So my animations are now finished and i have all the time in the world now to get on with my own little projects :)

So as some of you know i've been working on the Cerebus project for some time and a few months ago i started on the introduction animation of the Dragon roaring to wake up the villages, this was a great scene to work on and i found it to be a massive challenge for me as i had never animated creatures before, but it was great to push my skills out of my comfort zone and see what i could do.

This is just an example of the Dragon textured, as the scene isn't completely put together yet and thing are not fully textured i took a render that Oliver had sent me and added a background by Gray Summers to it that i located on Google Image.


I've asked if it would be ok for me to use the rig for personal use (giving credit to the other artists of course) so that i can strengthen my showreel and he has given me the ok so i'll hopefully be knocking out some more animation soon using these rigs.

Here is the final animation i submitted, look at it now after taking some time away from it i see some things that i would maybe change but its nothing massive, just the positioning of the camera and maybe the neck movement on the upper thrust of the final roar.


The position i would most likely used can be seen here in an low poly playblast i did, it just feel a little more dynamic then the one above.


So as well as the Cerebus animation i was asked by Droomwevers to work on the introduction animation for a learning DVD aimed at teaching children and adults the alphabet presented in writing, illustrations and music. I was given the task of introducing the letter S for Szolnok which is a place in Hungary, it was a lot of fun working on this project but sadly didn't take me very long (around 2-3 hours) so it was over before i knew it but still great to test out my skills in over areas outside of character animation :)


Outside of the world of animation (i know that stuff belongs in my other Blog but i've got other stuff for that one) i've been working on a Minecraft Server with my mate Jezz, we wanted a place that we had a little more control over as all the other servers out there are packed with to many power hungry admin. We set up a Bukkit server and kitted it out with awesome plugins and mods to make it a more enjoyable experience, as of yet its not public and can only handle 10 people (although this isn't yet tested) so it'll be a nice place to go and build and share :)

At the start of the server we did the normal required stuff.....you know.....using TNT to blow everything up ^^
If you play Minecraft at all you know that its a tradition that you dig down to bedrock and then build a massive TNT tower upwards, then of course blow that shiz up ^^
Well, we took the hole that was created after blowing it up and filled that with a little TNT.....now when i say a little, its kind of an understatement as you can see below :D





Soooooooo yeeeeeaaah as you can see....quite a bit of TNT ^^
Sadly when we ignited the TNT it kinda crashed the server....but we made a backup so i can test it out on my computer and see if we can get full destruction...should be fun f we can.

This is as far as it got before the server died....



After we killed the server we started a new seed and started work on the building in hour spare time and late nights :)

So far we've put together a nice little spawn point for everyone that comes onto the server (although the Endermen keep taking blocks... >_< Grrrrrrrr), i even built a little puzzle for people that go around the world from village to village although at the moment the warps aren't set up so you go nowhere as of yet. This is the temple i was working on, it has a lot of redstone wiring in it to run all the triggers and reward systems, i wanted to make it look old and ruined with blocks missing so that people could see into the temple but without making an offering to the gods they wouldn't be able to get in. I also wanted to make it a floating temple with water flowing over the edges so that people can't just walk up to it but if they where to find the warp gates through the map they would be able to get access to the island. Anyway thats it for this weeks posts, im sure i'll be posting again soon....just need to get more work done :) Until then here are some shots of the temple.....enjoy ^^