Emma from Glee, my current favorite show on TV.
Done freehand, but with reference and measuring lines added in Photoshop to help achieve the right proportions.

This was an exercise in how to capture a likeness. I think I must have scrapped about 6 prior attempts. Once I got the likeness close, the painting went pretty quickly.

The colors are still a little wacky. But I think it’s time to move on to the next piece.

Photoshop CS4. 12 hours.

Some fan art of Kaylee from Serenity. Photoshop CS4.
I lost count of the hours trying to get the likeness right. Maybe 8? Finally had to give up. It’s just not quite there. I wish I were a better artist so I could see how to fix it more easily.

Finished it off with a quick hack coloring job of only an hour or so.

I was a bit rusty after not painting for at least a month it feels like. It was hard to get back into the groove.

For me personally, it’s been a great opportunity to wear lots of different hats. In addition to the stuff I usually do like write software and shaders or work on shots, I was able to do some concept art (lighting key paintings) and also make a contribution to a matte painting. I’ve also been much more involved with directing the lighting and look of the final frames because the directors and art director have placed a lot of trust in me.

Can’t wait until the world gets to see it.

Here’s a teaser image that I helped to render out and then Andy Harkness our art director painted over. That’s Wayne on the left and Lanny on the right.

There are announcements in Variety and USA Today if you want to read more.

I’m going to add a few footnotes here to the article…

Although the crew based the pipeline on Autodesk’s Maya, they designed it to be independent.

This is true up to a point. We don’t ignore the fact that we are using Maya, but at the same time we don’t try to replicate functionality just so we can work without it. Think about recipe cards and their relationship to actual food. Our pipeline worked with the recipe cards. Maya files were like the food.

Yun-Chen Sung, who had worked on a lighting package for DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, created new lighting tools called Lilo…

Lilo was also used for applying shaders and adjusting materials in addition to being our lighting package.

Effects supervisor Cesar Velazquez… Effects animator Dave Hutchins

Actually, David Hutchins was the supervisor, and Cesar was the artist for the orb shots. At one point, we had pretty much every effects artist in the studio working on the short. We had close around 90 shots, most of which contained multiple effects elements or prop animation.

The nightly auto-render served as a troubleshooting tool.

The auto-render process and scripts were written by Mike Harris, a fantastic technical director. Every night, the process would query the production database for the list of shots that were done in animation and in inventory for the character effects department. We are using an evolved version of this process again on our current show.

Pixar’s Mike King helped the team develop the asset management tool, which they named Nani.

Another correction: I used to work at Pixar. But I have been at Disney Animation since late 2004.

Some trivia: Nani is the companion tool to Lilo, so we named it after Lilo’s sister from the film.

I also wrote a production notes & task database using Ruby on Rails. The intent was to make a more artist-friendly tool and help production management keep tabs on what was actually happening with pipeline data. The separation of show policy from the data pipeline helped to simplify the toolset.

iPlay, written by Sung, gave the artists the ability to look at the whole short and select what they wanted to see within a sequence.

iPlay lets you see the latest shots from any department that creates movies. So you can choose to see all the latest animation. Or just layout. Or just storyboards.

If you wanted to see all the latest lighting, but mix in animation where lighting shots are missing, you can do that do.