animation progress

d rough animation progress from Jerry Chan on Vimeo.

Regulus touch up

Reactive armor always looks cool

Regulus vs. Aethon

Keep in mind that the Regulus has a wingspan of about 1.5 km and is 700 meters long

Tonight I rigged the Regulus, the giant airship that attacks Dee. I should be ready to start animating act 3 by tomorrow

Regulus progress

I still need to work more on that landing bay, but now this thing looks scary

Maya crashing

Just to be clear, even though Maya crashes on me every once in a while it doesn't mean that it's a terrible piece of software.

On the contrary, it's probably the most stable 3D packages I've ever used.

Animation Master... now that's a crappy piece of software!



Crashing every 15 seconds to make this (I did the mouse cursor in Flash afterward)

Compared to this, in which I had no crashes at all




So is it a pain in the butt when maya crashes? Sure is! But there are far worse options out there. In fact, I dare say that Maya is actually pretty fun once you get used to it, especially for animation

Spiderbot test rendered from Jerry Chan on Vimeo.

Aethon rigging

Rigging the Aethon right now.

Also I'm using a pitch counter now to count how many times Maya crashes on me now



Also I haven't had a crash in the past couple of hours since I turned off the toon outlines

I need to go to sleep earlier!

My, how the hours between midnight and 3 AM fly

d hand drawn comp test from Jerry Chan on Vimeo.

Here's a test on how I plan on attacking the hand drawn aspect of d. Basically I'm copying the workflow of Who Framed Roger Rabbit

1. Film/Shoot the movie like an "invisible man" movie
2. Find keyframes. Draw Dee in
3. Inbetween
4. Color
5. Shade (+ post production)
6. Composite

The biggest difference between me and the WFRR crew is that I don't have access to a giant optical camera and that I'm doing this all out digitally. Honestly, I'd rather do this on paper but I simply don't have the time to do that

problem half solved

Looks like the problem was that the normals were flipped (thanks dudes @ conceptart.org)

But now there's a thick black outline at the end of the wing now. Not quite sure how to figure that out

[edit]

Problem solved! Apparently you can't ever have a negative scale in Maya, which was causing this thing to get all messed up.

And also there's no documentation on this ever so yeah, thank god for 3D teachers

[/edit]

toon shader's acting up

Got a slight problem with the toon outline





It looks like half of the wing (not affected by lights at all) turns really dark. Not quite sure why either- I know it's not the lighting because I shifted the light over and it's still just as dark (like my soul)



Actually it happens in the mountain flyby too




update: The tail's been shaded/textured. The last remaining thing to be mapped/textured is the engine

mountains + cloud test

d cloud valley render test from Jerry Chan on Vimeo.

Zephyrus progress

Well I managed to render these files before Maya crashed.

In fact, it looks like my save files were also corrupted



Missing:
-middle blimp
-one full tail, half of one tail
-3 support columns connecting the 3 blimps
-(weirdest one) The default lambert (texture) that covers everything

aethon