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:

Happy Halloween

During my copious spare time I made a Halloween card using Tumult Hype that uses HTML5, CSS, and Javascript to create an animation. I did all of the drawing on my iPad 3 using Procreate, then transferred them as .PSD files to my Dropbox account and exported the layers as separate PNG files. The load time is a little long, perhaps I over-reached.
The software allows for a lot more interactivity than I put into it. The only real 'easter eggs' are a mailto: link on the credits, the Play Again button and clicking on the mask reveals the intruders face. The next time I do one of these I'll concentrate more on the interactivity than the animation, and try to use more JPEGs than PNG files. I have this idea for a Thanksgiving themed arcade...
Since the load time was getting too long, I ditched the sound and went with captions and 'sound effect text' like in a comic. I'm not sure it was the best choice. Again, lesson learned.
I don't know how to host the HTML5 version of it here, so the link above will have to do. I was able to do a video screen capture of it and post that to Youtube, so I'll link to that here:

Anyway, have a Happy Halloween!

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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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.

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.