Aerodynamos Teaser

So here's the latest update on my animation thesis Aerodynamos! I finished enough footage to compile into a short teaser for the animation. Here are also some of the updated concept designs including 3d projections and characters. From now until graduation, I will be focusing on the designs for the project instead of production so that I can make improvements on my portfolio. After graduation I'm planning to finish up the rest of the animation so stay tuned!

Self Portrait and Color Study

I've been working on a lot of thesis lately and it was really nice to do something different and refreshing. Fist up is a self portrait I did for MICA senior party's poster. I had fun using a slightly more saturated pallet than my usual style. The second drawing is from a character design class I TA. For yesterday's in-class assignment we exchanged each student's characters and designed environments that are intended to complement the scene, character, and bring sense of narrative interaction. I participated in this assignment and drew a scene from Kate Guthrie's story about a protagonist who lost his memory and tries to put his fragmented memories together by using a psychological therapy machine that allows him to dive into a cyber world of his own mind. With this study, I focused on how to convey mood and tensions through color. I had a lot of fun choosing complementary colors and resolving compositional problems through color intensity and differences. I'll put up the thesis progress in the coming days!

Thesis - Shot 2

Here's my current progress on the thesis. I changed the storyboard a little bit and instead of having the camera do a long spinning descent from the top of the tower into the interior, I decided to just have side scroll to avoid having to deal with too much extra detail. Over all this shot took 11 individual paintings to complete along with a 3D set up. The 2nd shot of the thesis has been by far a big challenge for me because there were so many technical problems along the way. Although at first I thought that this technique was some kind of dream trick that allowed me to do anything I imagined, I soon realized it had limitations. In the beginning I planned to have Tiger's head in the shot and the camera would pan sideways across its head. But I realized that this was almost impractical due to the amount of time it would take me to model a surface for the projection and painting the tiger texture from multiple angles. The ears of the tiger became a big issue because for it to look fully projected as the camera slides across, I would need to break apart the model into smaller parts and draw textures for left side and the right side of the ears, not to mention there are two ears and a whole face to worry about. So the solution I came up with is to get rid of the head all together. Instead, I just had the tiger's body in the shot and thankfully that was manageable. Still, modeling a mock up of a donuts shape and then painting in two sets of textures from different angles was not as easy as I imagined it to be.

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Another thing I had trouble with is the discontinuous work flow. So far my workflow for projections have been 1) building a primary 3D set up from a sketch, 2) drawing in basic forms to fill the environment, 3) camera test, 4) painting in final details, 5) repeat 3-5 until everything is filled. This allows me to make sure each projections works properly but since I had to paint in everything by parts, keeping the color work together as a whole was a challenge. This shot took me almost 2 weeks and it probably took too long considering the amount of time I have left to finish this project. So far I would like to have at least 1 shot a week. I have around 23 shots total so I might be in a bit of trouble if I want to get this done by May. I'm just hoping that some shots wont take as long and that I would get faster. If worst comes worst, I may have to cut down a few shots and make a shorter animation. I hope I won't have to do that. Crossing fingers.

LAIKA works

Here are the links to the LAIKA commercial works I did over the summer. The clients include: Toys R Rus, Honda, and Orville Redenbucker. I was working as a concept artist making characters, environments, set designs, layouts, and colors. Unfortunately I cannot show the raw drawings I did at LAIKA but here are the final products!

LAIKA - Toys R Rus Big Book from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus EX from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus BCSE from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Honda Pilot from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbacher Adios Trans Fat from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbucker Whole Grain from William Niu on Vimeo.

Thesis - Panoramic Shot

Now that storyboarding and a whole bunch of pre-production designs for my thesis have been solidified, I can finally painting in finished backgrounds! It has been so long since I worked on anything finished so this was such a great feeling. This is a panoramic shot that is going to be the first establishing shot for the whole animation. I'm going to camera project this image to emphasize depth and see how it looks. Over the winter break I'm going to be working on more finished backgrounds in order to catch up on my thesis. Its going to be fun!

Thesis Progress

So here's my progress of the thesis so far. Instead of 20-30 sec animation as I initially planned, I will be extending the time to a minute long short animation about two rollerblade kids racing each other in a 3D city. As I have mentioned before, I will be using camera projection technique for the background city and then go over on top in 2D for the character animation. Here I have a primary animatics, camera projection test (for full rotation camera angles), shot study, and then character sheet. At this point I'm close to having all the pieces I need for start painting in the backgrounds which is going to be fun and finally doing something fully rendered. In the coming weeks, I'd like to have a more realized animatics as well as character sheets. I will be attending CTN expo this week and I'm super pumped!

Preparing for Thesis

For my senior thesis, I am planning to make an animated short which incorporates 2D painted background projected onto 3D space. I think this would be a great way to present my environmental paintings and after doing some quick experiments, I'm pretty exited for its potential. I did these to get the hang of the process. After some trial and error, I feel like I'm finally at the starting line. More to come for sure!