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Robot Assembly Render

June 13, 2010

After spending the last couple of weeks on this Minimate animation I've realized that it might be a bit more than I can handle right now. There's probably a good four minutes of storyboards all layed out. The scene and characters are all modeled and textured. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with the animation process. Things that should be simple and straight-forward aren't working properly for me.

It's not the end of the world, I think I just made some mistakes early in the process that weren't apparent until now. The bad part is that I don't know what those were. So instead of starting over and repeating my mistakes, I'm going to scale back and accomplish smaller projects like a creating a Wolverine with functioning claws, Cyclops with an optic blast, Banner transforming into Hulk. Try to learn something from each little success.

I'm not scrapping the large animation project either. I'm just postponing it until I have more experience. Here's one of the many test renders I made for it.

Click the image for a 1080x720 version.

MMMV Hunt #3 - Part 0

October 1, 2009

There's no substantial update today for two reasons. One, I've been spending my Minimate-time shooting photos for the 2009 version of the MMMV contest hunt. You know that one I've been pimping for the last couple weeks. Here's a photo of my Hunt Buddy, Comrade Boris Tiltawhirl Girlieshorts.

Two, I'm running out of material. Chronologically I'm only a year back, and since then I've only done three or four Minimate projects. Once I've posted those, I'll have to make new material. Heaven forfend. :) Maybe I'll start just posting once a week instead of twice. Or perhaps one major project post per week and one little tease post like this per week. We'll see what happens.

Off To Comic-Con

July 19, 2009

I'm going to be skipping updates for the next week or so because I'll be off to the San Diego Comic Con. Normal blog software would allow me to write a bunch of posts ahead of time and set the date for when they would be 'published'. Unfortunately I wrote this system myself and haven't quite implemented that feature yet. Since I'll only have limited Internet access at the show, I don't want to hack something together then have it break when I can't be around to fix it.

As a consolation I'm going to give you a sneak preview of my SDCC costume. I'm obviously too famous now and I have to go incognito. Sure, whatever.

Welcome

May 24, 2009

Greetings. Welcome to my own little self-indulgent corner of the Internet. ("Internet" is still capitalized these days right?) This is the obligatory introductory post filled with useless information most people don't care about.

This is my attempt to centralize all of my Minimate projects and share them with the world. Previously they've been scattered over various providers, photobucket accounts and message boards. No longer. Now I won't have to hunt through old hard drives to find some long forgotten image.

Until a couple weeks ago, this site was going to be named Minimate Arts. I had the domain registered, the images created, the database set up... but for whatever reason "Arts" never sounded quite right. Thankfully one night Richard Feynman appeared to me in a dream and said, "Fie foolish mortal! You are not fit to sweep my laboratory. Get thee gone from here, and take Salvador Dali with you."

...and the new name was born.