Animation project- Main Crypt

 

I based this crypt on one I LOVE from the North Dorchester burying ground in Boston. I had to learn sweep nurbs in blender which involves making a profile and "sweeping" it along another shape, in this case a rectangle then adding details on top. I used a plugin that damaged things and another to add a grunge texture to complete the worn/aging effect. This will be the main focus in a couple important shots so it has a lot more detail than anything else in the cemetery will have.

Animation / Blender : scene update

 

Getting there. The textures are greatly improved and the rendering time is still reasonable for animation. So far. I have to make the garden area on the side of the house for a scene later in the film and find a better solution for the walkway to the house and the ground around the house that you can't see in this render.  Balancing the street light and fog was not easy, it had to be think enough for something emerge from it and not too think to hide the lights completely. 

Blender progress for my first Blender short film.

 One element in a much larger setup.  The mansion will be behind walls and a gate and we will be looking down a foggy street lit by lamplight. My goal is to model the street and set up the shot and lighting then make the characters to be animated. I will need a cemetery set, an indoor set and this mansion will have a garden somewhere. So not many locations. It has to be as simple as possible so I can learn enough to make it look OK and live long enough to finish it. The mansion is an older model repurposed and redecorated. 

Illustration: Dragon 1982

 This was found in a frame somewhere while clearing out my may parent's house. I had forgotten all about it even though I have a pencil drawing with this same dragon in it. Ink with watercolour with chalk pastels (I think). It almost fit in the scanner but not quite exactly. I sometimes wonder what else is out there still that I drew and forgot about. 

Illustration: rue Berthier

 

Another in my local house series. This one is also close to the gym as those are the houses I see most of the week. I think I like the brick houses, they look cool to me and I like the colour palette. 

Like a lot of there, the drawing looks much nicer than the real place. This building is cute but it is hidden by poles, electric line, meters... you name it. There really should a law against visual pollution blocking our appreciation of the places we see every day. 

Blender 4.0 - Am I really learning it finally?

 I certainly hope I am! With the release of 4.0 Blender has updated it's interface to a point I thought I could  finally understand it and use it. I had no real choice, my V19 of Cinema 4D stopped being supported by the MAC OS and Maxon has gone the subscription route, including not very satisfying updates since. 

I started with CG Cookie's playlist of basics which introduces you to the layout, interface and basic concepts in a sort of an entertaining but text book way. I will go over it again as I begin to start a real short animation in my Lovecraft series... soon... soon-ish. 

I then went on to Blender Guru's famous Blender donut tutorial, updated for 4.0 and teaches the software by taking you through a project using all of Blender's most used features and tools. I didn't follow it slavishly, I have a lot of 3D experience already but it really helped to see it all done step by step in Blender. So I have joined the crowd and finished the donut tutorial. 

I do feel I can work or will be able to work in Bender now, gradually getting confidence and learning the things I need to to continue making films. The interface is more user friendly but not exactly intuitive or easy yet. It also crashed much more than C4D did for me. More positively working with the EEVEE live renderer it was much easier to see what I was working on clearly and with a big update for that coming very soon, I can see rendering my finished project quickly. Cycles was more slow but also, I thought, a better render than that of the native C4D rendering options. 

So see my donut thing in all it's donut-y glory above. 

Cirru book series for children

Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.

The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations! 

Click the title to go to the Amazon page! 

Cirru Counts to Ten

Learning Shapes with Cirru

Learning Colors with Cirru

Animation: New ideas for my Nauti 2D character

 

I know a little more about designing a cartoon character and decided to redesign Nauti the character I experiments with 2D and hand drawn animation with a while back. This new character sheet could be helpful if I decide to use the more mainstream style of 2D using bones, puppet tools and computer assistant like MOHO which looks pretty enticing but I will need to somehow find about 500$ CAD or more. If I could get up to speed in Blender I could mix 2 and 3D as I have been doing here and there more efficiently and at no extra cost. Right now I am playing around with the idea of making the keyframes in Affinity Designer and hand drawing the inbetweens and see how that works. 

I was hoping Procreate Dreams would be further along in features to do this but I might need to stay with Toon Squid on the iPad. Krita has improved but not enough for what I need so far. Open Toons is s till a little frustrating to work with but might have the features I need. 

Below is the original design, it's very different in style. 

Cartoon: Sheep (moutons)

 

More animals from Mobius Meadows farmstead. It was a bigger challenge than expected. This is the third iteration, the other two were... not good. mostly because I was too biased towards realism and couldn't seem to get my head around the cartoon part. In the end this came out OK. 

Illustration: grange - Möbius Meadows Farmstead

 

The barn at my friend's farm in Vermont. I drew it when it was much smaller. The original barn was hanging off a steep hill and in bad shape. he had it moved to a safer spot and built a much bigger barn around it. This is in the style of my last few colour drawings done in Procreate with maybe a bit more painting detail than the rest.