You know, that thing where...

Yesterday I did that thing where I start and finish a short video project within one day. This is kind of for a school project. It was basically a proof of concept, showing that I can animate character designs based off of a single still Photoshop file. I basically isolated the parts of the character that I wanted to animate from the Photoshop file, and then mapped them onto identically shaped flat-planes, which I rigged up to be animated with an armature. All of this was done in Blender.

I have to say... I wish that I could find it in me to work as hard and as fast on The Battle for Axis Mundi as I did on this. I really just got down to business... even though it took, literally, all night. I finished rendering out the final animation at 7:55am, just in time to leave and go learn about Photoshop. Hahaha. When I describe it like that, I realize how much I love being in college and studying Digital Media.

A scene from The Battle for Axis Mundi

So... I decided that I would upload something kind of out of the ordinary for me. It is a preview of a scene from The Battle for Axis Mundi. I don't generally like to upload "previews" of my stuff before it is done, but I felt like I should make an exception in this case. Firstly, because this preview is not using footage from the actual film. Secondly, because it has been so darn long since I started this thing, I feel like people should get to see some indication of what is in the works. The animatic takes place about 4 minutes and 30 seconds into the film. That's how long it is right now. So basically over the next few weeks I will be working on making the very scene that you see in this video. But in RCT3 with fully animated 3D characters. So go ahead and take a look at what I am talking about, and then I'll give you some more tidbits:

So yeah. Kinda basic, but you get the idea of stuff happening. You also may recognize my slightly Derpy drawings as the Warrior of Light. You also may see a creepy spiky dude that you have never seen or heard of before. I guess I am kind of revealing him here. Oh well. I don't think that it matters that much that it stay a secret. Since I have shown you a 3D model of the Warrior of Light, I might as well show you a picture of what this bad guy, who's name happens to be "Evil," looks like in the game:

Now you are officially kinda-half spoiled. But not really. Because the point of this film is the animation. And I haven't made anything close to these animations before. So hopefully you don't feel too spoiled. Given that this is the biggest update for Axis Mundi so far, I kind of feel a little let down. I was expecting to be like OOHHHH YEAAAHHHH CHECK IT OUT ITS AN ACTUAL VIDEO ABOUT THE BATTLE FOR AXIS MUNDI WOOP WOOP!!!1!!1!!

Maybe I'll feel a little more excited once you guys start talking about it. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Storyboards and Photoshop

Unfortunately I have not actually filmed anymore for Axis Mundi since the last post, but I did work on it in a sort of round-about way. I had an assignment to sketch a 16 panel story board, so I sketched the scene that I am about to animate.

I also finished a project for one of my classes recently, where I had to replicate a photograph using collage techniques. There was an option to do it in photoshop, so that's what I did. The images on the left are my replications, and the ones on the right are the original pictures.

Notice the trees? They're from Crysis 2.

This second one is purely Google images.

There you go. That's what I've been up to lately. As usual, I need to get back on track and work more on Axis Mundi more often.

Vector Drawings

So I finally finished the drawings of the robot for my class. The lines were drawn in Illustrator and everything was colored in in Photoshop.

Still not more than superficial progress on Axis Mundi. I need to remember that post I made a while ago. There's no reason why I can't be working on The Battle for Axis Mundi as much as I can during my free time.