So i haven't had much time to rock my pose a day challenge.... I found out last week i would be immediately relocating to Portland, Oregon to start a contract with Bent Image Lab. Before i flew up here i had CTN last weekend which totally radical! Met a ton of new folks as well as people i'd previously only known digitally. I saw some amazing panels, amazing artwork, and received some incredible feedback on my reel. I was lucky enough to have some of the worlds best talent critique my work in school, but it was even more awesome to get some more uber talented eyes to tell me what's what!

At the close of CTN Sunday, i immediately flew up to Portland and started work Monday morning at Bent. I was lucky to have a buddy living up here who also happens to live 2 blocks from the studio whose letting me crash here until my wife gets up and we find ourselves a place of our own.

Bent is pretty incredible. They do a lot of really great stuff. I'm with a team of 6 animators (and it appears we're all AM grads) working on a huge commercial. It's all character stuff and there's like 20 different characters in the spot. I'm currently working on a shot with the principal character and learning a whole lot about cheating to camera.. haha.

I hope to start back up with the pose a day thingee come after i've settled in up here. Should be sooner than later. Until next time amigos!
rock.
ryan

So this week has just been banana's! I just locked down my first animation job at Bent Image Lab up in Portland, Or. It's a 2 month contract working on a commercial. That's about all i know for now, but they do super awesome work and I'm stoked to join the team. I found out about this all last Friday, and found out they need me up there ASAP, so I've spent most the week making my arrangements and I head up after CTN this weekend in Burbank.

I also found out i have at least one interview while I'm down at CTN! Awesome stuff!

Can't wait to get started in this crazy animation business! I've got a crazy weekend ahead of me and then i fly from Burbank to Portland to start work at Bent on Monday. Wish me luck!

It's been about a week since i've put up my poses! Oops!

This week i played with a horse rig and did some horse poses.

So i recently had a phone interview for a potential contract in Portland, OR at a studio that uses 3ds Max instead of Maya. It seems like there's plenty of studios that use Max instead of Maya, particularly games studios, so i figured i might as well play around in Max and see if i could figure it out.

The first thing i wasn't aware of is Max is only for Windows. Sad news to this Mac kid. So not only would i have to get Max and figure it out, I'd also have to figure out how to get Windows up and running on my Mac. Note: Though I consider myself pretty computer savvy, i haven't touched Windows for well over 10 years.

There's a great piece of software out there called Parallels Desktop that allows me to run Windows (and OSX at the same time!) on my Mac. After installing that getting windows running was no problem (except for the fact my version of windows was dutch - as if windows wasn't foreign enough to start with.) Good ol' Google translator got English working and i finally got Max up and running.

Now, i gotta say it took me a few hours to feel kind of ok. A lot of the Hotkeys i use are the same from Maya (something i think they've only changed recently) so that's good. The hardest part is the way you navigate your scene (zooming, panning, and orbiting.) It's way completely different and just enough to drive you insane. Luckily the studio i'm talking to mentioned a plug-in called dRaster that basically makes 3ds Max work like Maya. I gotta say, it's getting a lot easier now on day 3.

There's still some little things i haven't figured out that bug me. The lack of something similar to Maya's Channel Box drives me nuts. Right now, to do precise # driven amounts, i select the key in the curve editor to manipulate it's value (seriously, there's got to be a better way.) Also i don't know how to select every keyable key and set a 'Key All.' I figured out how to select all and set a key, but that doesn't include modifiers (like facial controls, eyes, extra foot controls, etc.)

I just started a quick 100 frame test to see what the learning curve is, and so far, while a bit slower than i am in Maya i'm still producing pretty quick. I haven't edited in the Curve editor yet as i'm just finishing my second blocking phase, but i imagine that will slow me down in polishing... we'll see! Overall, i think after a week or two here i'll get the hang of it and be working at about the same pace.

I hope to have my first 3ds Max test up shortly for y'all to see

Another Pose with the Max rig in 3ds Max.

Haven't been slacking! I had to learn 3ds Max this week and i still haven't figured out how to render a frame (or playblast for that matter) so i gave in and just screen capped it. This rig is called Max. He looks like a cocky cheeseball to me. Like Shooter Mcgavin from Happy Gillmore. So i acted out a few poses. I've actually turned these poses into a quick shot i'm working on now to get familiar with 3ds Max.

Superstar

Hey Hey there! Trying out another new rig today. This one is called 'Malcom' and he's brand new from the dudes over at animschool. This rig is pretty crazy! It's very appealing to say the least, it's a full on feature quality rig, and did i mention it's free?!?! I gotta say, coming from Animation Mentor, (where are rigs are no slouch either) the controls on this rig are pretty overwhelming! Hundreds. I mean the GUI (which i usually don't use, i like to just select curves) looks like a friggin jet dashboard. It's gonna take a lot of playing around on this guy to get the hang of things. Here's my first pose with this crazy ol' character. I changed the expression as the pose kinda looked like he was beckoning to dog or cat to me..

you can download Malcom FOR FREE here:http://www.animschool.com/DownloadOffer.aspx

Sexy Otto. Experimenting with doing poses from fit models and transposing them to the fat rig (as opposed to finding fat reference.) Basically an exercise in "how would a fat person do this pose?" In other words, not necessarily copying the pose as much as thinking about how THIS person would do it.