Like Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor, Comrade Bearsaw also made the transition to 3D, but with a few improvements along the way.

I wanted to make a render of just the two Ursaws. I also learned how to get smooth depth of field and ambient occlusion renders without them being all grainy in the process. Hopefully I can use this in getting the other scene to render faster.

This is the first of a pair of still-life images I had to make for an intermediate 3D class at school. The only requirements were that there be about 12 objects, made in Maya and Mudbox, arraigned differently for two images. This was our project for the entire semester. The second image isn't currently finished to a point I'm happy with. I've been having a certain rendering issue that I still need to deal with (something caused rendering time to jump from 1-2 hours to 24+ hours...), but I ran out of time before I had to leave for the break.

The vinyl toys have made another comeback, and the third one has received a much-needed revision and has become Comrade Bearzooka.

These are various gesture drawings I made during the BYU Animation Club's weekly Wednesday-night gesture-drawing sessions.

This was an exercise in design I chose to do outside of class. I guess the prompt was to create a fairy-tale character, and I decided to go with Coyote from Native American lore. My aim was to imitate the Tlingit art style and try to define a 3-dimensional form with it.

The final for the Animation class I took during the spring semester required us to animate a character acting through a short voice clip. This was my project, with an additional inbetween pass that I did since the end of the class.

The sound byte is from a segment of a clip provided at the 11-Second Club website.

This is a scene from my latest solo animation project, titled "A Viking's Quest."

All effects are done in Adobe Flash. The fog effects are the easiest, as they comprise of a Movie Clip symbol of a shape tween and given alpha transparency and a thick blur. Layer a few of these on top of each other, and you have a blur effect similar to the one seen here.

Of course, using Movie Clip symbols has a long history of being difficult to convert to video. However, since Flash CS3 was released Quick Time export has been capable of rendering Movie Clip symbols as they would play in a normal Flash file. Unfortunately, the way it works causes complex scenes to render poorly, resulting in choppy scenes as the program drops frames to keep up with the recording process.

My current plan to work around this is to export a version through this method as is, so that I have an accurate audio track. The next step will be to render the movie at around 4 frames per second so that I have a video containing all frames in their proper position. Then it's just a matter of bringing them both into a video editing program and finishing things up there.

A rendering of the communist space pirate from a previous sketch done in Flash.

A short animated skip cycle to get used to using a tablet again.

This is a random walk cycle I made a while ago.

This is the explosion sample from when I was working on the graphics for Shattered Colony: The Survivors.

Those Soviet scientists are at it again!

Another piece from Drawing for Animation. For the midterm, we were to take the vinyl toy design we created, and add another element to it. Our class chose "soviet."

We had a "vinyl toy" project for the Drawing for Animation class that I took last semester. We were to pick a theme for a vinyl toy and design one over the week. The theme we chose was "disturbed circus."

So here is my disturbed circus vinyl toy design (right to left), Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor.

This was the final project for the Drawing for Animation class I took this semester. We were supposed to use the character derived from a fashion photograph from the previous project, give them a non-human sidekick, pit them in a fight with an ice-monster, and tune it for an audience of 12-to-14-year-olds. Therefore, the result is the Happy Scooter Guy and his hyrax-sidekick are fleeing from the villainous Ice Cream Man, who requires a bio-suit made out of a refrigerator to survive in his current environment.

Unfortunately, since I seem to be permanently locked out of my laptop thanks to some kind of BIOS "feature" Toshiba felt was necessary, this is the only project from that class that I can currently post. The others, including the one with an explanation to the origin of the Happy Scooter Guy, will have to wait until next year to be posted.

So with that, I think this is it for this year.

The final project in the Intro to 3D class I took this semester was to create a bug and place it in a scene, using Maya.

Some logo designs for my portfolio.

The first assignment for the Drawing for Animation class I am taking. The theme was "treecrabs of the lonely forest."

Final project for the Intro. to Animation class I took last semester.

Last week's class sketching assignment was to create a pirate, a cowboy, and an astronaut, with one of them being female. So I drew a communist space pirate, a robot cowboy, and an astronaut taking her astrochihuahua for a spacewalk.

A selection of gesture drawings from January and the beginning of February. I started with a micro-point Uniball and switched to a Pitt brush pen later on. Drawing time ranges from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.