justin owens

Hello blogosphere, it’s been a while. Until recently, I had been quite busy with school and the bakery. I’m still at the bakery, but only two days a week for the time being. School is out for winter break, my finals are behind me. As usual, they aren’t as final as I had hoped they’d be, but I’m happy with their progress. I’m looking forward to working on them more over the break.

I’ve otherwise been resting up and planning out some personal projects. I’ve also had the time to do one of my favorite past times, discovering *new artists! Two such artists I came across the last few days are Jeffrey Turley and Sam Nielson. Check em out.

I’m also feeling like tackling some 1mr work. With school and all we hadn’t gotten around to any updates. I said I’d pitch in when I had some time. Well, time, I has it.

*new to me that is

I opened up my wushu animation for the first time since midterms. I had gotten it about 85% finished by the time it was due. As usual, once I had it turned it, I felt burnt out on the project and didn’t much have the energy to finish it. Our teacher has really been encouraging us to keep bringing him updates each week so he can help us refine and finish the animations.

Today I felt the excitement again and jumped on in. I have some sections I need to refine and polish, but overall I felt something needed to be done about the timing. Where I had left off, both jumps felt the same as far as the beats are concerned. There was variation in height and action, but I felt they didn’t have enough contrast. I started playing with the timing of the first jump to see how it would feel. I really slowed things down going into the jump and then went back to “real time” as he comes out of the apex of the jump.

I really think it’s an improvement. Now when I watch it, I think both jumps stand out. Slowing down the timing of the first jump is going to give me a nice opportunity to play up his expressions in that section (now that you can see them!).

To do:

• Work on the first pose and anticipation. Possibly a transition A to B pose of him getting ready to move (cracking knuckles, stretching sorta thing).
• Fix the intro/outro of the second jump. The timing feels off a bit.
• Work on the last “hop”. Doesn’t feel right yet.
• Refine expressions and hand poses.
• Offset keyframes after everything else is done!

Here’s where I left off:
wushu midterm

Adjusting the timing of the first jump:
wushu refinement 01

Hmm, a bit of funkyness with PodPress. I’ll have to get that sorted out.

 

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Today is a me day. I’m cooking good foods rather than eating out and working on personal projects. I’m painting the sketch from my last post and I’m planning on doing some new drawings. I’m listening to the new Sigur Ros album, I’m digging it. They are selling their album for download off their site, awesome!

Today and tomorrow are the first two days off in a row I’ve had in…well, a few months. I’m going to take the opportunity to watch some movies tonight, it’s probably the only time I’ll have to do so until the end of December when school gets out. I plan to watch the Dark Knight and perhaps some anime. I’d like to watch Honey and Clover or Haibane Renmei as well, but my housemates are going to be out this evening, so maybe not. Maybe some Ghost in the Shell though, I’d like to finish watching Second Gig!

Speaking of gigs. On top of school and work an old client of mine recently asked if I wanted to do some product renderings for a design he has. I’ll post some shots of that as I go along. It’ll be fun to do some 3d modeling again.

Come winter break, I think I might tackle a new theme for my blog. I’d like to change it up some, though I don’t have any specific ideas yet.

I’m in the computer lab at school putting the final touches on my wushu animation. I need to work on my timing a bit, touch up some of my key poses and add in the facial expressions. After that I think I’ll be ready to start offsetting my keyframes. I have a bit of a back log of animations (2d and 3d) that I haven’t posted, I’m going to try and get those online in the next few days.

Well I’ve been rather lax in making blog posts. I don’t feel that I’ve had any free time between school, homework and work and I typically feel like I need time to feel I can sit down to write.

So the triple-boot didn’t work out. I could get both MacOS and Ubuntu to cooperate, but Windows wouldn’t play with the others. I ended up going with a MacOS and WinXP dual boot, that way I get my productivity and gaming covered. Ubuntu was going to be an experiment in alternate, and interesting, operating systems. Well, another time.

School is going well, I feel like I’m learning lots. I spent six hours working on my 2d animation yesterday (we’re animating the flour sack character jumping off a crate). I’m keeping mine really simple so I don’t get distracted. I got about 80 frames drawn yesterday, I’m going to shoot it tomorrow night and see how it’s looking. There are some sections that really looked promising and others I’m not sure about.

Far Cry 2 comes out tomorrow, I pre-ordered it last week and I’m hoping Kimi can pick it up for me while I’m at school. Or I’ll just get it on Thursday. Now hopefully I’ll actually find some time where I can play it!

Not much else I feel like saying at the moment, just wanted to give my blog some love.