Panda does kungfu badminton

Back in January, Richard Lico released the Baquir rig in the anticipation of his amazing Animation Sherpa animation course. A week before that, I was inspired by Kiel Figgings soccer animation prototype he posted. Giving the opportunity of being inspired by both of these amazing animators that I looked up to. I created an animation of the red panda playing badminton. Using a method I have not done before, I created the blocking of the animation using basic geos to get the timing of the shot including the placement of the character.

I eventually referenced in the character and started to blocked in the animation. This was a fun project that I do plan to come back to complete, specifically after I go through Richard’s course as the Rig was intended to sync with what the course is teaching. Back in January, I was too busy with work on Hades that I wasn’t able to concentrate on learning or perhaps learning a whole new workflow wasn’t a priority on my mind as I am always learning and creating out of work. My goals in the early part of 2020 was to level up my modeling and rigging skills. I have been achieving these goals and now am ready to dive into the course especially with Hades shipped on September 17th.

Monster intro

At the beginning of 2020, I made this animation in response to celebrate the end of 2019 and to welcome 2020. The original text was 2019, 2020 text would down from above in front of the monster once he landed. After going half way through 2020, I changed the text to reflect my inner frustration about 2020 craziness. This continue to be a work in progress as this page intended to showcase. This rig was purchased from Kiel Figgins store.

The Yello Mouse experiment

The Yello Mouse is my artist signature; I then decided to create a character out of it. The first version of The Yello Mouse was created in late 2019. The plan was to release a free rig for educational purposes alongside with a Youtube channel but I quickly realized my time was better-spent learning/experimenting and creating instead of managing a channel. The first version of the character was simple box modeling. The rig was manually created from the ground up. Thinking about how to ease someone new to 3D into using a basic biped rig, I made toggle attribute for several sections of controls to have their visibility on and off with the thought that one can just focus on the basic first but have the ability to turn on more controls to work with if needed/when ready.

First version of The Yello Mouse Model/Rig

The second version of the character was created in February of 2020. It was my way of pushing myself to learn Zbrush. I created the character in Zbrush and Retopo him in Maya. That was my first time using Maya Retopogy tool. I loved it. I learned to use Substance Painter to do a basic diffuse map on the character. I then decided to use Mgear to rig up the new version of The Yello Mouse instead of manual rigging as my goal for these kinds of learning exercises were all to rapid prototype. I also modeled/ manually rigged up a small motorcyle for the mouse based on the model of my own motorcycle. The creation of the version 2 model, texturing and rig with simple animation to test the rig was done within two weeks. This achieved my goal of rapid prototype on top of learning new tools along with learning how to sculpt and retopo.

Second version of The Yello Mouse Model/Rig