New reel

Hello again!

This is just one small update. I made a new demo reel yesterday, and I’m now making it available to the public.

BTW it opens with the rendered versions of the animations I posted here a week or so.

*will animate for food*
(and money)

Maya 2010 and some other stuff

Well, remember that animation I was working on a couple of weeks ago? It’s rendered now, but I haven’t had the time to edit it or anything. The contest ends this week and I now I have to rush to finish on time.

I’ve just been too busy on different projects (no word on it yet… all I can tell you is “lights, camera, ACTION!”) so I couldn’t finish earlier.

A couple of weeks ago I got the new Autodesk software packages (Maya, Mudbox, MotionBuilder and Softimage), so you’ll be seeing some reviews in the next weeks. The first one is already up, actually: Maya 2010 review.

So see you when I see you and I hope I’ll be making a big announcement these days :p

Animation update and shortfilm

Hello everybody!

I just wanted to share this new anim with you guys. I’ve been somewhat busy this week so I barely had time to focus on this, but I am nearly done, just two more shots or so.

In the meantime, this is the latest one I’ve made.

BTW, we FINALLY have an opening night for “Tormented.” The film will open in Cinemark La Gran Vía on October 23, so if you live in El Salvador or happen to be in the country by that time, go watch the movie!

Continuing with my animation WIP

Ok, Youtube finally decided to accept my video, so here it is. So far I have like 12 seconds of animation (including a camera fly-through). I pretty much have 1 more week to finish this one since it’s for a contest and I want to make another animation as well.

So, here’s the video! Gotta go back to my keyframes :p

Animation WIP and another video about the shortfilm

Well hello again. I promise I will update this blog more often, as I haven’t been paying it as much attention as it deserves :p

A week or so people launched an animation contest here in El Salvador. People are supposed to turn in a 20′-30 second animation by the 20-something of October. Actually I’m planning on doing 2 animations (there are 5 categories and you can participate in up to 3).

While writing this, I’m TRYING to upload an animation to Youtube. It should work, eventually… I have a previous (shorter) version of the animation up already (that’s the one I’m linking below), so if the darn upload doesn’t work I’ll try again tomorrow.

In the meantime, this is the previous WIP:

The character is the catsuit chick you’ve seen on this blog, and so far I have like 10 seconds of animation (including the simple camera-fly-through intro).

Anyway, more about the short film. Diego Murcia from El Faro (a local e-newspaper) held a little interview with us about the short film. The video was published on El Faro’s website this week, as well as on Youtube (at least he’s able to upload videos… I envy him… thanks for nothing Youtube).

Anyway, you can watch the video below, if you understand spanish.

Well, I finished this blog post and Youtube is still trying to make up its freaking mind about whether or not it should allow me to upload a video… thanks for nothing Youtube!

New software review

Well hello again. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve posted a new software review. This time I had the chance to write my impressions on PzDB, a Poser library manager.

Update of the day – Mudbox rocks

Well my last update was, again, like one month ago. I’ve been up to many things, including being a Maya instructor. There’s also 2 more things, but I can’t really talk about those right now :p

Anyway, I’ve been doing some work on Mudbox during my free time. I was thinking on an somewhat action-packed animation with Arianne, so I was thinking I needed to make a special outfit for her. This is part of an internal thing I’m making for the studio.

I actually took my workstation to the limit with this thing. The catsuit is a “second skin” that I made in Mudbox based on her body, which I subdivided 6 times I think, reaching a polycount of like 18 million of polys.

On the other hand, I pretty much went crazy on the jacket. Just for fun I reached 80 million polygons, and actually the workstation managed to handle it but it was too slow to work with, heh, so I went back to 20-something million.

I took the generated displacement maps to add imperfections to the leather color texture and make both pieces look somewhat worn. I also added the displacement maps to an specular map, making the worn parts shine less and all that.

This time I’m linking to a high-rez image instead of a medium-rez one so that you can see the details and stuff.

She’s still missing the gloves. That’s something I will work on as soon as I get my current assignments done. Give me a week or so.

I’m also working on a review and it should go live in a week or so, so I’ll let you know when it does. More reviews are coming so keep your eyes open. If everything goes as expected, some of them is about something super amazing (don’t you just love when someone tells you he’s working on something ultra-cool but he doesn’t tell you what it is?)

Argile 2

A couple of weeks ago I got my copy of Argile 2. I spent some time testing the program, although I was already familiar with it since I also have version 1.

You can read my thoughts on Argile 2 here.

I hate it when people are so unprofessional

Or rather I hate it when people pretend they know what they’re doing but don’t.

Well, here’s the thing. You remember a while back my rant about nothing. Well, supposedly the films open in a week or so, so I’m happy about that. I’m still not happy with the fact we had to wait for two months for this, specially when the people making “that other film” have not finished yet.

The reason behind this post is somewhat different to the whole films thing, but it’s related in a way. As usual, I’m not mentioning any names, but if you know me you already know who I’m talking about. A few months ago, someone hired me to matchmove some shots. Some of them I had to do by hand, some of them were made with a matchmoving application, and some of them were plainly impossible to solve (more on this later).

Don’t you hate when someone ruins your hard work? The “doable” matchmoves were perfect, but somehow the final shots don’t blend at all. After watching the video closely I realized that both clips run at different frame rates, causing the digital elements to “slide” onto the live action plate… so the guy doing the blending pretty much screwed up.

This was not an isolated problem. Half of the shots showed the same flaws.

As for the unsolvable shots… during the planning someone came up with a brilliant idea of using a rope as some sort of swing (although after seeing what I saw I wonder if there was actually any planning because I can’t seem to finish counting all the flaws I saw during that production). The thing is that the rope had to be replaced by a solid object that followed exactly the movement of that rope (including the bending that wasn’t supposed to be there since it’s supposed to be a solid object).

I like working with people, as long as they know what they’re doing. I hate to work with those who don’t because that pretty much means you have to work twice as you have to do their work as well. And above all I hate when a so-called visionary artist ruins your hard work.

No wonder why the guy can’t seem to finish their film.

Updates, works, stuff

Well, you surely saw the previous post, where I mentioned that the film is FINALLY opening in two or three weeks. It’s about time, I should say… after all, we spent a little over 2 months waiting for this.

There was a private screening where we had the chance to watch all of the short films produced during the film workshop. I can say that when it comes to the story, I liked the work a lot. However, I still think there’s still a lot to do when it comes to quality.

Some of the films just felt like they were shot using one of those Handycams that your uncle or anyone else uses to record “family events.” I mean, even if the equipment was there (they all used HD cameras and all that good stuff) there were some things that made them look not so well. I don’t know what it was really, maybe the colors or the “image quality” or anything else. It just felt weird.

The audio left some things to be desired as well. You may imagine I know nothing about sound mixing… which is true! I just know when something doesn’t quite work (that doesn’t mean I know how to fix it, though).

Unfortunately our short film has its faults as well. For starters, as I mentioned on previous posts, we pretty much had to rush to finish on time (or at least I think I did… or maybe those posts are on the production blog). The good thing is that we finished, and when it comes to business that counts more than having a perfect-but-unfinished piece of work.

Some of the renders came out not-so-great, with weird artifacts and stuff like that. The audio mix is also flawed, and there’s a lot of things that could be improved (BTW, we didn’t do the sound mixing).

Still, there’s the fact that we did finish on time.

And if you remember a previous blog post I was talking about a project that didn’t finish on time… and they haven’t finished yet… I’ll leave it at that.

Moving on…

Well, since I came back from SIGGRAPH 2008 I’ve been very interested on stereo filmmaking. I’ve been reading a lot about that lately, gathering pieces of information from different sources and I’ll be experimenting more with stereo soon. I’m storyboarding an animation we’ll work on in the following days. Actually I’m planning that animation to be part of something I can’t talk about right now, although it’s going to be great.

Since now Youtube supports 3D, I will be posting that experiment there.

Now if I could only get my hands on an old CRT and a pair of glasses…

Work has been kinda slow lately… damn economic downturn. That’s why I’ve found myself in the need to look for different biz opportunities. They are all related to 3D in one way or another, although I’m aiming different mediums now.

BTW expect a review next week, I think. I’ll be posting the link when it hits the front page.

There’s also a rant I’ll be posting, but that one will have to wait. I’m just going to say right now that I hate it when others ruin your hard work, specially when we talk about novices who think of themselves as experts.

More about that on a future post. Remember you can also follow me on Twitter.