Archive for Animation Gallery

Rocky the Cat

Looking through my work on here I realized I have very little 3D work visible!

Rocky is a character I was working on in the past every so often.  He is inspired from my adoration and love of Garfield the Cat.  Growing up I would say I was obsessed with the cartoon and would not only watch every single cartoon, but have the urge to buy or have someone buy me every Garfield product imaginable that I could find.  I have countless plush dolls, mugs, erasers, toys, figurines.  I have signed artwork from a Paws artist and a signed Garfield cel from Jim Davis.  Garfield greatly affected me growing up in my artistic style, my love for cartoons, my plush design, and I would say my sarcasm.  Now back to the piece. ;)

I modeled, textured, and rigged Rocky in Maya.  I hand painted the textures in Photoshop.  In Maya I wanted to create a soft look for Rocky without having to use fur or paint effects.  I created this velvety texture by duplicating the main body color of Rocky and applying it into the incandescence with a ramp.  This allowed the material to be shown at full color and depending on the angle, a lighter value to create the halo and soft appearance.

The background was also done in Maya and rather fast compared to Rocky.  I wanted to create a scene that is reminiscent from a Garfield special “Out on the Town.”  In the special Garfield meets a group of cats who are members of the Claws gang. I imagined Rocky as the nice member of that group.  He is fully  rigged and has blendshapes for his head.  One day I would like to animate him, I could see him singing something from West Side Story! But for now he is a render.

Together Again

Something I am very interested in and haven’t seen much of is combining my two passions: 3D  and Fabric Design.   I like the idea of creating something on the computer but its finished result is dependent on the fabric and its final stitching and embellishments.  One project I worked on this revolved around Humpty Dumpty.  Below you can see the original render I created with Maya.

I wanted to create something that can be recognized from the nursery rhyme but still be a bit of a surprise.  I first drew a small sketch to build the composition.  Looking at the rhyme, I knew I wanted a rock wall for Humpty to fall off of and mountains in the distance for the King’s men to come from.  But with my twist I decided it was too late for Humpty to be put together again.  I hand painted all the textures in Photoshop and applied them to the models in Maya.

Once the main render was complete, I took the composition and started breaking it into sections to render out separate areas to print onto fabric.  I used my own personal printed and fabric made especially for it.  The fabric does need to be treated with water and let to dry after printing, but using my own I could decide how to break up the sections.  Below you can see the final result.

Similar to how the ground can look from the sky, I stitched the ground together first to create strips of patchwork and give the scene some additional depth.  Next I quilted the rock wall over the background mountains and ground plane.  And for the final touch I added the fabric pieces of Humpty Dumpty and quilted him into the final wall hanging composition.

This was a lot of fun and I have two more pieces I plan to embellish, The Beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk and the Spider from Little Miss Muffett.

Animation Test

I will be teaching an Advanced 2D Animation course in the coming spring term. So that means I have to get my traditional animation skills up and running!  What’s a better test subject than my little belly monsters?  They look just like floursacks and should be fun to do some test animations in this new software I am learning.  This is a basic layout and initial timing of a simple jump.  I hope to clean up, color, and complete soon all in order to learn the software.  Even though I only worked on this for a quick 15 min test (counting Zoe interrupting me numerous times) its been fun getting back into 2D! I am looking forward to this class!jumpTest