Smoke Stack

This week the Animation Principle was to make a looping smoke column. I chose to do it in Flash instead of hand drawn.


 Looping Smoke Youtube

 I am quite pleased with the actual loop of the animation, I think it is difficult to tell where it starts and ends which is what I was trying to achieve.

 I think the animation is playing to fast, especially near the smoke stack, it would have been better if the drawings were further apart ti slow the speed of the smoke down.

 I drew the smoke using the pencil tool as opposed to the brush tool that I usually stick to, I like the more squared off effect it gives however it was sometimes frustrating to watch flash change my shape drawings into perfect squares, which Isn't what i wanted. 

Popular posts from this blog

Life Drawing - Session 1

Image
I took these after my first life drawing session. Life drawing was difficult to get used to at first but I found it much easier by the end of the 3 hour session. I think my drawings improved over the duration of the session. I think the white chalk exercise was the most successful and was the best drawing I produced however I wasn't happy with the head. The aim of the exercise was to capture light falling on the model instead of trying to simply draw the figure. These are my very first drawings, they were all drawn in between 2-3 minutes. My main aim to focus on for the next session is really looking at the shape of the model to make it as accurate as possible. I found drawing with chalk very much helped my ability to draw the smooth lines and shapes needed for life drawing, I think the session was far more successful using chalk than if it was done with a pencil. The image below shows my negative space drawing. We were to draw o...
Read more

Big Top Plastic Shaders

Image
For look development on The Big Top I have been working on shader tests for plastic materials, in both Renderman and Arnold, these first 3 are rendered with Arnold. We are taking reference from Evil Corp  who make great plastic style CG models that look very realistic. The key things I picked up on was the subsurface scattering, and the amount of specular on the skin, so before we get some models and textures I am experimenting with these properties on this model. I played with getting the scattering correct, which you can see working on the ear. I then played with varying amounts of specular and reflection. I don't think any of them are quite right yet, it will be easier to play with shaders once we have some textures painted. I do like Arnolds ability to add lights for specific attributes, for example subsurface scattering, although its not physically plausible sometimes you want that control to push an effect in specific areas, although this could probably be...
Read more

Renderman Conversion Script

Image
I have gradually been building up my material converter script, I have re-written lots of it over the past week, changing elements and making it work better. In it's current state it detects the type of material and assigns a similar type of Renderman Material, currently this only works for lambert and blinn, so I need to add some 'else' statements to include the other types of material. I also added, and then removed connecting transparency, because Renderman doesn't have it in the same way Mental ray does, I did try plugging the transparency into Rendermans presence, but this was not reliable depending on how the mental ray material was set up. I have also added in the ability to copy over diffuse colour values to materials without textures, so it is more of a complete conversion. It needs more work, but it is coming along nicely.
Read more