Quick sketch blabla

Possibly for graduation project? The fast one :3

Face evaluation

Well, the face I was working on seemed to have alot of problems. With the help of the kind people at Zbrushcentral and a pair of fresh eyes I managed to spot, and hopefully fix, quite a few. This isn't final, and I'm not sure if it's at all an improvement :3

Started on the torso

It's supposed to be leather armour... :3

Worked on it some more

Added some skin detailing and couldn't resist trying out a moustache. Hair is not final of course ;D

Free time sculpting

Practicing :3 Comments and critique welcome.

And some more...

There we go.

Making way

Well, we've all been lured around by schoolprojects... not much to show for unfortunately. I made these in my free time.

Showreel Insanity

And here's mine, as promised!



Download Quicktime versions:

Sorenson codec:
Showreel Gijs van Kooten 2009 (96.5 mb) (.mov)

H.264 codec:
Showreel Gijs van Kooten 2009 (97 mb) (.mov)

Streaming:
Showreel Gijs van Kooten 2009 (youtube)
Showreel Gijs van Kooten 2009 (vimeo)

Is that a head?

Yes it is. It damn well is. It's actually the robot's head! Which I modelled! Tom did the texturing, as always. This is just a turntable I rendere dout for my demo reel. I WOULD TOTALLY POST MY DEMO REEL, but I still have TWO unrendered shots in it due to a multitude of problems. I'm actually rendering out one of them right now using a plug in that allows you to batch render straight from your renderview in maya. Mayabatch.exe has forsaken me once more!




So, hopefully I can show you tomorrow or the day after my full resolution demo reel that also features this shot AND a rendered walk cycle of the total robot! Fancy.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

CAN YOU FEEL THE BASS?

I sure can't! Hence we have Tim de Man!

Yes yes, a very old friend of mine from elementary school. While I was painting funky pictures on my computer screen, he went ahead and became a musician! Isn't that neat? Since he's interested in making music for film, and we're interested in making films with music in them, it seemed like a very logical choice! Although logic, to me, is a weird thing. As 1+1=2, is classified as being logical. So, if 1+1 would equal 3... Then you'd have more logic...?

Regardless, Tim does alot of funky stuff which you check out here and here. He even made a few samples that he thought would go nice with our mood and story. We picked one, but I won't post it yet. Hur hur. He's gonna match it to our film as soon as we have a final final final editing. Which should be in two weeks. Hopefully sooner.

It's gonna be awesome =3

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

An end of things!

Soooo, long time no see from me. So here a PERSONAL update! The reason for the lack of updates has been because of a lot of things. Render issues, me not working for like two weeks because I've been skateboarding like all Hell (broke up with my girlfriend of 2,5 years, so I gotta do something, right?), production being kind of slooooooooooow. But, the deadline is in two weeks! And we're never gonna make it!

The deal is this: in two weeks, we will have the entire short animated, and 1/3 of it rendered. This will be enough to get our grades in school, and we'll complete the film after that. AS FOR THIS FINAL EFFORT: the entirety of the Steamteam (hopefully!) will come to my house once more next week, AND BY GOD, WE WILL ANIMATE! WE WILL KEY THOSE FRAMES, AND COMP THOSE SEQUENCES! WE WILL SMASH KEYBOARDS, CONTROL Z OBSESSIVELY, INCREMENTAL SAVE FEVERISHLY, AND MOST OF ALL,

WE WILL FINISH THIS SHORT AND NOT SLEEP.

In fact, even Roy might come along to discuss some MOVIE stuff I can't talk about yet. Well, I can, but it's not certain that we're gonna do it. But if we will. Oh boy. Big screen coming up, babies. Dutch big screen. But still. Big screen.

Rawr.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

What's the matter with them ROBOTICZ?

Hey guys, little updates lately! There's a reason for this! We just had our MID-PRODUCTION ASSESSMENT, which means our first 8 (almost 9 now!) weeks are spent, and we have just 8 (well, more like 7 almost...) weeks left!

But of course we have other classes in school too that needed adressing, so we all had a very, very hectic week and are now trying to get back up to working full speed again! TO RECAP:

• -The father and daughter are completely finished.
• -René is animating the first shots!
• -The set is completely done, and Tom is THIS |<---->| close to figuring out all the render issues
• -The money shot matte painting that will be our opening shot is NEIGH COMPLETION
• -The robot is nearly finished!
• -We should really make a thread on CGsociety?

Anyway, here's what I'm gonna do right now! And what will finish the robot, even!

1. Script all the machinery
2. Finish rigging the two remaining arms (why do we have FOUR?!)
3. Make some DRIVEN KEYS for the lens on his face
4. Make the needle system which you don't know about yet =3
5. Figure out how to implant Tom's wonderful image sequences
6. Fix the scale on the Global Controller I've made (damned parent constrains :D)
7. Look for them horrible weightpaint errors that are bound to be hiding somewhere
8. Send it to classmates for CRASH TESTAN!

Well, I hope to have most of this done by tonight (upto point 5) and the rest by tomorrow. Expect more then!

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Final Look

Hi,
We want to have a good image that reperesents the final look we are going for in this animation. We we decided to create a Wallpaper, Gijs posed his robot and Rene posed both mine and his.
I've been trying out some rendering and compositing stuff for a lil while now, and it all came down to this...
I rendered the scene with the default set lighting, so no additional lighting for the characters.
Here you can see 2 ugly "beauty"layers painted toghether, using the ambiant occlusion, reflection, speculars an the luminance depth I created the final image.. This just to illustrate how much work I plan to do in compositing. I still gotta figure some things out, but I hope it'll turn out awesome!
Here's the final Wallpaper!

Some burshan' updates

Soooo, I've been working on the organics of the robot. I just finished off the modeling for the body that will be textured tomorrow by Tom (which will involve the final layer of detail). Tom has been doing quite the job with the face I modeled earlier. So please ignore these (in comparison) quite shoddy Maya screengrabs, but hereeee it is! I also modeled the robotic parts for the head you can see, but not yet for the body.

Check HERE for a turntable of the finished head, and HERE of the organic part of the body and how it all fits together. Tom will probably post tomorrow with a textured version of it and it won't be long then until this whole thing is finished.

ALSO, AS OF NOW RENÉ IS ANIMATING THE FIRST SHOTS. HOPEFULLY WE CAN SHOW SOMETHING SOON.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Sleeping is giving in.

So, late night update here. Tom and René went to their own homes for the night, so I've got the kingdom to myself. And by kingdom I mean a bad-ass quad-core rig with a 24 inch monitor. And by that, I mean TWO of them.

That's right, bitches.

Anyway, I continued working on the robot's face and this is where I'm at now. I really can't stop being amazed at Maya's high-quality rendering in the viewport, this really is just a screengrab pasted in paint!

Anyway, here's a turntable of it, hope to show you the final model tomorrow, and I'll be texturing it (with Tom's helping hands!) either Friday or Saturday!

GOOD NIGHT!

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Did you say, RABAHT?

Hey guys, we's all workin' real hard he'e to deliver sum'o'dem UPDAYTZ.

AND, AS DAWN APPROACHES, I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON THE ORGANIX OF THE ROBOT. Here a quick preview of it, far from finished! I EVEN INCLUDE A SMALL TABLE OF TURNS.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Steaman'

Steamteam has partially relocated to Gijs' house for the week! It's our ONE, FREE week before the mid-production assessment of the film. Because Gijs' house is naught but a broken-down cottage, we had to be creative since the lights don't work. Hence our newly-made GHETTO LIGHT SETUP.

RAWWWWWR.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

More robotics

Hey guys, update as promised! Got some robot stuff going on! The geometry is coming together nicely, and I already started rigging some, otherwise I'm just gonna lose track of everything. So, this is what I have geometry wise, clicky for a small turn around.

Please note that the leg is alot less stupid-looking with its normal maps showing (yes for high quality preview). The normal map is probably too low resolution still, and the leg needs more detailing anyway. But I'll have a look at it next week. Point is, that most of what's on display here is already rigged and good to go! Even though there's still so much to be done, being; the organic upper body, one robotic arm at his pelvis, one organic arm at his pelvis, and likewise for his torso. And, of course, his head.

So, what are some interesting features? Well, last week I showed you how I control them cogs. Tom even made a fancy render test with it. Anyway, there's lots more cogs in now, so that rotation speed controller had its attributes doubled. I also made some stuff that moves according to how the rest of the body moves. It's kind of hard to see, but in this quick test you can see a machine on the right side of its pelvis moving according to the rotation of his backjoints. It's not easy to see because of the sucky quality, the fact you can't see his body, and the fact that it's shoddy animation, but still!

Occlusion render of some of the geometry. As you can see it still has alot of loose ends :)

This brings me to the trash on his back, this is animated by a controller on the ground. I found it necessary to avoid dynamics again, so I initially aim constrained all the 'scrap'-objects on his back to said controller. It worked fine, but everything moved so uniformally, and that I didn't like. So now, instead, you just animate the large bag of cogs, flip a switch on the controller, and bang, all the stuff moves around, each with a different delay and rotational offset!

Well, anyway, that's it for now, I gotta get to working on this thing again. When it's all finished and complete, I will write a detailed post explaining the rig and its scripts (which already takes up 5 whole pages on letter size 12!).

So, see ya :D

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Daddy's got a brand new rig

Well, Tom's father character reached a nice endpoint when he came to me for the rigging. I truly enjoy rigging, but time's pressing in this project. Since the father doesn't do much (sorry for the spoiler!) we would go for a pretty limited rig. Kudoes to Tom for creating such a solid model, I had no problems with it, not even with weightpainting!

So, it's just your basic rig, got a reversed footlock, pole vector constrains at the knees and elbows (no FK-, IKswitch, isn't necessary for this one), we got ye olde blendshapes, and ehh, a soft eyelid movement thingy!

We didn't need a complete facial rig for the father, hence we decided to go for just blendshapes. The girl rig does have a complete curve rigged face as she plays a bigger part. We hope that this will do just fine for him, though. And yes, 'father' in Dutch is actually 'vader'.

For the hand we wanted the ease of just having two attributes for 'fist' and 'grab'. But we also wanted the control to change finger positioning slightly for the extra feel, and so that we don't get stuck with our damned predefined stuff. So I just rigged up controls for all the fingers and used driven keys for them two attributes, easy stuff. I reckon that's where all the 'blendWeighted' nodes come from. I need to do some research on that one...

One thing I hadn't done before though, was the soft eyelid movement. Initially, when I heard of it, I tried scripting it. Just duplicating the eyejoint and have it take over the original joint's rotational values *0.1 (or /10, whatever you find more pleasing in your script). But, my axis seemed all a mess. I tried recreating the joint and freeze transforming, deleting history, bla bla bla. Didn't work, at one point, the newly created eyeLidJoint would just totally flip and go from 0 to -360 and shit like that. I think I spent a few hours trying to fix it with no luck. So, I just did it a little less inconspicuous. I just put another join after the original eyeJoint, and just slightly weightpainted it on the eyelids. Works wonders!

Like I said, the rig itself is quite limited. The character doesn't do an awful lot of stunts, we don't have much time for this project, and what we're planning on having with it in the scene is quite heavy already. Hence we didn't go for corrective blendshapes either. His arms and legs are both thin, so it work out well enough, without using blendshapes or influence objects. For the end of the coat, I tried some dynamics. I had worked with nCloth before on my motion capture short, so I knew my way around it and I had it quickly set up. But still, we wanted to avoid dynamics as it is just another production pass that's just waiting to fuck us over time-wise. Although the nCloth test was a relative success, I had a shot at just weightpainting it, and it's working great for what we need. Proof of concept, bitches.

Overall, a well-done model, and the rig was fun and relatively easy to build, since there weren't too many new gizmos. The robot is a completely different story, I'm working hard on it already, but it's not going as fast as I would like it to go (durr!). BUT THERE WILL BE A ROBOT UPDATE TOMORROW.

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)

Some set work

Well, the chores were easily divided when we started on this project. I would do the robobt (who would only show up from about halfway into the film), René would be making the girl, Tom the father, and Job would be doing all matte paintings. Which is all very great, until someone had to stand up and make the damned set; a steampunk-esque street. Hmm. Since the robot didn't have top-priority, I rose to the challenge! I figured there wouldn't be time to build alot of unique houses, but that was alright, we wanted the set to be impersonal anyway. So I figured like this; I would take a cube, 10 by 10 by 10, use stanard UVs, make a dozen different textures that tile on all sides, and voilà, we have building blocks to build a street with!

The interesting part to note here was the fact that it was figuring out HOW to do this, took more time than actually doing it. Which has never happened before with us. But hey, you gotta learn, right?

Once I had made some textures, I made a few stepped gables (yes, we're very Dutch) that would fit onto them, UVed in a way so they could use the same textures and still fit. This would allow me to duplicate some blocks, put one of the gables on it, scale and move it around, and be done with it! INSTA HOMES. I made the entire street like this, meanwhile Tom had made some cool windows, doors and sidewalk-thingies, and I put them all over the place quickly filling the street.

render by Tom

Tom took over from here, working out the lighting and further placement of the props modeled by Job. Tom was by far the guy for this as his understanding of shading, rendering and compositing greatly exceeds ours. Keep an eye out on his future posts to see what he made of the final set :)

-Gijs щ(◕‿‿◕щ)