Winter Walk

Let's take another walk...

Seiya-!

Today's little sketchy...

Last night I went to a birthday party of a friend. When I came back home early in the morning, there were big slopes in our street. But we had no rain at all during the night....I was confused but I didn't care and went to bed. When I woke up and went to the bathroom there was no water coming out of the faucet. I couldn't use the toilet either. Later I've found out that we had a water main break in our street. It was fixed pretty fast in the afternoon. But once again I noticed how helpless you are without water...

Wonder Forest....

Been busy with animation the last couple of days....time for a new painting!

Sniper

A sniper in the dark, preparing to do his job.

"Chirp!"

Artrage 2 is released! A great freware painting tool. I did the sketch for this one in Artrage and colored it in photoshop. I'll certainly try some Artrage only paintings.

You can get it here

Car Guy

Today's little sketch.

Office Girl

Morning Walk

Fortunately my face is not swollen at all! The left side of my face still hurts a bit but it's way better than yesterday. Still can't eat real food....I'm starving... T.T

Here is a little doodle from today.
It wasn't my intention but the guy looks like me ^^;
I don't have no dog either.

Interaction between Characters and Objects

When your characters interact with objects, you often need to figure out methods to make the animation process comfortable. During the last years I used several methods.


Scene: "character picks up a bottle from the table"

How I used to do it long time ago (don't do it like that!):
Example 01: "simple parenting and keying the visibility attribute"
The hand moves towards the bottle. When the hand grabs the bottle, you simply duplicate the bottle and parent it to the palmbone of the hand. On exactly the same frame, you set the visibility of the bottle on the table to 0 and set a key. You leave the visibility of the parented bottle at 1 and set another key.
Then go one frame back and do the opposite. Set the visibility of the bottle on the table to 1 and the parented bottle to 0. Now you have a invisible switch of two bottles.

Problems:
-When you adjust the timing of the animation you have to move the visibility keys as well. And when you change the pose of the character sometimes you have to readjust the bottle in the hand.

-When the character has to put the bottle back on the table you'll have to do that duplicating process all over again.

- Some renderers doesn't support the visibility attribute and your objects will be visible the whole time.

Example 02: "Parenting and scaling"
You can do the same thing as in example 01, keying the scale attribute of the object instead of the visibility. That way any renderer will render it correctly. Still not the best solution cause you have to duplicate the objects...

Example 03 "Parent Constrain Object":
A realatively new feature is the parent constrain. You can constrain the target object to the hand and blend the weighting between 0 an 1. If the weight attribute of the parent constrain is set to 0 the object will stay on the table. When you set it to 1, the object will be parented to the hand. This works pretty well and you have to key only one attribute to let the character interact with the object.
I used this option for most of my animations. A big plus is that you don't need to duplicate the objects anymore!

Example 04: "Parent Constraining Hand"
A fellow artist gave me the hint to constrain the hands to the object (not the object to the hand). That is a really good solution especially when your character has to interact with an object with both hands. For example when he is lifting a box. You simply parent constrain the right hand to the box and do the same for the left. Now you only have to animate the box itself. Fingers and hands are still movable.

I think the last two solutions are pretty comfortable when characters interact with objects.

Wisdom Teeth gone forever...

Uh...I had a wisdom tooth surgery today. 3 of them were pulled out at once. But it went way faster when I expected and it didn't hurt at all. About 5 minutes for all 3 of them. I was spitting blood the whole day...uh disgusting. The left side of my face started to hurt a couple of hours ago. I had to take a anti pain pill, but it's not swollen yet. I put ice blocks on both cheeks the whole day. The next days I can only eat soup T.T

Anyways they're out and they won't come back! Yey.
Off to bed...

Meditation & my progress...

I started painting digital in April 2004. I was hanging around with my buddy Stephan in school. He is a very gifted concept artist and since the day I saw his paintings, I wanted to improve my painting skills as well. He told me that I should paint at least one picture per day. At the beginning of April I decided to start with my daily paintings. The first 20-30 paintings where mostly painted using reference photos. I tried to paint them as quick as possible (around 30min - 60min each) without picking the colors from the original photo, just to get used to colors and values. Once in a while I tried to paint my own pictures that I had in my head. But it was very difficult cause I rarely painted with colors before. I drew my whole life with pencil and paper but working with colors was kind of new to me.

The first few weeks were very hard cause I had to learn the basics, painting from reference all the time...but as I reached around 30 paintings, I started to understand little things and painting without reference was getting easier. Now I knew the basics and Stephan could easily critisize my work. That was the most precious thing during the learning process. I didn't miss one day without painting a picture until the beginning of August 2004. I went to SIGGRAPH and I coudn't go on painting. ^^
Until today I still try to paint as much as I can. Sometimes I painted over an old painting just to compare my improvement. Last year I painted over one of my very first digital paintings and I was really pleased about the result. Here is a comparison of the two paintings.

"Meditation" April 2004

"Meditation" August 2005

I can't describe how much I learned from the daily paintings. There were some really busy moments where I had to animate night and day and I couldn't find time to paint but I never really stopped doing my dailies and I certainly will go on doing them ^^.
Thanks Stephan for the continuous support! Check out his work at www.stephanart.com

Pure

Just experimenting.

STORE 56 now online!

Good News! My online store is finally running!
I was asked a couple of times if my paintings were available for sale, and I always wanted to start an online shop but I neither found time nor a good solution to do that. Now I was asked again and it motivated me to give it another try. Since I saw some fellow artists running their store at cafepress.com I checked it out as well. And it happenend to be a great solution to make my work available for sale. After a couple of busy days I finally managed to get the store running. Check it out ^^V!

Pocket Spy Cam

Yes! I Finally got my Pocket Spy Cam I ordered las year! It's a little geek toy. A tiny digital camera in a Zippo-Style case. You can take up to 99 pictures and about 30seconds video with audio!! And the quality of the images is comparable with the digital cameras integrated in cell phones.
There are couple more features included. It's really awesome ^^
Took this picture today. Could be a scene in a psycho thriller...
hehe I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this new gadget ^^

aa~ I just love geek toys!

White Hair

Typing Madness

Found this little game on the net. It's a typing game. First you can choose a language for the words that will appear on the screen. The words are flying from the right to the left and you have to type them before they reach the left edge. It's starting slow and gets faster and faster.
You should master touch typing first cause the guys in the high score list are really good typers! (especialy in the english words section). It's even hard to get into the score list.... T.T

2addicted

My hands hurts....enough of the typing for today... ^^;

mmmh...Candy

Just a quick sketch before bedtime...

Fireflies

I remember that I loved to catch fireflies when I was little. I was somewhere in the mountains with my parents and my brother. In the night there where thousands of fireflies and we catched a bunch of them in a bag and took them into our hotel room. We lied down on the bed and opend the bag in the dark. And a beautiful fireflyshow started. After a while we fell asleep. The next morning the fireflies were gone. That was really strange. The windows were closed all night. We searched the whole room for them. Under the bed, behind the picturesframes, in the bathroom, just everywhere. But they were gone. I'm still wondering what happened to them ^^;

The Visitor

A little speedy before bedtime. Played around with complementary colors.

Smile...

Snow, where are you?

It was getting warmer the last few days and the snow is gone T.T
I hope it comes back.

Happy New Year!

I went to a New Years Party yesterday with my best friend and some fellow students from the German Film School. The Party was held in a movie theatre at Jungfernstieg in Hamburg. There were two floors with differnt kinds of music and an outdoor chillout lounge. The lounge was very comfortable with really good music.
At 12:00 there where huge never ending fireworks. It was really great!
We had lots of fun celebrating the New Year!
So here we are in 2006! Happy New Year everyone!

My first painting in 2006.