Once again my dear friends, the time has come to put out a new demo reel. The year at Teesside University is behind me and it is time to fill out job applications. Or so I’ve been told anyway.

This new reel is mostly a restructuring of old work, though there might be one or two new shots in there. I’ve also found some new music and created nice, new opening/closing graphics to give the reel a prettier feel than the rather crappy simple May demo reel. Here’s hoping someone out there will like it. Fingers crossed!

For CV, shot list and my all new dedicated demo reel page, head over to reel.thimic.net.

So here is the result of the past months work, from idea to storyboard, previs to film shoot, modeling to compositing. Hope it isn’t entirely hopeless

Well, technically it’s been finished for a week now, I’ve just been too fed up to blog about it until now. The past month has been incredibly busy and seeing as my field, post production, comes last (who would have thought?), I haven’t been sleeping that much lately. Lack of sleep coupled with missed deadlines and frustration levels through the roof generally meant that keeping the blog updated became one thing too many. Taking an hour or two out of the on average five hours of sleep I got every night to blog didn’t feel particularly inviting. And if I had taken the time to do it anyway, it would probably have made for rather unpleasant reading.

So I’m picking up the thread a week later, now having had a few nights normal sleep and some time to relax and think about things other than the film. I’ll be back with a few posts about the past month and reflections on the finished film in the next few days.

So we’re finally at the animation stage. Or have been for the past few days. To get the most out of the remaining time, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie are chipping away on the shots while I render them out and take them through compositing.

As I’m the last person to touch the footage before editing, I’ve spent the past few days trying out different “looks” for the final film, screened them for the rest of the team and adjusted things based on the feedback. We finally decided on the look in the video above. I then created a Nuke template that I can use to quickly apply the same look to the rest of the shots.

The only thing remaining for actually pushing out finished shots is to work out the wind direction and position of the sun for each clip so that the clouds move properly etc.

To stay sane, we’ve created an Excel document to keep track of what everyone is doing.

We’re also planning to have a bit more convincing smoke and fire effects this time around, so I will add smoke and fire to certain shots when they come in. For this reason, I’m currently spending my time learning the 3ds max plugin FumeFX so we’ll be able to produce convincing fireballs, smoke trails and explosions. Allan McKay has some good tutorials on the subject, so I’m looking through those. Here’s hoping V-Ray and FumeFX will play nice when it comes to render passes…

First things first. As we had a few problems getting the first story to work, we settled on a new one. The team gathered for a few hasty meetings and came up with a new story with the working title “Fetch!”. The most recent draft of the treatment, at least that I know of, goes like this:

Fetch!

(working title)

DESERT day. LOW ANGLE CAM. Small FLOWER in focus. Ground starts shaking as from giant footsteps. PULL-FOCUS to reveal WOMAN and ROBOT-DOG walking down straight, endless road. Woman reading manual “Travelers best friend”, Robot-dog pictured on cover. Woman starts playing fetch with Robot. Spots RABBIT. Woman’s stomach growling. Produces knife. Sneaks toward fluffy prey. Robot trails behind. Robot, desiring to help, overreacts by initializing destruction-mode, platforms large missiles, blows bunny to smithereens.

Montage begins. Rising action. Shot pace quickens:

CAGE TRAP. Robot holds rope, woman sets bait. Robot is distracted, drops cage over lady, rabbit jumps close, eat baits, continues jumping.

Commands Robot to set up TENT. Robot sets up upside-down.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot climbs in tree in background, like a monkey.

Woman tries to throw SPEAR at bunny. Robot thinks they play fetch, catches spear split-second before kill.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot chases rabbit like a bull, holding fingers like horns.

Woman tries to set up tent, robot mess up somehow. Tent collapses.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot dances ballet in background.

Woman lights match to make fire. Overenthusiastic Robot “helps” with FLAMETHROWER. Torches campsite. Including tent.

Montage ends.

Woman sits in foreground, manual lies on ground beside her. Robot prances in background. Flying sheep + kafooom. Jumps about again. Total CHAOS. Robot aware of depressed lady. Sudden SILENCE. Robot hand enters frame. Gives flower from opening shot to woman. They walk into sunset, playing fetch.

The girl and the robot will have the same basic designs as in the previous story, though we will change a few things to make them fit in a bit better. Having blocked out the new story, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie have spent their remaining time knocking out the storyboard at school. For my part I’ve been taking it a little bit easy because of that illness thing, but have a few things to work on: Mainly environment concept art, brushing up on FumeFX, finding music/sounds for the new story and create a camera shutter for the robot’s “eye”:

This might be overkill for the actual film, but I got a bit carried away. Main thing is that I know how to make one I’ve been going through some sounds in my library as well and next I’ll tackle FumeFX and the environment.

Lastly, I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7.1 and the latest build of K2 yesterday. The upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as usual, but I believe everything should be working properly now. If you spot some bug still present, leave me a comment somewhere on the site and I’ll look into it as soon as I can.

It’s been a busy couple of days and therefore little activity on the site. On monday we presented our film idea and got some feedback. Might work some of it into the film. We then shifted focus to concept art as we need to have characters, environments, storyboard and animatic ready by the 12th of February.

We worked from home on tuesday as Jamie was still in Egypt and Andreas had to work. I spent my time revisiting the cinematic logo, working more on the fluid sim and started a high quality render (first image). Included a Z-depth pass to bring the other paint buckets out of focus (second image). May remove the extra buckets all together.

I also went on the hunt for temple references. Found that I really liked the designs of Santiago Calatrava. Might try convince the other team members to use some of his buildings as reference.

Lastly, I looked at ways to create a desert landscape that we’ll need for the beginning of the film. Just a test at this point, but what I have so far looks like this:

Rig: Brad Nobles Skeleton Rig

The second assignment is about facial animation and lip sync. We were to pick a sound file and animate a character based on it.

Rig: Enrique Gato Borregáns Tito

Bear in mind that these clips aren’t necessarily the finished ones and that character animation isn’t what you would call my cup of tea There’s also a third digital acting assignment that I’m working on. Will post it when it’s closer to a finished product.

“The Diversion” is an animated short film about an energetic old woman, Rose, who wholeheartedly wishes to enter a night club. When the guard at the door refuses her entry, she devises a series of clever schemes to get to the door without the guard knowing…

So the movie is finally done and we’re reasonably happy with it. Some of the animation, voice acting and rendering could definitely have been better, but there is only so much you can do in four weeks. I’ll update this post with more information when I’m less exhausted

Had some speed modeling challenges at school last week. Most of them with an hour to complete modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering. Was quite happy with these two. Both scenes were lit using an HDR image and a single omni for shadows.

The teacher told us to create a simple 3d character for use in the upcoming animation lessons. I came up with this one. Made a face for him too, but that’s not quite ready yet. I prefer to keep him anonymous for now. Rendered with V-Ray and and lit with an HDR image. The resolution of the HDR isn’t that great. Hence the grain.

Ok, project’s over and site’s updated so I thought I’d do a write-up as promised in an earlier post. Those who know how to count might have guessed that this was the third big assignment given at 3D design and animation at Noroff 07/08. As such, we were once again to build on skills already acquired and character creation/animation were the natural progression.

Criteria for this project:

I also made a carrot as a prop, to emphasize the fact that the character is a vegetarian. Although it’s almost too small to see in the final shots, I thought it turned out rather well:

I had a fair bit of trouble when it came to do the hair. I experimented with everything from mesh to Hair&Fur to VrayFur. All of which had their own advantages and disadvantages. In the end I stumbled upon a plugin called HairTrix which seemed to play fairly nicely with V-Ray:

A bit more detail modeling and texturing and the character was ready for rigging and skinning:

Due to too much experimentation in the beginning of the project, the fact that one of our four weeks was the easter holidays and because my first skinning attempt disappeared under mysterious circumstances, there was now very little time left. With three days to deadline there were still skinning for a second time, walk cycle, poses, rendering, DVD and presentation left to do. To say I was rushing things near the end is a little bit of an understatement. Still I finished on time after working through the last couple of nights.

Pose 1:

Pose 2:

In this pose the character is supposed to be inches from touchdown. It looks a bit weird though, as I didn’t have the time to create the chute itself.

Pose 3:

This was the last pose I did. I wanted the character to look skywards, but not entirely sure I pulled it off. Made only a few hours from deadline.

DVD:

Walk Cycle:

Due to some miscommunication between me and my teacher I got the impression that one cycle (every two steps) had to be made from 24 frames. This resulted in a rather faster walk than I would have liked. When I finally realized we could choose the cycle length ourselves, there wasn’t enough time left to fix the cycle and re-render. The character actually blinks in this cycle, but due to the size of the movie it’s rather hard to tell.

All in all, I’m quite happy with the result although in hindsight, there are certain things I wish I had done differently. If I had more time, these are the first things I would have improved on in no particular order:

I’ve added a few more points to the list above. Got my grade this week as well. Another A

This was the second graded assignment I got at Noroff. We were just starting animation at that time and so we were assigned a ride movie which only need animation on a basic level.

Criteria:

With the story fleshed out, we started building environments while researching music. Some environments were built entirely by me. Others were made by Elwin and later refined or looked over by me. Mainly, texturing, lighting and animation fell on my shoulders as Elwin didn’t feel quite comfortable in those areas, but he was with me every step of the way so that for instance an animation might be created by me, but would still fit Elwins’ vision.

WIP objects/environments:

WIP animations:

Final movie:

DVD:

The sound was mixed in Apples’ GrarageBand and the movie itself was cut in Final Cut Pro.

Unfortunately, we were a little short on time near the end, resulting in some jerky camera movements, a rather quick round with the sound effects and a couple of animations we weren’t entirely satisfied with.

On the whole we quite liked the end result though and the assignment was graded an A. No competition this time.

I’m getting my next big graded assignment the coming monday; Character design and Animation. As we’ve done nothing but training for this assignment for the last two months, I might be posting some minor works I’ve done up until now. Then again I might not. I’ll at least try to do some work in progress posts when on my next assignment.

That’s quite some heading. Say aloud five times in rapid succession. Where was I? Ah, yes. This was the first graded assignment I was handed after a couple of months at Noroff. The criteria were the following:

Some WIPs:

Project DVD:

If I had more time, I would have worked more on the fur, fixed the weird carpet pattern and found better textures for the stool among other things.

The project earned me an A grade and won a competition connected to the assignment with almost 60 contestants.

Edit: And 4 years later, I thought I might give this thing a quick retouch:

This is the first complete image I ever attempted to make in 3ds max, back when max 4 was the most recent version. The inspiration was a scene in The Longest Journey, but it bears little resemblance to the original.

Back in 2002, I was into Microsoft Flight Simulator so naturally, when the 2002 version came out with its made up airlines, I took matters into my own hands and repainted this Dash 8 in the colours of SAS. I put the repaint up on flightsim.no and as I write this it has been downloaded more than 2900 times.

Battlefield 1942 was also a game I played a lot when it came out. Me and a couple of friends wanted to create a custom map based on Band of Brothers and I was responsible for 3D objects. To the Jeeps I added a folding top and wrote
Easy Company on the hood. I also made haystacks, though they didn’t turn out just the way I wanted.

Some time later, I made this low poly house (that happens to be where I live) for an unofficial map for Silent Heroes. I never got around to actually implement it though.

Next up is an illustration I made for a mini project on NTNU back in 2004: We were to drop an egg from the height of 10 meters down on a concrete floor and the egg had to be intact after impact. We could only use provided materials. My team came up with this idea which I visualized.

In 2005 I took a course at NTNU named Product Development and Production which involved designing and building a bicycle. Again I used max for concept visualization and this is what we came up with. I was also responsible for the website design.

More NTNU projects. This time a computer game involving Are & Odin, written in Java. I was mainly responsible for graphics and came up with the design above for the menus.

And one last NTNU project: Design a small tanker. Once again I used max for visualization and this was the front page for our nearly 100 pages long report. I only did the 3D. I stole the clouds from somewhere else.

Well, that concludes previous works. Next up is my first graded Noroff project.

These were a series of smaller exercises combined with my determination to learn V-Ray.

The exercises went like this: