Color makes me scared and weak.... (but once I get past it, I really enjoy texturing). I'm posting this now so I can show it to Anim Forum... which starts now. ;)

Here's what I've come up with for the group's color scheme. The challenge is giving them all a distinct color of their own (you know, since they're super heroes), and keeping them unified.)

I started somewhere around here, and didn't feel like they looked like part of the same group at all:


So then I unified them more, but it was boring:


This is what I've got right now. I ended up changing the outfit of the one on the right since she was sticking out the most (her clothes looked too formal). Right now I'm using the exact same colors on everybody, but I plan on varying these up a little more, so it looks a little less.. juvenile?


I've pretty much finished UVing Moe and will start texturing her tonight! The Max UV work flow isn't too much different from Maya, but it took me a little bit to figure out some differences. :)

Still a few little pinches here and there, but I'm happy enough with her to move on to texturing.

Some modeling progress - I'm almost done with my first JPop girl! Just need to get in there are start doing some asymmetrical stuff. I should come up with real names for them.. so far I've just been referring to this one as "Mo"





And, since I didn't post it with their character designs, this is the sort of look I'm basing my designs off of. This is the Japanese pop group "Buono!" The dance moves they will be doing are going to follow this style of dance.

Figure drawing from today!












Also some sketches from last Thursday's lunchtime sketch session. One of the topics was giraffes, which we all quickly learned we didn't know how to draw from memory. I decided to embrace this fact. :)

So for my next exercise, I had initially wanted to work on armed combat. In my recent push to make things more fun, I came up with a sort of 'J-Pop group gets attacked by robot' piece. Once I got really into the research and got my dance all choreographed I decided I simply had to make my own characters for this one, since the fashion references are too fun. :)

Here's a limited set of my initial exploration:



Then I decided I wanted to try more exaggerated proportions, and perhaps expand it to 3 characters instead of one:





And here are some more refined drawings from today:








I'm excited to move forward. My main issue right now is making them all seem like they're from the same universe (I think they maybe look too different in the pencil drawings)


Also, here's a random drawing I did the other week when I was first thinking about modeling, which is unrelated, but I wanted to share:

Some sketches from the Natural History Museum in NYC from last month's vacation:

Exercise from June: Takedown



Initially, I'd intended for this to be a combat test animation, but the more I thought about it, I really just wanted to work on the body mechanics of 2 people slamming into each other. This one's for all of my friends that have been getting married/engaged lately. ;)

I'm particularly happy with the guy's hit.