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Showing posts from March, 2010

Review: How To Train Your Dragon

Awesome. Just awesome. Dreamworks has definitely taken a big step forward with How To Train Your Dragon. Everything on it was way beyond anything I've ever seen come out of Dreamworks. All the technical stuff seems a lot further along, in terms of hair, skin, textures, and effects. The animation was amazing. Toothless (the dragon) was especially really beautifully done. I find it hard to discuss that without going too nerdy on you so I'll just leave it at that. But most importantly, the humor works, and it had a great story. The characters were very well executed and you really felt for everyone. I couldn't have hoped for a better movie. Watch out Pixar.

My first 3D Model

So going into my next class at AM, we get the decision of doing our 3 assignments of different themes, or do all 3 with the same theme. It's all body mechanics stuff, and I was thinking about what I could do that would be cool and fun to animate. After some thought I came up with "Stewie's Jedi Academy" (Stewie is what we call the rig). I thought I could do some cool physical stuff with a lightsaber, the force (flying objects), and other fun things. I tried to look on the net for some lightsaber models that I could use, but nothing was free. Not wanting to pay anything for one, I decided that in our downtime this week I would try my hand at modeling. I had to read through my Digital Art book, and watch some tutorials on youtube to figure out what to do, but I mustered through it, and I'm pretty pleased with the results. It is a direct model of Luke's lightsaber from Return of the Jedi. For a couple of reasons, it's one of my favorite designs, and it's

6 Months In: Self-Assessment

So the last shot of class 2 has been finaled, which means I'm now pretty much done with Class 2. One more goodbye Q&A with my awesome mentor Martin Hopkins, and a progress reel and I'm done!......for 2 days until class 3. Anyways, it's been about 6 months since I've started AM and I've come a long way. I figured that I would sit down and give myself a self-assessment on my skills and what I think my current weaknesses and skills are. Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not to sound braggy, but my work tends to feel better than most of my class. But maybe that's just me. I can achieve a pretty high level of polish with my shots pretty easily, although I'm not sure if thats not smoothness more than polish. But my arcs are pretty good, my spacing feels nice, and I have pretty good weight. I think I have a pretty good understanding of mechanics so far, but I took a look at next quarter's syllabus and it looks like we're going to learn a lot o