Here are some pictures of the Gold piece I am working on that will be a short animation, with figures and animation done in Maya, and secondary animation and compositing done in Apple Shake.

My final project in animation school was an animation between two characters of mine, Jimmy the Raven and Monsto. I was never fully pleased with the piece, and wanted to go back and redo this animation with a better sense of motion and color.

Here are some shots from my original reel.

The original was done mainly in sepia tones, and I wanted to push this remake to include more tones, but still have that sepia feel to it. After a summer of struggling with the idea of what color to use, or how to use it I saw the movie Strings, and one of the marionettes was painted gold. There was my answer. Having gold as a skin tone also gave me some throw backs to my love of Chinese and Japanese Paintings with gold leaf, so I had a little more depth to work with.

Jimmy the Raven is a character I have been working on for a long time. She is done here with gold in her armor, and as the color of her skin.

I remodeled her 2-4 times, and re-rigged her 4 times. I really wanted the model to be something I was proud of and show my skill as a modeler, plus I wanted a model that didn’t put limitations in my animation. I think I have created a model that will endure.

Here is a side by side of the new model vs the old one. You can see she is much more feminine and the model itself has a much better flow to it.

Problems are that I think the textures look yellow, and not gold, I may not be skilled enough to get that low luster that gold creates yet in my own personal texture work.

Monstro is another character that I have been working on for sometime now. Here are a side by side of the new vs old models.

As you can see in the origional model I made sperate models for the shoulder, because I was so inexperienced with modeling that I could never do the shoulder armpit correctly, now it is a very smooth mesh. I have also over time changed the skull tattoos from big skulls to more flowing natural tattoos, in this model I feel they are a bit too small and look more like lepard print than skulls.

Problems, again he looks yellow to me, not gold, and there are some minor bind issues that I am working out as I animate.

I have also worked on a new interactive environment for them to play in, here are some pictures.

I work in Shake and Maya, heres a pic of me working out a problem in Shake.