Graduation yet again

Yes, it's graduation time again, only this time I'm the one graduating! Yay! I can't believe I'm finally done after 3 1/2 years I'm done and I couldn't be happier! I'm also a little scared as well! But that comes with the territory of leaving school. I'm leaving behind alot of good friends at that school and I'm going to miss hanging out and talking with them everyday. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do after school (besides try to find a job of course) I've never not been in school before so it's a bit intimidating. I'm graduating with some very good friends of mine as well and I'd love for you guys to have a look at their demo reels.

Here's my demo reel which quite frankly I'm sick of looking at lol but here it is anyway.
www.christascribbles.com



Chelsey Shirahata
www.chemishi.com


Emi! We made it! We're done! And we're gonna kick ass at portfolio show!


Richard Van Sant
www.richardvansant.com


richard, good show dude. You weren't even nervous about review were you? lol

Nicole Ellison
www.nicoleellison.com


We didn't talk all that much but I've always been a real big fan of your work. I was super happy to hear that you passed review. It always irked me when the teachers would get on your case about not doing 3D stuff. Illustration is just a tough as 3D. If you're good at something you'll find a job doing just that. And you're definitely a good illustrator, for sure.

Rub Henao
www.nightmaresherbert.com


We didn't talk all that much either, Ruby but you've got top notch work and it's worth showing off! So that's what I'm doing. Good stuff! I love that snowy town!



A bunch of awesome people graduated last semester as well that I didn't get to blog about so I'll quickly link their demos down below. They've also got some of the best reels I've seen come out of our school so definitely give these guys a look!

Sean Pennock
www.seanpennock.com


Maria Walker
www.dustylantern.com


Ryan Ching
www.chingconcepts.com


Mark Robertson
www.jabberwalky.squarespace.com



That's all folks! Please check out those websites and demo reels, too much work has gone in to them for them to be unseen.

Shadow of the Fallen King

Alright, so I meant to get to this sooner but I've just been a bit lazy.

Here is the final render of the short opening movie for the senior game Shadow of the Fallen King.



The story break down of the short is, Set, the red hippo guy, plans
to over throw Osiris, his brother and take over the throne. He hands him a scarab which is triggered to stab him and inject him with
poison. The poison weakens Osiris allowing Set to kick Osiris down the stairs and dismember him. He sends Osiris' body
across Egypt in separate canopic jars.

Our team was much smaller than a typical animation team. There is usually about 12-15 people on a team there were only 5 on our team
so we had alot of work to do.

So with that here's a list of everything I did specifically on the short:

the storyboard and animatic:



The animation for these scenes:






Designed the team logo as well as the animation for the opening logo:


All the color textures for both character's clothes and armor:










the anubis model and texture:



the knife model and texture:


the color texture for the scarab amulet:



the color texture for the pillars:



the color texture for the throne:


And contacted and commissioned the very talented voice actor Joshua Tomar


Thanks to my teammates!! Keron Arthur, Chelsea Shirahata, Alex Munguia, Korsyca Oya
and of course thanks to our very patient instructor Rocky Bright.

And that about sums it up. Members from my team I intend to keep working on this to finish up parts that we didn't get to during the actual class. I hope you guys liked the short :]

The Animation Workshop

So recently on Vimeo I stumbled on a really cool short called "The Backwater Gospel" and instantly fell in love with it. It's got the most impressive art direction that I've ever seen in a 3D short. A couple days later we watched the short in class and watched a few more videos by the team that created "The Backwater Gospel" and all of their shorts were plain amazing. They're called The Animation Workshop on vimeo and I highly recommend you go and check them out. They've got some awesome awesome work.

Here's some of my favorites from their channel:

The Backwater Gospel:
Alittle violent but it's well worth the watch trust me.






Mighty Antlers:Very very well done fight scene in this one




The Saga of Biorn: Love the simplistic style to this one





Captain Awesome: HILARIOUS

Finally finals!

Alright so the quarter ended yesterday for me but I didn't get to finish rendering my full video for one of my finals (it was taking ten minutes a frame and I had 265 frames D: ) and it made me really upset because it was turning out beautifully. My instructor saw what frames I had rendered already and said that they looked legit enough to give me a good grade which was fantastic because I was all kinds of worried about it.

So here are some of the frames that I had already rendered. When I get the chance I'll finish it off and put up the full video. This was for my 3D Visual effects class. (when the particles hit the grass flowers spring up)





My Character Animation final turned out better than I thought it would. There are still some things that I'd like to go back and fix though as per usual like the feet sliding around so much >:[ I'd also like to make it longer, but anyway here it is!


Here's the ref vid! I posted it before but I didn't feel like linking again so here you go!



And last my Anubis statue for Team Production is FINALLY done. I'm glad too because I was just getting sick of looking at that thing. I like how it turned out overall there are still anatomy issues that bug me but it'll do! Click on the image to see the details better!

Graduation 2!

Alright, so another graduation has come and gone and again I had a bunch of really close friends graduating this quarter whom I'll miss seeing everyday very much :< Here's their websites and their demo reels. Give them a look! :]



http://zsa2.com/

Zsazsalyn Deocampo 2010 Demo Reel from Zsazsalyn Deocampo on Vimeo.

ZsaZsa my bff! Major huge ginormous congrats on getting best in show! I was stoked when I heard the news. Good job! I'm definitely gonna miss talking to you everyday in school and setting up the orientation kits over the break will be less fun now D:


http://www.abpositivedesign.com/

Arnel, I'm so happy for you! And you finally got to leave AI lol You've always had really impressive design choices and compositions I'm so jealous! I'm actually really PO'd at whoever decided that you shouldn't get the blue ribbon this show. You totally deserved it, oh well. Keep drawing awesome, keep designing awesome, and just keep being awesome in general!

http://curtisperry.net/

C Perry Demo from Curtis Perry on Vimeo.

Curtis, man I think you've been at that school longer than all of us. I was thinking "Jeez, I don't think I'd ever be able to stick around as long as he has." But you did it and you came out with a sweet reel and now you can move on to other things! All that hard work paid off!


http://www.brandonlinconcepts.com/

Graduation demo reel Portfolio review corrections from Brandon Lin on Vimeo.

Hey Brandon, you're reel was kick ass you did some awesome work and it always made me super envious of your epic skillz! You winning best in show for Game Art was a no brainer you totally deserved it. I'm gonna be looking for your name in the credits of future games! Didn't know you as well as the three above but you still had really badass work so I couldn't help but give you some spot light as well :]

Well that's it! Again make sure to step by these guy's sites and watch their reels!

Mudbox sculpting

So here's a bit more progress on my Anubis statue. I'm adding some finer details in Mudbox which is a 3D sculpting program. It's alot of fun to use because it's more like actual sculpting and drawing than anything you might do in Maya or 3DS Max. However, I do wish I used Zbrush instead only because I've used Zbrush before and there are more people and teachers at my school who know their way around Zbrush better than Mudbox. And also I've never opened Mudbox before so that was a bit of silly move on my part lol Although moving and navigating around in it is identical to Maya and all the tools are there up front and pretty self explanatory so it wasn't too hard to pick up.

Here's a quick little vid detailing what Mudbox is all about:



I wanted to record the entire face sculpt but the computer was lagging too much from the recording so I had to cut it short to get more work done on the model. It's a little hard to tell what's going on as well :\ Anyway here it is! The vid is about 4 minutes long.

Anubis Mudbox sculpt from Christa Carpenter on Vimeo.

Here are some stills:

Anubis model progress

I've been working on a prop for my team production's animation. It's an Anubis statue, I'm not really proficient in modeling but there's only five of us on the team so we all have to do some modeling. I'm actually a bit surprised that it's overall turning out alright considering how horrendously bad I am at modeling. The backlegs have been giving me issues. I think I may just redo the legs. Hopefully it doesn't come to that though because we're on a pretty tight schedule. Anyway, here's a video of me working on the face it's about 7 minutes long along with some stills.

Anubis model progress from Christa Carpenter on Vimeo.

At this point, if my instructor tells me the backlegs are ok I think I'll take it into Zbrush or Mudbox to do some sculpting.

Light my fire

Another assignment for my 3D visual effects class. We had to do a fire simulation. I think I'll go back and tweek the flame a bit and add more lighting to the torch so it doesn't look so flat. I did this really quick in about 20 minutes or so because I didn't have alot of time the day I was working on it. I haven't turned it in yet so I've still got time to do some noodling about with it!



Also, for my final for my character animation class we have to animate a dance for our chosen rig. I'm gonna do this little 5 second clip I found on youtube. Fun times!

Master copy

My finished master copy of a clip from 9. It was an assignment. As always I'm not completely happy with it. I didn't do the rest of the hand movement at the end and he still looks really stiff but as for the overall finished product I'm ok with it.



Here's the clip I was supposed to copy.

Salesman Pete

My 3D visual effects teacher showed us this awesome animated short the other day. I thought I'd share it. I love the fact that it's so stylized and it has an almost seamless blend of 2D and 3D. Check it out.

Salesman Pete from Salesman Pete on Vimeo.

Dynamics

Been playing with nCloth and Dynamics in my 3D Visual Effects class. We've been working on a pirate ship for the pass week or two. We were to make the sails billow out and the ropes swing around as well as animate the ship bobbing back and forth here's what I have so far.



Here's also a test I did before working on the ropes for the ship. It's just a simple bridge breaking and swinging down.

Lipsync warm up

Just something we did as a refresher in lipsyncing in my Character Animation class today. About 45 minutes of work, it could use improving especially with the face overall, but since this was just a warm-up, it's ok as-is.

Crows concept art and Brainstorm Logos

I've decided that I want to do a short moving illustration animation for my demo reel. If you don't know what a moving illustration is well it's a bit hard to describe so instead I'll show you an example.



Pretty neat right? Well my little animation is going to be called "Crows" I've not yet settled on a definite story and for all I know the title might change as well but I can tell you that it will involve a little boy and a scarecrow. Here's some sketches I did today. I'm trying to get a style for it down. I think I want it alittle grittier and a bit more obscure as far as stylizing goes but we'll see.



I've also been working on some logos for my pre-production team. Our "studio" is called Brainstorm Animation which we all decided on last week. So here are some of logos I did. We'll find out tomorrow if one of these gets picked for the logo or if we go with another teammates design. They're alittle rough I'll probably go back and edit them digitally.




And finally just something I sketched while watching the movie "White Out"

The Monk and the Monkey

So I found this fantastic little animated short while browsing around YouTube today. It's called "The Monk and the Monkey" it's a very well put together short with some superb animation. The backgrounds for this are just breathtaking and it has a very heart warming story to it. It's definitely worth checking out!



Here are some stills!






And the scene breakdown

The Monk & The Monkey breakdown from Brendan Carroll on Vimeo.

Finals week and possible comic concepts.

Well finals week has finally come and gone, this was by far the toughest most mentally/physically straining quarter I've had while being in school. I had four project heavy classes and I couldn't put 100% into either of them because of time and program availability. Many sleepless nights, issues with money, Life in general got in the way as it usually does. I overall only came out with mediocre assignments that I'm not all too proud of and barely passed my classes by the skin of my teeth. Not too happy with myself at the moment.

I already put up my Materials and Lighting final a couple days ago so here's my Advanced 2D Animation final and my Intermediate 3D animation final.

Advanced 2D is far from being finished and it's very unpolished. I have to step away from it for now because at the moment I'm tired of looking at it.

Advanced 2D animation final from Christa Carpenter on Vimeo.

Intermediate 3D final actually didn't come out too bad but I still think it could be improved on.

Lipsync Final from Christa Carpenter on Vimeo.

In some lighter news a friend from school and I are planning a comic project. It was actually from a group project from this quarter and we liked the premise and the idea so we decided to take it further. Here's a few sketches I drew up, it was originally for the group presentation, these aren't final designs for the possible comic but something along the lines I was thinking for these two clans. Anyone from DA might think these look familiar to the Civil War Red vs. Blue idea but...that was purely coincidental. These guys aren't really fighting each other anyway.

Graduation

A couple good friends of mine are graduating this quarter and I just wanted to give them some spotlight here because their demo reels really rocked the portfolio reviews last week. One of them will definitely get best in show I'm not sure which one because that's really a close call but it will almost undoubtly be one of these badass folks. Check out their sites and demo reels if you get the chance you won't regret it.


Minapaulos.com

SMALL -HD from mina s paulos on Vimeo.

Mina! Who's gonna keep me from going AWOL on 3D stuff now? Whooo? I'm gonna miss you, go out there in the real world and kickass and take names.



Rickquemado.me

Demo Reel 2010 from Rick Quemado on Vimeo.

Hey Rick! You definitely showed the school that 3D animation was not the be all and end all of the animation industry. You have some really slick stop mo pieces. I am jealous!




One last epic artist who is graduating this quarter. I didn't know him too well I've really only passed him in the halls on occasion but his demo reel impressed the hell out of me and should really be seen by more people.
Alimination.com

Ali Minaian Website Demo Reel from Ali Minaian on Vimeo.

Suuuper impressive stuff. I think this is one of the best reels I've seen come out of the school in the Game Art program.


Again if you get the chance check out these guys' websites and demo reels. They really have some impressive work :]

Materials and Lighting

My final for Materials and lighting. I really really don't like how it came out, It's garbage ugh... I'm definitely NOT a modeling/texturing/lighting artist, but I spent alot of time on this and stressed for eleven weeks over this class so I figured I may as well put up what I worked on. The model itself is not mine it's from 3Drender.com. The texturing and lighting was done by me.

There's artifacting on the walls and table because I didn't have final gather turned up high enough X[

Kitchen from Christa Carpenter on Vimeo.

rough animation and sketches

Here are some scenes I've been working on recently. These scenes are about ready to be cleaned up and composited.



I have some minor tweaks to do for this one


This was the walk cycle I was working on in the previous post. Turns out I'm still going to have to revisit this one as the instructor wasn't quite happy with it. *sigh* I've redone this cycle about 5 times now...ugh



Here's a sketch I did while waiting at the doctors office the other day. Just a little something for my Sociology class for my group's Nation project (create a fictional nation and the people that populate it)
she's an engineer chick for a ocean nomad fleet.

And Robin because I felt like it.

walk cycle

Here's a walk cycle done for my Intermediate 3D class. It needs some work but here's what I got so far. Also, it's pretty fast I forgot to loop it, my bad.

15 second pre-production

So next quarter I have to do a 15 second long hand drawn animation for my Advanced traditional animation class. And since that takes up most of the time the second half of the intermediate 2D class was dedicated to the pre-production work for it. Like, storyboards, phoneme charts, expression sheets, character model sheets, etc. So here is some of the work I did for that.

Model sheets (excuse the crappy scan quality I was lazy and didn't want to rescan :\ )-




Expression sheets:




1 of 30 something Exposure sheets ( an x-sheet pretty much outlines everything your character does or says in a sequence frame by frame. So if a character raises his arm, you'll need to write that it starts on frame 7 and ends on frame 15 or something to that effect. It's tedious) -


1 of 4 phoneme charts for each speaking character ( A phoneme chart just gives you the mouth position of each sound in a word) -



Animatic (I'm aware that there is a strange jump at the beginning where the boy is walking down a hall and then there is an over the shoulder shot. He turns his head while he's walking down the hall. I just didn't draw it. It's in the X-sheets though)-



I did not choose the audio clip. It was given to me by the instructor and it's such a lamesauce audio clip I had the hardest time trying to figure out what to do with it :\

That's pretty much all for now. I did have another in-betweening project but I don't want to upload it for the simple fact that I'm not happy with it. Maybe I'll put up some more sketches later on in the week to balance out all the school work I've been posting.