New Dialogue Animation!!

Took me an entire weekend to do this. I am very satisfied with it especially since I haven't really finished a dialogue shot before. Learned a ton of new tricks while working on this. More to come inshAllah. Comments and critiques are welcome.

HoverBike!!

My Final Render of the Hoverbike :)
I am EXTREMELY happy with the result because it took me a few long hours to really understand how things worked.

Ball Exercise!

A small exercise I wanted to do to see how fast and how well I can do on it.
Turned out pretty well I think and I'm hoping to be working on a new exercise
just as soon as I finish my Hoverbike Model.

Space Ship short animation!

I thought I'd give it a shot and try to use the space ship rig for a short animation. It's good practice with Composition and also a good practice for Sound Editing. I think this is going to open up a lot of doors for future ideas. Let me know what you guys think.
Thanks

Halloween Video!!!!:)

So I'm posting a short video I made for Halloween. It was mainly made for film making practice and also to practice sound editing. I'm pretty satisfied with it for the most part but there's always room for improvement. Check it out and let me know what you guys think:)

Learning Modelling in Maya!

So now that I've finally decided to pursue a different goal in life,(which is to try to master all aspects of CG instead of just the animation part) I've put together a short to do list that MUST be accomplish in a certain order. I literally dissected Tyson's progress on his website and one thing I've learned from it is that he had a certain order he followed. One question I kept asking myself is: what makes his work stand out from other artist's work?? There is just something about his work that if the same project was done by any other talented artist it wouldn't look nearly the same. I guess what I mean is its his STYLE that stands out. Its all about taking it one step at a time and "not rushing it."

Nevertheless, I've tried really hard to come up with a order that I can follow but it's definitely not finalized. It's just a base that I can build from to fit my time frame and my train of thought. Also since we're not all like Tyson in the way we think(because honestly I think he was animating in his mother's womb lool jk) I figured I'd have to get help from tutorials. So what you see above is the first ship I modeled. I actually modeled it three times just so I can understand it and become much faster at it. It was definitely fun to do and I sorta regret not doing it while I was going to AM because sadly but honestly this one small tutorial could of helped soooo much with my animation. While I was doing the tutorial I was thinking to myself how much more things I could of done with my scenes if I knew that stuff back then. Anyway we live and learn and I'm just glad I'm setting myself straight now and I'm following a path at least. And hopefully in the future people will look at my work and follow my path.

InshAllah Khair( God willing it will be OK)

Making the ultimate decision!!

So my last post got me thinking more about this whole concept of learning more of the animation process and not limiting oneself to just one aspect of it. I finally came up with a question that would help anyone interested find an easier way to figure it out.

Would you want to be like Glen Keane, James Baxter, etc...or would you want to be like Tyson Ibele (if you dont know him check out tysonibele.com amazing cg artist)???

I asked myself that recently and I thought long and hard about it for a while. My answer was definitely to be like Tyson Ibele right from the beginning and no matter how much I wanted to convince myself otherwise it was just not enough. I mean no offense to Glen and the other geniuses who literally shaped the animation industry into what it is now but it's just not enough for my taste. What Tyson has accomplished in such a short amount of time and at such a young age will not go unnoticed. He's already known by a good amount of artist who've seen his work to be one of the most talented/creative minds on the planet.

So after seeing what he's done I made it my goal in life to become as close to that as possible. You see the way he makes his decisions is really ingenious. What I respect most about him is that he could easily be working at the baddest studio in the world but he knows that he'll be too busy for his own personal work. He loves his personal projects too much to let go and I don't blame him. All you really need in life is a good paying job that could take care of your everyday needs and won't suck the life out of you before you go home to your own life. He figured out a way to do that and I give him much respect for that.

In conclusion, the life that Tyson is living right now is what I want to do for the rest of my life. If I can accomplish what he has until now before i die I think i'll die a very happy man. Would I die happy if I accomplished what Glen Keane has accomplished? Absolutely. But it's just a more fulfilling feeling with the tyson one.

Those are my thoughts, now I want yours.
Till next time :)

Hmm....To learn or not to learn???

Alright so I need to know what people think of this topic because it's always been a confusing one for me. Should character animators worry about learning other aspects of the Animation process?? What I mean is should animators focus solely on mastering character animation or should they also make it a priority to learn how to render, model, rig, etc.??

I ask this because I think I might a different opinion on it then what I have been taught and I believe there is a big confusion out there especially for the newly incoming animators. When I first started Animationmentor.com I was the biggest rookie in my class. Not only did I have no experience in animation before, I also didn't have ANY major education in the Arts in general. So my creativity was very much at the highest level at that time(sarcasm). Anyway, one of the first things I learned in class one was "not to spend too much time on rendering/lighting your scene and focus more on the animation/posing itself."

First time I heard this I agreed completely with it and was determined to follow the advice as best as I could. But as time passed in class 1 I was slowly becoming depressed seeing my character poses, although posed fairly well, were not as "appealing"(keyword today) as other peoples. So slowly but surely I began wasting more time trying to render/light the scene better so I can make it look as nice as others. Was I wrong to do that? Did it affect my work in a bad way?
Well I'm glad you asked my son. Honestly, no matter how good I could of posed the character or did an animation, without a decent rendering pass it always looked just awful. Additionally, it made animating a bit frustrating and sometimes stole the motivation away. So as soon as I figured this problem out I began to learn a few tricks to make it look more "appealing", and surprisingly I started to have more fun with the homework/assignments.

So my point of this post is that although I don't recommend spending a ton of time learning all the other good stuff that come along with animation, I do however recommend learning ENOUGH in order to keep yourself motivated and add excitement to your work. On a last note, one of the principals of animation is "appeal," so this can only help push the animation a bit further in the right direction.

Let me know what you guys think.

New Website up

well here I am trying to test a new way to add
my blogger to my website directly.
It's taking me a long time but I think it
will be a good thing to add to my website and
it will help me be more involved with my website