl- - to zoom out in web browsers. I have a dual-monitor setup, so I always have a reference off to the side. I tend to work pretty directly from reference, but the more you practice an animal (and the more cartoony your style) the less you'll have to glance at references. You should still start out learning from references, though, to learn some basic anatomy and proportioning.
Identify the basic shapes of the animal. Some animals' heads are like circles, others are like ovals. Shoulders look like kidney beans. Some muzzles look square, others more cylindrical. Take a good look at your reference and find the shapes.
Start drawing with the line of action for full-body drawings(it's usually made up of the spine, head, and tail). This is the direction in which the animal's action/energy appears to be going, like what direction it's jumping in.
Add on a skeleton made of basic shapes(you can skip this if you've got some animal drawing experience). Circles/ovals for heads, ovals for ribcages, sticks for arms, and circles for paws will get you started.
Check your proportions. That's why you start simple, so you won't go crazy if you have to erase a lot. Make sure the head isn't too small or large, stuff like that.
Flesh out the form with more shapes. Tapering shapes for arms, wedges for thighs, etc. You shouldn't have any body parts depicted by sticks now.
Check your proportions one more time. You don't want to be an hour into a piece and realize the body is too short.
Make your blocking out drawing less opaque. If you're drawing on paper, rub over it with a kneaded eraser to lighten your lines. If you're drawing digitally, just lower the opacity of the layer you're on.
Make the detailed drawing. If you're drawing digitally, do this on a new layer. Look for changes in the planes of the animal. Some areas will be obvious, others you will have to learn to see. The more you draw animals, the better you get at finding all their little details. You don't have to go super detailed when making a line drawing. Too many details can make your drawing look too busy, and many subtle things are better represented with shading than with line. Usually you'll add the most subtle details when you shade or color your work.
Clean the drawing. If you're working traditionally, erase all those unnecessary guide lines from when you blocked out the drawing. If you're working digitally, hide unnecessary layers. Look for stray lines, and erase when necessary. You don't have to clean it too much. If you wanted to use the piece as line-art, you'd want to ink over it anyway.
I've recorded myself drawing a three different animals. Take a look at the videos (feel free to just scrub through them, you don't have to watch every second of them if you don't want). I've provided some commentary for each of them, and a link to the image I referenced. After reading and watching all of this, try drawing what I drew, keeping in mind the 10 steps above.
Similar things can be seen in this video where I show how to draw a young lion's arms and paws. Pay attention to how I don't allow my blocking lines to constrain me. If I feel something needs to be bigger, longer, or shorter, I draw it that way. The more you work like this, the less often your blocking will be incorrect and you can stay within your guides.
But what if you're drawing an animal that you are not very familiar with? Well, you approach it the same way. You can see how in this video, my blocking shapes are much more scribbley. That's because I'm not as sure of myself, so I go over my lines more as I fix them. But I go through the same steps as in the last two videos, and the end looks fine. With more kangaroo practice, it would look even more similar to the reference photo. Also, it doesn't hurt to spend more time with a piece if you need to. All of these videos were pretty short because the program I was using to record them (Windows Expression Encoder 4) only gave me 10 minutes per video, so I had to draw fast.
Today's sketches
Reccomended Reading: "The Art of Animal Character Design." I got this last Christmas and love it! It's the only art book I have that I've read all the way through. At first glance, it seems to be mainly full of pictures with very little text. The truth is that David Colman gives all sorts of wonderful animal drawing and designing tips in a good concise amount of text, letting his art drive home his points. The beginning has some especially helpful tips about animal drawing, including the most difficult type of animal drawing: drawing from moving animals. I highly suggest it.
So that's it! I hope this overview of how to draw animals was helpful! Next week, I'll do a much more detailed series of tutorials all about how to draw canines (one of my favorite subjects). Feel free to leave comments and questions, and to link me to your work!
I've finally finished making Bobby the Bobcat! For a while I thought he'd never be complete. But I've learned that while it may look like I abandon some projects, I always come back to them eventually. This goes for 2D art and CG work. I just can't stand starting something and not finishing it. But I think 2 years is the most I've let anything drag on. I think I let it go on for so long because school made me forget about him and college kept me too busy to work on him. But now that it's summer break I've been able to relearn/remember everything that I forgot about Blender (since I had been using Maya so much in college) and I was finally able to finish him. The confidence boost I got from my cute bunny turning out well also helped.
Here's a render of Bobby:
And a turntable:
And finally, here's his walk cycle:
He's a lot of fun to work with! I can't wait to do some more serious animations with him and with my bunny character!
You can download Bobby and see more images of him (including his wireframe and rig) here.
I finished my Cute Bunny model! That's what I'm calling him until I can think of a good name. Anyway, he's all rigged and tested and ready to go! He's really a lot of fun to animate! After all those problems with Bobby, it was nice to make something that didn't fight me every step of the way. Rigify helped a lot with that. I still had to adjust and add on rig pieces, but it really sped the whole process up tons.
Here are some screenshots of the Bunny, with and without his rig and jacket.
Here's a new turntable:
And a walk cycle:
And finally, an example of how his jacket reacts to movement.
You should definitely expect to see more of this guy in the future. I want to try compositing him into a photo, and do some lipsync with him. I'd also like to be able to animate him with his jacket. That shouldn't be too much of a problem, render-wise, as I've set up a tiny sort of render farm! It's just this computer (my stronger 64-bit Windows 7) and my last computer (an out-of-the-box 32-bit Windows Vista). I transfer files between them with a USB stick, because I can't get the Vista online. The Vista renders slower, but it's still nice to be able to share render loads with another computer.
Anyway, if you want to animate this little Bunny, too, he is now for sale on Turbosquid.
Well, the model is actually very gender neutral, so it could be a girl, too. But I started calling it Bobby a while ago, so now it's just a habit.
Originally, I was just going to post some stills of the model once I got his textures back on him, but instead I've got something better: a turnaround video. I found it when digging through my old files. It was made a little over two years ago, on February 15, 2010. Here it is:
I've got to make some tweaks to the model (some areas look too square), and then I'm going to get to rigging. The whole experience should be pretty interesting, since the last time I used Blender it was just 2.49b. Now it looks completely different. On top of that, I've been using Maya for months. I'm setting all my Blender presets to Maya, but that makes it a little difficult to follow some tutorials. Oh, well. I'll figure it all out.
.jpg "How to Draw a Realistic Dog Panting")
.jpg "How to Draw Sketch Grumpy Cat Art Tutorial")
.jpg "Arabian Horse Sketch How to Draw")
.jpg "How to Draw Animals")
I got this last Christmas and love it! It's the only art book I have that I've read all the way through. At first glance, it seems to be mainly full of pictures with very little text. The truth is that David Colman gives all sorts of wonderful animal drawing and designing tips in a good concise amount of text, letting his art drive home his points. The beginning has some especially helpful tips about animal drawing, including the most difficult type of animal drawing: drawing from moving animals. I highly suggest it.
