This project was similar to the Still Life assignment. All the models were provided and it was our job to light and texture everything. We arranged the set as we saw fit. It was also our first introduction to compositing in Nuke. All around an incredibly fun project.

Cemetery from Rachele Alexander on Vimeo.

Pre-Pro

So right before spring break we finished up our first pre-pro stories. For those not in the know, pre-production is the class where we create the story that will become our senior thesis. We develop one story for half the semester, and then another for the remainder. So here's a bit of design work from my first story. It didn't pass, but that's kind of a relief. By the end I was rather fed up with the direction the story had taken. I'm far more excited about the one I'm working on now, though.

Delicious~

This was our still life assignment. We were provided with the models, and we had to compose and light the scene, and texture everything. This was the assignment that really solidified my love for texturing. I had a ton of fun with it :)

Still Life from Rachele Alexander on Vimeo.

Push/Pull

So the big assignment last semester in Computer Animation was called Push/Pull. We had to create a character from scratch and animate that character pushing and/or pulling something. First we focused on more naturalistic weight and movement. Once that was completed we worked on an exaggerated version for the remainder of the semester.

Push/Pull - Natural from Rachele Alexander on Vimeo.

Push/Pull - Exaggerated from Rachele Alexander on Vimeo.

My animation really improved a lot since sophomore year. However, my favorite parts of the pipeline are texturing, lighting, and modeling. In that respect I'm really satisfied with how they turned out.

"Value"ables and Drama

So this assignment was called VALUEables because we had to do an environment painting in black and white focusing on value. Oh, how they love their puns. In addition to the environment we had to include a character interacting with it. I chose to use my little griffin chef guy from the Laboratory assignment.

Next we have the Drama assignment. Basically same thing as Valueables but this time in color. Some dramatic situation taking place in an environment. I chose to adapt Pandora's Box because at the time I was toying with the idea of pitching an adaptation of it for prepro. I did pitch it but it didn't get picked.

Moving Along

Continuing my Junior year retrospective, here is the very first assignment from our Drawing for Animators class last semester: Laboratory character designs. I had a lot of fun with this one. We had to "find" characters in silhouettes, textures, and scribbles. Then we developed them into finished designs.

First, the exploration.

And here are the characters that were selected from this exploration and refined to the final stage.

New Blog

So I finally decided to join the club and start a blog. To start things off I figure I should do a bit of a retrospective of what I've been up to at Ringling this past school year. First: Intermediate Figure. I had this last semester and had a ton of fun. If you haven't taken it yet I highly recommend you do so. I saw a lot of improvement. So here's a sampling of some of the work I did. These are from the last part of the semester, when we were working with models in costume. Figure drawing with clothing was so hard! It was like learning to draw all over again.

More figure work to come later.