from my vimeo page: The cartoon I’m going to be making featuring the budgie you’ve been seeing will take place in this apartment living room.

There seem to be two flaws.

1. The camera seems to move in a strange, unanticipated way in the beginnig
2. I need to fix the lighting situation. I had done most of my lighting testing with the walls off, adding the walls has apparently caused a lot of light to be blocked.

Apartment Lights, etc Test 1 on Vimeo

The short will take place in an apartment living room so I’m taking a little bit of a break with the budgie to work on the living room. (This is, in many ways, a lot easier than the bird, so it’s a welcome change)

Finished my first ever couch today. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I didn’t even look at any tutorials - I just worked at it for about 30 minutes until I figured out the best way to represent a couch and what I would have to do to get it. Blender is one of those tools, like Photoshop, that takes a while to get used to, but then, once you start thinking in the program’s paradigm, you become insanely productive. So here’s what the apartment looks like so far in lo res and, by clicking, hi res. (The object hanging on the wall is a very small LCD Tv. I hope to give him a larger allowance so he can buy a bigger Tv. q;o) But for now this’ll do.

The budgie is almost complete. Here I am testing all of the bones. I just have a few things left to fix up with the bones. Then I need to fix the tapering of the wings. After that I just have a few little things like making the bird blink. Then I’ll be about 80% done towards finishing up the cartoon the budgie will be staring in.

Budgie Final Rig: Test 1 on Vimeo

Finally got to do some more work on the budgie today after having taken about 4-5 days off to do other stuff like photography and be with my wife. Finished rigging up all 6 toes on the bird. All I have left in the rigging is to do his legs and creating a tracking bone for moving his eyes. Here’s another foot animation to showcase all the little toes moving around. I hope the next one will have the entire bird moving through his entire range of motions as a test.

My budgie is almost ready to perch. I finally finished getting all the bones in the right front toes. This is the annoying part of computer animation. I need to make bones for each part of the body I wish to move and then tell the bones what parts of the flesh they move.

So here he is moving his toes around and getting ready to perch.

Budgie Feet: Front Toes Test on Vimeo

Didn’t get to do any work on the budgie 3 Jan 2007. However, I did get a lot of texturing and adding of bones done late on the second, I just didn’t post it. Here are some of the highlights.

I added the strips behind the head, which you can see much better in the picture after this one.

I also added some “feathery-white” textures based on a picture I saw online of a blue budgie.

I wanted to play a little with particle systems in Blender and see if I could get some realistic fur. I came to the conclusion that I need a lot more practice before I try to implement it. Sure, making a furry sphere went very well.

As I work on editing and uploading all the pictures I took during the holidays, please enjoy Penguin Flight!

Penguin Flight on Vimeo

Raul Domingo and the little Penguin. This turned out to be a lot harder and more complicated to put together than I imagined. Thankfully the programmers are working on a better implementation. (Click on the picture for a larger version that may work better as a background for your desktop)

Alright, I finally finished up the animation for Raul Domingo. In addition to all I did before, I now know how to lip sync, use the NLA editor, and do some other pretty neat stuff. I technically know how to make him blink, but I was having some technical difficulties and wanted to get the animation going, so I skipped that for now. Part of the animation involved creating facial expressions for Raul so that he could speak and show basic emotions. Here are some of the facial expressions. (Link to the videos below)