As an add on, to add to the human persona part of the character , I modeled a pet cat the sits in front of the operator across from the keyboards, very subtle, but one of those details I believe in combination with many other little parts, make a great composition. See if you can spot him: www.daveschool.com/spoonman
Last but not least, was the Eyepiece, which I made completely on a hardware base technique; the inspiration for the eye was the many different sized camera lenses I could get my hands on and some creativity; I started with a fairly high poly disk at the back of what would be the eye and extended and Smooth Shifted my way out to the front of the eye, leaving enough geometry behind in between cuts to go back and smooth shift a good amount of nurnies and variations, to make it seem like there were different parts that in conjunction would work well together for focusing purposes
Texturing:
The texturing for the operator was quite simple, there’s a UV map applied to the shirt he’s wearing to display Newtek’s Lightwave logo, since the project was powered by this application. The rest of the character was assigned basic color texture maps, which under Cel Shader and edges turned on, would give it a very stylized drawn almost 2d look, the environment was textured almost on a hyper-real manner, and this is what gives us the very distinctive style and composition of the movie
Rigging:
Rigging was a simple task for this character, being that he is seen briefly on screen and he is fixed to a big contraption, the only rigging that needed to be done was for the arms, hands and fingers, this was done by using skelegons in Modeler and activating the same in Layout for a fast pace robotic like action packed typing animation. Uhmm, maybe not action packed, but pretty cool, nonetheless
Bio:
Born in Columbia, South Carolina and raised in Venezuela. I have always been interested in computer animation. Living in Venezuela, I had very limited resources when it came to this craft; so I decided to move to the US to get a career doing CG. I arrived in New York City where I took classes at NYU on Soft Image and Photoshop. After some time being there, I got hired by Walt Disney World and moved to Orlando, Florida where I got the opportunity to continue my studies at the DAVE school, where I learned Lightwave and Maya and now hold a position as the technical assistance for block 4; Character Modeling, Rigging and Animation. I’ve developed a liking and enjoyment for the whole character process. I’m highly motivated and always enjoy a good challenge
