Team Fortress Madness

With my graduation date drawing ever closer, I've turned to commissions in order to make a bit more money whilst I look for a job, now that I don't have a loan to fall back on. Along with my regular commissions, I'm now taking TF2 loadout commissions, since people seem to love seeing their customisations drawn. 

The above drawing is my Scout, and I drew him out as an example of one of the types of pictures I'd be able to offer.

I also drew some icon examples, using my Pyro and my brother's Soldier. We're both now using them as our Steam icons. :P

He's A Large Ham, v.2

I decided to do something a little different to my usual warm-up doodlings, and decided to redo the shading on one of my older pieces instead, since it's been bugging me for a while now. I experimented with a new shading method while I was at it, which involved doing hard shading and then blending parts with the water tool in SAI, and I like this version a lot better than the old one.

Also doodled Ivan and Percy wearing shutter shades whilst being pink because... because? I'm not really sure. They were fun to draw, though.

Aaaand here we have a Burstman, also making use of the shading method mentioned earlier. Poor Burst isn't a terribly popular Robot Master and he's from a rather unpopular instalment in the series, but I think he's adorable.

Robots, Robots Everywhere

I've found coming up with more humanoid appearances for Robot Masters to be pretty fun, so here are a few more doodles of that.

I've posted this guy before, but here's Hornet again. I'd decided I wasn't too happy with how angular his face was, so I softened it a bit and tweaked his colours a little, to make him look warmer and friendlier. I also finally got the hang of drawing that darn hair of his.

Next up is a design I came up with for this guy, who's known as Hard. The original design's pretty thick and rounded, so I kept that aspect in his body type, but while also keeping him looking as though he could probably punch through a wall if he wanted to.

Also, as a bonus, here are some recent silly warm-up doodlings I've done.

Here we have a strange giraffe creature.

A monster that likes to hide its true face...

I'm not sure what this is, but it's kind of cute.

Some sort of brown-y pink crocodile thing...

...aaaaand a creature I used to doodle a lot in my early teens, that I named the "lesser toed Nog" for some reason.

Finished Products

Whoops, been a while since I last posted. In that time my deadline's come and gone, so in this post I'll be sharing my finished animations.

First up, we have my final third year film, Three's A Crowd. The majority of my progress on this was documented by blog posts, but as the deadline began to draw near, I ended up just focusing on working on it, figuring that it'd make the parts I didn't post about more of a surprise.

I had a lot of fun working on this project, and I'm kind of surprised I managed to get so much done, considering I didn't have any second years to help me and so had to make all three character rigs and backgrounds and things by myself. I learned a lot of things in the process of making it and my animation skills improved too, which I feel becomes apparent the further into it it gets, considering I mostly worked on the scenes in chronological order. I also stepped out of my comfort zone quite a bit, especially with the backgrounds, which I don't normally have much confidence in doing.

From concept through to finished piece, this took about 3 months to produce. The programs I used were a combination of Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop for backgrounds and rigs, Toon Boom Harmony 10 for the animation, and Adobe After Effects and iMovie HD for editing.

Next up is the finished music video that my friends and I created for "The Flower Temple". While I only animated a few scenes, I contributed a lot of ideas while in the storyboarding process, and created several set pieces that could be used to put together backgrounds. I also created and rigged my character for the credits, made the end title, and helped with final editing.

The scenes that I did animate are both of the night sky scenes (shown in the video preview), my character's movements in the credits sequence, and the movements of the flowers in the end title. 

The aspect of this project that I enjoyed the most was the style we'd chosen to use, where everything looked home-made and practically was, since we'd bought lots of felt and buttons and things and used them to make various pieces in Photoshop. It was also interesting animating the hands, what with them being photos and all.

This isn't necessarily an animation per se, but a presentation I put together for the final part of my course, and it details the process I went through to develop and make my final film. I had to make it on my laptop using Adobe Premiere Pro, and it didn't quite export properly so some parts aren't on-screen for as long as they should be, but otherwise the important stuff's there.

Aaaand last but not least, here's my updated showreel, comprised of my best works from my three years of studying at Staffordshire University.

Sleeping Moon

I started working on one of the scenes for the Flower Temple animation today, now that we finally have everything put together and organised and things.

One of the scenes I was allocated to work on involved a night-sky scene being put together and Aaron singing on the moon, so I took a few flowers that the others made and painted over them to make them look like gold. 

Here's what I've managed to get done so far. I'm waiting on Faye to do the lipsyncing, and then she's going to hand Aaron's rig over to me and I'll put him on the moon and animate his movements.

Videos Galore

And now onto the animations I've done.

I had rushes today, so I took the scenes that I've managed to get done so far and put them all together, adding sounds and music and things as appropriate to give an idea of how it's all coming together. I've decided I need to tweak the second part of the opening scene a bit, most likely just moving Zombie and Biscuit further down the hill to give a better impression that they're travelling and that's why Biscuit is tired.

I also tested out Tlun's new rig by animating one of the scenes I'd been looking forwards to doing, where Tlun seems to land on Zombie. Obviously it's still a work-in-progress and I still need to draw up an actual background for it, and I'm going to change Tlun's reaction after he lands and realises he didn't get anything, but otherwise I like how it turned out.

I'd spent most of the day animating Zombie and Biscuit, so when I first started working on this scene, I got to a certain part and then decided to work on a scene involving Tlun instead, since I was getting a bit burnt out animating these two. This is what I had already done when I made the decision, but when I came to work on it the next day, I ended up changing Zombie's movements completely because I didn't like how they looked and his position would've just made the rest of the scene awkward to do.

While I was first working on the aforementioned scene, scrubbing back and forth over the timeline made it look as though Zombie was dancing, according to my friends. So I made this. (I hadn't extended the frames for all the pieces properly at that point, which is why things randomly vanish.) My friends suggested I should have Zombie doing that dance in the credits.

Rig Mishaps & Silly Expressions

I have a bunch of screenshots I took of things that amused me during the process of rigging/animating, so I figured I may as well give them their own post.

Before that, though, here's some before and after shots of Tlun's rig. His first one was too thin for my liking and made him look too much like a puppet, since I'd been having trouble trying to figure out how to do his arms. Animating three separate pieces proved to be awkward, so I updated them and poofed up his fluff a bit to make him look bigger and more intimidating. Now his arms are made up of two pieces, one of which makes use of replacements.

Some screenshots I took while in the process of getting Zombie and Biscuit into the same scene, and posing them so Biscuit was carrying him by the scruff of his neck. Zombie was initially huge when I imported him in, and then while trying to get Zombie's back to go behind Biscuit's mouth, I realised it kind of looked like she was eating him. After that, I noticed it looked like Zombie's horn was going through her eye. 

Some silly expressions from after Zombie's little bath. First he looks horrified, and then angry. Then weirdly smarmy for some reason.