Nepal Trek

Went a trekking in Nepal on Annapurna Sanctuary Trek...amazing,tiring and will go back again!
Here are some pics of the trek and Kathmandu.

3d Matte Paintings

HAND PAINTED RENDER




Ive come to realize over the years the value of a good matte paintings.Since my initial exposure to animation was in CG, my typical approach was to do all the final lighting in 3d ,which meant hours of painful lighting, rendering and tweaking in 3d to get an ok result.
Im using a different approach for my own short, and that is to actually paint onto a base 3d render.
You can see the result for yourself, much richer and varied colours and a chance to artistically control the lighting without going mad!


ORIGINAL RENDER

Cover art direction

Ive done a lot of covers over the last two years , mainly for Tinkle magazine.Its quite a detailed affair with 3 artists working on it.I thought I would give a peek into how I do the art direction process.After I draw the rough layout sketch, a penciller will use it to draw a detailed sketch and then hand it over to the painter.After a quick first pass, the painter hands it over to me, I do a art direction paintover.
See for example how the background was pushed into a warm color, redesigned the robot some more and played with the overall composition and lighting.
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Background Color Directions

Backgrounds that I did for a friend,good to cut loose with just flat colors!

Update:He added a texture pass and some additional lighting, its really starting to look good now!

NID OPEN ELECTIVE JAN. 2010

I took a 2 week Open Elective workshop in my old school,National Institute of Design this January called 3d Visualization for Designers wherein I taught students visualization techniques using clay and software.
Im quite happy with the workshop as they were new to 3d modelling and sculpting and after a week's instructions were producing some phenomenal work in both software and clay.I ended up teaching some rudimentary tools in Silo and Zbrush which they used to produce the final assignments.The quality of the students in NID is very good still and the resources they have access to are top notch.
Ive posted some stills of their work(scroll down) as well some pages of the syllabus content I designed for the 2 weeks I was there.

We finally printed all the final assignments in A0 and the course process showing progression in the Aquarium,where I had put up my pre-dip many years ago!
Real blast from the past...we also setup two workstations where the students showed how they modelled and detailed hi-rez 3d models in Zbrush and Silo in live demos for the final Open Elective presentation.There was a genuine buzz on campus as every Open Elective had also put up their work,personal favourites were the Bamboo workshop helicopters and Anuj's awesome drapery assignments.Very inspiring work!

Whistling Woods Character Animation Workshop

I took a course at Whistling Woods, an animation and film school in Mumbai setup by Subhas Ghai.
I basically taught students how to use stepped keys ,breakdowns and inbetweening in Maya using traditional character animation techniques.They learnt how to draw on cell sheets on the monitors to make sure that their arcs were smooth and their poses "read" properly.Im posting some pics of my workshop over there and some student assignments showing the process I taught them.
I think the biggest takeaway they took from the workshop was how to plan an animation before they start animating,how to hit strong keyposes and how to make sure that the arcs and inbetweens contribute to a strong perfomance.

Getting to draw on the screen definitely broke down the barriers that 3d animation creates , and since they had a strong base on 2d animation, thye could translate their animnation concepts seamlessly over to a 3d animation software such as Maya.

Matte Paintings

Been developing some matte paintings ,late nites.
Having a great time discovering a good blend of 2d and 3d to push the look of my short film along,take a look...