I have decided for the sake of simplicity and ease of communication with potential employers, that my website needs to be my name not my initials. As a result I have registered the domain www.johnvanderbeck.com and will not be reneweing jwvanderbeck.com. That means that at some point this site will cease to exist entirely.

I have started a new blog however using Blogger, so that I can maintain a blog independant of my site. If you want to keep in touch with me, please move on over there at http://johnvanderbeck.blogspot.com

In the future you will be able to find my new personal website at www.johnvanderbeck.com.

In our case we actually got a special treat. We will be doing the post-production (IE visual effects work) for an actual client. The show is roughly 44 minutes long and has already been shot and will be passed off to us for pos-production work. This is EXACTLY how it works in the industry and so the experience will be invaluable.

Moving on into this stage however, I have decided to make some major changes to my website. In reality I think very few people actually read the blog, and as I move towards graduation I will the need to have a more portfolio styled website for my job search. As a result, I have decided to spend the holiday break redoing the website into a portfolio style website showing off my best works and demo reels. The blog will, for now, be discontinued.

This is the first part of our Animation Fundamentals lessons. In this first part we had to animate a single bouncy ball rolling off a ledge and bouncing through the camera view. It sounded so simple, but there really is a lot involved in animating a bouncing ball. Even more than we did here in this first animation!

Animation Fundamentals - Bouncing Ball

Downloads: 335 File Size: 0.0 KB File Name: johnvanderbeck_af_ball_bounce.mov

There are two things here. We did an animation which is a “turntable” of the model, and then there are a few renders showing the model in various “stress test” poses, where we stress the joints in the character to test out modeling and rigging before animation with the character.

Enjoy, and as always feedback is welcomed :)

TT Project Turntable

Downloads: 255 File Size: 0.0 KB File Name: johnvanderbeck_tt_turntable.mov

Our first project is the animation of a ball rolling off of a table and bouncing across the screen. This is a rather simple animation but one that is teaching us all sorts of important concepts. To begin with we’re learning the ins and outs of the animation TOOLS in Lightwave, as well as things like the dope sheet and graph editor. It is also teaches us things such as timing and weight. At this point we aren’t doing any squash or stretch, but we will be getting into that later. In this project its a matter of making the ball feel as though it has weight to it, and getting a good grasp of timing as the ball’s velocity decays slowly over time, and the bouncing arcs decay as well.

It sounds really simple, but i’ve restarted the project a couple times already. Its really a perceptual thing. The first major problem I was having was that the ball did not seem to be losing velocity throughout the animation. It sort of did, but not really. I modified my curves and everythign as instructed, using things like tension to make the ball ease in/out of the arcs. This gave the feel of weight as desired, but the ball’s overall velocity seemed to be relativly constant. I simply coulnd’t figure out what I was doing wrong!

It was a matter of timing and spacing. I was missing the fact that I had to increase the TIME between bounces. By increasing the time between each bounce, the ball appears to slow down, thus losing velocity. Painfully obvious in hindsight, but I find it interesting that my mind just didin’t see it on its own. I was tweaking the hell out of those curves and frame VALUES, but totally missing the important concept of TIME until it was pointed out to my by Eddie, the teaching assistant. Thanks Eddie!

When I get home from work i’ll be polishing this up then posting it here for you all to enjoy :) I’m also considering doing a Video Modeling session to illustrate this vital point. Stay tuned :)

I pulled my Finnegan’s model out of the closet and did more texturing work on it, and then set to work on compositing it into a full scene with other real life buildings.

I’m on, I think, my fifth remake of this character. One thing i’ve learned about organics is that it is very easy to lose control and once i’ve lost control there is almost no going back. It is easier to just nuke the whole thing and start over. We have to have this thing for the most part done on monday, so it will be a long weekend.

Our instructor, Chris, seems like a decent guy. He got us off to a rolling start yesterday. So rolling that I think I fell out of my chair halfway there :) By the end of our first day we had modelled most of a cartoonish head. Well he did. I got something that looks like a badly shaped piece of fruit with scary eyes and a goofy mouth. Yeesh this is hard!

In the end this project was a killer for me. I worked several all-nighters without any sleep whatsoever and in when all was said and done I was not happy at all with what I turned in. We’ll see how the grades go. However, with that said, I will be posting that animatino either tonight or tomorrow. I PROMISE :) I just need to get it compiled into an actuall video since right now its a series of 90 still image frames.

I’ve also been hard at work on an improved version of this animatino which I will post by the end of the week. Speaking of which; this is the final week of block 1: hardware modeling. All the “projects” are done, and this week we work on our first demo reels. Each block we do a demo reel of the major work we’ve done at school. This first one is more for us to learn about making them, and while it will be graded, it certainly isn’t a reel i’d be sending out to look for a job. Despite that however, I will be posting it here for everyone’s viewing pleasure :) The reel will contain animations for the coffee cart, building, and space shuttle projects, and they will all contain footage you have never seen before because i’m going back through all these projects and polishing things.