flux

Wanna know how I made this toon shader? Read on…

Toon Shader Basics
If you know the basics of a toon shader in Maya, feel free to skip ahead to Building Moom’s Shader.
A simple toon shader in Maya is a surface shader fed by a ramp containing two colors: The fill and the outline. This ramp isn’t [...]

Here’s the counterpart to the prisoner run cycle I posted earlier.

Like that one, it’s got plenty of issues, but it was fun to animate as a quick study. It’s a heavy [...]

Here’s a run cycle I animated as a class demo. I’m teaching a Game Animation class this Fall, and I needed to brush up on Character Studio! Here’s what came out. It’s a 10-frame run at 30fps.

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Some folks have asked about the process behind the look of my recent scenes, the Bee Chase and the Stair Fall. I’m starting a series of posts to answer those questions. I’d like to start with the backgrounds, even though (as you’ll see from this post) they were created after the animation was done. I [...]

He loves flowers. Too bad he’s terrified of bees.
Another cartoon animation exercise. The focus of this one was to come up with a simple story and animate it to a musical beat. It started as an assignment during my last APT session with Keith Lango. Big thanks to him for the assignment, and for the [...]

Here it is! The cartoon test I’ve been finishing up. I did most of the animation during my last APT session with Keith, and then tweaked it afterwards. I also wanted to try a loose, rough style of rendering and backgrounds, to go with the animation style.

Nothing ground-breaking here in terms of animation, but doing [...]

A little over a year ago, the Scifi Channel commissioned our department (the animation department at the Art Institute of Washington) to produce a one minute short based around their “if” theme of promos. Here’s the result, created by a hand-picked group of students working in and outside of class. The preproduction was supervised by [...]

So I finally finished cleaning up the animations I made during Keith’s APT 5 session. It’s been a while since I finished that session, I know, but I first had to deal with all the things I had pushed back during the APT, and get them out of the way.
This is my attempt at a [...]

Woohoo! It’s been an intense but amazing four weeks of animating, in Keith’s APT program. I needed someone to push me and guide me, give me honest, expert feedback. And I got that and more. The man is an Animation Buddha!
Here’s the “Spanky” scene, all cleaned up. Like any shot, it’s never really done, I’m [...]