DigitaLeon Illustrations

The red hound, with red stuff or maybe flames, but anyways, I just wanted to try some practice at doing a walk cycle with a creature with four legs, it's been a long day.

Watch it!     I know I haven't been around, or updated for a while, I've been a little busy of course, I've been working on this character! This character is fully rigged and animatable, but I made a slight miscalculation, and did the texturing after doing the skinning and rigging, so going into Zbrush and doing the UVs there, changed the model so the rig has to be re-skinned to the new mesh from Zbrush. I learned that I have to get into texturing the model as soon as I'm done with the modeling, otherwise I have to re-skin the character to the rig, in this case.     Well I've also have been drawing up some sketches for the next character I'm going to be creating soon, one that might be a lot more difficult as far as the detail that I see in my mind, but if it works out according to what I have in mind it should be pretty epic!     So here's the 3D turnaround for the character I've been working on for some pr...

Here are some renders of a project that we've been working on in my Production class. It was really interesting working along with everyone and I ended up doing most of the animation in the project, which I can't complain about at all, it was great practice. When it's all edited and fully completed, I will most likely put up a video here as well. Good news is that if everything is completed in time, this animation will be shown at the MIA Animation Festival! To know that the big guys over at Disney, Cartoon Network, Blizzard, Nickelodeon, and more, might get to see what I've worked on, is actually really amazing, it probably hasn't dawned on me yet, but I'm looking forward to it! More info on MIA Festival:  http://miaanimation.com/Festival.htm

Here's a rough play blast animation for a project we're working on, it's been a lot of fun and we've been learning a lot about being in production with a group to get a project completed. As you can see, I I'll be doing more shots. It's been a blast.'m responsible for the animation for these two shots for now, there's bound to be changes to these shots to improve upon it, but I sure hope I'll get more shots to work with.

Well, back again in full force, well, kinda. Here's a short animation I did in a previous class, advanced animation principles. It was a very fun class actually, learned a lot of new things on animation, like how to really get the feeling of weight in an animation. I also improve a bit more on the timing of movements in an animation.

A short animation I did in Flash, I haven't used flash before this, for years. So when the class was oriented around using Flash, I was pretty excited to be able to use it again. We had to break up the characters into different parts, like arms, legs, torso, head, etc, and animate the different parts using motion tweens, and in some cases frame-by-frame. The backgrounds were painted in photoshop, and imported into Flash.

Now this is the final composition for another class. Compositing is a very powerful tool, and if used wisely, there's truly no limit to what could be created. I used a few clips here and there, and the challenge was to add effects into them. They were comprised of mostly either 2D or 3D elements, composited into the individual clips, and then the clips were edited together.

If you've been in any math class, I'm sure you'd remember the grid were you plot points, X coordinates go left and right, Y, goes up and down. Then, there's the Z, which goes toward and away from you. So the challenge of this project was to create the feeling of depth in an environment. As if you were traveling into it, I of course, opted to paint all of the visuals myself in photoshop for necessary practice, because I could have used images from the internet instead. I wanted to give the feeling of going into another world, from a room with a broken wall, into a lush forest which leads to temple deep within. I really like how this turned out, and I'd definitely use something like this in any animated series that I'd do, because it truly creates the feeling of depth in the environment. To push it even further, I could have animated elements layered and really broaden the horizons.

Here's the completed walk cycle, and also a background I painted in photoshop to add into the project. You know, it's always great to have the character's environment to be clearly defined. Having the environment clearly defined, really brings a new element of life and depth into any animation. The quality of my animation has surely improved, I remember the first walk cycle I had to do and it was okay at the time. However, it was very jittery and inconsistent, this one, is so much more consistent and I kind of like the result. 

Here's a new walk cycle done for digital ink and paint. It's still kind of rough, but much better than the last attempt. At some point I want to add the inbetweens so that the motion is a lot more smoother than were it's at now. Next I've got to make a background and have the walk cycle play over a panning background. So that should be fun. Another short animation for the same course! A head turn, I did this before the walk cycle and it was earlier in the course. Seeing it now, there's a lot of things about it I would definitely fix and do it again.

Here's the final animation for my 3D character animation class. Yes, more classwork! So much it can drive you crazy! Well it's a learning experience, which I'll be taking to any project I'll work on. This class really made 3d animation a lot easier to grasp and there's so many different techniques for getting the same thing done. It's really choosing the one which will be truly beneficial is what comes with experience.

This here is the final for my Intro to digital composition class. It was a very short and fun class, I've learned a few new things about after effects which is what this was made with. It was too hard to work with, I started off with just a single image in photoshop, which is the bubble and then used that as a sprite for the particles, so that every particle rendered looks like the bubble I made in photoshop.

Here's a short How To, I hope could be of help to someone who'd be interesting in learning how to set up a 3D model for lip synching, or any kind of dialogue animation in 3Ds Max. I'm sure that this could be useful in other 3D applications as well. This is kind of what you can end up with: When you've completed a 3D model that you want to to be able to animate with facial expressions, and have a character's mouth animate along with a dialogue. One way that you can achieve that kind of animation is with the use of a Morpher modifier. I'm going to explain the process of setting one up, don't worry, it's very simple! This is an example of a completed head model, it could be textured or not, it's entirely up to you. From this point, you won't be able to do much animating to it's facial expressions or do an lip sync. Why? That's because you have to apply a morpher modifier on the the main head model. Next, you'll be making copies of...

Hey everyone, I hope everyone finds the time to enjoy this day, whether you're on the hunt for those hidden eggs, or in church. Happy Easter! Here's a little Easter joke for ya'. Why did the Easter egg hide? He was a little chicken! Ha ha, okay that was bad...Well at least I tried. :)  Here are some animation tests which I have completed for an intermediate animation class. I do wish I had more time to dabble with my own animation, I do have one I'm working on, but I think it's quite too soon to show it yet. :p Emotion Animation Test Flour Sack Emotions

I had to get Tim here, to walk along with the background. When I was first drawing out the walking part, I really didn't think that would be necessary, buuuut I guessed wrong, and so I had to find out a way to get him to walk in place, so that I can pan the background. I also "beefed" up the background so that it would be wider for space to pan the background. :)

Whoa, so after a few hours of animation and some more of coloring this short 2D animation walking cycle flies by the screen so fast...Even so, I get a small sense of accomplishment from all labored hours of fun animating. This walking cycle is for a class project, and it will be used, just before Tim, slips on a banana peel. Next week I'm going to animate the slip and fall of Tim and it shall be glorious! :}

just practicing..

A short animation of a biped I animated in 3DS Max for my class. The animation is still a bit rough but it's animatic using the key frames and animating each body part one by one. Since I didn't have IK on the biped, movements seem to be a bit stiff, next one, hopefully I'll get fully rigged, so the animation could be a bit easier and natural looking.

And so, another very great class is over, and finally some break!! The video is the accumulation of what I learned in the Principles of Animation class for five weeks, all put into one. The 12 basic principles of animation are, Timing, Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Staging, Straight Ahead, Follow through and overlapping, Slow in Slow out, Arcs, Secondary Action, Appeal, Solid Drawing. Of course there are now close to 28 used today, but they are mostly derived from these principles. Here's a link to  12 Principles of Animation . So now, I'll hopefully have more time to do some of my own projects :p