Dragon 04 - Background

Seems like a while since the last update. I completed the storyboard, and edited it into an animatic, but I'm not going to show that until next time.

But here's something I can show. My first ever environment in Unreal Engine 4:

Dragon 03 - Treasure

This week I modeled a bunch of treasure for the background of my short.

First I made a treasure chest:


Then I made some gems to sprinkle across the piles of gold I made. I'm going to make the shaders in the engine, so these are just temporary flat colors:


And lastly I made some various bits of low-detail treasure to add variety to the piles of gold (again, textures not finalized). I also made a low-poly version of the main pile of gold for the gold in the way back.


I was also experimenting with physics simulators to make realistic piles of gold, which are going to be used for the foreground. By next week I'm going to build the main environment with Unreal Engine. This will be the first time I've ever made something this big with the engine, so I'm excited to give it a try.

Dragon 02 - Props and Stuff

I was busy this week with my birthday, but I thumbnailed the storyboard, and modeled some props and decorations:

Most importantly, I modeled the deer background character. It only appears for like, ten seconds in one scene, but still has to be modeled and rigged like every other character.

I started off the week modeling a dead knight as a background gag. I'm going to stick him in with all the treasure in the Dragon's cave. The design is based on what I can remember of my college roommate's knight character from way back in sophomore year. I thought it would be funny to turn him into a skeleton and stick him in the background.

And I modeled a coin... with my face on it... so... here it is:

For the next update, I plan to start working on my backgrounds.

Dragon 01 - Dawn of a New Project

My brother the other day said "Hey I have an idea for an animation you should do." I said "Nah, I'm good, I have a lot of projects I want to do," and he said "But hear me out: cute dragon!"
...
So I dropped everything I was doing and drew up some dragon designs:

And I drew this character turn around:

Then I took a break from this project because I had some job interviews, and in my spare time I decided to teach myself Unreal Engine so I can render this next animation in real time.

Step one was getting something simple to render. I needed to learn the basics of importing an FBX into Unreal Engine, moving a camera, and rendering out a video. I started with a box that hops across the screen:

Then I tried a simple character with simple blendshapes and simple shaders:

And finally I did a test with a more complicated rig, which I don't have a video of. I was finally able to start modeling the dragon (textures still in progress):

And that's that. After I finish texturing, I'm going to rig it, and see if I can get it to render in Unreal (where I know I'll have to adjust the materials some more). I want to model some props next though, so expect that in the next update.

Low-Poly Art

Trying out a Low-Poly art style, because I love the way it looks. This is a low-poly caricature of myself.

Witness Progress 09

Remember that animation I was making and I said I wouldn't get distracted from it? I got distracted from it. I had a job interview, made that gif for my website, and then was inspired to make an animatic which I can't show now, but I'm quite proud of. Anyway, I'm back working on this. I have a little more than half the scenes animated (though I've saved the most complicated for last).

New Website Header

I took a break from my personal project to make a new header for my main website, and wanted to share my process work with you.

First I thought of an idea. Then I realized the idea was WAY too long and complicated, so I came up with a different idea, and I made a series of thumbnails to visualize and plan the actions I wanted:

And then I made a rough layout of how big everything would be with the final 1050x350 size that the website allows.

Then using the layout, I modeled the letters in Maya, and imported my Lou the Janitor Character. I also almost went with a black letter on white background, but it didn't look the way I wanted it to when I lit it. The background was constantly getting over-exposed, while the character looked dull. I like the way the character pops against the black background.

And finally, I animated it, lit it, rendered it, added a subtitle in After Effects, and made it into a gif.