Monday, December 23, 2013

Picture Depth

I didn't have a lot of time this week.  Spent most of it preparing things for Christmas, then did some stuff for my birthday, and caught a cold.  I was thinking about that scene from the trailer of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where Sean Penn is in a photo and beckons to Ben Stiller, and I wanted to play with taking a photo and pushing it back in space.  The camera move ended up fighting with the motion of the photo expanding, and I didn't get around to making a new move and re-rendering.  Also, I feel like I should have shot a short clip of something moving, that seemed to give the Walter Mitty scene more shazaam.


Picture Depth from conor scully on Vimeo.

I'm not sure what I'll be able to come up with next week since I'll be out of town for a few days.  I may just play with some deformers and effectors or something.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Little Blobbies

I saw a music video on motionographer this week that I thought was pretty cool, so I tried to play around with some of the techniques that I think they might have used.

Blobs from conor scully on Vimeo.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

What the Hell is on My Coffee Table?

So we are now caught up to the current week.  This week I wanted to do a lot more than I had been, now that I feel more comfortable working in Cinema and After Effects again.  I started with shooting a quick plate and creating a panoramic of my living room using PTGui. My panoramics usually come out a little janky at the top and bottom because I don't have a full frame camera, so I can only get about 150 degrees vertically, and I poorly fake the rest, but they work out pretty well.




Coffee Table Plate from conor scully on Vimeo.

I found this awesome HDRI plugin a while back called Smart IBL by HDR Labs, which I have just begun using because I have been shooting panoramics and adding them to my own IBL library within SIBL.  It's pretty cool.  They have their own HDRI library that you can download, and if you shoot your own panoramics as well, you can use the SIBL Edit to keep them all organized and ready to go. I strongly suggest checking them out.

Anyway, I got a nice track in Boujou, had a rough time getting it into C4D, but finally figured it out, then I started playing with what to put on the table.  I had been wanting to learn how the metaball worked, so I played with that a little and came up with this guy.


Coffee Table from conor scully on Vimeo.

I ended up cutting the final a little short because correcting the reflection in the table in After Effects was taking up too much time and a little beyond my skill level.  Next time I use the metaball, I think I'll try to get it to conform to different shapes, or into text.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Earthquake!

The real reason I started working in 3d was so that I could do one simple thing.

BREAK STUFF!

I was playing around with the fracture tool, looking up a bunch of different ways to shatter objects in C4D since I feel I've gotten a fair grasp on the rigid dynamics and I found thrausi.  It is so sweet.  If you haven't gotten it yet, you can download it for free from Nitro4D.  It's simple to use and a lot of fun to play with.  Once I got the hang of it I also decided to try out Trapcode Particular, which I had used once before in this small logo animation from school.  I basically ripped off an old ABC logo animation and followed a Video Copilot tutorial.



PBS Logo Animation from conor scully on Vimeo.


Anyway, since it was Thanksgiving week I really only had about 2 days to put this together, so I didn't end up making it as cool as I would have liked, and I just pulled the statue model off of TurboSquid.  Next time I'll put out more nulls for larger individual chunks and give them dust trails too, and probably some dust puffs when they hit.  Also, when I used thrausi, I broke the texture mapping or something, so I'll have to figure that out before I make another destruction animation.



statue crumble from conor scully on Vimeo.

Sea and Diamonds

After the craps project I became interested in some of the mograph tools, so I played around with the cloner and effectors.  I also wanted to try to mess around with some animated textures more, so I made this ocean with some little floaty things coming out of it.


sea diamonds from conor scully on Vimeo.

Craps!

So I just started trying to get back into Cinema 4D.  I haven't worked with it in about 4 years, so I wanted to practice doing some simple modeling, texturing, and lighting.  I also noticed C4D has a simple stereo camera setup, so I wanted to do something that I could make pretty deep.  Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to rendering out the right eye, but when I do I'll put up an anaglyph composite.


craps from conor scully on Vimeo.

Intro

Howdy!

My name is Conor and I'm a 3d artist.  I also consider myself an amateur photographer (only because I use a real camera), I used to be a mural artist for an interior design company, and a caricature artist at a number of theme parks.

I've recently been doing a bunch of small personal projects in my spare time at home to learn new software, tools, and tricks.  Most of them aren't really finished pieces, but seem blog worthy, so I'll be posting them around here instead of my website.

If you'd like to check out my professional work, or some of my more finished personal work, you can check it out at www.alwayslookingleft.com