I actually did this a while back but, decided to upload it after looking at the earlier version that I had posted. Below are a couple of video clips, as well. One is a turntable of the model, and the other is an animation/normal map test of the character walking over a BG still from the original film. I really wanted to emulate Harryhausen’s animation style in this test.

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Just fooling around with texture mapping, and posing…

 

 Cyclops Turntable [0:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Cyclops Walk [0:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is a digital painting I did recently after helping my daughter, Hannah and friend, Tristan shoot a video for their band, Ed Vector and the Orthogonals. The video is for a song called Jimmy the Cubist.

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And here’s the video…

Jimmy the Cubist from Hannah on Vimeo.

Boy, it’s sure been awhile since I’ve posted anything. Unfortunately, I’ve been really busy with work that I’m unable to post to a blog at this point.

But I took some time tonight to fool around with a concept painting for a…uh…concept that I have.

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This was done digitally in Photoshop.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the habit of doing more personal stuff that I can post.

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This is a piece, entitled, “Portrait of the Artist with Two Teenage Daughters,” that I did for an upcoming gallery group show called “The Virgin Show.” The show was put together by the irrepressible Kyle Neswald and Joe Olivares. Kyle has put up a mySpace page about the show here.

The Virgin Show is at the Lost Souls Cafe, which is a very cool space in the old bank district of downtown Los Angeles, and the opening reception is Friday, October 27, 7-10pm. It should be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward it.

The address is: 124 W. 4th Street, Los Angeles, 90013.
Phone: 213.617.7006
Web: www.lostsouls.com

Well, not really…It’s actually Wubbzy by me using Photoshop to do silly imitations of the masters.

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I recently got to design and paint a song sequence for Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, called Paint a Picture, which was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Trying to paint Wubbzy in the style of Gustav Klimt was something I never thought I’d have to do, but what a great assignment. I also did a Dali, a Picasso, a Warhol, and others. Thanks, Google, for making it easy to find all the reference that I could ever want of classic paintings to “borrow” from. I love the internet!

Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and all related characters © 2005 Bolder Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Over at the CGTalk Forum I saw a thread about doing anatomy studies based on works by the masters, and I couldn’t pass that up. The piece above is based on a painting by Caravaggio. I created and posed a base mesh in Maya, and then sculpted in ZBrush.

Fred Seibert was kind enough to ask me to do a poster design for The Channel Frederator Awards Show, and since I’ve been obsessed with CG lately, I thought it would be fun to take a shot at doing this poster using that method.

I submitted a couple of very rough concept sketches, of which they chose the second one.

When I proposed the idea of doing the poster in CG, which I’m not known for, Fred and Eric Homan didn’t bat an eye. It’s great to work with folks who ask you to be involved with a project because they believe that you will produce something interesting, regardless of the style, rather than looking for you to recreate your earlier work.

Thanks, guys!

This image is a low-res test render. Click to enlarge.

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Above is a thumbnail sheet of the design work for a song sequence from the upcoming Nick Jr. series, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! The show was created by the inimitable Bob Boyle, who I met while working on the Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom series at Nickelodeon.

I had the pleasure of watching Bob develop his shows, which began with rough sketches and notes in yellow legal pads, that he diligently worked on every day in his “spare” time. It was inspiring to see a person who works so hard at his day job, have the discipline to turn down lunch offers every day so that he could go off to his regular booth at the local coffee shop to work on the stories and art for his personal projects.

Eventually, his legal pad scribblings became the basis for two series that are currently in production at two different cable networks. It’s good to see that good things do happen to good people.

I had wanted to be involved with Wubbzy as soon as I heard that it was going to be picked up because the style of the show is so darned cute, but the timing didn’t work out, as I still had commitments to FOP and Danny, which I had been working on concurrently and consumed virtually all my time. When Fairly OddParents finished preproduction, it freed me up to take on some freelance, and the opportunity eventually came around to do the character, prop, and BG designs for song sequences for Wubbzy. The thumbnail sheet above is from one of those sequences, and as a designer it’s great to have that much input into the design of a film.

Of course, the style was already set by Bob, and there is a very talented team of designers working on the regular episodes whose work I routinely pillage, and then the stuff is recolored by people who know what they’re doing, so I can’t take too much credit. Since the show is animated in Flash, the design work is done in Adobe Illustrator. This means that I can build a library of work that had been done by others, cobble it together into scenes, and then take credit for it as my own! I love modern technology! If the shows were hand drawn, like in the good old days when cameras had film, I’d have to stoop to actually tracing the original designs, and that would be like…work.

Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and all related characters © 2005 Bolder Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

This blog has been turning into a CGfest lately, so I thought I’d post something unabashedly flat!

This is a portrait that I did in Illustrator of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ first guitarist and manager. If you want to read the story of an honest artist that helped create a genre, yet never received a dime in royalties, take a look at That’s Alright, Elvis: The Untold Story of Elvis’s First Guitarist and Manager, Scotty Moore

Scotty not only played guitar for Elvis, but scouted him for Sun Records, and managed the trio that set the teenage record buying world aflame. But he neglected to get Elvis’ signature on the dotted line when a verbal offer for a percentage of royalties was made. Unfortunately, for the trusting Mr. Moore, a very domineering personality got involved with Elvis’ career and Scotty was relegated to session fees for his pioneering work.

Let that be a lesson to all you artists who are too shy to ask for what you deserve! Honesty is always the best policy, but don’t expect everyone you deal with to be as honest as you are.

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I’ve done a bit more ZBrushing on this guy, but the big breakthrough for me was rigging and posing him in Maya. I used a plugin called The Setup Machine that enabled me to rig the figure in about 15 minutes.

This is exciting, as it’s the first figure that I’ve sculpted, rigged, and is animatable! WooHoo!

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In the post below I uploaded a couple of images that I rendered in Maya of a copy of Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops character that I sculpted in ZBrush. After I uploaded it, I noticed that it looked a bit different than it was intended to. For technical reasons that I’m still figuring out, the proprtions of the character changed when I imported it to Maya.

The images above are how the guy looks in ZBrush. I’m right in the middle of a leaning curve with this stuff, but I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I just want to get to the point where I can concieve an idea, sculpt it, rig it and animate it! Is that too much to ask?!?

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This weekend I went to the San Diego Comic-Con to hang out with some friends, but I really went to meet Ray Harryhausen. He was there signing books, DVDs, figures and comics that were for sale. I went first thing in the morning to the booth he was at, and I was relieved, and amazed that there weren’t more people lined up to meet him.

Harryhausen was one of the handful of heroes to my friends and myself as we made our way into the SFX and animation industries. We used to study his films on super 8 in search of the magic secrets of animation. When I met him, and shook his hand, I was still hoping that some of that magic would rub off. Ray Harryhausen inspired at least two generations of filmmakers with his superhuman efforts; there must be some sort of medal available for a man that animated seven skeletons fighting live actors, in an era when video tap wasn’t even a concept, let alone a reality.

After half the day wandering around the con and having lunch with friends, I went back up to my hotel room to relax, and the next thing I know I’ve got my computer on, with ZBrush loaded, and continued sculpting a CG figure of the Cyclops from 7th Voyage of Sinbad, that I had started earlier in the week. I got so involved with it, that I never did get back down to the convention that day. And by the time I couldn’t see anymore and had to call it a night, I was determined to go back to the Harryhausen booth and buy a DVD just so I could meet him again.

It’s not every day you get to meet a guy that was a one man genre, single-handedly drawing, sculpting and animating virtually every frame of film he ever worked on. And it’s not everyday you get to shake the hand that shook Willis O’Brien’s hand. So I was determined to make the most of it. Unfortunately, I was very much tongue tied, but I was at least able to tell Mr. Harryhausen how much he means to us, and the effect he had in steering us in the directions that we eventually went.

The images posted above are of a work very much in progress, it still needs much more sculpting and detailing before it’s done.

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The rendered images above are of my Draggin’ Dragon character, which is a work in progress, the ones below are a test figure to see if I could get anatomical detail. Both the models were done using ZBrush2, over the July 4th weekend in between my freelance work and family fun.

ZBrush is an amazingly intuitive program. Before I bought it, I watched a few tutorial videos at the Pixologic website and the ZBrush Central forum. Immediately after opening the box and installing the software I was able to sculpt most of the guy below in one evening. It is the most comfortable 3D modeling environment I’ve used, because it’s designed for the way pencil pushers like me think. Very cool!

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My imagination has been turning more towards fantasy again lately…