Miscellaneous

The following two characters were self assigned. I'm working on a short animation about penguins and polar bears as a metaphor to the Windows vs. Linux struggle. Click on the thumbnails to see them in their complete form.

This penguin turned out to be especially cute. Click to check him out.

Click the thumbnail to see a small test animation of the penguin. A funny thing happened when I was working on this character. My three year old granddaughter came in the office to see me. I had just finished rigging the penguin's beak so that it could speak. My granddaughter pointed at the screen, laughing at the character, so I started moving the slider control to open the mouth and ventriloquizing a conversation with her. She was tickled that the penguin was talking to her and knew her name. The next visit, she wanted to talk to the penguin again.

After doing this train for an illustration, I just had to animate it. Click the thumbnail to see the silly animation. I put this animation on a DVD just to test the field rendering and motion blur on an NTSC screen. My four-year-old grandson was visiting that day. I showed him how to run the remote. He would run this train back and forth using the play and rewind buttons. He thought that was awesome.

One of my favorite self assigned projects was this animation for a Jules Verne fantasy submarine. The sub was originally sketched by Brad Teare. I then modeled and animated it. Click the thumbnail to see an animation.