Paper Craft Owl

This was my very first attempt at crafting together paper art! It was fun, but man! that learning curve caught me by surprise!

Simple, wintry owlness. Or theme, "Solitude".

(This collection idea came to me after seeing one of Brittney Lee's pieces)

C_21 Preview

I just wanted to show a pert-near completed shot (even if it is only one second long) with my atmospheric script composited in. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on more in the near future.

Relaxation

Another one bites the dust.

Cat

Busy Busy!  In the meantime, here's a sketch I doodled and then painted in Photoshop (part of the 100 themes challenge):

Preliminary Sweat

This is late in posting. I'm kind of lazy when it comes to sharing 3D work, simply because it takes so daggum long to get it up on the web. At any rate, I just wanted to show the finalized movement for the sweat effect I did for BYU's animated short, Butchered Meats. Final renders to follow soon in addition to some atmospherics! Yay!

100 Themes Challenge

In an effort to pick up the pencil more, I decided to jump into a silly little thing called the "100 Themes Challenge". The gist of the challenge is this: make 1 piece of art per theme--multiple themes per image are not allowed. Simple! Right? So here's my take on "deep in thought".

Sketches

More sketch-doodles.

A Delicious Vintage

Sometimes I like to bust out the paintbrush. This was a gift box to a good friend who's from Kentucky and has a soft spot for Little Debbie snacks (who doesn't!?), but loves New York and its dazzling skyline.

Cobwebs

I found my old flour sack animation I made to apply to BYU's animation program. Oh the things you find in the dark places of your computer.

Old Goodies from The Blankenships on Vimeo.

Sketches

Here's a little segment from my sketchbook on water spray studies:

The Pencil Returns

Upon dedicating myself to learning the principles of scripting and Houdini for the past year and few months, I have unfortunately neglected my sketchbook. Like alot. So to celebrate the start of my last term of university, here's a self portrait/caricature. Since I have to keep a sketchbook for one of my classes there will be more to come.

Piston Revised

Basic Piston Rig from Tracy Blankenship on Vimeo.

About a year ago I built a steam train piston system in Maya that accelerates and decelerates based on the user-input train speed. Now it's in Houdini! And!! It's a much cleaner rig! Video breakdown:

Part 1) Illustrating the basic connections of the rig
Part 2) Illustrating the default acceleration/deceleration of the user-input train speed
Part 3) Illustrating how the optional train engine weight affects the rate of acceleration

Visible Progress At Last

After months of being neck-deep in code, I finally have an image to put to all of my text. For those of you who have a vague idea of what I've been up to, here's the down-lo: I've been working hard on writing my own smokey haze atmospheric for our senior film Butchered Meats. Seems simple enough, but I have never worked with the RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) before, nor traversed through a scene via code, so it was a huge learning experience.

I also took a lot of time to add a number of optimal features to my script. I wanted to give our director (and the lighters) as much control as possible over the troublesome substance. The user can adjust the density, the haze color, the areas where the haze will be more and less dense, where the haze starts and stops accumulating, which objects will be excluded from the haze, and so forth. I also added a switch that allows the user to jump between smokey looks and plain 'ol atmospheric fog. The point of the whole script is to provide our boxing gym with the smokey haze seen in those pugilist films we love. I'm super stoked to say that the image rendered below does just that!

It's not very visually impressive, but actually getting to see some sort of finished product come out of all my effort is awesome! I was so excited to see it working that I just had to share (even if it is in a temp shot with really crappy lighting--done by me :) ). Go forth and appreciate! I will be doing another post soon with a shot from the actual film (and maybe even an animation of the smoke moving).