Teddy Balloon

my latest teddy bear episode! i used a bunch of expressions to tie the balloon to the string and act realistically with mo-Dynamics.

Teddy Balloon from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

5 Second Prject - Sel Portrait

This months 5 Second project from GSG was themed Self Portrait.

And this was my entry

Self Portrait - 5 Second Project from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

Cool title Effect!

I saw this example of a title on GSG and he put forth a small challenge to see if we could copy the same effect without using tutorials. so i gave it a whack.

title test from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

TEDdy Bear fever

I put together a Teddy bear Rig to try out some animation working with skeleton rigs. I thought it might be cool to see a teddy do some karate so i animated it.
here it is:

Teddy Karate from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

I came across a few issues which i could only see after the render. it was with the lighting setup. midway through the bears foot blocks one of the main light sources which causes the lighting in the room to change. Now 3d rendering is one of the most strenuous things you can put a computer through and on my new Pentium i7 core 3Ghz with 9GB RAM this 13second animation took 35hours, 40minutes and 20seconds to render. and because this was just a play around i couldn't warrant spending that much time re-rendering it.
Just thinking about it there were a few things i could of done to cut off some major time in that rendering process. I used things like ambient occlusion, global illumination, reflective floor and Hair(teddys fur) which were optional tools that i used to make it look pretty. ah well next time will be smooth i hope :)
Learn by doing!

House On Fire!

After creating smoke with particles for the twilight menu i was interested in developing this technique further. I wanted to create some particle generated fire with smoke that could ignight, extinguish and move around the scene realistically.

So i made this short sequence to test out some ideas, aslo gave me a chance to test out filming with the new canon 7D.

house ON fire from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

FAIL - 5sec project

GreyScaleGorilla hosts a little monthly competition called the 5second project. Basically to enter you have to make a 5second animation based loosely on a word or phrase, this months word was "Fail".

Here is my entry.

5second project "Fail" from Ted Adair on Vimeo.

Nerfed! prt1

I started working on a new little project where ill film someone shooting a nerf gun and the camera will follow the foam dart out of the gun to a close up and then follow it as it hits the target.

Im awaiting arrival of my new canon 7D to be able to actually film the footage. but its never too early to start modeling and prepping my 3d stage!

Ive finished a first draft of my nerf dart model.

this is what a nerf dart looks like(one on the right is what i used)


....here is my setup


....and here is a render of it


so yeah....ill post more once i get my camera and can actually film some shots to composite this onto!

The Twilight Project.....How?

Just thought I would share some of the techniques used to create this animation from scratch. First step was to get a reference image of what i was looking to create, in terms of style and movement.
here is the poster I used.




















First think i noticed was the Smokey atmosphere and the silhouetted trees. So i decided i would set my scene in the same location as these actors.
Next step was to create the back ground. I just Binged (its not that bad!) pictures of forests untill i found one i liked. this is what i found...


Then i just went through the process of overlaying different coloured layers and textures from my database of texture images to get the grungy old rusty look. And jsut like that i had a nice background to start my animation on.

One of the hardest parts of this project was to create realistic smoke.
I decided to generate my own smoke rather than compositing footage of smoke so that i can more control of how it moved.
here is a screen shot of the steps i used.

Firstly i created a simple particle generator that emits dots at a desired rate. then i duplicated it. distorted it. and finally blurred it.
When you have it layed out infront of you like that it seems rather simple, but to get a moving mass of dots to look close enough to realistic smoke, its a lot tougher than i made it out to be.

And finally the last little nugget of info i have was how i faded the title onto the scene. I used an effect called fractal noise which layers lots of noise ontop of each other, kinda looks like clouds. many of you might be familiar with this effect in photoshop. Well its teh same thing, except i added some animation to it and used it as a mask so that the text looked like it bleed into the scene like it was ink on paper.

And thats basically how i did it, hope you liked it!

The Twilight Project

About a week ago I was chatting to a house mate about his business which specializes in filming sci-fi conventions and creating souvenir DVDs for sale. He showed me the current project he was working on and the first thing I noticed was how bland the DVD menu was. People usually think that DVD menus are an insignificant part of the DVD but in fact its one of the most important. The menu is the first impression the audience gets about what the quality of the product is like. I know if I bought a DVD from a non well established publisher and saw a less than apealing opening menu then my entire view of the actual production will be slightly tainted.

Anyway I offered to make a replacement and instantly he jumped to it and its now being published in the latest Australian Twilight Tour DVD.
Here is the video


if you cant see it properly check it out on vimeo. Link: http://www.vimeo.com/8802785

Welcome!

Hi guys, welcome to my new blog page!
I decided to start this up as a tool to be able to display the work that I do to the world. Nothing will be overly complex, ill just upload screen shots along with descriptions of how I did stuff and then maybe a video link of the final product.

so enjoy!

- Ted.