Doing my own thing

Work has been absolutely mental the last few weeks but in a good way. I've had the chance to do some matchmove work on Man of Steel and Fast and Furious 6 which feels like a huge step forward. Whilst its not animating its the next step on the VFX ladder.

So I've finally had a day off to do my own thing and figured I'd make the most of this enthusiastic/exciting spell thats going on at the moment. Spent this afternoon trying to get a decent model sheet sorted to I can get into Maya and start modelling a base mesh, so rather than upload a whole bunch of pictures here is a gif... YAY

As per usual I got carried away with thinking about details and not making decisions but creating more options so here's the breakdown of some of the variations:

Not sure when I'll be back on this but I think I'm in a good place with it to crack on with some 3d stuff now :D

30 Days of Anatomy

Did another 30 Days of ... Calling this anatomy is a stretch but its people and limbs and stuff so that sort of constitutes anatomy right? the full gallery is here (day 30 will post tomorrow morning)

Not sure what's next. I've almost finished the matchmove training at work but could be a year before any spots appear so trying to fill the time with something more creative than making coffee and delivering post. Going back to a few old film ideas so at this point in time its literally anyone's guess as to what appears next.
Want a character similar to Polarity to appear again so I can animate something of interest to me and get a little reel together to pass on to the animation dept and see if I can get into the mentoring scheme...

Learning Python

I think it was maybe a year ago that I headed to Eurogamer and got a chance to talk to one of the lead artists at Creative Assembly and we spoke about how I could go about getting into animation and things I could learn to become a more useful member of the team. One of these was learning Python/Mel. So now I have a good 4 hours a day back and a nice quiet place to work I've made a start over at codecadamy .

Obviously I can't say 'this is amazing and it teaches you Python super fast' as I'm two days in and haven't applied any of the things its taught outside of the projects and materials it provides. That said it does have achievements and they are something I adore. Give me icons and badges and collectables and I will sit and plough through the material for as long a necessary. Well played codecadamy, well played. Another thing worth mentioning is that the Python course is still in it's Beta phase so there's not heaps of content but the bits and bobs I've done so far have been surprisingly easy to get my head around and often find myself testing bits out in the console on my desktop before committing to the one on their site.

So yeah with the points/achievements and streaks its a nice little incentive to keep at it and will hopefully give me a decent enough foundation to restart the 'Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner' I bought a while back.

The whole idea behind learning it is to help improve my rigging and writing tools that could speed up workflows etc. I had ideas for small bits and pieces that would speed things up when working at Rare but had no way to apply them. Moving house has been a genuine breath of fresh air and I think this is probably the most productive I've been outside of work and training ever.

It's been a while... to say the least

Well so its been pretty much a year since I updated this at all. It's been a *really really* busy one too. Rare was amazing and I'm chuffed to have my first animation credit under my belt, unfortunately there wasn't much junior animation work going around in the UK at the time so I ended up becoming a runner at Double Negative VFX and 9 months later I'm still happily playing in the vfx industry =)

Looking back at what I was doing a year ago is strange, a big kind of regret (?) is that the Polarity project fell through, she's all modelled and ready to go but no direction/scripts/concepts were ever sent my way so seeing as she's not 'my' character it's hit a dead end. Originally I'd removed all the work as I didn't want unfinished pieces up here but it was great fun and hopefully I can find a new writer/concept artist to work with in the future. So I think for now she'll stay and hopefully motivate me do get back into learning modelling (along with the endless list of other things I wanna try out).

Anywho why update now, after so long you ask... Well I've spent the last 9 months working at DNeg and spending 5 WHOLE HOURS a day commuting but at long long last I've saved up enough to move to London. I've got a good 3 hours a day back and a spare room to set my PC up in and get cracking once again. Its all started out with a quick 30 Day Drawing challenge where I've posted sketches daily to a new tumblr (the full set is here if anyone is interested). I think the idea behind this was to just get back into doing stuff again rather than staring out the window on the train ride home. Work is good but its not an artist's role yet, still running and training in matchmove out of hours. All new 3d artists go into matchmove before a specialism and its a challenge I've enjoyed so far.

For now I think I'll leave it at that and should have some more interesting things to upload in the future, there's definitely a few short ideas kicking around and I'm itching to start making something again!

Oh and for a possibly more regular update you can follow me here