PUTTING PIGEONS ON STUFF! I've been wanting to do this for years.
They're obviously designed to be background assets, but they still hold up fairly close.
Should I have tried to figure out how to make some of them flapping? Aaaabsolutely- but for now I figured it was better to have them err on the side of subtlety.
There are 20 pigeons in th...
2020-11-20 23:42:58 +0000 UTC View PostFirst: an apology- I am SO behind on messages.
But yes! I'm still indulging in the decadence of updating old VFX shots, which I know I shouldn't do, release-schedule-wise, but it feels so good; instead of staring at a blank scene and thinking, "okay lets build everything from scratch" I get to pop in and give younger me's work a once-over of that last 10% using stuff I've learn...
A few tricks for cleaning up photoscans, and some rigging! I think a fun project could be compositing this guy into some live action footage, maybe?
Also, I'll be uploading the skater guy as an asset in a bit here, in case anyone needs a flying skater dude.
A few links:
This video t...
I've been working on a bunch of stuff, but nothing that's lent itself perfectly to a tutorial, so I decided to go easy on myself and say it's okay if tutorials cover ground I've already covered before, and here we are! This was fun :D
Here's the waterfall footage if ...
The last few days have been pretty wild here in the US, so I kind of intentionally let myself check out to greeble city for a bit (between checking twitter every few minutes).
Oldton (and Waterworks Market) are separated from the rest of the city by some industrial areas, so most folks take the...
Went on a hike along the Dosewallips river last week, and did some scans! They were going to be for a halloween video I ended up not doing (I thought it'd be fun to put on the rokoko suit and be like a ghost or an eerie prospector or something), but I liked how the environment turned out.
I used proportional editing for all the assets to ease down the edges and make sure they can all eas...
H'okay! Here's a bunch of different piston rigging techniques! Dependency loops are one of the biggest issues when trying to set up a piston rig (you typically target each half to just point at the other half, but blender hates it when two things are dependent on each other).
For that reason I like doing it with an IK chain, which maybe seems like overkill, but it's quick to set up, and...
Just a quick upload of the merchants from that shot I was posting the other day (Download Below)
They're maybe a bit specific to be particularly useful, but I know I'll be raiding it a bunch in the future for small little parts to put on shelves and such, even if not the merchants themselves. They're a kind of interesting aesthetic. On one hand, I'm not the biggest
2020-10-31 10:16:09 +0000 UTC
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Alright! I'm going to be getting a little granular with these videos for a bit, because hopefully there's a lot of info in there that's useful in contexts outside of creating CG robot arm (let me know- would you rather have a lot of shorter videos, or fewer longer videos?)
Later bits will probably be, like, "Advanced Rigging (featuring special guest Nathan Vegdah!l)", "Modeling Die Cast...
Mostly I just made this video because I'm really jazzed about a new shot (just woke up and got to see it rendered!) and felt like talking about some stuff. Definitely things I could tweak, but I love how the photoscans integrate with the environment (if you feel like seeing it minus YouTube compression, you can 2020-10-24 22:51:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Robot arm!! [download below] I learned so much doing this, both about rigging and anatomy. I loved the learning curve of getting started in rigging; it's really easy to get your feet wet, and just keep getting in deeper without even noticing. I still have a ton to learn but it feel good to know I could probably figure out most basic mechanic stuff that I might want to do.
2020-10-21 08:02:59 +0000 UTC
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MOOOORE neon, seriously Ian? YES! So I have a bazillion other things I should wrap up (robot arms and merchants and HyperBoles), but I wanted to see if this would work and it did, so I made a video because I'm jazzed.
Here's the flicker controller image, although it'd also be super easy to come up with your own on your end with custom animations, if you wanted....
Heeyyyy- want to know a secret technique to never finish a film? Take so long to finish it that eventually you begin looking at the first VFX shots you did a couple years before and start wanting to re-do them.
Cause that's a slippery slope.
It's full-blown BICMIB syndrome [But I Could Make It Better]. When you're trying to worldbuild with CG, there's always that questi...
After years of tweaking, I finally made a jellyfish I'm happy with!*
The above isn't really a full tutorial, because I haven't found a way to make them consistently good, but the technique is very straightforward (basically just: "wave modifier"), so feel free to check out the video above!
It's a 7 minute video, but the basic node setup only takes a few seconds. Very simple, and a surprisingly effective way to add some cohesion/age to a scene! Personally I think it works best when you leave it subtle, but I cranked it pretty high for visibility purposes.
You COULD mix in a different texture into the mix factor, too, like fingerprints or whatnot, or into the color channel ...
This isn't a tutorial because I don't really have any idea what I'm doing, and yet, I'm documenting it anyways.
This is just something I've wanted to do for a few years. I feel a little bad starting this project when I have so many others I need to wrap up (HyperBole, so I can wrap up Dynamo Dream), but alsoooo sometimes you gotta follow your interests. In my head, thi...
Part 2 tomorrow! Or the day after!
So- as I mention in the video, I was going REALLY hard in the cg department for a bit there, and while I'm super amped to finish up the HyperBole sequence (and the Dynamo Dream episode!!!), I wanted to take a moment to stretch my legs with some other stuff, so I'm going to take a few days to try and refamiliarize myself with arduinos/electronics/project...
I've been slow to make this video 1.) because I'm not a particularly great animator and 2.) because anything regarding animation is mostly just going to devolve into a bunch of graph editor tweaking (cause that's how you do it).
Final animation at 25:30. I'm reasonably happy with it, but what would REALLY make it work is secondary motion- wheels/suspension bouncing, the driver ...
WHEW! This took significantly longer than I expected. Higher detail neon signs (64 total), every letter, upper/lower case and the numbers.
I know I made a tutorial about this, but now youuuu don't have to spend a day doing it!
Love-Of-My-Life-Kaitlin and I went on a last-bit-of-summer trip around the Gifford Pinchot forest the past few days, and I snuck in a little Bower-Bird-esque proposal- she said yes! :D
We're really excited to have the wedding with all of our friends, but given the current state of things, we'll probably be waiting a while until it's safe. Gives us more time to plan!
Whew!! Inadvertently signed myself up for way too many projects the past couple weeks, and while it's been fun, I'm really excited to get back to business as usual- but in the meantime, here's a video about making a big ol' Beefy Mechanical Iris Door™!
Actually, the last couple weeks taught me a lot of little lessons. I keep taking on small gigs that I think I can blast out in an ...
2020-09-24 09:56:23 +0000 UTC View Post
This post is a continuation of this post here
SO! I did a presentation for Kitbash3d's "Game Day" for LightBox- feel free to watch it here! It's mostly stuff you've seen before if you've watched a lot of thes...
Been letting myself enjoy the last few weeks of summer (I feel like Winter's going to be a tough one), but I've still been working hard on the HyperBole scene!
Just finished the scene below. I was imagining compositing one of the HyperBole contestants into some sped-up drone footage, skimming over beaches and deserts, and it got me thinking about the old salt flats and other 2020-09-05 10:38:26 +0000 UTC
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H'OKAY SO yes, it's fairly easy to make a text outline glow and call it a day. But what if you want to make something that holds up to some sort of scrutiny?? I wanted to make a HyperBole neon sign with a few more polygons, so if you're interested in that, here's a video!
Also, I was fairly proud of my "linear-gradient-to-separate-the-front-bits-from-the-back" solution, but on a dark wh...
I suppose this one's a little more oriented for beginners (since I'm fairly beginner in this area), and I figure anybody who knows constraints is probably already familiar with most all of this, but it's been really fun playing around with this stuff the past few weeks, and wanted to share the experiments!
2020-08-29 02:18:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Proooobably should have held off on this video, and I suspect it's of limited use to anyone with even the most basic rigging knowledge, BUT, I've been having so much friggin' fun with this technique that I wanted to post a quick video about it! Oh and here's where I go...
2020-08-20 01:07:03 +0000 UTC View Post
A quick rundown of a bunch of the techniques I've been using lately for all these greebly (nonsense detail) bits! There's almost always a more efficient way to do what I'm doing at any given moment, but that's part of the fun of it :)
Also, spent some time today and made this little control panel (with HEFTY ol' tubes coming off the back, haha)! I think it's going to work well for a few...
Halfway through August!! wooo! Finally getting a 95 degree day tomorrow, I'm ready for it.
It's wild to me that August is the cold month for you folks in the southern hemisphere. August=Heat is just burned into my head.
You know what else is wild? MAGELLANIC ...
2020-08-15 21:59:05 +0000 UTC View Post
In my new quest to make the HyperBole become my most overly-inflated side project, I've decided I need a bunch of distinct background combatants, so I made some modular bits for quickly bashing together new vehicles.
I'm really happy with these guys. They're all based on actual aircraft...
The Hyperbole isn't a good idea, but it's one I've wanted to do for a while, so I kind of want to put some effort into it?
That said, I'm in a tricky zone right now, where I'm designing different characters, and I don't want to spend too much time on them, but I also want them all to be distinct. I think my aim should be to have a few "hero" combatants, then fill...
