Something wicked (and awesome) this way roars...

Sorry that this is a blank post; consider this a teaser cubed post concerning some heavy work that I've been fortunate to pick up in the last couple months. You will not be disappoint.

Paladin Rig: Bound and Determined

So I got all the manipulators made, all the constraints and parents and what have yous in their places. Now comes the part that everybody and there mothers love: binding. A friend told me about his use of interactive binding, so maybe I'll experiment with that here.
Modeled/Textured by Maury Weiss

New Rig: Paladin

Here's some stills of a character I'm giving a rig to: the Paladin.
Modeled/unwrapped/textured by Maury Weiss (http://mindofmaury.blogspot.com/).

Nothing too fancy, except for the armor manipulators I'm spattering here and there; manips for the leg guards, shoulder plating, and cod piece. Also, since his breastplate is a single piece, that makes configuring the spine controls pretty easy.

And cape manips. Always the capenips. Cat nips. Spin Tack. Speed Track. That's enough gobbledy gook. Time to work.

In the home stretch

It's almost time to turn this beast in. My goal is to at least make it in the top 50, so here's hoping. Changed the camera angle, and finished the lip sync and finger passes, and now it's all just going over it and buffing out the scratches. I'll be glad when this contest gets over, since they can be royal time sinks, but boy are they fun.

11 Second Progress

Here's a new video with more progress on the 11 Second Club entry I'm working on. Added the 2nd character, smoothed out the majority of the animation, and have just started on the facial animation. Will also be starting the hands soon.

Let the Games Begin! ...a week ago

Man, it's been a while. The last week and a half was a tumultuous one, what with moving and everything. Finally getting out of downtown Seattle and settling in Suburbia. At least it feels like suburbia, and Google Maps informed me that we live in a gang-ridden neighborhood. Still, it's been a quiet settling in, and with internet finally installed there will be no need to run back and forth everywhere just to get my fix.
This month I'm keeping busy with an 11 Second Club contest entry. (http://www.11secondclub.com)
The source audio is from Downton Abbey, a show that tells the story of the Crawley family and its trials and tribulations leading up to the first World War (thank you IMDB). This first video is WIP status, but just you wait til next week. Til then, enjoy.
Critiques (what little there is to give at this stage) are appreciated.

The last hurrah (and some that didn't make it, but are still cool).

The game is finished. The team presented it this Tuesday, and everything that they had set out to do had been, from what I saw, fully realized. I'm very excited for this to be finished: before this project I had a hand in 2 other projects, COG & Olive (Both are playable through the links on my portfolio site. Toxologic, the game featuring the Minotaur, will be available soon.). With some light work ahead of me in the coming weeks, I'm designing a new look for my reel and site.
These two videos are the last remaining animations that got finished, but as the title says, some of them didn't make it. The first is the entire boss sequence played end to end: climb up, berserker roar, crate toss (we do love our crates), damaged, and defeated. I'd expected the team to use it as is, but they did something pretty funny with it, turning it into a macabre parody of all those Modern Warfare slo mo sequences (e.g. CoD4 final boss).

The second vid goes through all the sequences from stop to finish too: run, wall smash, dazed, snapped out, foot stomp.

Thanks Toxologic team. You're a great bunch of people to work with, and I hope to do so in the future.

Branching Out

I foresee a lot of delays happening with the minotaur animation sequence (for which the deadline is fast approaching). Instead of scrambling something together out of wood chips and ABC gum, here's a vid of a 2D piece I'm whittling away at. I know I have my animator's survival kit somewhere, but for now I'm just drawing it as I see it.

Back from the Prehistoric Ages...

I wish that time travel was the reason that I'm a full week late. I mentioned it before, but with the contract job I have, certain time slots had to be sacrificed for the good of my sanity. But here I am preaching to the choir, so I'll cut that short.
Right about now, this blog has caught up with my work, and so my worst fear has happened: I may have to rummage through Big Bertha's drawers to find filler.
These two videos are the same animation loop: Minotaur kicking door down. The first video is from a full visible view, but the second video is through the eyes of the playable character.

Take a step out of yourself...

and you turnaround.
Adequate words, penned by Mark Mothersbaugh, for the following video: a recently finished 180 degree turn-around. There's some other 30-point-something degree turns I finished as well, but they aren't the brightest looking bunch, particularly because I erased all keys for the master manipulator, so they spin in place. Also got another attack animation finished: the horizontal slice. He's got a few more waiting in the pipeline (namely a foot stomp, hopeful a fist pound), but the list of primary animations stretches on.

Armed and... too strong for his own good.

Life isn't always about yelling at people and sneezing though, sometimes you have to get violent. Take for example the Minotaur, a creature who's diet consisted of human flesh. For this difference in lifestyle, he was sentenced to live out the rest of his existence in the Labyrinth at Knossos.

It's the worst kind of discrimination, I tell ya! But still, a man/bull/monster's gotta eat, and his utensil of choice... is an axe.

AVicious cycle

After getting some basic throws down I wanted to take a "break" and unwind with some idles. You'll notice that he's now armed, and I've got some attacks in the pipeline, but we take things one step at a time here: that's company policy.
The first is a sneeze, which goes right into the berserker roar that is triggered when he catches sight of the player in some scenarios.


Modeled and Textured by,
Brandon Hegland
                 Beck Sebenius

The big one.

The previous post showed the Minotaur heaving some relatively smaller boxes at some off screen enemies, as well as a roar for character spicing. This is the big throw, which requires both hands and a tremendous amount of effort. For this piece I used some video reference.
Whenever I use vid references for animation I prefer to record myself acting out the movement, because you can spend minutes (or even hours) trying to find the right reference, and recording yourself saves time. It also helps you understand the flow from one pose to the next by acting it out.
One more thing: this is the beginning of this blog becoming a weekly deal.

One for the money, two for the show...

3 to make ready, and now SCRAM!

I'm just kidding you can stay if you want. I have something to show you. These two throws are part video reference and part eyeballing it. About 75% eyeballing.

Alive, but a little stupid.

After these first three quickfire posts (this being the second), I'm gonna cut this back to a weekly post; I had only thought to do this about a week and a half after I'd started the Minotaur rig, and some base animations. First video is just two idles, but I try to project as much character as I can from the get go: lazy anger, surprise, alertness, suspicion.

Running with the Bulls

Not in Spain, but in the infamous Labyrinth from the Greek myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur.
As far as my work history goes, this is one of my proudest rigs. Up to now a good portion of my rigging experience has been with few, if any, mechanical creatures, but more organic ones. Before this I worked on a mobile app for Voda Digital and Viva Media called Mobile Linebacker, an arcade style sports/strategy wherein the player must read a play and guide the line backer through the gap and sack the quarterback. This is an entire tangent that I could make into an entirely different post, and so, without further stalling for time, I give you my new project: the Minotaur.
Modeled by: Brandon Hegland
                              and Beck Sebenius