Tuesday, July 31, 2007

A little home cooking

Obviously I’ve been doing a lot of studying, thinking (and too much writing!) recently about exploring different visual and motion styles for CG. (Or rather more properly “visual and motion aesthetics“- thanks to Erik for the nomenclature help). Anyhow, just to show that yapping my trap isn’t my only area of activity- here’s a little test that I cooked up this weekend. Just a little something that was fun. Maybe different?

attitudeClickToPlay.jpg

I puttered around for about a day on it- most of that time spent trying exploring different ideas for bringing the background to play a role in accentuating the performance. I have an earlier version with a totally different method for making the background plate, but I abandoned it for being too complicated to set up. Simple is the watch word here. The character rig is a freebie rig I downloaded from HighEnd3d.com, not my own creation (Although I did apply some different shaders that I made to get a different, non-literal look for it). I expect when I start using my own rig (it’s almost done) that I’ll be able to push the animation technique a bit further with regard to deforming the shapes of the character in motion. Obviously this isn’t the end of my efforts, just a stumbling step along the path. I’m not trying to emulate any specific animation style or medium. Rather I’m trying to borrow flavors from all different kinds of sources, all rolled into a (hopefully tasty) visual recipe. That’s something that I believe that CG is uniquely positioned to do better than any other medium.

But the best part was that this was fun for me to make. Fun is the ingredient that all audiences can taste. I hope that part shows through at least.

OK, I’m gonna take break from typing for a while. Back to the kitchen!

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