A UVW unwrapped, skinned, rigged and textured character model. Work in progress, the animation isn't finished at the moment - just testing the skinning and rigging.

A video of the model in action can be viewed here.

A test of some camera matching. My main focus was on the motion of the camera rather than the animation or rendering of the ball - that's to come later, now that I know I can match up the camera! Time to come up with some ideas...

A robotic transforming ball initially to be used for the home page of my website but possibly for more in future.

Well, after a week of my poor PC rendering, this is what I have so far. I rendered each key area in layers, so any mistakes in rendering (fortunately there were few) meant that only that section had to be rerendered, rather than the whole thing, which saved a lot of time.

I'm still adding layers as I go - the rendering hasn't finished, but here are some examples of the layers used so far. If you click on the first image, then press the right arrow key, it will scroll through each image:

Background


Helicopter


Fog (against a black background so you can actually see it)


Lens effect (not particularly prominent in this frame example but included it anyway)


Tail rotor smoke


Composited together

Things to fix:

• remove the random black object just before impact
• position the helicopter closer to the ground for final resting position
• do something about the random scenery objects (and lack of)
• fog/mist?
• smoke & explosion effects (doing in post)

For a preview before the test render, click here.

A test from the destruction animation I'm working on to show deformation of the model with tests on breakaway effects.

This is the toy car F1 intro render before additional affects were applied.

A quick video to show progress on the project I'm currently working on, along with a model of the real life car I created a while back for comparison.

Has an engine...

... and is going to involve lots of these blocks.

Almost how I want it, still some problems with the lens flare and a little camera tweaking needed, but nearly ready for the main effects.

Work in progress sample of what I'm currently working on, the plan being to extend this a little. The lens flare and aliasing are the things that stand out needing the most work at the moment, as well as tweaking the camera and adding effects.

Another test render, this time of a different shot.

Changed my mind about the purpose of the motorway in the end, and decided to stick an F1 car onto it instead of the planned helicopter crash, which I will come back to in a different setting - the F1 idea suddenly appealed to me more.

Used a 2008 car, because I didn't feel the need to make a 2009 car... and the 2009 cars look horrible (apart from the slicks, which I have used).

Many things to fix, and some things to add (like a driver and smoke).

Main thing to note is the car rig, which I have updated to allow wheel spin and oversteer, and enhanced weight shift, which are all apparent in the video.

The last post about the motorway was getting too long and needs editing when finished, as will this one, but here's part 2...

The video (at 4x speed because it's boring with nothing specific happening) is of a flythrough of the vehicle motion. You'll be able to see some of the tricks used, particularly at the end. Needs more vehicles, and more difference in the vehicles used, particularly in the colours... it's surprising how you don't really notice too much the same car going past as many times as they do until you stop to think about it....

Some grass and foliage tests I've been working on. The video is of randomly (although you wouldn't think it from the brief video) moving and populated grass. The image below is static, but also randomly generated from a series of grass blade model meshes.

I'm leaning towards the style from the video, simply because it's animated and also is quicker to render, although for a still image, the static would obviously be better as it looks slighly better - although I will continue to work on the animated grass.

The final video can be viewed here.

Further tests included using displacement textures, which, depending on the amount of grass I need, may prove to be the best - certainly for long range. Because it isn't actually using polygons, it renders much faster so is better for larger areas. There's also a small amount of moving grass inside the displacement texture map area to hopefully provide a better result.

This may be the method I use for wider angle shots, and then for closer shots set it up to use the completely animated style as in the video. This should be less of a problem where the camera is in motion, as it would be difficult to actually tell exactly how the grass looks when it's more of a blur.

I'm also using this opportunity to experiment with other render methods including lighting and mental ray raytracing and shadows.




Bloom and lighting effects, as well as camera effects such as vignetting and depth of field:


Sky change, trees, specular highlights, road textures, lens blur:


More objects added. Close to being ready for vehicles and animation now - need to dirty up the textures really first though I think...

A few renders of the Black Hawk model I created. A final video of it in action can be viewed here.

Experiments with Reactor physics for now, to turn into something a little more useful. Depth of field is all broken but some of the other camera effects are looking quite nice.

Not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this just yet, but hopefully something clever...

I decided to abandon the last animation and I'm tweaking it slightly to turn it into a vehicle animation, rather than character animation.

The image is a slightly out of date render of the environment for the first part...

Should be familiar if you've seen any of my UT3 City work. I thought I'd use it in an animation at some point since the assets are all there.

I really should give this animation a name so I can stop calling it work in progress...

Anyway, here's a draft render of the animation so far to check the lighting, textures and glass breakage effects.

The main thing left is the building explosion so the whole thing actually makes sense. And he needs a gun as well to shoot at the glass so the glass doesn't spontaneously explode as it does at the moment.

An update on what I'm working on (see previous related post here)

Still very much work in progress - textures, animation and obviously special effects still need working on, but you can see roughly how the animation should end up.

The idea is he's running from a bomb that he planted in order to kill something evil, although I've not yet decided what this evil thing is, or even if we'll see it. But in my head at the moment, it's something like a tank (not my upload) from Left 4 Dead... but I'm not sure if I'll go as far as doing a section prior to this, and may decide to just go onto learning Maya, which I've been putting off for a while.

Here's what I'm working on for an as-yet untitled animation that will be first rendered in 3D Studio Max, then exported and reconstructed in a game engine for comparison.

Here's what I'm working on at the moment, and it involves bringing this monkey back that I started to work on ages ago.

I'm experimenting with morph targets now to try and get some expression, and it's still very much work in progress...

Demo Reel.

View a small, low-bandwidth version above, or click on the link below for a higher resolution version.

Other variants of the demo reel are also available on this site. There is some overlapping, mostly because nearly all of the animations I have made have contained both special effects and animation, but each one hopefully draws enough attention towards that particular area.

Animation Demo Reel.

View a small, low-bandwidth version on the right, or click on the link below for a higher resolution version.

Other variants of the demo reel are also available on this site. There is some overlapping, mostly because nearly all of the animations I have made have contained both special effects and animation, but each one hopefully draws enough attention towards that particular area.

Special Effects Demo Reel.

View a small, low-bandwidth version on the right, or click on the link below for a higher resolution version.

Other variants of the demo reel are also available on this site. There is some overlapping, mostly because nearly all of the animations I have made have contained both special effects and animation, but each one hopefully draws enough attention towards that particular area.

Here's what I'm currently working on.

Obviously still a long way to go, but it's recognisable, I think...
Nothing here is representative of what it will finally look like, except perhaps the character.

UPDATE: View the finished version here.

I'm lying. My demo reels aren't online any more because I'm making new ones as they get out of date too quickly. Look out for a newer demo reel post some time shortly!

My show reels are online, links below. It comes in three flavours, one demonstrating a variety of animations, one to show special effects, and the other to mix them together and also demonstrate other related things I have done.

Demo Reel
Demo Reel - Animation
Demo Reel - Special Effects


Other videos are viewable on the videos page.