Door Versus Alien

 

This is an animation I did last semester for a class. The alien model was provided to us (a link is in the description of the video on YouTube if you're interested), but I made the door and did all the animation. My sister said it was like Veggie Tales. That made me really happy.

God's will be done. Thanks for this.

Taking Lessons From Eastern Animation

 

 

 

Doodling with pen, I studied and practiced some characters from anime until I figured out what I was missing in my own drawings. Then, I was able to create this drawing. I've long admired eastern-style animation for being able to create aesthetically beautiful characters with so few lines. They've really broken down what makes a drawn character attractive to look at. Many western animated characters have "Appeal," but most character designs could hardly be considered attractive. This is somewhat intentional on our part too. Ever since The Simpsons, American creators have been competing with each other to make equally nonsensical, avant-garde character designs that still read as human. Look at Phineas and Ferb or Gravity Falls. To be clear, I don't personally dislike this style. I love Gravity Falls and Phineas and Ferb. Fanart of those shows has featured on this blog. I owe my practice in art to Gravity Falls and its simplistic character style. I just want to be able to do something else.

It took me a long time to figure out how to make something like this consistently and without a specific reference. When a character looks attractive, it doesn't feel like a lot of work has been done. It just feels "right." You'll notice on Atla here (the character pictured) the shading of the eyes, how the shoulders are formed from misshapen rectangles rather than circles, that the shoulders are connected to the neck with a concave curve instead of a straight line. These were some of the elements I misunderstood.

One downside of doodling with pen is that your practice work may bleed onto the next page. I tried to mess with the contrast and colors of the picture so that my drawings on the opposite page were not as distracting. I'm sure someone who has more understanding of camera work could do better. 

Praise God. I love you. God's will be done.

Evan.spp

  

 

 One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Surfacing class, where we design textures and surfaces for objects. This is the model I came up with for the organic model assignment. Evan was created using a website that's name I forget which creates randomly generated and rigged human models. My teacher introduced it to me. I'll have to ask about it later. 

I want to be able to create a 2D look in as short a time as possible. To that end, I'm interested in learning about cell-shading and creating 3D models that appear two-dimensional. A lot of the animation industry and research right now is geared towards finding ways to make even more complex and realistic simulations of the world with the technology available. As soon as one effect becomes easy, they push themselves to another even more complex effect. I think this is somewhat absurd. There is, of course, a place for pushing technological boundaries, but technological advancements should be taken advantage of to produce work that is beautiful but cheap and time-effective. Imagine a world where a 10-year-old could use easy-to-understand software to create a beautiful CGI film clip. That is more what I'm interested in.

As you can probably tell, Evan here is my first attempt at anything like this with 3D software. The black outline around him is a slightly larger Evan model with the normals reversed (this is animator talk). The rest is hand-drawn with a poly-fill tool and a normal surfacing brush in Adobe Surface Painter. If I was to remake Evan, I would lift elements such as his collar and buttons off from the model. For now, I'm satisfied with what this has taught me, and I look forward to finishing this model and giving it eyes.

Praise be to God. I love you. Happy Easter.