The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
As I was doing it for myself, I thought I could share how I go about turning my designs.
If you are having trouble making your designs “turn”, here is a simple trick that might help you. Click on the pictures to zoom in.
And here is a more advanced character turnaround demo by the great guys at Bam Animation
That’s it, with the “Dizzy” episode having aired last week, my final showreel is here!!!!
A lot of lessons were learnt working on the production, some positive, some negative but I am really proud of the result. I think it looks very impressive considering it was Doodle Productions first TV series. I will be looking back at the lessons learnt in a following post but for now, I hope you will enjoy this great show I was privileged to work on few years ago.
Ah! and if you live in the UK and want to see more episodes, here is a link with the latest episodes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/messy-goes-to-okido
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/166612959[/vimeo]
Olivier Ladeuix “Messy goes to Okido” Showreel 2015
Pose library I created for Mayor Oki’s character
Related posts:
“Messy goes to Okido” Lolly’s ice cream van
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/138861480[/vimeo]
At the begining of Messy goes to Okido”‘s production, our TD needed some help to rig various props and environment so I gave him a hand for few weeks and mostly for the “Taste buddies” episode. I never got credits for this but I don’t care much since I don’t really want to advertise those skills too much. I am an animator and don’t want to land rigging jobs.
Among those props was the rigging of Lolly’s Ice cream van which was a lot of fun.
It was a bit of challenge as I hadn’t done that kind of stuff in Max for a very long time but at the end of the day it didn’t take too long since I was able to use the exact same techniques I would have used in Maya. I could have spend a bit more time on some areas but TV series require a really fast turnaround unfortunately so the entire rig had to be done and tested in less than two weeks I think I remember.
If you live in UK, you can see the rig in action on the BBC Iplayer right here:
bbc.co.uk/iplayer/cbeebies/episode/b069r3gk/messy-goes-to-okido-4-tastebuddies
Enjoy!
Dear blog, it has been a while since we last spoke. I was intending to finish and upload the shots I did while attending AnimSquad but things went a bit crazy since last December 😉
The last few month have been really busy with a secret project I can finally talk about.
I have been privileged to get involved with “Tofu Fury”, a launch game for Amazon’s Fire phone, a pretty cool mobile device that among many other features, can track the head of the user thanks to four additional cameras and simulate 3d in a manner that hasn’t been seen to that level of depth on a mobile device yet.
If you want to know more about the phone, The Verge got it all covered with several articles. The Mayday feature will be of a great help to my mom and dad who just don’t understand how to operate a smartphone.
I still can’t divulge too much about our game but it is coming very soon and it was awesome to have it demoed on stage by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos himself when the device finally got announced two weeks ago. Funny enough, he called the game “Angry Tofu” because the idea delighted him and the title caught up with the press to the dismay of our producer and our studio owner.
Working on the game was a great challenge as on top of being the animator, I was also the Character TD and it was the first time I relied so much on Morph targets (blend shapes) in Unity (the game engine we used).
Since blend shapes are really new to the version of Unity we used and there were so many horror stories on the Unity forum, I tried everything I could to stay away from them and use bones and joints deformation instead but blend shapes were ultimately the best way to create the stylized deformations we were after.
As the main character is 100% animated with blend shapes, “Tofu Fury” is a testimony that blend shapes are perfectly reliable in Unity. I even went to the extent of using blend shapes for some of the bad guys and “non-playable-character’s” (NPC) skin deformation that are traditionally handled through joints and the result was visually more pleasing and less resource intensive, at least for the test we did we Martin, our programmer mostly involved with character animations.
Ok, I think that is all I can say for now so here is a video of Jeff Bezos demoing our game.
Ah, one more thing. Like most cool kids I just created an Instagram page for my Life drawings and sketches. If you are also an Instagram user, feel free to follow me at
#oliveuktoon
What, wait! Three Ringling students made this?!?!! How the hell is this possible !
I just love it, especially the character design. Really good work guys! I want to see a sequel to this!
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/71748250[/vimeo]
and here is a link to the artist’s blogs where you will find a great making of video:
Yoav Shtibelman
Taylor Clutter
Kendra Phillips
While I am posting, here are some news for you. I am currently attending Nate Wragg’s “character design for production” class and it is awesome. I always manage to screw up and not respect the deadlines but the character I am working on is developing really nicely. I will be posting all my work when the class finishes but here is a little work in progress for you. We are not supposed to do any rendering but I felt I needed to shade this guy for this week’s turnaround.
I learnt that painting technique at Schoolism. This is the technique used by Nathan Fowkes, Bobby Chiu and Andrew Hou.
I will probably share my Photoshop brushes at the end of the class. Here is that work in progress, the mouth is completely out of whack but I think it is a fun painting.
Related post:
Francesco Giroldini, lighting tutorials
I would love to be paid to draw more and realized the best way to achieve that would be to put together a 2d portfolio and apply for 2d animation related jobs when they come up.
I am certainly not giving up on 3d animation don’t worry, I just live in a place where there are just as many 2d and 3d positions. Ultimately, 2d and 3d skills work hand in hand so cultivate one and you will get stronger in the other one.
Here is a selection of work done in my free time or during the AnimC and CGMW character design classes.
Thanks to Nate Wragg, Chris Sasaki and Albert Lozano for being such great mentors and inspiring artists.
testing some asymetry and a facial expression in Zbrush. Fun stuff.
[update] Found a better material or MatCap
I have been watching a lot of movies lately, hoping to find some great audio clips for my soon starting AnimSquad workshop.
Since I don’t like to feel I am wasting my time, I am also doodling in Paint Tool SAI, just to get better at it.
Drawing in SAI is a very relaxing activity, you should try, it will make you rediscover your Wacom tablet. In fact, I even stopped using my TabletPC and I don’t feel the need for a Cintiq.
Here is a drawing I did while watching Tombstone with my custom Tombow brushpen.
Zbrush 4.4 and dynamesh are awesome. Mudbox’s interface makes way more sense but for some reason I prefer sculpting in Zbrush.
Here is a quick straight-ahead sketch I did yesterday as a way of procrastinating using mainly the clay tube brush.
If I was always that productive when procrastinating…..
In order to broaden my range of skills and improve my employability I have started making comics. I think this could be a great training for storyboarding. My storyboarding teacher Steven MacLeod told us how much it helped him to clean up his boards so that should work for me too.
Here is the first story, well the first part. The first panels were drawn in Photoshop and the last one in PaintToolSAI. If you are a Twitter subscriber you have already seen some pictures I posted few weeks ago, that software is great.
Forgive the rudimentary colors and inking, I am really new to all of that and few month ago I couldn’t even draw with a wacom tablet. Things will get better with practice.
The second page will be uploaded tomorrow (I’d better finish it! ;-)). Enjoy
Related posts:
Pressing matters 01 rough first pass
Pressing matters 02 rough first pass
Pressing matters 03 rough first pass
