This is Stan he's a seven-year-old Monster, and he likes to rock 🤘
One of a few character design options I'm sketching out for a project, before picking one and taking it into 3D.
Lately this has been a way I like to work, doing a quick basic sketch to be able to really feel out the main shapes and personality, but leaving some design decisions until I get into 3D. In this case, for example, I decided to just focus on the overall shapes and leave decisions about the fur until I pick a final design to block it out in 3D.
#cutemonster #characterdesign #3danimation
The aesthetics of function. This excerpt from a recent project we completed shows how we often approach more technical and B2B products. While showing how the product features work, is paramount, it's never at the expense of making it look beautiful. This isn't just pretty for pretties sake, if the engineering and design of a product are remarkable, then how you show it needs to feel remarkable. The emotion reinforces the content.
#cg #mograph #3danimation #medicalanimation #medicaldevice #healthcaremarketing
A little WIP/test, experimenting with different ideas for a project around/inspired by organic plant growth. The final will be quite a bit different from this but wanted to share one of the early process steps I do which is maybe the CG equivalent to a sketch (a bit of look dev, a bit of play and exploration and a bit of testing out some ideas and technical approaches all in one).
Working in SideFX Houdini which is really great for simulating organic systems. The flower is using Danny Laursen's amazing free FLOPs tool.
A fun experiment based on my love of Sci-Fi using #Houdini and #Nuke One of my goals with this was to figure out getting a realistic shoulder rig feel for the camera, as well as playing with Axiom solver for making the dust storm.
One idea I also took from my illustration practice was trying to work in a really restrained palette and let the values do the heavy lifting.
#CG #SideFXHoudini #Sci-Fi #robots #3Danimation #mograph
Image from a little passion project I am working on, fulfilling a lifelong dream of making a sci-fi comic. It's a huge challenge because I don't really know how to draw, and I am teaching myself along the way, but every journey begins with the first step. Having so much fun working on it and learning an entirely new medium.
#comics #sci-fi #creativegoals
New web series between myself, Creative Director of Handmade Creative and Josh Usheroff co-founder of @blackboxmtl where we have short focused convos to tackle some of the issues that often come up in creating #animation and #marketing videos.
Watch and subscribe: /@Creative_Collaborators
This series is for anyone who wants to be a confident collaborator on video and animation projects including: #freelancers #studioowners #marketingdirectors #advertisingagencyproducers really anyone who's work touches creating video or animation projects for marketing.
Another little tease for Creative Collab. A series for creatives and marketers that want to be good, confident collaborators when making video and animation projects.
So what is this series exactly?
1. This series tackles best practices for collaborating on video and animation projects, dealing with questions that have come up repeatedly over the years.
2. It's short and focused. Roughly five-minute episodes on a single topic. Podcasts are great, but this short format is optimized for learning, giving you a few ideas you can put into practice.
3. Despite being short, each ep. is a convo between Handmade founder Noah Wohl and Black Box Productions founder @Josh Usheroff. There is no one right way to do things, and so we have different perspectives on the same issue and sometimes challenge each other's ideas. It's just as much about how we think through the issue as the solution arrived at.
For a while now, Josh and I have been having longer versions of these types of discussions every month as a way to learn from each other, challenge our thinking and avoid getting stuck in a rut. Hopefully, this series inspires you to seek out that kind of peer exchange for yourself, but until then, you are welcome to be a fly on the wall in ours.
#CreativeCollab #videomarketing #animation #teamwork
Excited to start rolling out some self initiated projects that were quietly in the works last year.
Our first that will drop this year is called Creative Collab (more info coming next week). As you can guess by the title, it's about a subject we are passionate about, creative collaboration, and it only made sense to make this a collaborative effort and so his project was done in collaboration with our friends @Black Box Productions
Follow, stay tuned etc. for more deets.
#CreativeCollab #Creativity #Video #Animation #TeamworkMakesTheDreamWork
Follow up on yesterday's post. I thought I'd share my initial sketch for the character side by side with my 3D render. You can see that there were some subtle adjustments to increase appeal. I felt the sketched hair in a pompadour looked a bit too cocky and grown up, and I wanted to give the hair a bit more of a mussed up look like a little kid.
Definitely, on larger projects we might do more refinement at the sketch stage and draw out proper turnarounds, but for smaller projects and personal work I always start with a sketch, which I like to refine to what, I feel, is 80-90% there and purposely leave things a bit loose to refine proportions and details in 3D.
I've always wanted to make my own Muppet/puppet. Maybe at some point I'll actually build one practically, but meanwhile I've been noodling at this little character in 3D.
Besides the fun of just building out the character, I've been using this project to R&D a full character pipeline, exclusively in Houdini. So going from modelling, through rigging and even rendering (using SideFx's newish Karma render engine). Hoping to post some animation tests in the future.
This project has also been a special collab with my daughter (7 years old) serving as art director. For the record, I managed to address all her notes, except she still thinks the hair is too messy (it was my first attempt using Houdini's groom system, pretty sure I can nail it on V2).
#mograph #characterdesign #puppet #muppet #CG #3Danimation #mascott #SideFXHoudini
#CreativeProcess Here's a page from my sketchbook as I work out the design for a Muppet style character, that I'm going to make in 3D.
I'm sharing some rough initial sketches that I use to work out ideas. One reason I want to do this, is I really wish I would have understood early in my career that you don't need to necessarily be that good of an illustrator to use drawing effectively to refine and communicate ideas.
This is the type of sketch I'd be more likely to share with team members than clients, so it feels oddly vulnerable to share this part of the process that never usually sees the light of day, even though almost every project I work on starts with some kind of sketching and thumb nailing (even if it's a simple peanut with fur, like this cheerful creature).
#creativeprocess #characterdesign #puppetry #mascots #CGI #mograph #3danimation
Some more process sharing. Here is the iteration that I did for before the color version I posted yesterday. This version was just trying to figure out the values and shadow shapes. Working in greyscale was a good way to just focus on solving a subset of design problems. I am not an illustrator, so the process is 50/50 R&D for a project and sharpening my fundamentals at the same time.
#WIP #Illustration #comics #motiondesign #artisaprocess
