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simple animation test

This video’s a few years old. I was try­ing to doc­u­ment my meth­ods for sculpt­ing a char­ac­ter head in ZBrush.

The ani­ma­tion was pro­duced by just export­ing the work in progress at var­i­ous phas­es, and using the result­ing mesh­es as morph tar­gets in 3D stu­dio max.

The music is… well, it’s some­thing I should prob­a­bly fin­ish writ­ing some­day. But I only had a few sec­onds to fill, so there we are.

Every part of this is some­thing I’d do dif­fer­ent­ly today. The advance­ments in soft­ware have been crazy!

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Idea Ship

I made this image as a Christ­mas present for artist and activist Phil Yeh, who cre­at­ed and owns the Winged Tiger and Patrick Rab­bit char­ac­ters pic­tured, and reserves all rights to them.

Phil’s work is about pro­mot­ing lit­er­a­cy and cre­ativ­i­ty, and I used this project to pull myself out of a cre­ative slump. It seemed a poet­ic fit.

If you haven’t read Winged Tiger Comics & Sto­ries, the scene depict­ed might not make a lot of sense to you. Patrick Rab­bit is a car­toon­ist with writ­ers block, and the Winged Tiger is using its mag­ic to drag Patrick all over the uni­verse to ask artists where they get their ideas. Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, the answers come from Phil per­son­al­ly inter­view­ing those artists, and the comic’s art­work incor­po­rates sketch­es that they give him. It’s an inspir­ing com­mu­ni­ty effort, as well as a tech­ni­cal­ly daunt­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion. To read more about or pur­chase Phil’s books, vis­it wingedtiger.com.

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Rejected: 50 Years of Lefty’s Head

In 1998, Left­y’s Head released a con­cept album titled “50 Years of Left­y’s Head” (the con­cept being that some­one had sent their great­est hits com­pi­la­tion back from the future, to serve as a bea­con of hope for us stuck here in the less-enlight­ened present). The fol­low­ing images rep­re­sent vary­ing stages of devel­op­ment for the CD cover.

Here’s the first con­cept sketch I made:

My hard dri­ve died short­ly after cre­at­ing that last pic­ture, so I had to start over. I went a more comedic route this time.

This ulti­mate­ly proved to be the wrong direc­tion; por­tray­ing the band in a dis­turb­ing and unat­trac­tive light.

This is as far as I got with it before they asked me to stop.

They went with an oil paint­ing from a dif­fer­ent artist, depict­ing the band at their present age. And while that was prob­a­bly the right move, I do think it dark­ened their basic message.

If ambas­sadors from the future are still con­cerned with the appear­ance of youth, how far could we have pro­gressed, really?