Joelecdote

I’ve just come back from my holidays in Pembrokeshire on Tuesday (more on that in a later post!)…

Yesterday I randomly decided to do a sketch and the first thing that I saw was Patrick Moore on the cover of one of my “Sky at Night” magazines. So I challenged myself to try and draw him! I think the result actually looks pretty amazing, if I may say so myself! Although it doesn’t quite look exactly like him, but I’m pleased with the shading in general…
Click here to view a bigger version (I added a bit of a soften effect on this larger size)… (JPG, 286Kb)

I’ve also done a random animation using an old Blender test file that I made a while ago. It turned out looking a bit like a “silly walk” (like in Monty Python, Ministry of Silly Walks)… I’ll post the video later.

Just done yet another sketch today, based on one of the illustrations by Chris Riddell in a book called, “Muddle Earth”:

I think it turned out pretty good actually… I’ve also started reading “The Fundamentals of Drawing”, so in theory my drawings should improve more!! There are some pretty interesting exercises in there for me to practise doing, e.g. drawing straight lines (without a ruler) and circles…

The other day I also did a sketch from my imagination!!! Which is quite an achievment I think… I think I started by drawing the nose(s) and then went on from there. It’s ended up looking like a Chavlien (Chav Alien):

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve added another page to the site, finally edited the “About” page, and updated the portfolio page with my latest editing job with the Anglesey Youth Theatre.

This brings me onto the next bit of news - the Anglesey Youth Theatre was so impressed by my editing on those 4 clips that they’ve asked me to edit a video they’re making about the dangers of over-drinking (I can’t think of the proper translation of ‘goryfed’ at the moment), called “Ffwl Gwirion” (Stupid Fool).

I’ve just (finally!) got myself a sketchbook and some graphite sketching “sticks”. I started sketching without any reference pictures, and it turned out OK, but not too good. So I decided to start by using references. First one I did was from Pauline Baynes awesome illustrations in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in the “Horse and his Boy”:

I think this turned out pretty good. There’s something not quite right about the front foot though…

Yesterday and today, I’ve been sketching based on a reference photo of a field mouse by a user called “gazzat”, that I found on Flickr:

I think it turned out pretty good actually. I think maybe the fingers at the bottom are not quite right. The next step is to draw something entirely from imagination!

Just a quick doodle type of thing I did t’other day, I think it’s pretty cool:

I’m rendering a 141 frame (5.64s) fluid simulation at the moment - it’s taking aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages!! On average it’s taking like 4 minutes per frame! Anyway I’ll probably post that up by tommorow.

As I mentioned before I’ve been trying to get this optical flow effect to work in Blender using the displace composite node. I tried it out on some real ‘live action’ footage (as opposed to the cube I used before). It didn’t really work that well - mainly because the shot contained some very dark spots where you couldn’t really make the effect out. Also I think the clip was too short, so you barely noticed the effect at all. I think I might try and make it work by looping some fire footage and duplicating it a lot of times. Another possibility is to use a development version of Blender, which has enhanced particle effect features (see the progress here), to use a technique called billboards, which means that you use particles to control a certain video, which in this case would be the looping fire footage. This would mean that I could have a controlled randomness to the fire footage. Unfortunately I’m having trouble getting the billboards to work without crashing Blender! Anyway, hopefully I should have a nice optical flow effect to show by… the end of the year!

Just did a quick sketch of Gollum the other day, based on the picture of Gollum on some making of Lord of the Rings book:

Click here to view a higher quality version… (PNG, 516Kb)

I got the proportions a bit messed up, so his face is a bit longer than it’s meant to be…

I’ve just finished editing four 1 minute video clips for the Anglesey Youth Theatre, it was actually quite fun to do. Avid went a bit weird the day before I was going to start editing it. Every time I tried to play back a video it was start stuttering and go all messed up. I think the problem was that my old hard drive is dying/slowing down, so it couldn’t keep up to speed or something. That and a combination with having the audio buffers set to high.

I was going to make another short film with Huw and Laurence, but even after we came up with an ace idea, we were a bit too hyper to make it and ended up filming random stuff in the forest by Treborth running track, i.e. me doing my ‘awesome’ Russell Crowe and Russell T. Davies (writer for Doctor Who) impressions and Laurence doing his Russian millionaire accent. Thankfully Avid wasn’t working, so I couldn’t edit it! I think I’ve taped over most of now as well… what a shame!

Anyways I’m hoping to do some more sketching in the coming weeks, as well as some modelling in Blender - see if I can actually complete a project… I’m thinking of going for a really simple creature type thingy that will be really easy to model (hopefully) and then I can concentrate on getting really realistic fur and stuff.