Life is a F-Curved

Moving

Mei Chu — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:38 +0000

Thanks to a lot of luck and nice people, I was able to secure a domain and host for an extremely cheap price. Therefore, I’m moving my website to http://www.meimchu.com/

Please go there from now on for my future update ! Thank you.

Posted in Uncategorized

Walking

Mei Chu — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:35:27 +0000

My first attempt at walk cycle in 3D ! The animation itself isn’t the best because I’m no good at rigging yet :( Therigging part rig took me far longer than the animating part because I am very un-familiar with joint and IK tool. I watched a couple of rigging tutorials online and attempted this on my own. Here is the result:

So that short walk cycle took me about 5 hours, which is ridiculous ! 3D animation is crazy time consuming :O

Posted in 3D Videos Tagged: 3D Videos

Eye test

Mei Chu — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:19:36 +0000

It has been a while since my previous update, and that is because I was busy doing some pixel art for a forums I participate in. I don’t feel like showing them off right now because it doesn’t quite fit the nature of this blog, but I will consider showing them off later.

In my previous attempt at drawing a cartoon face, I noticed a particular trouble I had with drawing eyes. So I decided to tackle this problem head on. I have drawn a cartoon eye in greater detail so I get more practice in drawing the eyes. It is still an early work in progress so more update will come as I improve this eye more and more in the future.

Eye

As always, comments and critism is welcomed.

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills

Re-visit

Mei Chu — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:15:11 +0000

I re-touched the previous female head that I drew with Photoshop because I thought the mouth could have been done better. I mainly focused on re-drawing the mouth but I also touched up on some other areas such as the eyes and ears and heavier shading.

Re-touched Face

I think it looks slightly better :)

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills

Youtubed

Mei Chu — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:36:08 +0000

I did a little bit of 3D animation today because I wanted to play around with skeletons and skin. Here’s the result:

Jumping Man

My goodness look at those watermark ! I think they stand out in this picture more so than my actual model. However, that seems to be the price you must pay for this free version of Maya :( I also uploaded the video on YouTube for some laughs:

Enjoy !

Posted in 3D Videos Tagged: 3D Videos

Mostly done

Mei Chu — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:25:32 +0000

A continuation from my previous post, I have now mostly finished the painting the way I want it. Here it is:

Finished Face

As you can see, I have completely changed the colour scheme for the face to make it actually look good, haha ! A lot of painting, blurring, erasing and I finally got a decent result. Face seem a little flat, but I’m reasonably happy with it.

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills

Unfinished business

Mei Chu — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:07:29 +0000

More playing around with Photoshop. This time it’s serious business ! So serious that I don’t think I’ll be able to finish this piece anytime soon, so I’ll show the work-in-progress (WIP) for now:

WIP Face

Not the best colouring, I don’t think, but I’m learning !

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills

It’s hot in here !

Mei Chu — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:47:39 +0000

So I was messing around with Photoshop some more last night and got really intrigued by the Smudge tool. After a couple of brushes, I just kept smudging and smudging to create this flame-like “thing”. Originally, I was only playing around with different brushes to see the result, so I crop out the rest of the canvas. After that, I added a small Noise filter with Photoshop to make it look more raw. Here is the result:

Flaming Fire

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills

3D-ness

Mei Chu — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:52:07 +0000

About a month ago, I bought a book called Learning Learning Autodesk Maya 2009: Foundation in order to self-teach myself a bit of the Autodesk Maya software.

Learning Autodesk Maya 2009: Foundation (Courtesy of Wiley Canada)

The pages are contained coloured graphics so that is a bonus in my opinion. Anyways, each lesson from the book is not too long so I plan on tackling one lesson per week. I have Maya 8.5 PLE and don’t expect there are significant changes between this version and the 2009 version. So, last week, I finished lesson one and I have a screen capture of the wireframe model:

Lesson 1

Here it is more close-up with the actual model view:

Lesson 1 (2)

Following the lesson, I have made nice little building inside what appears to be an igloo-compound (Har har, a Canadian joke made by a Canadian). Well, that round object will eventually become the sky surrounding the structure within. Anyways, that’s all I have for now, so I’m going to have to work on the second lesson to see what’s going to happen in this scene :O

Posted in 3D Stills Tagged: 3D Stills

First Start

Mei Chu — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:32:34 +0000

WACOM Bamboo (Courtesy of Wired)

So I was able to buy the WACOM Bamboo from Futureshop yesterday at a decent price. Of course, I immediately started playing around with it goofing around Live Messenger with friends. After getting used to it, I have finally decided to really do something a bit more advanced with it. Given that the “Art of Up” book arrived today, I opened up Microsoft Paint and painted my favourite character from that movie.

Dug the Dog

Having finished that with Paint, I was unsure as to how I can colour it with Adobe Photoshop (I originally was not planning colouring it anyways). However the “Dark” default brush from Photoshop made it possible colour the dog underneath the pencil border ! The result of my 20+ minutes of colour is this:

Dug the Coloured Dog

So this is where I will, once again, begin my artistic journey after not having anything to do with art for a good six years. Cheers !

Posted in 2D Stills Tagged: 2D Stills