Samurai Genji References Complete

Wow! time sure does fly when your having fun! I have some good news and bad news. Which would you like to hear first?......... lets start with the bad news, I always like to finish off my post positively.

The bad news is, the project is still not complete and I am well past my second due date. I basically took 12 months from my last post to complete all of my reference filming and 15 completely blocked scenes. I am very disappointed in myself as an artist and moving forward I am promising myself  that will change. It has been the most challenging time of my life these last few years trying to stay focused on my career and this project. I've even asked my self a few times if animation was still the path I wish to follow.

Here is the good news... I do plan on continuing to follow the path or animation! However, I greatly apologize for my inaccurate expected completion dates from my previous posts. I do on the other hand have a very good reason why this project has become so stretched out lately. It turns out, I originally planed on creating a 3 - 5 minute animated short with the characters from Geoff Trebs' Samurai Genji Comic. After filming my references for the short. The total run time for all of my live action references jumped to a whopping 9 minutes! In other words, it would have taken me virtually twice as long to animate the short even if i was on schedule.

moving forward its probably best if I don't give an estimated completion date for the short itself. Instead I will try to state where I am with the project and about how long it will take me to reach the next stage of the process. Ill try to keep my goals a little smaller in scale so that I don't get over whelmed with the amount of work left in the short.

Currently, I have a total of about 120 story board panels that need to be blocked and animated. As of today, 15 of those panels are blocked. (not spaced, no in betweens, and not smoothed)

I've estimated I would need to block around 2 pages of story boards a month at minimum to at least have a chance at completing the animation portion of the project by the end of this year. There will still be special effects, rendering, and the credits that I would need to work on going into 2016

There is also a few audio clips that need to be recorded for the characters. however, (adding on to the good news) about 80 percent of the 2 character's audio has already been recorded. yay! pizza and cookies for me!

There are a few more details that will be needed for the short to be 100% complete in 2016 (hopefully) but I will save that for future post.

Again, thank you to all who follow my work!

Samurai Genji Rig and Story Board Complete

Just wanted to update the blog to inform everyone that the rigs for both characters have been completed. Also, the story board for the short is complete as well. Allthough it was done roughly, and when I say rough I mean ROUGH, I can see all of the great ideas for the short starting to come to life!

Curently, im now moving on to filming my references for the short. My goal is to start animating within the next two weeks. Last year, I posted that the project was exspected to be completed by march of this year. uhhh, thats not going to happen haha. Its a great challange finding time inbetween work to work on this project as I curently work two jobs. However, the good news is that the project IS moving along.

Moving forward, I have changed the exspected completion time of the short to January, 1 2015. I estimate it will take me roughly 6 monthes to produce good solid animation on the level that I have invisioned this short to be on since the begining of its creation. The remaining 4 months will be used to create special effects and composite them along with the shorts credits. I will try to update the blog as often as posible as I go further with the animation stage of the project.

Samurai Genji Models and Future Animated Short To Come

 Well here is the result of several months of work so far. After I completed my demo reel I started freelancing on two projects, one of which can be found on my website at www.otiswyrickanimator.com     under the models section. I started this project after I completed my two freelance projects. The characters above are genji and white fox, two main characters from Geoff Treb's comic Samurai Genji. I am currently working on a 2 - 5 minute animated short for these characters and the estimated completion date is expected to be march of next year. For those of you who follow my blog thanks for your support! Hopefully I will be able to find time to upload a few play blast as the animation is being created.

Demo Reel 2012

Well here is a portion of my excuse for not posting any work for about a year. My Demo Reel is finally complete. You can also find it on my website at: http://www.otiswyrickanimator.com/ 

Flying bug animation

Here is a short animation that i created in intro to 3d animation class a while back. I never had the chance to upload it because i was bogged down with modeling work. It was created using the bug model from the Mastering Autodesk Maya 2011 book and the rig that i created from following the tutorial. 

Resource Tower with Cannons

Here is a fun render of the resource tower with the cannons that i added to it.

Resource tower alternate render

As promissed, this is an alternate lit version of the resource tower that i compleated for class.