A new reel featuring a couple of recent animation projects made with Blender along with some other older work.
This is a link to a new generalist showreel I recently put together. It was just intended as a brief sketch or intro of some of my past work and career. I decided just to focus in on a very few projects. Some new and some old. Although a generalist sort of reel, it is still very heavily focused on animation as that has always been my main passion. Also it features two recent animated projects and sequences I made and animated entirely in Blender, apart from some of the texture painting.
The opening animation sequence was all modeled, animated and rendered, composited with Blender. It was partly an experiment in using Blender for creature animation work. It was also a deliberate exercise to try and take myself through the whole process of using Blender as a complete content creation platform for short film animation. All the way from modeling, rigging and block out, full animation, to final render and composite.
The last project on the reel was also all created in Blender. It’s an archeological reconstruction of the Rose Theater site in South London. This was the first solo commission that I completed entirely using Blender. Apart from Photoshop for most of the texture creation. It was for a short film documentary titled Shakespeare’s Secret Playhouse made in collaboration with director and presenter Anthony M R Lewis and the Rose Theater Trust. The final Rose footage was also used by the BBC as part of their Shakespeare celebration season a few months back.
Both these sequences were rendered in Blender internal. I’m still a little daunted using cycles for rendering lengthy animation sequences while working totally solo.
I have to say I love using Blender. I never had a problem with the interface and it really didn’t take me very long at all to get used to it. Even some of the more individual features, like right click select. I think it works well within the very wide ranging context of the program. Once I got used to it I found Blender to just be so amazingly fast and fluid to work with. I personally wouldn’t want it changed around too much now. It’s really comfortable. Also I think the animation and rigging tools are just fantastic and a joy to use.
My only gripes would be more emphasis now on clear production workflows and solid workable small studio scale pipelines. I think this is the area where some more focus could really be needed now. There are still quite a few gaps in some areas. My main problems so far were in the area of hair dynamics and caching with linked in rigs etc. No clear info anywhere ! I already wrote up a quite long post on all that already though.
I think the open movie projects do sometimes produce one off customized solutions, where we are starting to need some more solid and documented features. But I realize this is a known issue now that is being looked at and worked on, especially development of the cloud features. I’m also in no way knocking the open movies themselves, which are all of them beautiful. Nor doubting the very essential and vital role the the open movies have all played in Blenders development. It was also seeing, and being blown away by Sintel on it’s initial release that got me hooked on Blender in the first place.
Sorry that it’s not in full HD. So much of my past work is not in HD format. Yep I’ve really been around a little while now.
I should also add that … Yes of course ! ! ! the whole reel was edited in Blender too.