noah brewer

Wonderful work! Thanks for sharing! BTW (as you probably know already) if you want to keep your ship separated into different models, yet animate them easily in the choreography as one model, all you have to do is drag/copy a bone from model into the rest of the models. Then, if you make an action and drag into each model in the chor, the ship will always move as one piece. Another advantage of this technique is being able to turn OFF unseen sections of the ship when the camera is close-up on a character. (Unless you want to see them for reflections)

The three-quarters view looks great! I can't wait to see more! Pirates... sounds fun.

Wow, that does look nice. But what a render hit at 18 min...

Thanks, again. The Bubblegum Crisis music video is about 6 shots away from being completed. I figure I'll finish it up at some point when I need to take a break from Castle of Blood.

Great modeling & facial tattoos!

Thanks! It's great to hear from you all, too! This animation is going to be atleast 15 minutes, so it will probably take me about 3 years to work on. My goal for the rest of this year is to get about 10 minutes of rough animation done. I think this is possible because the average length of each shot is around 3 seconds, where as in my last project (Bubblegum Crisis), each shot was closer to only a second long. By 2008, I'm hoping HD disk burners and media will have come down in price, so that I can render it at 1280x720... -Noah

Hey, I've been preoccupied for a while, but I'm back now. Here's a glimse of my next project, although I'm not looking for critiques at this point: http://www.noah3d.com/bridge.html http://www.noah3d.com/watergate.html http://www.noah3d.com/tomb.html

Wonderful drawings! I bet that troll will take some time to model, though!

Looking really good!

Thanks, guys! I've been working on the modeling of this character on and off since I started using A:M five years ago. Its funny to look back at my first human model and see how bad it was! As far as smoothness, I avoid 3-point patches as much as possible. I think that I have one on each side just under where the shoulder and clavicle meet. When I have to use 5-point patches, I try to keep all five points as consistent to their incoming curves as possible. This means rotating the view of your model a lot to see the shape of the curves very closely. Sometimes you can only do so much. Finally, I use porcelain over most of the body (making sure all normals face out). I like to set the porcelain to a lower setting than the default, so that it doesn't smooth the surface too much. I also exclude points on the model from the porcelain group that I want to stay very sharp (like just around the nostrils, eyes, and ears). Finally, there is the photoshop technique that I outlined earlier in this thread, if you are just making still images. Another way of cheating in animation if you have a compositing program (and no other choice) is to use ambiance maps as masks on parts of the body that you want to smooth. After you've already rendered an animation, make a copy of the project and delete all of the lights. Also, add a ambiance decal to your character; Dark on the areas that you want to stay sharp, and light on the areas that you want to smooth. Render the animation again from the same camera, and you should get a nice mask animation, and the only thing that you should see are the areas that you want to smooth. Then, in your compositing program, blur a copy of the original animation on a top layer, and set its alpha or transparency to the mask animation. However, this technique is not completely perfect all of the time... Alright, I've got a lot of animation to get finished in the next month, so I better get back to work now. -Noah

Everything on my website so far has been done in A:M exclusively. Overall I like A:M more than Maya, but Maya has some neat bells and whistles. However, for a complex one-man project, A:M is the way to go in my opinion.

The animation will be looking fairly decent by mid-August, at which time I'm going to start sending it out to companies as a demo-reel. I will have some new animation clips on my website before that in late June or early July. As far as it being completely finished, I will be tweaking it into next year for sure. As far as donating models to the A:M CD... Sure, after the BGC animation is finished.

Although I'm going to fix a few more things on Figure 14 after I write this, mainly what I fixed so far was adding cast shadows and a bump texture to the background, and improving the lighting and compositing on the figure. In the past, I used to just airbrush out the parts of the render that I didn't like, but that's time consuming and doesn't always look the best. Recently I've found that I can get much better results simply by making two duplicate layers from the render, and setting them to "screen" and "luminosity" in Photoshop. First, the "screen" layer will smooth out (but also lighten) the tones of your image if you delete an inversed selection of the render from the screen layer. To do this, simply go to the RGB channel in the channels window, control click the RGB thumbnail (a selection appears), inverse the selection, and delete it from the screen layer. (You can use a layer mask first if you would like to have more control over the threshold) Then use a "luminousity" layer (also an exact duplicate of the original render) as a top layer. If you're familiar with layer masks, add them to both the screen layer and the luminousity layer. Now you can very quickly paint the layer masks to achieve smoothness (screen layer) or sharpness (lumiousity layer) anywhere you want without blurring the image or losing much fidelity.

Thanks. I just updated an old render, and fixed many things that were bothering me: http://www.noah3d.com/kokubu2.html

Yeah, I didn't put any thought into these faces (& noses). I'll probably fix them sometime. Here's a new image that I based from a photo: http://www.noah3d.com/figure15.html -Noah

I used porcelain and image maps for most of the body. I think I excluded a few parts of the body geometry (that I wanted to keep sharp) from the porcelain, like the nose and ears.

Thanks, everyone! Yeah, I agree that the feet need to be rounded out more on the sides. Other than that, for the 'floating' images, I imagine the figure having longer hair that swirls around through most of the compositions. However, that will have to wait until I have more freetime. Her face could use some more work in these images, too. I may want to go back later and add some specular highlights to the mirrors.

I thought I'd post some new images. I didn't spend as much time on these as the kokubu stills, but I wanted to take a short break from the BGC: http://www.noah3d.com/Main_figures2.html All criticism is welcome, though I will be busy working on the BGC for the next few months.

Thanks! I was just greedy, and wanted to take a crack at doing the BGC, before someone else tries to make a 3D and/or live-action version of it. As for originality, my 3D animated thesis project that I did in college had me in over my head in terms of personnal content, so now I'm happy dealing more or less with eye-candy. In a few more years from now, I will hopefully come back to my original concepts and try to make more sense out of them. BTW, here's a tunnel render that I did recently: http://www.noah3d.com/tunnel.html I should have the animations of this up in a couple more days...

I think it could be a really cool video game, if done right. Thanks! Now that I've quite my graphic design job, I've had a lot more time to focus on this project. However, as we all know, animation is tough, so I'm trying my best on this. I will do a more detailed tutorial sometime, but for now, I can briefly explain how I did it. First, parent four nulls under a Master bone. At the same level as these nulls (under the Master bone), I have a parent bone for the wheels, and a parent bone for the frame of the car. The parent bone for the frame will basically do exactly what the parent bone for the wheels does, only I add an "orient like" constraint with a short lag, so that the car frame follows the motion of the wheels with a slight delay. I aim the parent bone for the wheels at ALL four wheel nulls, so its rotation is the exact average of where each null is positioned. Now, as the car moves, you use the model bone, or the Master bone, but you can also move the wheel nulls around to control the subtle rotations of the car wheels and frame. The one downside to this is that you still have to check to make sure that the geometry of your wheels aren't penetrating your road. However, I still find this method extremely effecient. -Noah

Yes, I plan on making atleast 3 more "making of" short videos, but it will be a couple weeks until I get to the next one. Here is a little more animation: http://www.noah3d.com/m148.html However, I'm even more excited about starting the shots that lead up to this scene (the transition from the highway chase to the spider fight). I'll post some more as soon as I can absolutely -Noah

This is really easy. I just go the frames where the spider's legs come down, and keyframe the camera moving up and down quickly. This is even easier if you just add points to the camera's Y-Translate curve, that way it doesn't make key frames in other channels that you don't want. BTW, I should have a new spider clip posted tonight or tomorrow. I'll post a link, soon. -Noah

Thanks for taking a look, everybody! I just needed a break from animation for a few hours. I can't wait to burn-out on this project! BTW, I'm not selling a DVD; it will just be for my demo reel. However, I will post higher-rez versions of these files as I get closer to completion. -Noah

Nothing ground-breaking, but I thought I'd post it on my website since its going on my DVD anyway: http://www.noah3d.com/making_spider.html I can't wait to start some new shots with this bad-a$$! -Noah

Yes. If you look at movies and photographs, human skin specularity tends to look bluish, rather than the orange-yellow color that 3D apps produce by default. I have a map for the front and sides of the head (about 1000x1000), a map for the front and back of the body from neck to toes (about 1500x700) and a map for each side of the arm (about 400x900). I use a higher resolution map for the face, since it's usually closer to the camera. I actually have a lame gradient for the back of the head, but I will probably decal that area as soon as I need to see it -Noah