A Team Fortress 2 Halloween

This year my good friend Ryan Rasmussen and I decided to theme our Halloween costumes after characters from one of our favorite video games, Team Fortress 2. That's me in the Soldier getup and Ryan went as the Medic. Most of the costume elements were made from scratch, we paid particular attention to the weapons and gear since we wanted them to be really accurate. We made a spectacular mess of the apartment over the several weeks that we spent making these things...all worth it, of course!

Very special thanks to our photographer Alex Tkatcheva for making us look so good in these photos!

Old Knockout renders

These are some old renders of my Knockout character that I never put up...would love to have this 3D printed at some point...

One week!!!

The first movie I've ever worked on comes out May 29th! Go see Up!

Figure goodness

A couple selected pages from my gesture class this semester...

Hit and Run ala Chicago

The poster for our FINISHED thesis film! (to be posted after its May 2nd premiere)


Another collaboration between myself and the talented Mr. Marino.

The Signal!

Just finished lighting this shot today, thought I'd share.

Blog, I missed you.

I remember wondering as an underclassmen why the seniors never seemed to update their blogs, and now I know why! Finally have some new stuff to post, now that we're getting into lighting and rendering our pieces I should have some interesting things to show in the coming weeks. Here is the textured halftrack.

HOLY CRAP

Last night I got the biggest surprise ever. I am completely and utterly floored that my CA buddies got me something this awesome for my birthday.





Now I'll just say for those who don't know, I am a huge Rocketeer buff and I have been jonesing for this helmet for at least half of my life. In fact, the only thing that I want more than this is a Delorean, and that's a freaking car. This helmet is a limited edition reproduction of the hero prop used in the film, and is hand crafted out of solid brass just like the one Cliff wears in the comic. It is gorgeous! And it proves that I have cooler friends than you.

Thank you guys so much, you made my 22nd birthday a special one indeed.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot...check out what this warning tag on the helmet says.



Um...yeah right.

Ahhhh thesis characters!

I'm finally getting around to posting the most recent thesis stuff from Alex's and my senior project. These are our nearly finished characters! I was responsible for modeling and texturing Knockout, the sultry heroine in our piece, and Alex did Deconstructor, our megalomaniacal villain. Check out Alex's blog for more shots of his character, since I think he'll be posting them soon. The textures on both these guys are still in their first stages, and there are still things that we'll be changing and adjusting to the models, but so far they're coming along pretty well.






Aaaannnd the halftrack...that thing was fun to model. It still needs a sweet death ray on top.

Thesis wants attention

Well I can't believe that summer is almost half way over, and mine has been super duper so far. Pixar is a terrific place and the people here are awesome, I'm enjoying work so much that my thesis started to get jealous. It's okay thesis, I love you.

Here's some of that thesis progress. This is, or rather will be, the Knockout - one of the characters in Alex's and my collaborative project. The body is still being made at the moment, and parts of the head are obviously still in progress, but I thought it was high time to prove that I haven't been sitting on my butt all summer. Well okay, I do sit on my butt quite a bit, but it's usually in front of Maya so it evens out.

I'm Blind

Here's the double take animation that I've been working on during the last weeks of school. Click the link at the bottom to see the low quality movie file. Thanks to Polo for letting me borrow her rig for this project!





Watch it move!

Knockout!

This is our thesis's super girlie superherione, Knockout. She uses her feminine charms to get out of tight scrapes.

PrePro Madness!

My friend Alex Marino and I are doing a collaborative thesis next year, and I thought I'd share some of the artwork for our pitch this week. Our story is about a superhero and supervillain who get in a fender bender.

The car and houses are Alex's designs that I painted. You might also recognize the modified halftrack from a previous post...I'll post our character designs once we have them in a more finalized form!

Figure Gesture Stuff

I just realized that I don't have any figure work on here, and I really love gesture drawing so I thought I'd put up these pages from my portfolio. Most of these are from last year, so I have a ton of new work but haven't scanned any of it yet...curses.

Lip Sync!

Here are some frame captures from my lip sync project that's finally finished. Click the link at the bottom to see the finished piece!





Watch it move!

Environment Designs

Hey all. Now that I've had a whole spring break to recuperate, here are some environment designs I did recently for my drawing class. Hope all the rest of you Ringling people had a good week off and are ready for a whole 'nother two months of stressfulness ;)

Test Render

Here's a small test render I did of my model for a demo reel turnaround.

Blendshape madness!

My favorite part of making this character has been the blendshapes! They really bring the character to life, can't wait to see it moving.

Self Caricature

Hi all. This is the character that I'm working on for this semester's animation assignments. The whole thing is modeled, but the head is the only part with textures at the moment. I'll try to post progress as I go.

Finally, new stuff.

I just finished these two paintings for a prop design exercise. I'll post the others sometime, provided they turn out okay.

Fish in peril!

Here's another under water themed painting I finished today. I don't know why it's so much fun to draw freaked-out fish, but it is.

Octopus Lady

Decided to update this post with a color version.

DFA

Since everyone is posting their "drawing for animators" work, I guess I will too.

Ahhhhhh!

A quick painting I did in my drawing class today, probably a result of watching Finding Nemo last weekend. This is what happens when ugly fish meet for the first time.

Animation!

Here's a link to the piece I've been working on in my animation class for the last four weeks! In-Out Animation

More Brucie

I've been waiting to update until I had something worth updating. Besides the work I've done on her textures (which still need some refining), Brucie now has a rig and blendshapes, which means I'm animating ! Woohoo! Animation is fun...even though I like modeling better.

Brucie

Meet Brucie, the character I've been developing for my animation projects this semester. She's a fairy, and one of the sulky/vengeful type, so overall not a pleasant person to be around. Right now the face is the only part with real textures, and they're still first pass textures, but I'll be posting progress as I rig and add blendshapes.

Drawing is fun

Here's a page of nifty characters done from random silhouettes and a refined drawing of one of them.




Does anyone else think of Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive when they look at this?

Long John Silver

Oh man I love this character! He was so much fun to model.

Poly Einiosaurus

Dinosaurs are such weird crazy animals. I'm going to have to do more of them.





So these are more or less final renders. This thing ended up taking exactly one week to do, I might end up texturing it sometime but I think it's working okay without them for now.

Next up: Treasure Planet's Long John Silver!

Hades Bust

This is the Hades bust I made over the last week. Click for larger images!

I'm almost done with the model I've been working on so diligently for the last week and a half. This assignment is a prop/environment exercise where we were given a piece of Disney concept art and had to faithfully recreate it in Maya. Mine is a shipwreck from the movie Pinocchio, and besides a few tweaks here and there it'll pretty much be ready to show on Monday.

Be sure to click the pictures for larger images!






For any members of the fam who are checking in on what I'm up to, I'll be trying to update every weekend or so since I'm so busy during the week. Hope you like the pics!

First Week at Disney

Most of our first day was spent in orientation. The videos were neat and the tour of the studio lot was definitely awesome, but the best part of the day came when we got to meet our mentors in the afternoon over at Feature Animation. Nowhere have I ever seen so much inspiring work or such nice people. Everyone is amazing, like my modeling mentor Dan Platt. He and James Stapp (Nancy's mentor) are totally excited to be working with us interns, and they'll put down their work just to answer a question or show us something. It's really humbling to be learning from such skilled sculptor / modelers.

As expected, all of the other interns are super awesome artists themselves. Leo and Minkyu (my roommate) are learning traditional animation. I wish I had their skills. Then Paul, Mario and Lindsey are doing visual development, Brett and Byoung are CG animators, Nancy is the other modeler besides me, and Audrey is the lone texture artist. Being surrounded by all that talent is, again, a humbling experience. And every one of the interns is really cool, I'm really lucky to be working with such great people.

The classes we take are pretty varied. Just the other day we had Mike Belzer come to our work area and show us the making of Meet the Robinsons. Yesterday, Walt Sturrock showed us the system Disney artists use to create and pitch storyboards. We even took a trip to the Animation Research Library, the facility where Disney keeps all of their original artwork from all of their animated films. I got to actually hold original hand-drawn frames from Snow White! And then I get to model and sculpt in any time I have left. It's pretty much a dream come true.

Pictures to come!

New Maquette

Thought I'd share my progress on a maquette I've been working on since school let out. It's almost done, still have to bake and paint her.

Sorry that a few of the photos are a tad grainy. On another note, I'm leaving for Burbank in a couple of days! It's times like these I'm reminded of how much I hate packing.

I have a blog!