Rare

Posted on September 20, 2007  | 14 Comments
Filed under Animation

Just a quick post to inform everyone that I just accepted a job offer from Rare limited, in Twycross, 120 miles north of London. I will be finally be paid to give life to funny characters on the screen.

Rare www.rareware.com is the house that gave birth to the best game on earth “Donkey Kong Country” but also the excellent “Viva Pinata”.

I will be starting on monday and I must admit that I am really thrilled! I will be joining AM students Peer Lemmers and Richie Prado so I should feel like home.

I have heard that the guys in the concept art department work on Cintiq so they d better keep their door closed! 😉

Moving house

Posted on September 10, 2007  | 1 Comment
Filed under Miscellaneous

Today was my last day at my current job which meant moving house too.

It would have been much better if I started recording it from the begining but I only thought about doing this at 5am. Too bad you would have been able to see the bed and furnitures flying around and alos notice a terrible slow down around 10 am 😉

Memorable moments are when my girlfriend took pity and decided to get some breakfast from Mac Donald but a manager interrupted me in the middle asking why half of the Internet Café was closed? I started laughing since I wasn’t in duty anymore for the past 9 hours. She wasn’t very happy 😉 An other one is when I decided to get changed but the best is probably when I found a fully equipped mother board, a computer case and decided to build a PC 😉 what was I thinking!!!!

Phone number back

Posted on September 6, 2007  | 3 Comments
Filed under Miscellaneous

[edit] I am finally back on my old number: 0788 6383 170

Animation showreel

Posted on September 4, 2007  | 10 Comments
Filed under Portfolio

This looks like a new animation showreel to me, what do you think? 😉

Phantom shot refining

Posted on September 3, 2007  | 3 Comments
Filed under Portfolio

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

Posted on September 1, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Portfolio

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)

Posted on September 1, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Portfolio

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

Posted on August 29, 2007  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor, Portfolio

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.

Un Monstre a Paris

Posted on August 28, 2007  | 6 Comments
Filed under Animation

Since I first saw some animation test and renderings of this feature, I fell in love with it. The story takes place at the begining of the 20th century in Paris, at the time of the Moulin Rouge and the universal exhibition.

The movie is directed by Eric Bergeron “Bibo”, ex Dreamworks director on “The Road to Eldorado” and “Shark Tales”. I wasn’t moved much by the story on Shark Tales but I really liked the work done by the concept artists and the designs. “Eldorado” is also one of my favourite 2d cartoons.

The production is said to be starting in Septembre in Nice (France).

Here are some pics found on internet. Unfortunately that s all you can see. The trailer shown at Annecy will not be shown to the public unfortunately.

The website for the movie seems to be down at the moment but you can always have a look at Bibo films website

here is a list of blogs from people involved in its production, gorgeous work:

Matt Jones

Antoine Antin

ex Gobelin Aurelien Predal

Neil Campbell Ross

Related post:
Monstre a Paris short clip

Car pantomime (blocking first 8seconds)

Posted on August 27, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Portfolio

Here is the blocking for the first 8 seconds of my shot. Some poses are still a bit rough but I will do a second pass once I have all the poses in Maya. Some inbetweens are missing when Stewie looks right then left of the box.

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