My first 3d workstation will be 20 years old

The Iris Indigo from Silicon Graphics was made in 1991. We got one at Liquid that cost about £20,000  or something like that with the software. As I remember we used 3d animation package called Acrobat ( no relation to Adobe product ). Alias and Wavefront products were also available.

Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo:
CPU:      33MHz Mips R3000A processor with R3010A FPU,
          32KB instruction cache, 32KB data cache
RAM:      16MB Ram (8-96MB available)
Storage:  426MB Scsi fixed disk (see text)
          
          
1024 x 768 resolution, 60Hz refresh rate
Input:    
Software: Irix system R4.0; 4Dwm OSF/Motif-compliant window
          manager; Iris Workspace desktop; Anvil 5000 R2.1

Avatars and Sprites

Some character icons made as an exercise in making multiple characters from a small set of quick change costume parts, hairstyles and colours. If you have 5 trousers, 5 tops and 5 heads you can make a whopping 125 different avatar type characters - and thats without colour varaition included.

CLICK ON PICS TO ENLARGE...

Set of sprite style characters I designed into a sketchbook summer 2011. I scanned them all in and traced / inked them in Painter. Some colours yet to come maybe.

Kids and Fun Title Designs

I found a good compilation image of some of my work from before SquareZero when I was still at Liquid TV. This is all stuff from our old showreel called 'Kids and Fun' . I designed the titles for the first series of  'My Parents are Aliens' as well as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalls 'River Cottage' .  My artwork and animation / compositing appears in Eurotrash and Nicktoons idents also. 

My Nicktoons idents won a Promax award back in the day. SquareZero is currently developing our own children's TV series - hope it comes off, there's certainly been a lot of interest in it from the commissioners.

I still see my titles for The Tweenies airing perpetually on the kids channels. I composited the green screen Tweenies into a 2d and 3d CGI world that I made for them - all bright colours and blocky shapes. Animation was done with Softimage or XSi because it was before I learned Maya.

                            

Kids TV series concept

These were concept drawings commissioned by a major terrestial TV channel for the pilot of a new kids series some two years ago. The little characters would be 3d animations and represent small children.

another different character from the same show was cyborg type robot man who was later changed to be a boy. 

Some examples of the environments were worked out as well - these environment concepts would eventually all be realised as 3d animations.

Character Designs

More character designs knocking about the hard drive. These were mostly for animation series development projects or pitches I worked on for our company SquareZero Ltd

Elric and a zombie

my version of Elric - an albino warrior / magician from the books of Michael Moorcock

a horrible anatomic zombie skinned and peeled. ( or a holidaymaker who fell asleep in the sun somewhere on the Equator )

sketch fleshed out

This sketch was made for  a pitch ages ago and I recently found it and resurrected it. The concept was taken away from a superhero type costume and into a more military type cloth uniform.

Character designs work in progress

Some old and recent illustration work I've put together over last few years - some sort of gladiators and a scary norseman.

  

Tudor Town. stage 1

update on a personal project work in progress


A Tudor London was a project I started as a 2d matte painting some time ago. Recently wanted to brush up on UV texture mapping so I came back to the idea. The models are very simple low poly models with less than 100 facets each. The textures are small 512x512 so I should be able to make a scene with many of them eventually. Modelling and texturing gets quicker as you make them because parts can be recycled, recoloured, sampled, rescaled. Because of the simplicity a town of many hundreds of houses could be achieved later on, although I will need to model more distinctive architecture such as bridges, churches etc. These houses will need chimneys and a few additional details before they are finished. All work using Autodesk Maya.

SquareZero's Abba Hologram wows Abbaworld

We've recently completed two animated sequences of Abba performing the songs ' Dancing Queen' and ' Mamma Mia'. The animations are for projection on the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system at the heavily hyped Abbaworld exhibition in Earls Court, London. SquareZero have become leading providers of content for the Musion system, having created animations and live action content for more than twenty presentations, launches and events.

SquareZero used motion capture and traditional animation techniques to create the Abba characters. HD renders of the 3d characters were attached to motion data for the body movements. Faces and lip sync were animated by hand. Dynamic animations were applied for hair and other parts such as Bennies tie.

The likeness of the characters was arrived at after making caricatures of the band and reducing them to more natural proportions and attractive features. They were never intended to look entirely like 'Spitting Image' puppets or attempt to look completely 'realistic'.

Those who worked on the project at SquareZero included Jonson Jewell, Jon Ossitt, Chris Maslen, David Elices, Vicky Godfrey, Natalie Harvey, Sarah Klan, George Cheng, Richard Lester and Antonio Flores.

Motion capture for the project was filmed at Centroid.

There has been a huge amount of publicity surrounding the project and the exhibition launch.

But it seems most likely that Ulvaeus's expression is that of a man wondering exactly what expression to wear after being confronted by a lifesize 3D cartoon hologram of himself playing Dancing Queen.

In fairness, it's hard enough to work out what facial expression to wear when confronted with the holograms even if you weren't in the band. ­Punters are encouraged to get up on stage beside them and sing. This proves both breathtaking and deeply weird. I give it a go, to a response you could describe as frosty. Who'd have thought Dancing Queen was so hard to sing?

Still, the holograms' very existence is evidence that no expense has been spared on Abbaworld. 

     Abbaworld:Thank your for the music -  Alexis Petridis, Guardian

LONDON (Reuters) - If singing along to ABBA classics on the "Mamma Mia!" soundtrack is not enough, fans have the chance to perform alongside 3-D, holographic versions of the Swedish quartet at a new exhibition dedicated to them.

    Reuters article - Jan 2010

Official press release on SquareZero website

hologram video on Sky news 

clip of dancer on stage Youtube

animation on Gamer Blips website

Tales of the City pitch

Design pitch for graphics on TV series about the workings of the City. We didn't get the job but I thought this was  good frame. We could have given them a good set of graphics. The show featured the guy from Dragons Den - cant remember his name.

Science you cant see

Our friend at Red Bee brought us her design for a promo to a knew BBC factual series about science behind everyday appliances and applications. It had a few moody elements to depict the driven almost obsessional pursuit for knowledge of the scientists.

the Heist

during the summer after the disastrous fiasco with the Russian movie which had ended with Dmitry having to go find a proper job I was left with a studio and equipment but no work or partners. However the rent was very cheap on our first Shoreditch studio ( literally a square room ) so I took out a loan, paid off debts and carried on doing little jobs for JML shopping channel and odd little things for design company Fibre. The independance was pretty great after 10 years at Liquid TV.

 Then I briefly teamed up with pal Ian who helped me get this TV title sequence for Windfall Films. I had previously worked on two Windfall titles at Liquid so we all I knew I could do a good job . This was only the second title sequence I've ever designed as well as animate ( I also did My Parents are Aliens before at Liquid )

the show was on Channel Four - about a group of ex cons challenged to try a pull off some staged robberies with real security etc. The animation was 2d Flash and ToonBoom, with some 3d elements - the van and camera.

Baby Channel idents

with Vicky onboard , SquareZero finally got moving and networking. Leon Hawthorne was also in a start up company position when he approached us to brand his Baby Channel for which he had recently found funding to launch on Sky. Of course the funding barely stretched to graphics so the entire channel brand along with various programme titles were done for a low budget in which I designed various parts and Vicky dealt with a crazy three day shoot involving loads of kids, parents and friends helping out as extras. Jon had joined as junior animator and various freelancers put their hand in so we felt like a proper company with a proper commision at last.

Film effects work 'Miracles in Reshetova'

I set up SquareZero with Dmitri Lavrov end of 2003  - the idea was to produce special effects for a russian directors film. We made forty plus scenes of varying degrees of difficulty . They included a CG creature, a talking cat, a mermaid, magical transformations, melting bodies and a witch flying in a washing machine. The two of us spent four months working 12- 18 hour days using just the first Apple G5 and an IBM workstation. It went horribly overbudget and the director ripped us off balance payments so the company nearly went bust before it had even started. It took a year of hard scraping and begging for small jobs before we really got going again.

Travel drawing ' skullman'

You think scabby London beggars can look down on their luck ? then go to India. We saw this man who had no eyes or nose ( thats cotton wool stuck in the hole ) begging by a bus station in Northern India. All his teeth were in a bad way as well and can't imagine he had long left. 

Spaceships

Recently been plundering our 3d models archive and using some of the parts to come up with some monster spaceships. Like most of the stuff on this blog it's all work in progress -  ie I never finished it !

Traders and villagers

Some character and costume designs for some fantasy / medieval types

Pirates

Some sketches and designs for some pirate era characters. Spring 2009

Biblical Musion hologram designs

ideas for a never realised project putting biblical holograms into a massive high tech US church.