Screenshot Dumpage

Just a quick dump of screenshots from old 3D projects...

Screenshot of the Wind Waker island I made in Lightwave


Link and Aryll from my WW animation


Also from my WW animation. I was really proud of those trees, hah.


My 3 characters from my 3 school animation projects. The one on the left is a marionnette. I loved animating the hat.

Swinging From Pipes

This is what I felt like doing when I went into work today. Haha. I wasn't upset or anything, I was just way overly tired to do anything (yet I somehow found the strength to do this). And I can't drink coffee, so I need to find another source of caffeine.

ME - part deux

So, in my last post, I detailed how I discovered the world of digital art. Somehow between then and now, I started taking animation seriously. I should say, it was always something I dabbled in. When I was a wee lad, my parents got me an MS DOS program called... "Animator." Once I got the hang of it, I used it quite a bit. I animated balls bouncing around and... er, other things. Can't quite remember what. My childhood friend, Justin, and I used the animation tool in Mario Paint a lot...

I probably got the most pre-college animation experience through a little program I bought called "Klik & Play," which was a program that let you make your own computer games. It blew my mind at the time. They had a huge library of pre-existing sprites you could use, but about 90% of the games I made, I made using my own sprites. Even at this point, animation as a career never even occurred to me.

And it didn't when I started college either. I went to UMass Dartmouth as a computer science major, but quickly switched to Liberal Arts. I wanted to take some art classes, but after getting a work-study job in the Design department, I discovered Electronic Imaging as a major. Basically a conglomeration of all things "digital art" related. Animation played a huge role in this major, but there were many other factors to it as well. Towards the end of my college career, I focused mostly on 3D animation. I was fortunate to have my work shown in 3 UMass Dartmouth Electronic Imaging festivals (so far?). Unfortunately, I've gots no website anymore, so once I get that back up and running I'll be sure to post them all.

Back in October, before I started working at EMC, came the highest point in my life as an animator (until I got my first real animation job). I created a 3D animation in the style of "Zelda: The Wind Waker" for a very unofficial contest. I spent about a month from start to finish on it (I only gave myself about a week and a half to do the actual animation though... gulp!). Long story short, I didn't win... I got around 3rd place or something, which was still pretty cool. But what was even cooler was that somehow, word got out about it, and it was featured in some very popular gaming blogs (including GoNintendo.com and Kotaku.com, sites I visit daily). I uploaded it to Google Video, and it recently hit the half-million views mark... which BLOWS MY MIND. The Youtube version of it was uploaded a little later, and "only" has about 160,000 views, but it gets a lot more comments. I love reading the comments. :)

So it's kind of funny that after all this, I got a job as a 2D flash animator. But the thing is, if you know animation in any form, you pretty much know animation as a whole. I was able to take everything I learned from my time as a 3D animator, and apply it to character animation in Flash. It's just the software that gets in the way (but I picked up on that quickly as well).

And so now we come to the present day. A few weeks ago, I started to dabble in frame-by-frame flash animation. It started out as retaliation to an email debate between me, and my 7 siblings over how to pronounce the word "integral." I was the only one pronouncing it "in TEG ral," while everyone else pronounced it "IN te gral" (turns out both are right). Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. Here's what resulted from that debate, on my side.

My sister said I went against the grain, and warned me that if they ever cross a bridge without jumping, she'd bring a rope with her- just in case I decided to be different and jump.






My other sister tried making a fool out of me in front of everyone. This is me getting my revenge, in stick figure abuse form.






It ended around this note, in which my brother said it would be scary if we all had group therapy. I thought it would go something like this.







So these are just stupid little things I did in about 10-15 minutes each, and realized that it's a great stress reliever, since I don't have to worry about precision... the excess energy I have almost flows right through the pen. Yeah, I'm weird, I know. That's my abstract comment for the day. Anyway, my doodles usually suck too much for me to want to post them, but I thought maybe people would get a kick out of my doodle-mations.

And so this blog was born. Next time I'll post the other short animations I've done since these, and then I'll continue posting the new ones I make, as I make them.

ME - part une

Yo.

I've been in the world of blogs for a while now, but I've always wanted to have a dedicated art/animation blog, and after seeing that a bunch of people I work with have one, I decided to hop on the bandwagon. So that's what this will be.

I guess I'll start off by saying a little (lot) about myself. I've always, always been interested in art. More specifically, digital art. I started off with... "observational" art, as many people do. I remember when "The Lion King" came out in 1994 (my all-time favorite movie, by the way), I was 11 years old. We had an IBM PC, with Windows 3.1, and I tried to recreate a screenshot from the movie in MS paint, with 16 colors. Luckily, a few years ago, I found it on a REALLY old floppy disk, and uploaded it to my deviant art account. It's pictured below.



Kinda hideous, eh?


That was my very first taste of digital art. I started taking digital art more seriously once I got into this PhotoDeluxe program (a watered down version of Photoshop) during my senior year of High School. I visited a lot of online forums, and got tips and tricks from tons of talented artists from around the world. That, coupled with the fact that I eventually became an Electronic Imaging major at UMass Dartmouth (can you believe I was a computer science major before I switched majors?? What a different life I'd lead...) and was taking all sorts of art classes, I'd like to say I became a better artist, and Photoshopper. At one point, I recreated the above Scar and Simba drawing, using all the tricks I've learned. This one is pictured below.

















Eventually I became a full-fledged fan-artist. That's all I ever did. I learned quite a lot from my experiences in the world of fan-artistry. I've posted some of my favorites below:

Zelda: Twilight Princess compilation - I did this for a mini-contest, before I really knew anything about the game. I forget how I placed... I tried to color it, but it turned out kinda crappy.

Esmerelda: Triforce Hunter - a character I created for a contest, in which we had to create the alter ego of a famous Nintendo character. I chose Zelda.

Terra in Magitek Armor - at this point, I was learning Lightwave 3D in school, so I made the armor, and the background, in Lightwave Modeler.

Another Zelda Compilation of characters - Here I was playing around with styles, trying to go down a not-so-realistic route.

Justin and Feena - a simple piece I did, depicting a scene from the end of "Grandia," one of the best RPG's ever created.

Kingdom Heart character comp - not a big fan of the series, but it was a good lesson in how to draw clothes.

Grandia 3 - CLOSER - A silly little thing I did... in case you couldn't tell, I'm mimicking the poster/cover for the movie "Closer" with these characters. This one's actually pretty horrible, because if you try to make full faces by mirroring the halves of their faces, they look like deformed freaks. Their eyes are way too far from their noses.

Asuka from "Evangelion" - title says it all... going for the more realistic shading again. ...Meh.

Cast of "Haruhi" - Again, title says all. This was done in March of 2007, and is my last fanart (that I ever colored). The drawing was a little rushed I believe...

But I save the best for last...

"Zelda: Wind Waker" compilation - this is my absolute favorite thing I've ever done in Photoshop. It was my most successful contest entry, which won me a brand-spanking new PS2 (well, technically it won me a "Nintendo DS," but I already had one preordered, so I used my winnings to get the PS2 instead...).

So, I've done a lot of fanart. This is just a small fraction of all of the fanart I've ever done. In case you couldn't tell, I'm also a huge videogame nerd. Seriously. No, seriously. You don't have any idea. But anyway, the unfortunate thing about fanart is that it kind of restricts you from coming up with your own sense of style. But that's why I created this blog- to correct that.

This entry is already way too long, so next time I'll post about how I got into animation. From that point onward, the entries will be much more short, much more concise- I only plan on posting short animation doodles.

Till next time, folks!


(PS- I also have a weird and offbeat sense of humor, though it takes a lot to get it out of me if you're just talking to me)