Space Fire

A little something-something I worked on a while back at Amazing Society. We were trying to come up with a fiery hazard that would damage the characters. It had to look like it belonged on this flat ground, and in space. So here are some concepts I whipped up:



And here's a little example of what we went with - the line at the top is actually the frame by frame of the candle-like flame:



Have you hero'd up, yet?

On Twos

Hello! Back from GDC and back to work! Of course, having missed a week's worth of stuff means I got to spend the day updating Unity. Fun, right? Heh. Well, at least I got to have some downtime for sprint planning and in-betweening my heart fire. It's on twos now!



I also thought I'd design the look for when I clean it up. Here it is:

Left My Heart in...

Headed to GDC tomorrow! Muy Excited.

Here's a little animation I'm working on (definitely still in progress):



It's harder than I anticipated to conform to a style and use repeating shapes. I usually just go where the shape of the fire takes me, but I thought I'd be fancy this time around. Definitely a cool and worthwhile exercise.

Whip Wave

I have so much to learn. I've been reading Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation, and there's just a ton of really great material. Stuff I can't wait to put into practice.

Speaking of! In chapter 2, he talks about Whip and Wave effects, with a small cycle in it. I thought I'd compile it together for reference purposes. Then I did a little rotoscoping, then I just had a little fun with it. Here's my result:



The right is straight out of the book. The middle is my own scratchy drawing, and then the left is just a little blur and color addition. All Photoshop CS5. A forty five minute exercise during lunch today.

Key Comps - Roughs

I've been working more on my side project, and I've decided to give her a little more form before I start breaking down. So here's a peak at some of her frames:



Hah, a little difficult to see. Here they are laid out nicely with some color!




It's slow going! But it's coming along.

Karolina Pencil Test Work in Progress

Been a while since I posted any progress on that Karolina animation I started way back when. I've been awfully side tracked with work and snow and the holidays and family and my puppy. So! Here's some frames I've been working on.



Not all of them have been broken down, as you can see. But, it's a start!

Karolina Revisit - Look and Feel

Man I've been busy. I've been trying to continue these mini projects I started before I began working at TAS, but it's really hard to keep up. Especially because I come back after weeks and weeks to discover that I don't like the initial direction.

Here's a reworking of the concept for Karolina's attack. I like this style better because the animation can stay really rough, but it still allows for hard edges to create negative space.

Karolina Rough

This is about an hour's worth of work done on Photoshop CS5 Extended.

There's a ton of issues I need to fix with these roughs, but I thought I'd document the progress I've made so far. I'll probably start on Nico before wrapping this up as well.

Platforming Frogs

Here are some concepts and silhouettes for a platformer character concept:





And here's some keyframes of a frog swinging on his tongue and jumping I did in photoshop:

Dedicated to My Friend

So, I've been animating in Photoshop lately, and it's really cool. It's like... a combination of animating in Flash and After Effects, except... rasterized. Anyway, I decided to smash this little piece together (literally, minutes of effort - haha filters), dedicated to my friend John Mark. Because he's cool. And I didn't feel so bad stealing his video from youtube.

Enjoy!

Walking Man

Alright, this is as much as I want to work on this piece. It was a lot of fun, and I'm really enjoying the technique I'm implementing. I've already started branching off and doing different things with it. More to come!

Rough Draft Cont'd

Hey, so here's that model sheet I was talking about making:



And here's some keyframes; You can see the model sheet and some Richard Williams reference in the upper left hand corner.

Rough Draft

I made this a few posts back, and one of the designers at Digital Kitchen (Sean Dekkers) said it would be a cool animation. So, I whipped this up in about an hour. A proof of concept of sorts with maybe half of the animation principles applied (seriously, the hands are all kinds of messed up). But! I'll post it anyway as a part of my ~process~ for this upcoming piece.



I think I'll actually go back and "design" the character a little more - give him some personality. He's got a bit of a flare at the moment, I think I'll try and capitalize on that.

Organizing some portfolio work

And I decided to clean up some old Sophomore Projects stuff.

So here's the compilation with the breakdowns. Maybe I'll add music.



Special thanks to Adam Chandler and Monica Bartlett (team J!)

Updates for the sake of it

Fall is here, which means school. Chance of Rain is coming a long smoothly. John Mark is working hard on boob-rigging and the whole team spent two hours yesterday at the mocap studio.

I have to say that Romina is an amazing asset to my team, both as animator and as the choreographer and main dance reference.

I'm currently setting up cameras and scenes and things. Trying to get everything organized so that I can finally start doing what I want to do - FX.

I bought smgrissom.com and I found a hosting service, but for now, it'll just be routed here.

I suppose I could upload the working animatic, but it's going through some changes this week, so I'll just upload a few thumbnails I'm doing for a completely unrelated class (concept art), and a walk cycle I did over the weekend.



That, there, is a bunch of compositions for a concept art assignment. It's supposed to be a Musical or Opera poster for a Depressed Transient Devil. Fun assignment.



And this is Fatima walking. It's partly for a sound design assignment, partly because I haven't animated a character traditionally in three years. There are some kinks, but for the most part, I really like it.



and why not, here's the end Animatic for the short. We've changed the jump, but the timing and all is about the same.

2D Effects

These are some of last year's effects tests I did for the big scene.


I had to animate an explosion, first.


Then, I had to stipple the animation. That was painstaking.


Next, animate the electricity!


Then my team (Monica Bartlet - Water, and Adam Chandler - Smoke/Water Inbetween) and I had to compile all of our pieces together.


And finally, after a long hard battle, our scene is colored, composed, and complete.


Go Team J!