Animation Mentor!

If you've read any of my past posts, like this one or this one, you'll know that I've been preparing for Animation Mentor. Well I'm super excited to announce, that along with my friend and fellow Celestial Animation Lead, Lindsey Jones will be starting Animation Mentor in January! That means prepare yourself for a TON of blogposts covering my various animation assignments!

My mentor this semester is Ray Ross, a senior Animator at Blue Sky! If you click his name you can check out his IMDB and if you scroll below you can see his demo reel!

RayRossReel from Raymond Ross on Vimeo.

As you can tell I'm SUPER excited for classes to begin!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Don't Blink!

For those of you who have followed my blog for awhile, you'll know that I started a series where I would do typographic images of the various baddies from Doctor Who. So far I've done ones of the Empty Child and the Daleks. A few months ago I rewatched Blink and decided to do one for the Weeping Angels.

Enjoy!

~Josh

Doctor Who Titles - WIP

Hey guys! So this post is another WIP post. If you remember I recently rigged and modeled a Tardis from Doctor Who. Well I'm planning on recreating the entire opening sequence! Right now I'm working on making the time vortex and figuring out the best way to animate the Tardis in it. Here's what I have so far!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Spoilers!

Hi guys! Sorry I've been lacking with blog posts lately. To be completely honest this past month has been very difficult for me, so I've had a hard time posting. I was trying to figure out what to post this time round, and stumbled upon a piece I did a few months ago that I completely forgot about. There was a poster circulating around online that hinted of River Song's return for the 8th season of Doctor Who. While unfortunately this turned out to be fake, it still inspired me to create a poster for one of my favorite characters!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Product Review - Surface Pro 3

I recently was given a Surface Pro 3 to try out, to see if it was a step up from your standard drawing tablet. During the course of the week I had the Surface, I did all of my drawing on it instead of my Huion (if you're interested in that review, it can be found here).

Let me begin with what you get in the Surface Box. You receive a power cord, a wireless pen, and the Surface itself. The Surface runs Windows 8 and does not come with a keyboard, however there is one sold separately. Out of the box I already ran into an issue. For some reason the Surface was already on! I'm not sure why this was the case as I was the first person to open the box, but I feel it should be mentioned. The next issue I ran into was with the pen, for some reason when I went to the bluetooth options on the Surface, it would detect the pen but not connect. The pen still worked, but seemed to lag a little bit. Later on I did get the pen to connect, but I still felt like it was slightly laggy.

The Surface Pro 3 Box

The Included Pen (note while it does have two hotkeys on the front, I was unable to map them to any Photoshop shortcuts)

The device itself was quite nice. It wasn't super heavy and the adjustable stand on the back was a nice feature. I also liked the power cord as it was similar to my Macbook cord, where it worked no matter what way you plugged it in. The device had a nice finish and the screen was quite clear.

The Surface front

The back of the Surface

The kickstand

The two programs I installed on the Surface were Adobe Photoshop CC and Mudbox 2015, however, I was only able to test Photoshop as for some reason Mudbox never opened. I was really disappointed by this, as I had hoped to try some sculpting on the Surface. With Photoshop, I tried to work without using a keyboard, as I didn't have the accessory. I found this incredibly frustrating as it slowed down my workflow immensely. Eventually I caved and plugged in an USB keyboard into the single USB port on the Surface, which sped up the process, but also made the device less portable.

Once I began to draw with the Surface, I was pleasantly surprised at the pressure sensitivity. It was nowhere as good as my Intuos tablet, but it was much better than I expected. I did have to press fairly hard for the device to work, so it made faint line work a bit difficult. I was able to do some decent sketching with the device, but overall I found that it took me longer to draw things as a result of the pressure issue.

An example of the pen pressure

All in all, the Surface pro is a nice tablet for general use I used it for some basic web browsing, and played some music off of it and had no issues. When it came to using this as a digital sketchbook however, I found the device was severely lacking. No matter what I did, I just couldn't seem to find a decent way to use this over using my Intuos or Huion. I enjoyed the tablet as a tablet, but I don't think I could recommend it to someone as an alternative to a traditional drawing tablet. As a tablet I would give it an 8/10, but as a drawing tablet I'd have to give it a 5/10.

Thanks for reading and enjoy!

 ~Josh

JoshCam - Free Maya Camera Download!

Last year while working on Celestial, I began to develop a camera rig to use for future productions of my own. The idea was to create a rig that took the features that I liked from other rigs and combine them into one super rig! After months of trial and error, I finally was able to complete the rig of my dreams! It is now available for download from Creative Crash, which is an AMAZING resource for anyone in the 3D field. For those of you who want to try out my rig, you can download it here!

JoshCam - Free Maya Camera Download! from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

I hope you get as much out of this rig as I have!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

30 Day Disney Challenge!

A little over a month ago, my friend Jess Minoso and myself came up with this idea for a drawing challenge, where everyday we would draw a different Disney character for 30 Days! It was a really fun challenge and I think it helped me out a lot as an artist. There is still a lot I need to do to improve, however, I've now been able to narrow down exactly what it is I need to work on! You can follow us both on Instagram to see all of the drawings, and if you decide to participate in the challenge yourself, make sure to tag us!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Piece Breakdown - The Tardis!

Now anyone who knows me knows how much I hate to model. I'm talking about 3D modeling by the way, not modeling for photos. Anyways, it's just been something I've never really been good at. Recently, with the help of my good friend James Bridges talking me through his process, I was able to model one of my favorite props from Doctor Who, the Tardis! Now this model still isn't 100% done. While the geometry is completed, I'm still working on the textures and materials. I plan on compositing this into a live action scene soon, so I can't wait to share it all with you! I'm very proud of this seeing as I was responsible for every stage of this project; modeling, UVing, texturing, rigging, lighting, and compositing. Below I've included a turntable of the model along with the texture images!

This is what the textures look like!

This was a quick render using an Image Based Lighting system. Thats why it appears as if the Tardis is floating

Tardis Turntable from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

The final turntable!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

A "Fantastic" Selfie! - Piece Breakdown

Happy Halloween everyone! In honor of the holiday spirit, I thought it would be fun to do another Photoshop breakdown of my latest photo, which is also my Halloween costume this year! As you are well aware by now, my favorite Doctor from Doctor Who is the 9th Doctor! I previously made some Psychic Paper so I decided to complete my first ever cosplay! I wanted to take a really cool portrait to feature the costume, and I thought it would be funny if the Doctor was taking a selfie on the TARDIS! Here's how I achieved that photo!

The first step was to take a photo! I set up my green screen behind me to make it easier to remove myself from the background later on! I also used three lights to get myself nicely lit so I would somewhat match the background image I picked. You can actually see my lighting setup here if you're interested!

The next step was to remove the original background and place in my new background image.

This is where I really began to make the photo blend in with the scene. I did some basic color correction, removed the green spill leftover on the jacket, and got rid of the shadow cast on my face by my Sonic Screwdriver.

Now I added some shadows to the side of me and did a final color grade of the image so it match the background.

The final step for this part of the composite, was adding a lens flare to the sonic and a slight vignette.

Now I took another photo of myself taking a selfie. I didn't have any fancy lighting set up for this one, but I did make sure I chose a lens that would leave my background nice and blurry. This was important for later

Next I cut myself out of the original photo and threw in a blurry version of my background from the other photo.

The next step was to piece the background and foreground together and do some color correction to the foreground to match the scene.

Next I added in the composite image from earlier, and recreated the iPhone camera interface. I also added a slight glow coming from the screen.

The final step was to add a flare behind the phone, integrate the screen, do a final color grade, and voilà! It was done!

I hope you guys liked this piece, I'm really really happy with it! Special thanks for my buddy Edward Boswell for giving me some great feedback while I working on the final composition!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you have a happy Halloween and as always, enjoy!

~Josh 

Freelance Fun! - A Very Steampunk Wedding

So recently I was hired to do a Steampunk inspired illustration for a wedding. The clients best friend was the bride, so she wanted a piece done of the bride and groom together in a clock tower with the time set at their wedding. I was provided with a few pictures of the couple, a description of their outfits and a layout sketch of what the piece should look like. From there I came up with this sketch, which I sent to the client.

After the client approved the sketch, the next step was to line the piece!

The next step was to add some color!

Finally, all that was left was to add some textures, effects, and color correction, which leaves us with the finished piece!

And thats it! As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Tutorial!

Recently I've been playing around with a new rig from meryproject.com

I was asked by a friend to do a tutorial on how I approach prop interaction and thought Mery would be a fun rig to use for that tutorial!

Animation Tutorial - Prop Interaction from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Freelance Fun - Light Flight II

In my last blog post I talked about a packaging design I did for a magic trick my good friend Jeff Prace came up with. Jeff recently asked me to do a 3D rendering of the packaging along with a render of a Bic lighter. Now anyone who knows me knows that modeling is NOT my strong suit, so I knew immediately that there was one guy who could help me out. As I've mentioned before, James Bridges is a beast when it comes to modeling and quickly obliged with this amazing lighter model! All that was left was to apply some shaders to make it look real, light the scene, and do a little bit of compositing. Once that was all done, we were left with this, the finished product!

Keep your eyes peeled for more awesome magic from Jeff soon and if you ever need a model done, hit up James!

As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh

Freelance Fun - Light Flight!

As many of you know, in addition to being an artist, I'm also a Magician! I'm really lucky to be friends with Jeff Prace, one of the smartest magicians I've ever met! Recently Jeff came up with a great magic trick where the logo from a borrowed Bic Lighter appears on his own lighter. Jeff asked me to help him come up with some packaging for this trick so he could give it out at a lecture he had in August.

Previously Jeff had me paint a concept art piece for him for a trick he's working on and he wanted another hand painted image for the packaging. I thought it might be interesting to see the evolution of the packaging from start to finish.

As you can see it went through several iterations before we arrived at the one Jeff liked the best! Sometimes it was as simple as changing a font, other times it was just moving something over a few pixels.

If you're interested in Jeff's magic, you can check it out at his site here!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

I have a store!

So I finally got myself a store! If you've ever wanted a print now is your chance! If there is something I don't have available that you would like, shoot me an e-mail at Josh@JustJoshinMagic.com

You can find the store here!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Initial Shaken Renders!

Since the last time I posted about Shaken, a lot has happened! As you can see we now have one of our characters fully modeled and textured! The model was done by the amazing James Bridges and the textures were done by the fantastic Ward Silverman. Additionally, we've begun to work on storyboards for the film. Now while I won't be able to show you all of them anytime soon, I may post a few TINY sneak peeks in the future! I'm super excited about this project and I can't wait to share it with you all!

As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh

Ronin of the Mushari Kingdom - Artist Interview!

I've decided to try something new on my blog and interview fellow artists. Now awhile back I did a blog post where I mentioned my friend JP. I met JP while at UCF and he is hands down one of the most talented artists I know! Recently he launched a Kickstarter for a comic book series he's trying to launch! I had the opportunity to catch up with JP and learn a little bit more about him and this project!

JP has been a freelance artist for over ten years, however during this time, all of his work was done for clients. He had his own ideas and stories but never really had a chance to develop them. Back in 2011 he did a fanart piece called "Ronin of the Mushroom Kingdom." It was 2AM and he had this idea of doing an Alternate Universe piece of some of the characters from Mario. He thought of different places that this universe could talk place in and looked at the characters to come up with ideas. Eventually, after looking at the character Toad, he thought of Asian rice hats and decided to make Toad's head into a hat. From there he decided to go with a ronin samurai. Now that he had his concept, he needed someone to be the enemy. Initially he pictured Bowser as a dragon, but then after looking at Bowser's design, he thought it would make some really cool samurai armor.

The original print that inspired the Kickstarter.

JP's work has won several awards and was even featured on Buzzfeeds "Top 30 Fan Art of 2013." One piece that was particularly popular was the "Ronin of the Mushroom Kingdom" piece. Wherever he went, people would ask him if it was going to spawn a game or a book. Since so many people were requesting this, he decided to make it a reality. At Megacon 2013, a writer friend, J Huff, saw how popular the print was and decided to work with JP on the comic. JP has the whole series planned out, hoping to lead to a graphic novel. The story is split into three acts, of three issues each. He hopes that this Kickstarter can make this project a reality, as this is not the only thing he has planned.

The first issue of the comic is a background issue, to set the tone of the world and establish the major players of the series. The second issue is where the story begins to pick up. The comic focuses on a character named "Toshi" who was inspired by Toad. Fans of the games will find many references and inside jokes throughout the series, as this is inspired by the world of Mario.

You can follow the project on Kickstarter or on it's official Facebook fan page.

JP, who is responsible for all of the art in the book, has provided some sneak peeks of the series!

To find out more about JP's work, you can find him on his Facebook, deviantArt, or Tumblr.

As always enjoy!

~Josh