“Oh no! “Our table! It’s broken!”

Animation Progression - Blocking to Polish - "I'm Walking Here" (shot 1)

Here's a progression reel of the first shot of my "I'm Walking Here" clip. This is probably the only clip I fully animated straight ahead from start to finish, improvising each beat on the go.

Hospital - Personal Animation Test (2003)

This was a "Lipsync" exercise I did at home right after graduating and I still like it, not because it's well done but because it's super weird in its setting HAHAHA! Although this was an AHA moment for me where body mechanics clicked. It's on a small level but it still pushed me forward in a meaningful way. (the audio clip is from Jurassic Park)

His heeeaaad... - Personal Animation Test (2003)

Nowadays I would say "Don't use a famous audio clip!" but what did I know in 2003! Another old clip from school! I remember having a lot of fun tweaking the finger poses!

Ze Chair - Personal Animation Test (2002)

As my files get older and codecs are barely supported anymore I wanted to upload my old clips from my school time for posterity.

 This was a "Get out of the chair" assignment for my Maya 3 class in Fall 2002! Time flies!!

Who am I?

I don't even know what readers of this Blog know of me. I know my students know me pretty well if they've suffered through my classes and Q&As. :)

The first few clips on my Youtube channel will be introductory in nature for those who don't know me and the lectures will also start from the beginning.

In the meantime, here's a very brief into of who this JD guy is. :)

Hyper Light Drifter Fan Animation

After seeing the Kickstarter for Hyper Light Drifter (and loving everything about it) I couldn't resist and had to animate something related to it.

This is my fan clip:

There's also a Vimeo link and the Quicktime file.

The main inspiration was this picture:

And I wanted to incorporate this set, which also has the spiders, and the little puff clouds when he runs, all seen here:

The flash speed run is also really neat, which I tried to replicate as closely as possible:

This is technically only the first half of what I wanted to do, but now I'm not sure if I will continue. As always, finding the time is tricky and I kinda like how it ends now. I started with the continuation, which you can see at the end of the last shot:

Regarding the music, the Kickstarter says that Disasterpeace will be doing the music for it so I was trying to find a track of his that would fit tempo wise. The track I chose is "Prologue" from "Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar".

Other than, the Drifter is a modified Norman, the spiders are modified Spiderbots.

Animation was all done in Maya, using one day for modding and planing and one day for animation.

I think that's about it!

[added]

Regarding the cape: it's a separate piece of geometry that I skinned to a few joints and the movement is keyframed:

The skirt is another separate piece of geometry that I wrapped deformed around the thighs.

As for a playblast, it's what you see in the above animated gif. The lamberts are set with incandescence all the way up.