it is a cake, handmade no less, with love, by a warrior of the wind.

alright, time for some look development stuff. below is a render at about 45 percent of how bad ass i want him to look. its definitely a work in progress, but i'm liking the progression toward a really dark and gritty style. plus, it hides stuff i cant do. fuck you, sub surface scattering.







also, there is a line test in motion for the doubters and nay sayers. I think it looks pretty cool. combined with everything else should work nicely.




go america.

"he is indeed a mean little puke who is borderline retarded and must shout moistly every stupid sentence he manages to piece together."

An update.

Go America.

harry produces many a wine-out-of-nowhere spell, and is drunk every day before noon

dear blog,

its me, shayne.
its been a while i know.
i used to keep diligent tabs of my thesis progress on you,
but lately, i haven't even come to you to complain about how slow it goes.
i'm sorry blog.
you deserve better.
i'll change, i swear.
i'll come here at least twice a week and let you know whats going on.
cause you are my favorite blog.
my only blog.


<3 shayne


...anyway

been really busy on ...everything. reworked my mordred model and re-rigged the muscles. also fixed a lovely hip spinning problem i only discovered as i animated him walking backwards. all better now. im almost done with his facial rig too.

i have first passed animated about 30 seconds almost, bringing some of the shots a little past that first pass even. I will hope to have that posted here in the next day or 2.

i spent a day teaching myself sub surface scattering and then decided that realism just isn't gonna do it for me. my models aren't totally anatomical or realistic and its just not as interesting unless its textured and lit perfectly. and it wont be.

so i started playing around with some weird ramp shaders and post processing the frames alot. not going to toon shade by any means, but i can use them to get some really expressive colors and shadows. considering my concept sketch above had my main character bright blue, it might be more to my liking when its done.

again, hopefully, something to show in the near future. just gonna make some more blendshapes tonight.

out.

the sweet wizard in remission is psychically linked with the beautiful snake; having dreamt himself of eating leopards, boars, and dik diks.

some frames i had to render for my thesis class as a lighting exercise. but i threw the guard
character in there so i figured i would then throw them up here. i like the light glow and i think i am going to use that as some reference for when i finally render my own scenes.

word.

i'm broke, hagar. what do i do? hagar happily extends a finger at the goblin bank of wobble columns...

so i decided to go ahead and start modeling an environment. still in its bare bones but i'm liking it. nurbs are my new best friend. there are a few too many curves and frills and what not currently, slowing it down at render time, but after some tessellation tweaks and another few days of modeling, i should have an eerie industrial cathedral going.

or i could just have a mess of lofted nonsense.

but im hoping for the first.

the family porkums is hit palpably with shame. yes harry, do laugh on. laugh right in their unthinkable faces.

so, what do you know, i finally got my guard character modeled and rigged. im sure i'll have to revisit it a few times before its really done, but its ready to start animating, and thats all that matters.

harry must repress his urges of igniting in a demonstrative fireball, ending the lives of these three little pigs; but our wolf remains cool.

alright, here i am to finally make good on my word.
above is my previz. below are my excuses...

the music is a temp track by brand new. most likely will be re-scored. some continuity errors exist (ie. his position and blood in the light bulb rack focus shot) but that is because i re-cut this from an earlier version and did not re-render every shot. i think it still gets the action across.

my story is an adaptation using classic characters from the arthurian legend, but set in a future world where old merges with new. the knights are part robotic, the hero is bionic, and the castle itself is an old cathedral consumed by industrial debris. sketches and concept art and 3d to follow.

so the first scene is the boy arthur (white) talking to merlyn (green). the dialogue is taken directly from t.h.white's the once and future king. it shows all this promise and good intention of the boy before he becomes polluted by all the faults absolute power tends to bring. awww, right?

flashforward

we meet mordred (blue), in the legend the bastard son of king arthur. here he is our hero, the unwilling product of his environment, trapped in the basement of the castle. his blood relation to the king in this story is absent, and not even that important. he's just supposed to be a captured and betrayed everyman.

so mordred wakes up, not sure where he is. the experiments performed on him cause him to lapse into headaches and flashbacks. he finally clears his thoughts and realizes that the doors to the prison cell are open.
he looks around to find two dead guards (orange) and blood on his own hands. he takes off down the hall.

he encounters logres guards in the caina. (logres being the term used to refer to arthur's kingdom historically and caina being one of the lowest regions of hell reserved for blood traitors....oooooohhhhhh snap. here its just an elevator lobby)
they are chopped up fragments of men who have been all but taken by arthur's projects.

mordred fights them in the dark. kills 'em. cause he has like...extra...bionic power...stuff.

he takes the elevator and ascends to the throne room.

he encounters the king arthur. i should also explain at this point that merlyn is now trapped by arthur and chained to the wall next to his throne. so mordred and arthur exchange dialogue that wont ever compare to t.h.white's but to paraphrase:

"i made you"
"i didn't want it"
"you stabbed me"
"yeah, i'll do what i want now"

mordred leaves. arthur enacts mordred's circuits "lysine contingency" plan as he's dying.

merlyn, as a ghost-floaty thing, appears infront of mordred. mordred dies.

so yeah, there are alot of things going on in there that i doubt will get picked up at all in the final production...or even should be. tried to kind of make it have some meaning but if you preface a project with a "what i was trying to do here" i feel like you have failed already. so i mean, if worse comes to worst, i'll still have sci-fi-violence and guns.

go america.