Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Category: Portfolio

Phantom shot refining 3

Portfolio

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Phantom shot refining

phantom_refining.jpg After few days I finally reached a refining stage of my shot.

The lip sync is already much clearer, the body is less poppy, the facial work is a bit tighter.

This would be enough for commercial work or TV but I am gonna push it even further to try to reach feature quality.
I still have to get in and polish some of the motion like the standing up and the “he was just” section but the rest is looking fine.
Regarding the render, I would need to get rid of those nasty shadows cast by Bishop on the back wall but since I have to use Mental Ray to display the displacement maps, I will have to redo the lighing work anyway.

Phantom test render 0

Portfolio

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Phantom test render

phantom_test_render.jpg Because of a discussion with my friend Arno yesterday, I decided to try some renderings with Maya.

After about 3 hours, here is what I came up with.

Interiors shots are the hardest thing to do for me but I think that I managed to do something pretty decent.

As you can see I enlarged the window and moved it screen right in order to make Bishop’s body stand out a bit more. That’s a classic composition trick that Glen Keane used heavily when storyboarding Pocahontas.

I also tried my luck with colour harmony using Pink, green, blue and white. That should be alright don’t you think?

Acting shot 1 char (getting there) 0

Portfolio

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Acting shot 1 char (getting there)

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Here is my latest version just before going for dinner.

I still haven’t done much changes on the body mechanics (I actually made things worse;-) ) but decided to focus on my lip sync and the facial work instead. I never managed to get into that kind of stuff before as I normally get stuck just before.

This time was a lot of experimentation and I am really enjoying it. I am mainly working in linear and keying all my eases and overshoots. I will clean the redundant keys later using the G buffer curves in the graph editor. Some people like Victor Navone would have done it all in spline but I still don’t trust maya or I haven’t quite reach Victor’s level yet 😉

Ideally I would need to learn how to import and render displacement  maps in Maya so I could use a low level hat wrapped deformed to Bishops head instead of this million polygon hat straight out of Zbrush. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know!

1 character acting shot 1

Animation Mentor / Portfolio

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1 character acting shot

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Do no worry, I haven’t given up on my pantomime shot yet but I still have to polish my old shots so here is one of the oldies.

That one was on the back burner for a long time since I didn’t have a clue how to tackle the animation for the towel. Maya 8.5 and Ncloth have certainly gone a long way since the first years of cloth simulation but I finally had to resort to something else after few hours of research and failure.

Wrap deformers… that s all was needed!!! no need of fancy dynamics! Thanks to Ninja Philip To for the tip.

How do you like his hat? this was a quick test in Zbrush, I really liked the idea but I am not sure it will work with Bishop very odd shaped cranium.

Modeling showreel, finally done! 2

Modeling / Portfolio / Sculpture

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Modeling showreel, finally done!

I could have easily worked 10 more years on it but one day you need to say stop and post your work.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is my july 2007 modeling showreel.

This is a quicktime 7 version in Pal resolution (720*576) which is about 22Mo. It is mirrored on two servers just in case. The second mirror is probably slower but more reliable. Enjoy.

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Sketches from Annecy 4

Drawings / Portfolio

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Sketches from Annecy

With all the screenings and all the people to meet, I found it really difficult to find the time to sketch but eventually forced myself to do it in the last days.

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Sitting at the terrasse of a coffee shop, I thought it would be a great place to draw people walking in the street but as usual they walk too fast so I ended up sketching the people around us.
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In a bar late at night
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Terrase of a coffee shop. I had to draw those 2 girls in brown. Same outfit, different proportions.
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View from the Café des Arts. I really struggle with colours but I still like to experiment. Sorry for the mess 😉
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Pixar animators Patty Kihm and Ross Stevenson during a presentation of their work on Ratatouillle. “Yeah man” is the stamp of approval from Brad Bird when a shot is approved.

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“Surf’s Up” co director Chris Jenkins and Chris Buck.

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Gary Rydstrom during the presentation of the Pixar’s “Lifted”. Very nice animation, very nice rendering, but I didn’t like the character designs or the story. The human seem to be coming straight from Pixar generig, and the aliens just looked like blobs put together. The story is okayish. The audience seemed to like it but I found it a bit weak compared to the more subtle “Gery’s game” or “For the birds”. Actually, Blur’s “Gentlemen Duel” got an even crazier response from the audience compared to Lifted.

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On the way back to London after the Customs confiscated the Reblochon cheese I intended to use for a nice tartiflette. Damn.

Modeling showreel 3

Portfolio / Sculpture

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Modeling showreel

I must admit that I am a bit upset with AM at the moment so just to forget about it, I am now focusing on Modeling and rigging in Max and Maya so here is a showreel I am working on, hoping to get some work in that field.

There are only 2 pieces right now but I think they are pretty good and show exactly what I prefer: the cartoony stuff.

The first one is based on Shadow, a character and a toy designed by Australian Nathan Jurevicius, from the series Scary Girl. The second one, Thirsty, is a mix between Bob Parr from “the Incredibles”, Tom from Studio Soi “Tom and Lilly” and the retro cartoon look.
Both are modeled in Max and rendered in Vray or Max lighttracer. I could have used Maya to model but it is just quicker in Max.
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Summer time, character concept 3

Animation Mentor / Drawings / Portfolio / Sculpture / Short film / Tablet PC

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Summer time, character concept

As promised, here are some concept art for the design of my character Thirsty, a cartoony looking vampire. I have modeled and alpha version of him in wax already but I will probably change the proportions and use a different material. I started using a dark red wax but it is too dark and most of the detail won’t show up properly. I did try some Super Sculpey I had laying around but it was too dry and brittle. I also tried some Chavant clay but it was too sticky for my liking. I will go to Tiranti tomorrow and see what they have on offer….. not that I trust them much anymore but well let’s see.

Here are my concept art, 2 hours of brainstorming with my TabletPC and Sketchbook pro.

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And here is the unfinished alpha version of the sculpt.

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pastels 0

Drawings / Portfolio / Tablet PC

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pastels

I should be getting in Class5 “Short preproduction” next week and I set my goals quite high. Here is a test I did in preparation using Caran d’Ache pastels on Canson 170g…. well that was more ArtRage2 on my Tablet pc but I won’t be taken seriously if I say so.

You might recognise the inspiration from some tiny company in california.

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