VFS here I come!

I was accepted to VFS!
I will start studying the 3D Animation and Visual Effects program at June 2008.

I wasn't sure how strict their requirements are,
and I was looking a lot for portfolios that got people into VFS,
but found nothing on the web.

So here it is, for future reference of anyone looking to get into VFS -
my VFS portfolio.


1. Life Drawings
I handed a drawing of my cat, a drawing of a woman's face in the rain,
and a drawing of "Shoot 'Em Up" movie poster (the one with Paul Giamatti).






2. A Wasp Model
This model was done in Maya, and textured with Maya and a little bit of Photoshop.



3. A Walking Lego Man
Modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation was done in Maya.
Compositing was done in After Effects.

Wasp - Final

These are more or less the final images of the wasp - please click on the images to view the full resolution.

It doesn't look completely real yet, but I guess that's about the best I can do without working on in for another week...
So it's time to move on to the next project :)

Wasp Update

The eyes, wings and body are final, except for some hairs I might add later.
The rest (head and legs) still need some work.

Wasp Model

This is a model of a bee / wasp I've done in Maya.

I started it a long time ago and finished it in the last couple of day.
The next step is texturing it. This will be the first time I seriously texture anything so it might take a little time, but I hope it will be done in a couple of days.

After that - back to the Cubies...

Cat, Bear and Woman

Here are some more drawings from the last few days:

Shoot 'Em Up

6B pencil on A4 copy paper.

The reference for this drawing is the poster of the movie "Shoot 'Em Up":

Life Drawing: Face in the Rain

6B pencil on A4 copy paper.

The reference for this drawing is taken from a modeling catalog.

Cubies: Week 8.5

Forgive me blogger, for I have sinned...
It's been more than two weeks since my last update.


I have been called for duty in the IDF for 3 weeks. This is the second of them.
But that's not a good enough reason to stop working, (after all I am still home every evening) and so I did, and I proudly present the next complete scene.
I didn't update much since I was actually working on more of the same: Animating, animating and animating. There isn't much I can say about that :)

This time I did a playblast of two scenes together: first the big Cubie wakes up and then a third Cubie comes into play.
Together it comes to 30 seconds, which is something in which you can start seeing the big picture.

That means in total I have about one minute of action, and I expect the whole movie to take something like 2 minutes - lots of work ahead!



What I have learned the last two weeks is, animating 3 characters takes about 3 times as much as animating one character, and a little more. Not a big surprise there...

Thanks for watching :)

Cubies: Week 7 - Scene 2 Complete

Hello, it's been a week since I last posted,
and what I've done since then is finish the second scene.

Here is the final playblast (this time the controls are hidden so it looks a lot more like the final result):



The work was done in three phases:
1. First I took care of the minor adjustments to the rig. That took a little less than a day of work to complete. Most of the work was repositioning the cubies in order for their position with the new rig will match the position of the cubies with the old rig in the first scene...

2. Planning the timing - this time I was a little more confident and didn't use the spreadsheet - I just put the major keyframes (every step, jump, etc) as guidelines for the animation.

3. Filling in the animation, step by step. Along the way I added a lot of pauses that were missing from the timing. Without pauses the action looks mechanic and the characters don't look like they are thinking.
The pauses were the hardest thing to animate in this scene, since a walk is a walk (plus, I've animated like 50 steps with this rig already and it gets easier and easier), and I also got used to the timing of the jumps, but staying still while looking alive is quite difficult.
If you move too little, the character looks frozen and not alive, and if you move too much during a pose, it looks like it is working mechanically without thinking, or just looks unnatural.

Starting Scene 2

In the second scene, the young Cubie is going to wake up the older Cubie, which is going to start walking slowly and steadily while the young one runs around him and jumps on his back.

They will start walking to the right side of the screen, and then we will switch to scene 3 in which the last Cubie will wake up, this time by itself.

But first, there are some things I want to fix in my rig.
As a lesson from animating the first scene, I discovered the following facts about my rig:

• The knees and shoulders controls where indeed useful when growing the arms, but after that they just stayed static in the scene and just got in the way. Another problem was that the axes of the feet controls where rotated so the height of one foot was controlled by +X (instead of Y axes), while the other foot was controlled by -X (the opposite direction). I am going to try a different approach this time - maybe just using FK for the few frames in which the arm rotates from horizontal position to face the floor.


• A roll attribute was missing from my reverse foot lock mechanism - for every step I had to animate both the heel control joint and the fingers control joint. I'm going to add a roll attribute to the foot control so I can rotate the foot in both directions using an expression.


• The pole vector of the ankles IK should be constrained to another control, otherwise it's very difficult to animate. I didn't animate the pole vectors at all for that reason, simply because it wasn't accessible. I don't know whether I could use the pole vectors to make the animation better on this scene but I'm sure it will help in the following scenes.


• One of the small details that bugged me was that the foot controls were underground most of the time - meaning hidden by the floor. I was still able to select them since I knew where they were, but I think I will raise them to be a little above the foot for better control.

So off I go to fix the rig, and continue working faster and better on the next scene :)