Animation Reel from Puff, the Magic Dragon

Because I've always meant to, I will be putting up more work from previous employers and other personal projects I've worked on in the past.

I felt that I needed to better show that I am capable of animating. Although it is something that I will be endeavouring to improve on over the course of my career.  Which means I will eventually make that short film with Lampy and his story, and hopefully improve my skills greatly during that time.  Or maybe I'll land a contract soon that will help me put the skills to better use and hone them there.  Where ever that ends up being.

For now though, I am posting the animations I created for the Sterling app Puff, the Magic Dragon, while I worked at Padworx Studios.

While I worked at Padworx, my title was Senior Artist, which meant I was a lot of things.  But my primary tasks were focused on 3d work, and that included everything that makes 3d happen. Modeling, uv's and texturing, rigging and animating, storyboards, environments and more.

This video shows some of the animated scenes - basic viewport captures - of the work that I did on this app. I did all the rigging, and I was the lead animator on the project. Which meant that I animated a large number of the scenes by myself, while giving direction on others. Later though, when everyone was pulled away to work on other apps, I had to fine tune and finish all the scenes.

I tried to finesse everything as much as possible within the small time frame we had been given.

Mostly, I am happy with the way it all turned out.

The limitations imposed by mobile devices on the number of bones that can be assigned to vertices, and the small number of polygons allowed per scene made it somewhat difficult, but fortunately blender is very forgiving and allowed me to edit meshes without losing skinning data.

The work was entirely done in blender. Even much of the texturing work - which I didn't include here - was done in blender too.

Tourism Australia - There's Nothing Like Australia

Padworx Studios contracted me to create the intro video for the app they were building for Tourism Australia, which has recently been released. There's Nothing Like Australia App

I was pretty happy with how my work turned out and thought I would share it here.

It was rendered and composited in Blender, using a mix of both the internal renderer and the already amazing Cycles render engine being developed by the foundation.

Obviously, it was a pretty easy thing to rig, but I found that animating paper in 3d can be a tad more trying than flipping pages in the real world.

I'm glad I wasn't required to animate 100 pages. I think I would have developed a neuroses.

Some Good and Some Embarrassing Moments

I needed to get videos of games that I've worked on posted here, I guess as a way to show off something of what I have done in the past. Though maybe it was out of nostalgia.

After delving through some of the games that I have worked on, I'm feel that I am shaking my head that some of them actually ended up being made at all.

Not so much that they were poorly done, they were pretty current in technology and implementation. More that the content is so questionable, and we knew it at the time. But, what the publisher wants, the publisher gets.

Thank you for the indie revolution!

More recent titles first, down to the oldest.

Sideway New York
Unfortunately, neither I nor anybody else I know - besides the upper creatives - were given credit on this game.  I played the demo on the PS3, and didn't see anyone I worked with in the grunt departments of the art/programming teams listed there. I worked on this game back in 2009 when it was being developed for XBLA while I was at Fuel Industries, before large lay offs occurred. It really didn't change all that much from the version I worked on. The environments look to have been reused and that includes all the props we made, but the texturing of the models is completely different. Originally while I was on the project, the look of the 3D environment was more realistic to contrast with the Graffiti. That appears to have been taken away.

Disrespectoids

This was a fairly large project, that involved quite a bit of character modelling with another artist who was my lead at the time. While the characters were simple enough, surprisingly the toony aspects provided quite a few annoyances when translated into 3D. The same models were used for the cinematics as in game, because the ingame stuff was all pre-rendered on sprite sheets.

Microsoft Tinker, Swipeout Battle Racing, Tetsurai
Overall, these were some enjoyable titles to work on.  I'm not sure Tetsurai has actually really been made playable yet. Other smaller adver games for web browsers were made while simultaneously working on these projects.

This is one of those smaller adver games. Viking Quest. It was fun, just your basic hack and slash like Gauntlet. I modelled props and the enemy minions.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green

I think that this must be the most popular game I've ever worked on. There appears to be a lot of fan love on youtube for it.  I left before the game was officially finished. But It had been a fun experience at the time. Especially the protoype - Day of the Zombie -  that lead to this whole movie tie.

Pariah

This didn't perform well at all I don't think. I worked on the cinematics for a few months on this one.

Marine Heavy Gunner Vietnam

There is so much going on in this game that is politically incorrect.  And the majority of the team questioned how we ended up working on something like this. But this is what happens when you are mercenaries for hire. There were some good times had while making this game though.

Desert Thunder

This was my first real true game making experience, and again I questioned what I had gotten myself into. The team was great, but the content of the game questionable. We began working on this not that long after the events in New York on September 11th.  It appealed to a certain group at the time. 

Videos of Padworx Apps

I've been meaning to get work I've done for companies in the past posted here to the blog. Unfortunately, when my work is done on a project, it usually has a few other channels to go through, so it's not ready to be shown when I want to post it, and then I forget about it. Today however was a good reason to post teaser videos of the apps that I worked on while at Padworx Studios.

I was very happy with how my work turned out in the Puff app.  There were quite a few limitations on the meshes and skeletons that were later exported into the engine, but I think in the end it worked out well, even with those limitations.

I was a Senior Artist while at Padworx, but mainly that meant that I was the Lead 3D artist and Lead Animator.

All 3D and all animations were done in Blender, which proved to be incredibly versatile and forgiving.

The engine used for this app was Unity, and all 3D and animations were created with Blender.  Unity itself is a great engine for artists to work with. It may not be open source but it is affordable.

Posing test

Learning to RIG better

I'm in the process of once again switching directions.

The comic is on hold. But not indefinitely. As I've gotten again familiar with the science of rigging a character and familiarizing myself with Blender's animation tools I've become more interested in turning the comic into an animated work.

That being said I still want to work on it in comic form. It's something that I just NEED to do.

The story needs to be improved anyways.

So for now, it's all about Lampy and his encounter with this big dumb schmuck.

Background Painting

This is a fairly quick background painting, for my toony short. The buildings are almost placeholder because I may want more details as I zoom in.



I'm trying to figure out what process I'll be going through in order to complete my short. I am also trying to figure out how I will be working on things in the future. It looks as though a good mix of 3d and 2d is a great way to work on things when you work alone.

Back to One Blog

It's too much damn work to have multiple blogs when I'm not even making that much new stuff.



I am finally resurrecting Lampy from the dead. I think he's looking great!



And here Lampy is in his previous glory.