EMERGENCY BLOG POST! Back to the Future WIP Animation

So for those of you who haven't noticed, I seem to always end up posting four blog posts a month. Well it's the last day of October and I just realized I had only posted three blog posts! Well at the moment, I'm at a friends house and I don't think I'll be home before midnight, so I almost didn't have a blog post tonight! Side note, the aforementioned friend is a pretty bad ass artist as well, so feel free to check out her work here! Anyways, I happened to have a WIP of an animation I started this summer but never finished! I thought it would be cool to see the earlier stages of an animation. I plan on finishing this one eventually, so this post is also serving as a way to make sure I get it done!

As always enjoy and Happy Halloween!

~Josh

Celestial Concept Art... Again!

Hey guys! I'm going to keep this blog post short and sweet. Later this week I'm posting some concept art that our team has done over on the Celestial Blog. So I thought I would post some more of my own! I'll have another blog post up soon with my second Animation assignment!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Star Wars Icon Poster Series!

So a few months ago I posted this poster series. Afterwards I decided I wanted to do something new, but I wasn't sure what. That is until my friend Phil sent me these super awesome silhouette posters of characters from Toy Story. I love love love posters like these, so I decided to do a similar series, using icon Star Wars characters from the original trilogy. I chose characters that were easy to classify under a single title, had a recognizable silhouette, and had some sort of iconic vehicle or location. I then chose iconic quotes that they said, and wrote it above the poster in Aurebesh. My favorite ones are Han Solo Boba Fett, and the R2-D2 and C-3PO ones. I'll let you decide though which ones you like!

As always, I hope you liked them! Leave a comment below with your favorite one!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Station!

So this week our very first animation of the year was due! As one of the lead animators on our team, I was really excited to get to work on this assignment. The point of this assignment was to test out our rigs. Right now we are using Proxy Rigs, which are basically super low poly rigs, without facial controls. We were allowed to do anything we wanted for the animation, the only requirement was that our character had to transverse across the plane in some form or another. I decided that I wanted to test out how our character, Gan, would create a planet. Since our character Gan is supposed to be slow and elegant, I decided to take some inspiration from Tai Chi.

Fun Fact: Tai Chi inspired water bending in Avatar the Last Airbender.

Despite a lot of the issues with the rig, I think I successfully achieved the look I was going for. I hope that this animation test can serve as a possible animation style later on in the film. Once we have the final rig, I plan on redoing this animation to fix some of the issues that I encountered.

Here's the animation! Click the link to see the full resolution video (Blogger compresses it way too much below)

Recently, my friends Chelsea and Nick started Animation Mentor. Their first assignment was to take different poses and then pose a character so that it was doing the same pose. As I hope to do Animation Mentor next year, I decided to get a head start and work on the assignment on my own. Thanks to Nick for the first two poses!

I'm really happy with how these turned out! I definitely could push a few of the poses further, but for a first attempt, I'm quite happy with it!

As always enjoy!

~Josh