Throwback Thursday!

Here's a little something from my time at Dreamworks--the outcast soldier, who appeared many many times--often many times in the same shot (ha!) in the Dragons: Riders of Berk TV show. That beard, man. A lot of love went into that beard.

Space Pod!

OK, back to it! I'll be posting more regularly from now on, because why not? Plus, I'm deep into production on an animated short of my own, a real labor of love type thing, and I'm building up a sizable cache of images, both 3D and 2D, that I'd like to share. More on that project in future posts. What we have here, above, is not from my thing, but something I did for somebody else's thing. Space pod, complete with removable hatch. A simple model, but I like the way it turned out. 

Concept Art: Deep Space

So I'm working on a short animated film (which will double as a music video), and parts of it take place in strange, cartoonish (i.e., not beholden to normal physical laws), far-flung regions of space (and not necessarily in this universe). This is one early concept sketch (done in photoshop), a cluster of planets held together by a small, sentient nebula. Much more to come on this project, but since I am flying solo on this the work will come slowly.

Character concept: moth guy!

So, even though this is by and large a blog about 3D work, we're going to throw our mission statement out the window for this very first post, which will be be a brief chronicle of a character concept I did for a gig in the not-so-distant past. The assignment: design some funny monster characters for a show pitch.

For one of the characters I decided to go with an insect-meets-human hybrid. Now, this was for a comedy, so I needed an insect that had comedy potential. Anyone who's read The Tick knows that the moth certainly has comic potential. I decided to start there.

I did some initial rough sketches, stuff that eventually began to looked like this:

There were elements I liked in these first sketches, so for the next pass I focused on refining those likeable elements while also searching for new ones:

Adding the extra set of arms really helped sell him for me. I figured we could get some great comic acting out of somebody with two sets of arms.

Eventually you have to start thinking about color:

One more pass to tighten the color palette and put him in an action pose:

One last thing: I wanted to drop him into some sort of scene, just to see how he would settle into it. There was no BG art yet done that I could use, but I knew that the show was set in a very mundane, present-day American Anytown. So I put him in the most mundane place I could think of:

Unfortunately, this was to be moth guy's first and last excursion to Home Depot; the whole project was shelved shortly after I made this image. C'est l'animation!

Welcome!

Welcome to the relaunch of The Edgeloop Jungle! In addition to a fancy new title banner, this blog has a new mission. It was born many, many moons ago as a quick and dirty portfolio solution, and, having outlived its original raison d'être by quite a few moons (we count everything in moons around here), it is being repurposed as a repository for just-finished 3D work, almost-finished 3D work, models from yesteryear that do not exist on my reel anymore, updates on personal animation projects, and maybe some simple tutorial stuff for beginning Maya users. Still, I didn't get rid of all of the business of…business. All employment-related stuff (resume, reel, shot list) has been moved to separate pages, which can be found in the nav bar right under the splashy new title banner. 

At the moment there's not much to see beyond the redesign, but I'll be adding new (and not-so-new) material soon enough. Stay tuned!