Argos Animation Demo Reel 2014

As many of you know, I've been pushing the animation side of my business, and it's been growing rapidly. Here is a demo reel showing some of my projects:

Congregate Logo

I'm not sure why I didn't post this to the blog, as I did the original several months ago. This is a 3D model based on a drawing that I did for a mascot/logo for a local convention. The character's name is Greg 8. The eventual aim was to actually animate the character, though the mesh still needs some work.

Naturally, all the 3D work was done in Blender. The 2D work was done on my iPad using Adobe Ideas, and that was before I had a pressure sensitive pen to work with!

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New Whiteboard Video

I recently finished a Whiteboard Video for the Greensboro Partnership, for their State of the Community luncheon. It explains their efforts to transform the local economy through promoting entrepreneurship with various programs. This also marks the first big collaboration between Joel Bennett and myself since I bought Argos.

I'll let the video speak for itself:



That really is my big hairy mitt doing the drawing. I used Blender to do all the video editing and special effects. Sort of overkill, but it does speak to the versatility of the program.

I took HD (1080) video of myself drawing, with a bizarre contraption made out of leftover Octanorm in an office at the Nussbaum center, then sped it up. I have over 50GB of real-time video, which I will most likely be deleting. Sort of a shame, since that means the .blend file will be largely useless without them.

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Cadillac renderings

Here is a recent 3D model. They will eventually be greatly transformed to use in a story that I want to make about post-apolcalyptic rodents, but that's for another post.

These were made entirely in Blender, and the model was done entirely by me. The outdoor shot is from the warehouse parking lot where I store exhibit materials for clients. I modeled it in 3D and 'projected' the photo onto it to create the textures.

Happy New Year

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

This is a rendering I started for Christmas, but things got out of hand, time wise. Anyway, here it is, enjoy!

There are a few things I would want to change - this is the first time I've used subsurface scattering to any extent, or the tree generating script - but it looks pretty good, and it's already two weeks late. Maybe I'll use it in a card next year.

 

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City Street

I'm sloooowly moving forward with the rendering of the trike in an urban environment, but that means making an urban environment for it to be in. Ive had to learn a lot about texture mapping and baking to get the effects I want.

I've put far more detail into some of the objects in the scene than I'll ever need, especially the textures for things like the fire hydrant and mailbox. And far more actual modeling in the street lamp. And some of the object scales are off. And of course it needs more light, badly. It looks like twilight at the moment. I'll probably fix that using the compositor nodes when it's all said and done.

Still, it's been fun. Next step is to link this whole scene into the trike file to and add the motion and then render. And hopefully I'll find ways to re-use the elements so it won't feel like they were wasted effort.

Refinements

Working some more with Blender, refining the body of the trike for the rendering. Not sure about the background photo, I might have to go with something a little more urban.
The nice thing about Blender is it makes certain things very easy. Using the Solidify modifier to add thickness makes the entire process very simple.
Now if I can just figure out the Constraints for animation, I might just get somewhere.

Further with Blender

I've been using spare moments to build the skeleton of the trike model, and prepare it for animation. This is a screenshot of the left half of the rear suspension. I've just figured out how to animate the wires using Hooks, so they bend when things move.

As with a number of things in Blender, it seems simple in retrospect, but there are so many features in the program that it's easy to get lost.

If it weren't for the freely available tutorials online, I would have given up on the program long ago. Now my familiarity with it is starting to get to a usable level. I'm wondering if I should make a tutorial on the model, give back to the community. Well, let me finish the animation I'm working on first.

Test animation

This is actually a little old at this point, but I thought I'd throw this up there. I've mentioned before about playing around with Blender 3D, and this is a test animation I did to see if I could get a client interested. I had redrawn the logo that you can see on the spray can, and thought they might want to see it actually 'come to life'. So far no nibbles. You can see it a little larger by looking at it on YouTube.

Recent work

I've been trying my hand at Blender and this is a test render. It's a little dark and the model is far from finished. I'm trying also to figure out some rigging to make it an animatable model, to show the vehicle moving and banking in turns, doors opening, that sort of thing.

Texture wise there are a lot of missing details, obviously, so I need to decide when it's actually finished.

I've also uploaded an animation to YouTube, but I'm not sure why the colors look so weird.

(Edit 8-9-11) I've re-uploaded that animation, now the colors work.