Sleeping Dogs NIS

It's kind of difficult to detail in stills the process of taking the vendor made rigs and animation from Maya to Max into the pipeline and in an NIS for Sleeping Dogs. In the master rig image you get a glimpse of the rig and a precursor of the final controls, in the Max playblast a glimpse of the proxies that animation was transferred to and then a still of the end product. FBX was the lone squeaky rail which terabytes of animation data was ferried through the pipeline.

Dan Lindberg VFS Submission Portfolio

Art dump

So it's been a while since I put pencil to paper, or did anything creative in general. For the last few weeks I've been endeavouring to change this.




I picked up an issue of 3D Artist because it had this wicked tutorial on how to model this stylised woman by this awesome modeler named Andy Hickinbottom and this totally inspired. Initially I was going to create my own design and try to walk through Andy's tutorial but as I spoke with some people at work this thing sort of evolved into my first zbrush sculpt project. Rather than go through some oldschool modelling techniques pushing verts and edges around I'm going to dive right in to zbrush.

Initially the design started off as a saucy witch. I spent a lot of time looking at pop culture (the Disney rogues gallery most prominently) and 40's pin up references, even cheesy Halloween costumes.






Nothing seemed to stick until I landed on Yzma from Emperor's New Groove but even then the design was missing something. So I started straying further afield and began looking at haute couture in the hopes of seeing something strange and wonderful that simply worked. Besides Yzma was more of a flapper girl from the 20's and 30's than your archetypal witch. Seemed like the right path to follow.










Nothing seemed to pop out, all of them had elements that I liked but none of them were the one. Until I went off on a bit of a tangent..







Now I'm just quickly blocking this in with primitives in Maya that I'll import into zbrush. And if this doesn't work I can try to use the zbrush mannequin.



Going to be bugging the crap out of the character guys for pointers for the next little while.

Dangerous cat-like reflexes

Feel free to offer any feedback or criticism. This is the first bit of genuine animation I think I've done in two years. No mocap tweaking, no facefx, no rotoscoped facial data.

Heavy skip cycle

The goal is an exercise a day

To work off the rust and work my way up to something bigger. I think I'll do two more quick exercises and then work on something more elaborate. A dialogue or two character interaction.

And now for something completely different...

Trying to work off the rust with some asic animation exercises. Here's a Preston Blair style walk cycle with the Scout from TF2.