Laughing Crows Studio

Here I’m shooting for a fifties toon look. It’s a commercial spot running within an animation I’m working on.

by Albert Marquet. It inspired me to rough out a painting without thinking of form, only color.

Maybe I should give up animation and start painting again. I mean, these two small paintings were done in an evening, while even a short animation takes me a minimum of two months. Hmmm ….

Above is a view from a hill just up from our house in Santa Fe. I was looking out towards an adobe development just north of the Plaza. It was a crisp day just before dusk when that last flash of light turns everything a magical, super saturated color. Anyway, it’s just blobs of paint, smeared in wet, but I kinda like it.

It’s just a test 3d render, but after doing it I realized I get more of a thrill from draping photo textures over spheres and rendering them against a generated starfield than I do creating a painting. There’s just a sense of wonder to it I can’t explain.

Some new “sketchy” characters I’m working on. Ya know, it’s weird, but being trained classicly as an artist is a handicap when trying to create cute, whimsical characters. And yep, I was a huge fan of Dr. Katz.

… more to come

For months now I’ve been trying to come up with a virtual 3d product display using video game engines. The idea is simple: instead of playing games, you “play” a product to see how it works. It’s the next best thing to getting to actually touch the product, and you’ll be able to see it on your web browser.

But after months of testing game engines, I’ve found … they’re not there yet. Meaning they’re still very limited as far as advanced reflections go. Unless of course you want to drop 20 to 100K on licenesing. That’s where I get limited.

So being to dumb to give up, I’m now working on combining traditional 2D and 3D with Flash. Here is a sample render of the 3d model I made of my espresso machine. (looks real doesn’t it?)

Here I rendered it down to just lines in a simple animation.

I’ve done about a BILLION tests over the past four years. First testing every 2D and 3D package there is, then testing how well they share files with other apps, then how well they render and how fast or slow they render and on and on and on …. Not to mention learning how to model, texture, map, rig and animate characters and all thats involved with that. Now I’m finally getting near the end of testing which means I just about have an animation pipeline in place. THANK GOD!!!

Here’s my billionth test render.

Still working on a 3D toon look.  Getting closer.

OK, so 2D takes FOREVER to do! So I’m working on a 2D or anime look using 3D models.

Here’s a 3d model I made of my favorite little espresso machine. OK, so it’s not candy colored in real life, this is just a test shot.

I’m working on a new “virtual product display.” It’s like a combination of video games, marketing and the web. When done, you’ll be able to learn how to use this machine by watching it in 3D action on your web browser. Check back for the results.

UPDATE!

(click to enlarge)

On the left you see the base model I sculpted, comprised of only 790 polygons (those little squares.)
On the right you see the finished model which has about 6 million polygons. I painted the texture on using a digital paint software package and a pen mouse which works just like a paint brush.

This isn’t a finished commercial. It’s pieces from a script which will be combined with a new voice over track, narration, music, backdrops and an animation by another company of a huge block that gets chopped, then splits.

What was new for me in this piece was lateral movement, pointing and kicking towards the camera. It might look cute and simple, but their are over 75 different parts hand drawn for each character. Just think of every word spoken, blink of the eye, turn of the head or body and on and on.

It’s crazy to think that one “three second scene” can take a solid week of planning, drawing, animating then tweaking, just to get the motion right. Just look at the credits of any animated movie or even your favorite saturday toon, you’ll see up to a hundred names of animators it took.

This twenty seconds took almost a month to complete, but now that all the parts are drawn, things should go faster from here. Until the next script calls for something else.

It’s the first part of the script, then replayed in slow motion.
The third guy will be chopping a block of “high prices.”

To separate everything out, I put a blur on the background and a slight blur on the two middle characters. But that’s just a matter of preference. I could easily strip the blur and sharpen everything up.

Below is an actual frame from the animation.  The blur makes the “chopping” character really pop-out.

And here is a no blur.

The Agency I did this sample for does their own sound, so I just threw in a simple track so it would have something. All the voices are me - sorry.

- Each 3D character took about a week to model, UV Map, paint and rig. Then phonemes had to be built for each mouth shape so they could talk.

- Then comes animating each character, frame by frame. So a few seconds of animation could take days to animate.

- Last comes RENDERING.  And rendering means “quality of image.”  I have over fifty hours of render time in this, and that’s using a two computer render farm.  But, considering PIXAR will spend up to 90 hours rendering one single frame (that’s 1\30th of a second,) my fifty hours isn’t bad.  The trick is finding a balance between time spent and quality.

The good news is, now that the characters are built, they can be re-used over and over. And posed any way you want for your Print needs .

Here’s an easy way to create your own 3D caricatures:
Just show the computer a picture of whomever you want to model, press a button and seconds later it’s ready to go.   Shah!!!  YOU WISH!

I’ve studied traditional portraiture (painting portraits by hand) since I was a kid, so that makes capturing a likeness a little easier.

Just imagine building these models with a chicken wire frame, paper macheing it, then painting. That’s what building a 3D model is like.

If you think your paper mache model would look like crap, so would your 3D model.

Have fun.

Here is an actual still from the animation, just to give you an idea on resolution.

Just goofing around here. The song is red house by Jimi Hendrix and the guitar dude is an actual company logo brought to life. I’m just seeing what kind of animation looks I can get out of him.

Anyway … I hadn’t been home to see my pretty baby in about ninety nine and one half days … or so the song goes.

Watch Now:

 test [0:08m]: Play Now

The road sign didn’t pop out enough until I stopped for half a second and extruded the view. At one point I had cars buzzing up and down the road, but it seemed to distract from what we were doing.

For your business, I would have to have pics of the actual road signs, maybe a few of actually traveling to your location and some shots of your building and it’s surroundings for the model. Remember: the more detail and realism you want, the more hours I’ll have modeling and animating.

Who says farmers can’t dance?

What you’re seeing is live action recorded from a dancer and then applied to my 3d model. He’s warming up for an appearance in a new movie trailer spoof I’m working on.

Humble beginnings.

After some rough sketches, he begins to take shape. These are then used as patterns. I can pull them into my 3D modeling program where I start building the mesh.

And here is the wireframe of my mesh. It’s like building a paper mache model over wire.

After the mesh is built, it has to be “textured” or painted. At this point he looks right, but he can’t move or talk, so now it has to be “rigged” or given an actual skeleton. Believe me, there’s just no “gimme” step in this whole process.

This model took me two years to complete. Just kidding. But it does take up to a week or more depending on the complexity of the model.

So anyway, he’s still not finished, but this should at least give you an idea. And I can tell you it’s really weird to see your idea go from a sketch to a goof dancing around like that.

And the last step - the hardest. Phoneme morphs have to be made so your character can speak. That means the face mesh has to be shapped into an “o” mouth and an “a” mouth and an “f” mouth, etc …