1995-96:  Sean's Computer Animation Page III

Here's a little guy modeled mostly in Prism's Action, although the head was done in Houdini. He walks, his eyes open and close, and his fingers move independently. Note seamless joints between arms, legs, body and fingers. Each limb and finger is a separate object merged into the body. I find it much easier to get seamless joints with a polygonal model than with NURBs.

These are two of three monsters modeled for an "Ultraman Zeus" video game. The environment was built with Animatek's World Builder, and the model built in Prisms. It shoots flames from its mouth and feet. This game is reputedly of great interest to Otaku due to its high CG content.

The images above are part of a 30 second animation done for practice, early in my tenure at Satelight. The little sphere irritates the rocket into waking up so they can do their show. The rocket takes off billowing smoke and sparks. Modeled in Action 5.5.4.

One frame from a 10-second animation done at the Vancouver Film School in 1995 in Alias. Mr. Pickle struts around the fridge, and the eggs in the background rise up and imitate him by adopting his bumpy skin and green coloring.

Here is a logo modeled and animated in Houdini. It looks like the jellybeans would take a lot of time to model and animate, but it was very easy using a particle system. One bean was modeled, and then an exploding particle system was set up. A copy of the bean was made at each particle, and the bean's colors were assigned using a random expression. In Houdini 2.0, this process is even more efficient because now instead of making an actual copy at each particle, you can make an instance of the geometry, greatly speeding up interactivity and rendering time. (This only works if you want the same model copied to each particle, therefore it wouldn't work here.) "Dancing" of the letters was done using a lattice, and the other objects are simple path animations. By the way, it says, "Go Go Ponkicker," and I don't think anyone knows what it means.

Hmm, speaking of particle instancing, here is an opening animation I created using particle instancing and Houdini 2.0. Two seperate MoM models were created and then instanced to each particle. This was then composited in Ice along with the logo of my name, and MoM waving some flags. I did the motion blur in Ice by rendering twice as many frames as I needed, motion bluring, and compressing the time range, and then compositing the original, un-blurred Mom on top. This is much faster than rendered motion blur. It doesn't look so great as a still, but looks fine in motion.
 

Copyright© 1996 - 1998, Sean Lewkiw, Satelight Inc., Sapporo Japan.
URL: http://www.lewkiw.com