Sneak Peak

So, technically, my academic is over :D. Never thought I'd see the end! And that means I have time to actually post more stuff on this blog! I know it's been gathering it's fair share of dust lately, but when you all see the copious amounts of work that will be posted in the coming weeks, you'll understand.

I'm posting this screenshot and character turn-arounds a sneak peak into the animated short that I've just spent nearly five months slaving over. Once I'm moderately satisfied with the piece, I'll post it in full (along with everything else that went into it) on the site. Hope you dig it! :)

isaac turnaround 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.
seb turn around 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

The mouse LIIIIIIVES!!

Yay! We finally got to character modeling! :) Seeing as we were heavily advised to keep our characters as managable as possible, I decided to go back to my old mouse designs from years ago. They're fairly simple, so I figured they'd work well. Seeing as they were the first characters I fully animated (in 2D), I figured they'd help me out in the same way in 3D. I just made a generic design that'll act as a blueprint for all the other mice (or 'Sarfo Rats' as one of my friends calls them) that I'll model later. A 'universal mouse', so to speak. We had two weeks to complete this project and there was a LOT that I learned.

These aren't textured, I just lit them all fancy-like...

I gained a whole new understanding of polygon-flow doing this...

By the way, the design for these mice is very much influenced by Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. Not to mention Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters.

3D Hover Craft (I think?)

So, my first semester of the Masters 3D animation course at Wits is over, and I figure I may as well post everything I've done in these past 5 or so months. The course has been EXTREMELY intense, which is why I haven't had any time for regular updates, so I'm just piling everything in one go.

Anyway, here's how I went about our first proper project: modeling. Although I wasn't exactly new to 3D modeling, this was still a real challenge, because it was one of the first pieces I did without the aid of a tutorial. Also, learning how to model in a new 3D package (Softimage XSI) posed it's own challenges. Anyway, as the first piece I finished without a tutorial, I'm pretty happy with it :)

We didn't have to texture it, but I wanted to make it feel a little more 'finished'.

These are some untextured versions of it.