Every month at Robot Entertainment the artists select and create art work within a theme. September’s theme was GI Joe.
Snake Eyes is the most bad ass of all the GI Joe! So if you want to see the rest of the art work I created: click on the image!
chazBot construction complete!
I’ve created this avatar for my work’s art blog Art Bot Central. Be sure to head over there and check out all of the awesome art work created by the talented artists at Robot Entertainment.
Enjoy!
I drew these pics of my dogs back in July.
Skylar is the first two drawings. My wife got her in 1999 when she was a year old. I didn’t meet Kathleen until mid-2005; so we always joke that Skylar is the teenager step-daughter because she never listens to me. Sky is a pharaoh-hound black lab mix.
Nico is my dog. I got her when she was about a year old in Dec. 2005. She’s the dominant one of the three that we have, but she’s also the easiest except when it comes to food. Then she’s a nightmare! When I was drawing her I promised that I’d give her some beef jerky. Nico is an italian greyhound chihuahua mix.
My wife and I have a third dog, Oliver. We got him in Feb. 2006. He can’t sit still for even five minutes. So I haven’t been able to render I drawing similar to the above of him. He just has too much energy to be still. (Perhaps I don’t draw fast enough.) Oliver is an italian greyhound rat terrier mix.
He just can’t get that meteor under control.
I’ll try to keep the posts more frequent. When I draw something, I’ll post it. In contrast to when I draw something, I don’t post. Go figure.
So… here’s a couple of drawings. Enjoy!
Facebook has this nifty little app called NetworkedBlogs that allows you to follow WordPress blogs, such as mine. It’s similar to how you can follow Blogger made blogs.
I added the NetworkedBlogs widget to the sidebar on the right. So, now you can see who and how many are following my blog. It’s exciting! Most importantly, at the bottom of the widget is the Follow this blog button. So, if you have a facebook account, you’re visiting my blog and like what you see, then feel free to follow this blog.
Here are some production drawings from my rough short NEXT.
The first set is me exploring Super’s extreme poses of the fight scene:
This next set is a combination of the Baddy rough model sheet and rough thumbnail and timing drawings.
And if you can tell from my last two posts, I was finally able to scan in some drawings.
There are two animations I want to focus on in this production diary. I want to highlight these because I took time to thumbnail and choreograph them; which is typically something I don’t have time to do at a video game studio. So, I really tried to get it right. Both of these are exploratory animations developed to have a loose visual guideline for what the fatality system would look like. Fatalities in Halo Wars happen when one awesome melee powerhouse, such as the Arbiter, kills one of the other infantry units.
The first exploratory animation I was tasked to do was the Arbiter taking out a squad of marines. I soon got the idea that I would portray the Arbiter as an unstoppable shocking killing machine. And the marines would be dumbfounded and unable to react because they were paralyzed by fear and the ferocity of the Arbiter.
I was going to do a lot of drawing/thumbnailing to plan out my shot and I wanted to make sure that I knew how to, at least, crudely and quickly draw the Arbiter. That’s where this first page comes in as it was my attempt to understand how to produce quick gestures that I could read.
The next set of drawings was a loose choreographing of the massacre. I had the Arbiter twirling, twisting, spinning, and all other sorts of acrobatic movements that would make him appear graceful and bloodthirsty.
As thumbnails go, they are just a guide, and as much as I adhered to the drawings I also strayed from them. The Arbiter is pretty much pose-to-pose animation, and the marines are all straight-ahead animation. Here is the result:
From this animation we learned that all fatalities will be done one on one: person killing person rather than person killing a squad or groups of people. It would have been too much unique work to animate the fatalities in such a way where multiple people are killed. The fatalities also locked the attacker and victim in game while they played their animations. And only once they finished could the attacker be selected and moved by the player. (Which is really the only way you’re going to see the animation.) So, on average, we limited fatalities to three seconds, but never going over five seconds. This gave us enough time to create something worth seeing, and thus, losing control over your character for 3-5 seconds.
The next task in fatality exploration was to pit hero against hero: Arbiter versus Spartan. I wanted to make the Arbiter as swift and savage as in the first animation, but this time, his foe would prevail. Portraying the Spartan as instinctual and reactionary rather than purely dexterous: he moves fast and hits hard.
Once again this first image was done to get to know the subject, and to be able to draw him to quickly plan out the fight sequence.
Again, these thumbnails were a loose choreography guide to follow while animating.
The attacker is pose-to-pose and the victim is straight-ahead reacting to the blows. Here’s the result of the planned work.
Unfortunately, the animation workload over the course of the project never allowed us to do special case (hero vs. hero) fatalities. Rather, we had to reuse the victim’s animation and copy it on to the different heroes. Though, if we did have the time, animating hero vs. hero would have been really cool to do!
Neither one of these exploratory animations was ever taken to a true final stage. I only took them to a certain quality level of animation; setting the bar as high as I knew I could reproduce under actual production deadlines.
