A new year

Happy newyear first of all :)
I've been buzy lately, but I'll quickly give you an update.

The quest for an internship has come to a good end. Next month I will be joining the team at Hoaxland for a while. Pretty exciting, but I'm sure it will be fun and learnful.

I've bought two books on animation in maya (How to cheat in Maya 2013, about general animation techniques and Stop Staring, about facial animation), as well as Jason Schleifer's AFR series. So I know what to do.

I returned to gaming a little bit, blame Gabe Newell and his sweet steam sales.
Recently finished Portal 2 and man, what a game :). Also 'Thirty Flights of Stairs', a very short storydriven indie game with no real gameplay whatsoever, you have to find out what the story is through the environment and the characters. I like that kind of mechanic. It really pulls you in and lets you explore and imagine.
Nice music as well :).

Also, my final exams are right around the corner, so I've got a bunch of work to do. See y'all around :)

Ball animation

Here's a little animation I made of a ball while following Jason Schleifer's rigging tutorials which have been amazing so far..

Back to the roots

I decided to start focussing on working in Maya again. It feels strange after using 3dsMax for 3 years but I still remember most things. I really want to get into animating. Taking Simon Christen's advice I tried to take things a step back and work more on the fundamentals of animation.
Here's an animation I mide with a simple bot rig. (download here: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/simple-bot-rig-for-maya)

Ball from Pauwel Nomes on Vimeo.

I also started to learn more about animation workflow and it's really interesting. I tried to put some of the ideas in my own workflow: using step keys for blocking and later go into splining to refine things, something I really didn't do earlier. Also, anticipation, overlap and all those principles...
I can't wait to find out more about this stuff.

25 years Pixar

We went to 25 years of Pixar in Bonn with our animation class, where we saw an exhibition of awesome sketches, sculpts and other great concept art from the pixar movies.
We also went to a master class given by Simon Christen, animator at Pixar, where he presented his own history and work, and what it's like to be at Pixar. He also gave some animation examples in Maya, which was very interesting to say the least.
Afterwards me and my friends got the opportunity to show him our reels and got some very valuable feedback. Great stuff!

Artgame Weekend 2012

Me and my friend Dylan decided to go to the ArtGame weekend in Tourcoing, France.
It was a contest where we had to make an artgame (focussing on visuals/emotion/experimentation...) in less than a weekend. The first hours we shared our pitches and groups were formed. We were a group of 4 DAEers (out of 8 who came) and one French gentleman who did the sound design. Then all hell was unleashed.
We had one programmer scripting our game in Unity, he must have had a hard time implementing everything in less than 24hs, not getting any sleep basically. Luckily we managed to get even on the art side of things pretty soon, not having to discuss too much about style etc. But in the end the result was quite nice and we had a great time.

Animations update

Still trying to get an internship, this vacation I've spent a lot of time reworking my animations.
Check out my Vimeo channel for the updated clips: https://vimeo.com/home/myvideos

And my new demoreel :

Pauwel Nomes DemoReel November 2012 from Pauwel Nomes on Vimeo.

Animated food

Apparently I have some kind of obsession with animated food. I didn't even realize it until one of my friends told me I got it bad and that ain't good.

Anyway, here's a walking spaghettimonster.
A few weeks ago I went to film some footage of a kitchen. Then I tracked it and made this little test animation on top of it.