Dragon takes to flight.

Dragon takes to flight.

I thought I'd share this WIP. I may go back over the rigging as it is a little clumsy at the moment - most notably I don't like how the tail deforms.

Maya Head

I've been reading the excelent 'Stop Staring' book by Jason Osipa and learning how to create a high poly face with good edge flow. This is my progress so far. I coloured and created bump and specular maps using Mudbox.

Character set disaster.

After hours of rigging weight painting and so on, I now discover that the rigging completely messes up once I attempt to put all the controllers into a character set. This is the sortof frustrating problem that you can spend hours alone struggling to find a solution, whilst if you were in a studio with other animators, someone would probably already have the answer.

Skinned and rigged.

Maya Dragon progress.

A sneak peek at my new maya dragon. The texturing was done in Zbrush. I used the ambient map to create aspecularity map in Photoshop. The eyes give him a Godzilla vibe I think.

A more traditional dragon design in Zbrush.

Zbrush concept sculpture for my next animation.

Patrick Jones 3d Animation Reel 2011

My animation process blog.

The following posts shall document some of the process I went through to create my epic 3 minute final animation film- 'The Alchemist'!

Here is the wife. The left illustrates the low topology of the mesh. The right shows my first pass at texturing her. I would latter create a tattered rag texturefor her dress to make her look even more poverty stricken. Note how she appears extremely gaunt whilst the alchemist is fairly plump. I wonder who scoffs the food in this household?

Here is the Alchemist fully textured with stylish accessories.

I then attached the head to a low poly body. In hindsight I would have added a couple more edge loops to the body and arms as the low poly mesh resulted in some unsightly deformations whilst animating. I would solve these through ad hoc weight painting. The reason I went with such a low polygon count was to ensure I could work on my home computer without it crashing.

The Basic face mesh

I used the same base mesh as a starting point for all my characters as it had a good edge flow. This also saved a lot of time as I didn't have to create three faces from scratch.

The First Animatic

Inspiration

Out of all the paintings in the National Gallery, An Alchemist by Adraen van Ostade inspired me the most. Innitially drawn to the visual style which was reminiscent of two of my favourite artists - Heironymous Bosch and Brugel, I was further intrigued by the narrative within the painting and in particular the family dynamic. What kind of man was this alchemist to put his family into poverty while he spent his time and welath trying to turn base metal into gold? Was he insane? Imagine if his pursuit was not so foolish, what if he succeeded ? What then, how would this sudden wealth effect him and his family?