Walk like a man. Or a woman.

I recently had the opportunity to corrupt young minds at SCAD with a lecture on body mechanics and acting. To demonstrate a few basic principals I created this rig I call Generik. Here he is doing a basic "Neutral" walk:

Among humans, the biggest factor affecting walk is gender. Here I contrast an exaggerated feminine walk with an exaggerated masculine walk:

The second biggest factor in determining the style of walk is the body type of the individual. Here I contrast a "fat" vs. a "skinny" walk:

The third factor is mood. Individuals display mood in their posture. Here is an exaggerated "Happy" vs. "Sad" walk:

I created all of these cycles on animation layers in Maya 2009. You can copy animation layers to try out variations within a single animation file without having to start from scratch with each walk cycle. If you like a particular variation, export the animation layer to its own file. It's a nondestructive way to try out variations; and walk cycles are endlessly varied.

There is no more telling expression of character than the walk cycle. Use a walk cycle to get to know every new character you approach. I create a walk cycle as the first thing I do to test every new rig I'm building, so I can begin to finalize the rig in the context of the character's particular personality.

It is worth noting that the "heavy" and "sad" cycles would be at a slower pace than average, but I present everything at a standard 24-frame cycle for maximum compare/contrast.

A good online resource for further exploring comparative walk cycles is the BMLWalker.

BrainsBrainsBrains

BrainsBrainsBrains

They say a painting is never finished, merely abandoned. I'm about to abandon this series I've been doodling on for little over a year in favor of a new direction I'm taking. Before I move wholly into this new direction, here's a cleaning out of the proverbial closet. I call this series BrainsBrainsBrains, because they expose some deep structures in my gray matter, and in honor of the zombie-like catatonic state I would enter for hours when laboring over them.
Here's the whole dang Picasa album.

Word: Up

Did some freelance this spring at a place called Fusion Creative. We were bidding for the international print ads for the Up DVD release. Didn't win the bid, but they had some nice things to say about our mock-ups. Here's a sampling of the rough sketches I did for them. I did all of these over the course of a weekend. Had we won the bid, we would have picked a few of these to develop into full-color mock-ups, and eventually finished print ads.

As it is, I thought some of the roughs, rudimentary as they are, capture some of the spirit of the film.

The Ancient Garden

A storyboard exercise. 1 picture per word. The poem was inspired by Bonaventure Cemetery (Savannah GA) and Bell's Junkyard (Shepherdstown, WV). The Old Man was inspired by Jimmy Dean, the homeless highway walker of Route 50 in Salem, WV.

Category:  Film & Animation

Tags: 

Bonaventure  Savannah  Shepherdstown  Garden  Homeless  Sanctuary  Junkyard  Vandalism  Poem  Storyboard 

 

A storyboard exercise from some time back. 1 picture per word. The poem was inspired by Bonaventure Cemetery (Savannah GA) and Bell's Junkyard (Shepherdstown, WV). The Old Man was inspired by Jimmy Dean, the homeless highway walker of old Route 50 next to where I grew up.

Y'Down With NPP? (my New Painting Process)

Here's a work in progress, "The Messenger." It explores the same territory as my Strange Loops series, but utilizing an experimental process.

Here I started on paper with a felt tip sketch, added watercolor, then acrylic and then oil (progressively getting more "permanent" with the media) till finally scanning (in this case, with a digital camera) and continuing to explore in Photoshop as a digital painting. Because the digital medium allows for non-destructive experimentation, I am developing several variations on the image, the most successful of which I will attempt to emulate when I return to the traditional medium. I'm currently developing a whole series of paintings with this process. The end result will be a series of digital paintings as well as a series of related (but not identical) traditional-media paintings.

The Hazing Part II

As a companion piece to yesterday's post on hazy renders, I whipped this test up today. I realize the volume shader attributes in Mental Ray are very very sensitive, especially at larger scales. To get the above image to show up, I had to tweak the extinction parameter to an accuracy of three decimal points! After I got the haze going, I began to add lights. Here's after adding a key light but before adjusting anything:

It's kind of a cool posterizing effect with the hotspots blowing everything out. How come I can never get this look when I try to do it on purpose?
After setting up more lights I began isolating the "subject" of the composition by use of shaders. In this case, the subject is some twisty copper column:


Not sure why this vision came to me. It's just a jungle monolith of some sort. To me it represents frozen kinetic engergy, as do the shapes swirling around it. Kind of a petrified tornado. The haze adds to this stillness, this calmness that plays against the implied movement in the forms. After some shader tweaks, I produced the following renders.






As a lighting r&d test, I didn't spend much time setting it up, but I would like to return to this some day to heighten the mood with more refined models and textures, as well as glows and incandescence, more localized / patterned mist, etc.

Pump Up the Volume (Renders)

Squeezed in some R&D time for Sinister environments today. The goal was to convey a sense of vastness, best implied with atmospheric perspective. In painting, this is done by desaturating colors for distant objects. In the computer, you need to use volumes, which simulate particulate matter such as dust refracting light through the air, creating a "haze." Volumes are potentially a huge hit on render times. My goal was to find the fastest settings possible to deliver a sense of space and atmosphere.
The parti_volume shader in Mental Ray has always been difficult to understand, but with much trial and error I figured out a thing or two.


First I made some very simple geometry so I could have some "landscape" to light. Since this was a lighting/rendering exercise I didn't want to get caught up in modeling, so I devoted all of 20 minutes to extruding some arches with the "bridge" poly tool in Maya. After trying volume primitives (too hard to make subtle) and environment shaders (too expensive to render) I finally figured out a workable process with the parti_volume shader applied to a surrounding sphere (an atmos-sphere) that produced the above image.
Next I threw some shaders on the geometry. Everything is a variation of the Mental Ray material_x shader:


Next I added some local color and an IBL node for sky illumination (a simple ramp):



Then some bump maps and a warm directional light with cold shadows:


Some model refinements, more lights and turning on final gather:





I guess this exercise pays homage to Roger Dean, since it evokes his "arches" series. But more ... serpentine. This could be album art for a cheesy Yes cover band. Anyway, I figured out some of the esoteric mysteries of Mental Ray volumes. Hope you enjoyed the evolution.