I stopped working on it for whatever reason, but a couple weeks ago MC Frontalot himself commented on the video saying he’d like to see more. Being my only brush with celebrity to date (if you don’t count getting my glove signed by the Omaha Royals), I am pretty dang excited, I honestly didn’t expect for it to ever make it to him.

Anyhow, it motivated me to get back to work on animation so I started a new project, this time using the skit from Final Boss, A Skit About Vocations. It’s really funny and features Wil Wheaton rapping.

Here’s my progress so far, sorry about the video quality. I’m really trying to use what I learned from Grasshorse, stuff like the shot composition and general order of operations.

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I’ve also started work on a new Dune model! It’s a collab, too. A fellow Duner created the low-poly model and I’m going to texture it.

~”D-W-I-G-H-T.”

They hired me to do the character animation, but I ended getting a lot of experience working in other areas like scene setup, rendering and compositing. I also worked with Maya more than I ever had before, and STILL I think Blender is better. I understand why Maya is the industry standard, but as an animator I prefer Blender for its stuff like Action Editor and Dope Sheet.

I also got a lot of experience working with a rig that was provided to me. I’ve done animations with provided rigs before, mostly for Blender Animation Challenges at blenderartists.org. The rig was challenging, and not just because it was in Maya, but because the controllers and drivers were not as apparent or labeled as I would like. When I set up rigs, I prefer to lock down or hide EVERYTHING I won’t be animating. That includes stuff like the mesh itself and bones that aren’t animatable.

After two weeks, we finished it up, set it over to Integer and Hasbro to be approved. Now something I was a part of is on TV (until August 21). And it’s definitely the best looking thing I’ve ever done, I’m really proud of how the animation turned out.

I’ve been doing a TON of Flash work, working on two games simultaneously. Soon I’ll be able to post .swf files like I want to so I can share my work easier.

~”We’re lucky people laugh when I say stuff.”

I’m also adding new textures on the Danger Room robot, seen in an animation I completed last year.

Also, I compiled a Renderframe for the Skystriker. Hopefully I can begin a new model soon.

Finally, I’ve added a new page! Attaboy’s is a place where I’ll post recommendations and reviews of my work. I got the first from Sean Parnell, I did that little card-back for him last week. We’re beginning a new game once we find a coder.

~”Fear is the mind-killer.”

First, I’m just about done with another Rockstorm Dune model, the Harkonnen Skystriker! Sort of an AAA vehicle.

I’d really like to get back into focusing on character design, so taking what I’ve learned from the Rockstorm Dune models I’m going to go back and redo my Wolverine model.

Finally, I whipped up a graphic for a flash card game coming out soon. The new client only needed something for the back of the cards, and it just had to say “The 7 Elders” and have a snake and a sword. Easy.

~”It’s that thing when 2 jacked midgets paint themselves orange and you have to parallel park between them.”

While the coder, Adham, is working out the kinks for the MDA engine, Matt and I are working on a new game. It’s strictly 2D Flash, and we want to get it done fast. I don’t want to give away too much about the game until it’s further along, but I can say it’s about a robot janitor.

Lastly, I think I’ve come up with a decent compromise between the two Iceman materials. It reminds me of the Iceman action figure I used to have where if you put him in the freezer overnight he’d turn all frosty.

~”Yes, I’m married. But my wife understands that a good politician has to be appealing to the ladies. The fact that I haven’t even gotten close to cheating on her is a disappointment to both of us.”

This model began as a project to model a male form more anatomically accurate than I usually do. When I got the basic model down I put it in Mudbox and began sculpting in muscles and the proverbial superhero undies. I have so much better luck with normal maps on organic objects than I do more rigid structures like the Gunship.

I’m struggling a bit deciding on how the ice should look. I can get an icy look to it, but it covers up a lot of the work I did with the normal map, but otherwise he looks too much like the Silver Surfer. I want to eventually give him some hair, my favorite Iceman’s always have hair

~”Hippies.They’re everywhere. They wanna save the earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.”

He’s wearing a Binwin Bronzebottom t-shirt created by Scott Kurtz of PVP. There is much rivalry, rage, and love shared between Scott and Will’s D&D characters, and not even dying in an acidic pit could come between them.

Part of animating a sequence where the character speaks is creating all what are called Shape Keys. Shape Keys are stored deformations of the mesh, and they are useful for storing facial expressions.

I’ve also done more work on the Harkonnen Gunship model I’m creating for Rockstorm Games’ Dune:War of the Spice. After finishing the Windtrap, they featured it in their monthly news post, which was pretty cool. Now I’m working on the Gunship. I’m done with the low poly model, now I’m normal mapping it up.

Lastly, in between projects I’m making a game with Matt (he’s working with me on MDA). I whipped up some level designs, which was unfamiliar territory, but I’m getting the hang of it.

~”Oh, I forgot. Only guys can get hurt there.”

The first is my character, the half-elf Warlord of Kord turned Ardent Con Dottiere. The name is a play on the word condottieri, of which I learned about in Art History. I got a nice, long backstory on her and her fall from grace, but basically she was infused with psionic power by the Living Gate and forsook all other responsibilities (like keeping her crew from starving) in the quest of destroying all demons of the Far Realm.

Tim’s character is a human Invoker of Pelor, Daniel. Tim likes to play characters that create problems. And Daniel caused a lot of problems with his religious zealotry, never answering with a straight answer and instead spouting off some stuff about how Pelor will save you this, and Pelor heals all wounds that. It was great.

My brother let me know about a freelance job opportunity to make a bunch of flower and trees for a simple game. The employer said it would be a plus if I included an example of what I could do for the project so I whipped this up.

~”No, old friend. You’ve freed us all.”

This project has been great for improving my animation. I’ve had to make a bunch of animations of NPC’s reacting in different ways to what the player would do as the assassin.

It’s going to be a flash game, so it’ll be 2D. But I’m creating the 2D graphics by rendering out 3D models I create in Blender. To create the different animations, I would export each frame as a .png file then compile the frames into a Movie Clip in Flash.

These is a sprite sheet.

This is the animation that is created. The one on the right is a run cycle.

That’s how we WERE doing it, but we’ve gone through a couple coders since then so it’s not clear right now what the process is going to be. But what’s important is I’m getting paid for it. The bossman is paying me at the project’s completion, but so far he loves my work so he given me a bit of an advance for bearing with the team through the changes. Plus, he wants me to work on other projects with him so he’s trying to finagle a full time position with him making games. Which would be nuts. Awesome nuts. Chocolate covered nuts. Like quit-my-job-nuts.

Also: More Windtrap.

~”Like most things in life, pumping is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending.”

So far the game is still in it’s modeling stage, where the game assets like buildings and vehicles and infantry are modeled and textured. Though modeling isn’t really my bag, I wanted to contribute so I took on the Harkonnen Windtrap. The windtrap is probably going to be like a resource collector. Anyway, I had to learn the correct workflow for creating something and making it “game-ready”. Essentially what’s most important is making the model itself optimized with as few polygon faces as possible. From there I make a ‘high-poly’ model of the Windtrap, which doesn’t need to be optimized or anything, it just has to be super detailed. Using Xnormals I create a normal map which when applied to my low-poly optimized model makes it look like the high-poly.

Everything I just described took me like a straight month of trial and error to figure out, but now when I play Halo: Reach or something I can look at the Spartans and see how the developers made it awesome.

In other news, on Tuesday I applied for artist positions at Backflip Studios and Dire Wolf Studios.

If you haven’t noticed I’m teaching myself HTML so I can bug you with stuff like this.

~”But you keep treating me like a staircase its time to fucking step.”