I can’t imagine any real people check this site, but I can’t blame anyone considering this is my first new post of 2010 and it contains no new content. I have a several step plan that is aimed at reorganizing my career and I suppose my life as a whole. One of those key points is to redesign this site to fit it more into the archetype I originally intended. The key word in this is integration; integration with a functioning gallery, be it hosted here or through a service like flickr, integration with my social network through my facebook (so I can annoy my family and friends with all my little art related ramblings), integration between my [numerous] other sites such as mattwanimation.com, mattwvis.com, and the soon to be born dcaste.bigcartel.com. I’m going to rebuild this site from the ground up, hopefully not at the cost of my old posts, to help deliver content in a way that is both easy for me and convenient for anyone that will choose to read.

The goal of this site has always been to deliver my thoughts and ideas about art along with my artwork itself. I have multiple art sites, but they are all very focused, as they should be, as they are there to get me jobs. They are my professional extensions. This is a bit of my catch-all. It’s lived up to that position thus far, but in a wholly unorganized and unappealing way. I have a few sites that I’m going to attempt to launch all at once, with content already in place. It will be a bit of a harrowing task, but for this to be successful, this is how it will have to happen.

Though, again, I’m probably speaking only to myself, I’m going to disable comments on this post until I update my wordpress and put something in place to stop the insane stream of spam I get from this site.

Hugs and kisses.

is how i’m never gonna wind up

and pt. 2…

more crappy undead

I think his happiness is a bit feigned

was workin on this for a painting, but I never finish anything

self portrait with my bird. actually just some random tiny scribbles to round this off.

Got a bunch of sketches to rattle off

pt. 1

Sea turtle that may have suffered complications at birth

No idea, think his name is Jean

Zombie; my subject matter is neither atypical nor original.

Definitive light sources, psh, who needs em.

Behind every great man is a good woman partially-realized cycloptic squid.

more tomorrow…

Tried out throwin my little skull in max and doin a wax Mental Ray render.

little cartoon skull done in mudbox. never really got into a sculpting app before. I see some overall shapes that need improvement but I think that will come in time as I become more comfortable with the tools. I was having the most difficulties separating forms such as the brow from the main sphere of the skull; that transition is still much softer than I’d like.

Started a new job in New Jersey, no more driving to Delaware everyday, not that I didn’t LOVE it.

They have me doing visuals for airport security training demos at present.

Airport Check Point and Screening Area

Some Equipment

This was my first project done with mental ray rendering engine. lots of pros and cons compared to Vray. hard to make a true assessment since it’s been upgraded so much the new versions of 3dsmax, which we unfortunately don’t have quite yet.

Quick pencil sketch of my dog that wouldn’t stop staring at me last night.

The camera matches I had to do. The dusk shot was taken at like 2 pm, but looked so awful since it’s a dirty alley I tried to use some colors to happy it up.

Popping back and forth between living on a couch in Philly and staying in NJ is greatly cutting into my productivity. On top of that I’ve been working 13-15 hour days this week. So I don’t have anything very interesting but I can show off some of my stuff from work the last few days since it’s an existing conditions building. There’s a lot of playing with color and non photo-realistic techniques to get the feel the client wanted.

I’m not living on a couch in Philly anymore so I can post again.

As the past few posts probably reflected, I’ve been doing some fundamental animation exercises. I backed it up even farther and started relearning from the beginning. At this point I’m working on real fundamentals like spacing and timing, ease, anticipation, follow-through, etc. I’m really trying to not jump ahead and take it one step at a time. The exercises I’m doing are so rudimentary it’s not really worth posting, thus the lack of content. But these are a great refresher as I don’t get to animate much at work as much as model, light and texture. All this is leading up to my revamping my animation demo reel with much better and more suitable material.

So I thought I’d share some of the resources I’ve been studying lately.

http://massiveblack.com/
Great art education DVD resource. Shawn Barber’s painting DVD is amazing.

http://www.jasonryananimation.com/
Posts great animation tutorials in quicktime format with audio commentary in a mailing list. I think only the first 8 were free. I have a feeling it’s going to be a pay service soon. But if the prices are within reason I would still highly recommend them.

Book: Animator’s Survival Kit
I grabbed it off Half.com for like 10 bucks and am currently about halfway through, reading a bit every night and trying out principals the next day. Pretty much a must have.

Book: Illusion of Life
You wanna be an animator and you don’t have this book you need to order it now. Not the cheapest book, but it’s like a tome. You get way more than you pay for.

http://www.brianlemay.com/
I have yet to read this guy’s stuff, but it’s coming highly recommended by some highly-knowledgeable long time animators I’ve been talking to at Cryptic Studios.

Flip Blog
Just packed with great information and videos.

CarlosBaena.com
Way more material than I’d ever want to personally post so I’ll just piggyback it. Insane amount of tutorials and articles.

These are just animation related. I haven’t even started on modeling, mapping and drawing stuff I’ve been studying. I feel like I’m back in school. Only now I’m learning something.

Another animator from Cryptic gave me advice to further polish it so I couldn’t not do it. I’d be doing myself a disservice.

Really I promise. I picked up glitches in 3ds Max’s inbetweens, but I feel like everything has been ironed out at this point.

This is the 3rd Pass on this, I skipped posting the 2nd because I’m lazy. There’s still something to be ironed out around the contact poses with the feet and the follow-through on the arms at the top of their swings is giving a little double pump thing I’m not too into. I just want to get things feeling looser and more fluid. Next pass I want to be the final one so I can move on to the next exercise I have planned for this along with 2 others I have in mind: a set of ‘expression’ walks with a rig that’s just 2 legs and a head kinda set up and a colab model with a non organic modeler friend of mine.

Feels like he’s stomping…

Click for Animation

Found a quick sketch of a walk cycle for an unconventional body type. Not sure if I can embed this right.

I’m back. Coming home from Florida to New Jersey: Home of the Freezing Rain made for a hell of a flu. I spent my last weekend with a lot of time facing the bottom of a trashcan.

I’ve never posted animation on here, but that’s what I’ve been working on so that’s what’s going up. My demo reel needs to be re-cut as it’s stagnated over the last 3 years while I killed time working in architectural modeling and rendering. I’m actually strongly considering applying and attending Animation Mentor, the online course as a way to refresh and hone my character animation skill and really try and push them forward. It’s also a great opportunity to really flesh out my reel with a much higher quality of work.

Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes) has been nice enough to supply animators with their premade character rig (Here) which I’ve been tooling with all morning. This is a great way to get a feel for what you’d be using if they were to hire you to animate. It is exactly their rig as used in all their games.

I threw together a quick ‘Vanilla Walk’ (no real character or emotion) to get the feel for using the rig. The amount of work this needs to be good is really showing me that I truly need to work very hard to further push my abilities. I’m not as far as I thought I was.

Click for Animation

Just got back from a debaucherous trip through the Florida Keys thus the lack of updates. I had my Moleskine handy, but damn if I ever got a chance to put anything to paper throughout the trip. I’ll be gettin back on it over the weekend.

Little Gang Green. The skull/demon face is way over worked. That’s like the 3rd try. The perspective and distortion isn’t quite there. In fact there really isn’t any perspective. The board keeps its width (incorrectly) all the way down. I like the piece over all though and wouldn’t mind giving it another round and try and get it right. But for now I just needed to get the overall idea out of my head and onto paper. I just need to push it more.

Colerase red pencil straight edge piece. Probably too long and thin to work as a tattoo. This one’s obviously not a Sailor Jerry piece.