OOO its nice to post something that isnt the RAM chip. not that i dont like it, but ive come to realise its taking up alot of space on this blog.
last week my friend hayley contacted me about a travelling moleskin diary, where artists were invited to add their own little interpretations to the theme "Food for Thought". so i wrote a story (a true story) of the time myself and my friend aaron happened upon stephen hawkin leaving pizza hut with a pizza box on his lap.
it looked alot like this:-
find out more about the Moleskin, about taking part and what-not, gubbins etc at http://www.thompson.typepad.com/
and thank you hayley and Thompson Brand Partners for an opportunity to draw some nonsense (although totally based on a true story.)
been a relatively slow evening as i have been mainly just doing some weight-painting. but theres fun you can have with that, i.e bending the character into fun and silly poses
Here is come of my working over the past few days, i finished off modelling the RAM chip, and then went about setting up a UV in the time honoured tradition of planar and cyndrical mapping. reletively painless, no issues as far as i can tell! i had a wee play around with some toon shaders, settled on a slight gradient on a toon shader, to allow for a more gradual change in tone.
Toon Shader with no adjustments. theres a wee charm about them.with a slight gradient however, it gives a really nice effect, which doesnt stumble into just being another shader.
Testing out the face.
This is a Blinn Shader, which is giving it alot of shine. also im not very happy about the texture/colours. need to match the source more.
This is more like it! Toon shaded, and more subtle texture.
(with fancy lighting) So Far... gonna do a quick test of animating the texture today, mebbes throw up a quick video of that. also gonna do the manips for the skeleton and bind it, mebbes a wee animation test of him bouncing about.
This weekend we have been hosting a stall at the Newcastle Science Festivals Maker Faire! its been a great few days, where we've worked with people of all ages to create over 120 pixilation animations. We got everyone doing it, kids adults, mums, dads, even the staff got involved (right when we were about to pack up.. they snuck in 5 more!)
totally great experience, looking forward to uploaded the animations and letting people check out what we've been doing.
heres the ground floor of the maker faire, from the balcony our table was at.
wow, look at team kumo with enthusiasm and fun and stuff! kris and fran doing some camera work. here we all are looking super fun on the last day, 3 laptops, 1 HD TV, 3 seperate showreels playing and one camera on a tripod.
our tech. i was tech guy. things kept breaking and messing up, and in flew tech guy to clean up la mess.
everyone loves pixilation! the Science Fest staff have a turn, and seem to like the results!
also throughout the weekend we've seen the animation we created for the Science Festival being projected all around the Life Centre, so had to take the oppertunity to film our film, in some sort of paradoxical way. urm. yeah.
in a short while ill throw in an animation of a few of some of the tester pixilations we did, as a taster of what we've been upto.
Looking through some old files i found one of my old models, mr cowboy! he really never got a proper name. gonna have a bash at him, and do some animation with him, mebbes some emotion and walkcycles etc. for now, above this picture he is laying down a phat beat for his homeys. south central style.
Test version of the concept art for the cowboy saloon. built out of textures of wood, warping and lasso tool. had to start work on something else so ive put it to one side. any comments are welcome :)
find out more about the Moleskin, about taking part and what-not, gubbins etc at
(with f
