Woah, this astronomy animation is absolutely awesome! Waiting for the 1080p to buffer is worth the wait.

Interesting to see the data pulses and the flashlight-like observation cones. Seems to be some new methods taking place recently, with those perpendicular pulses evident at the end of the video.

School is out for summer, but some music from my brother's project is now to be found on iTunes. Theres also a video featuring another track from the upcoming album already online. Posting that below for your viewing pleasure:

Link to full size version of the video here.

While piecing together the media for the final delivery disks this afternoon, I grabbed the sounds from the animatic and spliced them onto the block animations. Works as a rough sketch for the final sound effects.

My animation efforts for The Thief thus far! Each clip represents a section of the animatic and are in chronological order:
...1) dryad's arrival in the cell
...2) her waking up from knocking herself out
...3) the final confrontation and evasion from the warden
Between the rock and a hard place of doing one section of the film to finished standard or getting a skeleton structure of the story arc I opted for the latter. The clips were rendered out in 1600x900 so 720p viewing is advised.

Test renders from the final confrontation between warden and captive. The large screenshot is most noteably missing the fumes from the recently swallowed potion (02:52 in the animatic).

I'm principally against zoos, but this video shows it has its merits. All those years hunting fish in rivers must have taught this teddy a lot about kinetic energy. Get a load of 01:13! I think he (she?) is trying to get the rod to twirl around the head, but finding the neck a little too wide. Anyhow, I'm finding this great inspiration during the final leg of character animation this semester, and thought I'd share. Makes you wonder what other activities the bears have been up to out in the woods all these years we've been building cities. Juggling frogs? Uphill rolling competitions? Newfound love for this animal.

Here's a few test-renders from the ongoing development for my short film effort. I'm falling short of the original ambitions for this semester - completing the whole three minute film - but I've got most of the action in the two main cameras blocked by now. The biggest challenge remaining is the final confrontation, the escape from the cell.

No phonemes yet for Dryad, since The Thief has no verbal dialogue. She does however, have a few facial expressions built in. A sprinkle of the main templates are shown here. Lighting, mixing the available morphs and changing camera angle extends the available emotions.

Animation rig is now complete for Dryad, bringing it to version 4.0. Textures downloadable separately.

Now available for download. Includes phonetics support. Singing and dancing sold separately.