The Ivy Tree

Tag: 3D animation

  • Guest Speaker: Ringling College of Art and Design

    Guest Speaker: Ringling College of Art and Design

    I was invited to speak to the Body Art and Culture class at Ringling College of Art and Design to discuss how to design diverse characters and accurately represent a culture without falling into the trap of appropriation.

    This was a journey into the processes our team developed as we designed the characters for the Iroquois Creation Story.

    This film was an exploration in multimedia convergence, where 2D characters interacted with 3D characters, and live actors balanced in fantastical spaces. Yet, in all this, every step of the process aimed to center the culture that the film represented, often subverting animation practices to accommodate the needs of the story and the characters.

  • Babur

    Babur

    The first of the Great Mughals, Babur was the orphan king who ascended to the throne as an 11-year old. In the decades that followed, he experienced great strife and turmoil, but his unbeatable spirit won the loyalties of armies and followers across Central and South Asia.

    The unbeatable spirit of Babur

  • Bob Walk Animation

    I enjoy building specific characters for my classes to help them practice visualizing animations for a variety of characters.
    This includes different types of ball rigs, a squirrel rig (basically a ball rig with a tail), a flat pencil-like character and this one-eyed biped named Bob.

    Bob is a favorite in my grad animation class and is invariably used in our biped walk cycle exercises.
    This is a clip of a walk cycle I animated in our labs this year as I led my students through the process of blocking, splining and clean up. The only thing missing is facial animation (blinks etc.).

  • Iroquois Creation Story – Accolades

    Iroquois Creation Story – Accolades

    Well! It was a wild and crazy ride making this film, which combined 2D, 3D and live production shots.
    We worked with so many artists to successfully integrate all three mediums together and make a completed piece, solving numerous logistical and artistic problems along the way. It was all worth it!
    Over the past 18 months, the Iroquois Creation Story has become a permanent exhibit in the Seneca Art & Culture Center in Victor, NY.
    This film has also been screened in a number of festivals (17 at current count) around the world and has won six awards for Best Animation and one for Best Music.

  • Iroquois Creation Story Rigs Demo

    Iroquois Creation Story Rigs Demo

    The Iroquois Creation Story combined 2D, 3D and live film footage in one space, but ultimately we ended up creating the majority of our characters in 3D. As we had not initially planned for many characters, I had decided to take on the rigging myself on top of my duties as the Director of Animation.

    What ensued was a fun(!) experience in setting up 8 characters in short order. Whew!

    Thanks to Kevin MacLeod for his royalty-free piece Danse Macabre for giving life to the edit!

  • Learning Lighting

    Learning Lighting

    Having never been a professional lighting artist, I am always conscious of the fact that being in academia tends to isolate artists from the rest of mainstream production. More than anything (except, perhaps Rigging), Lighting is a field where software and technology update faster than the speed of light and production practices are controlled as much by engineers as they are by artists.

    This was the second year SOFA included Arnold into our rendering workflow, so there’s still a lot of experimenting in this process.

  • Modeling a Face

    Modeling a Face

    Modeling in 3D can be fun and occasionally frustrating but nothing is more painful that trying to model a face that can deform without breaking when it moves. If you are studying topology then you understand what I mean when I say that. In my opinion, the true skill of modeling comes in when an artist can not only build a credible likeness, but also lay down all the necessary topology that will allow this face to retain it’s likeness as it deforms and emotes.

    In the meantime, if you’re looking to get started, this is how:

  • Iroquois Creation Story Character Update

    Iroquois Creation Story Character Update

    Two of our main characters are built, textured, rigged and ready to animate! As the lead Technical Director and the Rigging artist on this, it’s getting really exciting seeing how they look!

    More updates of their animated tests and renders coming soon!

     

  • Iroquois Creation Story – Creative Collisions

    There are so many people involved in the creation of this film. This is a short video chronicling some of the many moving parts we have been wrangling in this production.

  • Oregon Lottery: Santa’s Beard

    This is a fun production I joined as an assistant rigging artist at Nathan Love.

    I was in charge of finishing 6 of the characters seen here: