lavishfish

warm wishes

S Hustace — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:37:23 +0000

Fire cycle

S Hustace — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:43:57 +0000

This cycle is part of an animated torch logo. I credit the masterful work of John Halas & Harold Whitaker, whose drawings I referred to in creating this piece.

crow walk

S Hustace — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:23:58 +0000

a bouncy shuffle walk based on R. Williams’ subtle skip walk

Cadillac Mood

S Hustace — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:38:16 +0000

Dialogue from 1991 film “Twenty-One.” Modeled and animated with Maya; funkaliscious groovy mood lighting done with Photoshop.

Stars ‘n Stripes Hildy

S Hustace — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:55:00 +0000

I created this piece for a friend who is running for Congress in 2012.

I modeled, mapped, rigged and animated the character with Maya. My old version has some serious bugs with animImport, but I discovered a great freeware mel script for importing animation curves. It’s called dkAnim, and it worked flawlessly. Thanks D. Kramer for making such a great tool available!

The sneakers are Nurbs objects which I animated with stand in geometry since they were fairly memory intensive.

Hildy’s large head called for small movements to avoid looking wobbly. A little went a long way.

The walk cycle is based on a Milt Kahl strut/walk.

Power to the People!

bouncing balls

S Hustace — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:03:30 +0000

For this test, I had an idea of what kinds of balls I wanted to use, but didn’t think about how they could interact until I saw a smiley ball on eBay. Then things started to come together bit by bit.

To prevent the balls from slipping as they roll, I used an expression to establish the relationship between the ball rotateZ and the translateX of a parent cube node which drives the Z rotation as I drag the cube along in X. I was surprised this equation wasn’t clearly spelled out on any site I searched, so here it is:

Sphere.rotateZ = -360*Cube.translateX/(2*3.14*r)

In the case of the smiley ball which bounces on his head and then starts to roll, I had to use the inverse of the equation:

Sphere.rotateZ = 360*Cube.translateX/(2*3.14*r)

software used: Maya & Photoshop

flight cycle test

S Hustace — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:50:58 +0000

Searching for a middle ground here, i.e. punching up the accents without overdoing it. Final character look and feel will be painterly–which should loosen things up some more.

crow glide test

S Hustace — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:50:41 +0000

Gliding to the bongo beat. I may end up going with a simpler side to side action, but I enjoyed doing the swoopy stuff to see if I could pull it off. Will add a camera pan down too.

Penny Priddy

S Hustace — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:12:47 +0000

My first 3D dialogue test, which I modeled, rigged and animated with Maya. Dialogue from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.”