Walk Cycle|Machinima

Animating a walk cycle.

Walk cycle can be broke into 5 important stages, where character movement is very important and principles of animation should be applied. Walk cycle is not only legs moving, but the whole body reacting to the movement, arms swinging along the body, head moving slightly (or maybe turning around), torso bend a bit foward. With the Blob (fat alien character) I wanted to make a cycle, that will indicate his weight and how difficult walking is for him (unless 0G is on). His belly should be bouncing, movements would be really slow, tentacles that are on top of his head should also be bouncing a little bit and react to the overall body. I'd love to convey his personality thru movement, since Blob is just an ordinary, normal, quite overweight and lazy, alien engineer. It will also contrast well with the Captain walk, which I imagine being quite mighty and with each movement planned and thought through.

Frozen Shot Progression|PPP2

Shot breakdown for one of the scenes in Frozen.


Frozen- Shot Progression from Bobby Pontillas on Vimeo.

It's shows the whole process of creating a shot in animated movie, from the moment when one of the animators acts out the scene to the final, polished shot. It's surprising how many iterations one shot goes thru. Video reference is also very important, as it gives animators a guideline of how to deal with specific scene.
The is also a list of people who worked on it and there has been quite few people involved in the whole process, like modellers, riggers, animators and lighting artists.

Blob-UV Map|Machinima

After Elliot finished modelling Blob I started on UV mapping.

Even lo poly version were quite complex with some of the vertexes hidden or overlapping and I spent almost 2 hours on this task. First thing I did was separating various parts of mesh (arms, head, legs) from main body. Then, the whole process was fairly straightforward - cut UVs and unfold it.
Body was probably the most complex task due to the sticking out parts around shoulders. However, after a fair amount of untangling UVs, I managed to get it done.

Next step was scaling model down to be in appropriate scale. If one cube represents 1 unit in Unity, then Blob is around 1,6 (so more or less same as me ;)). By doing this now, we can avoid many problems with matching scales in Unity (as it puts everything to 1). Another thing I did at this stage was smoothing the model by 1. Because I did UV map on lo poly mesh, it stayed 'same' after smoothing. Now, I have to freeze transformation and delete history before starting on creating a rig and binding it to the model.

CGHUB|PPP2

I've been an active CGHub user for quite few years now, since it was website full of stunning work created by professional artists. I treated my profile like a portfolio, with only best work getting uploaded. I also had quite a lot great artists followed and many great pieces fav'd. I found news of CGHub being shut quite sad.
It started by simply redirecting people to CGhugs (ad website), there was no notice or clear explanation, which is bad, especially since premium memberships were introduced only month ago. Team Shakuro posted a short entry on their FB profile.

We are getting tons of emails and from the comments to our recent post we think that we need to clarify some things and answer the most common questions.

1. Team Shakuro was NOT associated with Full Spectrum Digital, LLC - a company that ran CGHUB.com. We were actually only responsible for development and of course were not authorized to make decisions like shutting the project down. That also means that we were not making money from ads, pro accounts and so on.
However, since the real owners prefer to keep low profiles we are the only ones on the surface (to blame).
2. We were caught completely unprepared. It was as simple as: “Guys, it’s over”.
Why the shutdown was like this and without prior notification – we have no answer to this question and that’s also beyond our understanding.
3. Even though it wasn’t our decision to close the project, it was us who tried to reach the community with at least a bit of explanation of what was going on.
And we are really sorry to see comments like “I am going to stay away from anything Shakuro will produce in future”, “Unprofessional” and so on … and we hope that they are made out of misunderstanding of the situation.
4. We tried every single option to keep the community running including buying it out, selling to somebody else, even pausing … it didn’t work.
5. Again the reason is completely personal. The project had a very bright future, we were beating our traffic records on monthly basis, had a perfect team and tons of ideas and even a couple of satellite projects in mind.
Situation in Crimea, hackers, SSL bug, aliens have nothing to do with the project closure. The servers and were based in the US and were secure. Management team was in US as well. Absolutely nothing is going on in Crimea that would prevent us from doing our business. 

CGHub wasn't perfect, didn't had a nice forum community like conceptart.org, but had by far the best art library with a really good browsing system. Now, many artists have to move back to Deviantart or DrawCrowd (or just use Facebook, which I personally find a bit unprofessional). Luckily, Team Shakuro may be able to bring another art platform soon. After all, MangaBullet and Anipan haven't lasted ages either, but their creators are still working hard on other projects;).

Spaceship concepart2|Machinima

Floorplan and perspective view of a corridor. As mentioned before, I tried to keep it minimalistic and futuristic.

Sketch_Dailies|PPP2

Couple months ago I found out about an awesome Twitter account called 'Sketch_dailies', which is a place, where everyday artists can challenge themselves with a completly new theme. I've managed to get few dailies done, with #CaptainAmerica, #Unicorn and #JEM being my favourites.

It's a nice challenge and a way to break from routine or art-block. Themes are funky and loose and although my artwork haven't got crazy number of likes I still enjoy doing it.

Portfolio Advice|PPP2

Recently I came across two really good pieces of advice regarding portfolios. First one comes from Ty Carter (designer at Blue Sky Studios) blog. He shares a lot of his knowledge of how to make a portfolio that will be appealing to the employer and includes few examples of his own work.
Second piece is by Jon Schindette and was posted on The Art Order website. It tackles a very important issue of maintaining number of portfolios and breaking into the industry. Many people create too many portfolios on many different sites and then fail on keeping them all organized and up to date. Chasing after the best opportunities and pushing too much too go viral can be bad for your career. Internet is a wonderful place for networking and getting new contacts but mixing a personal Facebook account with the professional one doesn't leave good impression. Jon shares few tips and it's a really good read.

Kara|Machinima

Kara is a short cinematiq sequence created by Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls) to showcase their 3D engine running on Playstation 3 in real time and was released back in 2012.
This technology uses motion capture footage of the actress that plays Kara to create a very realistic animation. Whole film is full of emotions and detail and I really like how the android character is presented.
Quantic Dream is not only a game developer but also a company that supplies a motion capture services. Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls are the titles on the border between the game and a film. Especially with the last game, many critics argued, that Beyond is closer to the interactive film than to the game. Player is actually not able to explore the world outside of the scripted events and as long as he follows the prepared scenario, everything looks really beautiful and perfect. Nevertheless, Quantic Dream games are very creative and show innovating way of storytelling.

Ni No Kuni|Machinima

Ni No Kuni is a jRPG game developed by Level-5 and Studio Ghibli for Nintedo DS and Sony Playstation 3. It takes a player onto an amazing journey across beautiful fantasy worlds, full of strange creatures and magic.

What I really like about this game is that it got this nice mixture of traditional 2D cut-scenes created by Ghibli and a 3D environments. There are few different types of cinematics in Ni No Kuni. 2D cut-scenes are used to present the most important key events of the game and can seem to be not long enough to fulfill players craving for beautiful animation. They are kinda magical and somehow special, which makes you want to watch Ghibli movies. 3D cut-scenes are also very well done and quality-wise doesn't stand out from the animated ones. They have nice feel to them, good, simple textures and cartoon-y characters (that don't look different to animated versions). The only thing I personally found a bit annoying were repeated animations during 'texted' scenes, were basic informations were explained to the player.

Voice acting is another strong point of this title. I'm glad that it had option to switch to original, Japanese voice actors with English text, rather than having to listen to English voices (in most cases English voice acting seems to be really childish and lacking charm).

Ni No Kuni reminds me of Blue Dragon, which is another jRPG (released few years ago on Xbox360). Both of these games were created in cooparation with manga/anime staff (Akira Toriyama in Blue Dragon case) and have similar feel when it comes to enemy/worlds designs.
Nevertheless, I highly recomend Ni No Kuni to all gamers, especially to Ghibli fans and people who simply enjoy beautiful stories.

Storyboard|Machinima

Storyboard of cinematic sequence for Machinima module.

The story is quite simple and light, below is a short script of what is happening.

• two characters walks into a massive corridor from control room;
•  they stop near window to compliment the view (galaxies, stars, milky way);
• Blob takes camera out and suggest taking a picture of ship Captain in from of the view;
• after taking photo he sees the massive Space StingRay that got glued to the windows;

I've already created an animatic to test if this story fits the one minute limit. Music will be really important as we decided not to include any dialogue. Afterall we are making a game ;)

Interior Inspirations_02|Machinima

For corridor design task I've put a moodboard full of photos of minimalistic interiors and furniture.
I really like the futuristic looking purple room in the bottom left and a wall/ceiling with holes. I want this spaceship to look futuristic but I also want to keep my designs clean and easy to understand. The dominant color will be definately white/silver with stripes of green or purple. As I want to maintain the sense of scale, most of the objects will be places next to the walls (these objects will have to be repeated to highlight 'infinity' of the corridor).
I'm pretty excited for this task since interiors aren't something I draw often enough.

Knack|Machinima

Knack is a 2013 platformer game, published by Sony (as one of the launch titles on Playstation4) and developed by Japan Studio.  It features a cast of funky, cartoon-y looking characters and monsters and its mainly aimed at younger audience. This game is also full of colorful world, which, unfortunately, player can't explore fully. Game guides thru a series of tunnels and tight streets, where most of the objects can't be destroyed (there are many doors to hidden rooms). Also, many gamers complaint about it being too easy and not stunning enough for new generation of consoles.

Cut-scenes that are shown in Knack and actual gameplay aren't different at all. However, player can't really control Knack during the cinematiq sequences (like it's possible in many shooting games, e.g. latest Killzone or Battlefield).

Knack it's a fun game and I personally enjoyed it a lot (enough to spent almost 60hrs to get all trophies). I wish there would be more platformer games that kinda have a same vibe as old Crash Bandicoot or Sly. These would rock on the Playstaion 4 or XboxOne.