Karate Kip and Ninja Ned

Today I was sitting at Barnes and Nobel Book store and drawing. This is a fun one that I came up with. His name is Karate Kip and Ninja Ned. They are bad-ass high school students who double as krime fighters. Not a very original concept, but the drawing was fun. Enjoy!

Character Sketch of my friend Sarah - For "The Adventures of Sarah and Sergio" comic

Below is a quick character sketch that I did of my friend Sarah. Sarah and I have an ongoing comic where we battle each other out in the form of a comic. Since she currently lives in Los Angeles, and I'm in Temecula trying to get to L.A. she and I have to do our comic battles online for the world to see. If you scroll down to my links section on this blog you can catch our comic. The title is "The Adventures of Sarah and Sergio". I had to stop working on the comic for a little bit since I'm currently trying to focus my attention and energy into finding a job. But I decided last night to start working on a drawing for my new comic. This is the drawing that I will use for the comic. If you want to see how this drawing will fit into the comic, you'll have to check into the site some time this week and find out. It should hopefully be funny.

This drawing was sketched with a Col Erase pencil on animation paper, scanned into the computer, and painted on Adobe Photoshop with several layers. The drawing and painting is still not complete but you can still get a pretty nice gist of the whole picture. I hope you enjoy it. And as always, your criticism is always welcome. Enjoy.

Click on the Thumbnail Image above to expand it and see it clearly.

Random Charicature

Today I was sitting at the Town Center Mall in Valencia, CA waiting for to go check in on the portfolio day at Cal Arts. While I was sitting at the mall I saw an older man and I really liked his exaggerated face. So I drew him into a caricature. Here he is for you to see. Enjoy.

Curly Fry's Trick and Treat

Here is another drawing I did for "Diary of a Couch Potato". Dressing up on Halloween, for the Fry family, can be a difficult thing. Most years Curly Fry is either an Avocado, a pickel, the McDonalds McNugget, etc. But this year Curly decided to attempt a Mummy disguise. Well when you're a potato wrapped in toilet paper, it's easy to confuse the outcome. Enjoy,

Ursula Grew Hair

This is my first time ever attempting to create any CG hair using Maya. I figured that since I spent so much time modeling Ursula, that perhaps I should spend the time to figure out how to add hair to her. So these are my results. The hair, when rendered, is extremely lit with no shadow maps. I'm still trying to tinker around with the settings to figure out why the hair seems to glow, but it's still a mystery to me. I think it has something to do with the lighting system I had created to illuminate my character. The rendering is done using Maya's rendering software which isn't good at all. I am trying to get either Mentalray or Renderman to create a much better and much more defined render of the hair dynamics created. For now you will have to just accept what I have here since it's beyond my control. But keep in mind that I am working like a mad man to figure out a way to create nicer and more believable hair. It's all a work in progress. Enjoy.

Front and Profile screen capture of Ursula with her hair.

A profile render of her hair. I'm still trying to figure out Maya hair and and still trying to figure out, also, why this hair is rendering super bring and almost glowing.

A render of Ursula with her hair. I'm still learning a lot about Maya.

Little Boy CG character

During my senior year at Cal Arts I took my first CG modeling class and this was my final character that I created for the semester. It was through that class where I began understanding the level of difficulty in CG modeling and the tedious process. But through that class I developed a fascination with MAYA and its seemingly endless capabilities that I want to learn. Today I decided to re-visit that character and fix things on him and add hair to his model. I fixed the lips and actually bridged the open gap between the upper and lower lip so that the character can actually shut his mouth without showing his teeth. I fixed his occipital portion of his head and rounded it a bit more. The original character took me about 3 days to finish. He was modeled with Polygons and his hair was created with Maya's hair dynamics. His teeth and tongue are also fully models which I will show on a later post. For now, enjoy what I have.

Made using Maya 6.0 and Maya 8.0. Polygon modeling with Dynamic hair.

Four Pannel view. (The hair is different in this one. I'm keeping the orange)

The Diary of a Couch Potato : Meet the Fry Family

Here is another drawing that was inspired by a student in middle school that I was subbing for. He had asked for me to draw him a drawing of a couch potato, and from that drawing of a simple potato watching TV I came up with the idea of creating an entire couch potato family. That's where the Fry family comes in. There is Spud Fry (The Father), Frenchie Fry (The mother), Smally Fry or better known as Small Fry (the Baby brother), and Curly Fry (the older brother). They get around town either hopping since they don't have legs, or they ride on a couch-like wheelchair for paraplegics using a switch that they can control with their mouth and tongue. Well, enjoy the Fry family.

Meet the Fry Family : Spud Fry, Frenchie Fry, Small Fry, Curly Fry.

An image of their Couch-like wheelchair that the fry family uses to get around in.

Cowboy Kitt and Giddy-up Cow Dog

Today I was substitute teaching for a sixth grade class at Margarita Middle School and the kids in my class caught wind that I draw and that I use to work for Disney designing characters for their games. To make a long story short, the kids all started asking me to draw things for them. One little boy asked me if I could draw him a "Cowboy Kitty Cat" and I told him I would do it, but he would have to pick it up during lunch. This is the quick drawing that I came up with. I gave the little boy the original drawing; But not before I asked him to run it up to the office and Xerox me a copy of it. Here is the digital outcome of the drawing I did. The coloring was done with Photoshop CS3. I figured I would give 3D a little rest and show you that I can still draw the old school way. Hopefully tomorrow I can upload another cute drawing idea that a student wanted me to draw for him. Enjoy.

Above Image: Cowboy Kitty AND Giddy-up Cowdog

Update

So here is an update of the last character I started modeling. I should be able to finish this guy tomorrow and start a whole new character this weekend. I'll try to rig this guy also and depending on time, may do a simple animation test with him. Enjoy,

Different Views: Top, Perspective, Front, Side

Character's Animatable topagraphy

Jiz Another Model

When I was a sophomore at Cal Arts I developed a film concept which was later called "Jiz one of them Days". I had developed a fun sperm character and thought it would be a cool idea to create a film around the idea of the dangers sperm face when leaving the body. I won't go to graphically in detail but it was a funny film which combined live action film editing with CG animation. I never finished the film because I didn't understand the concept of how to model or rig a character very well. So instead of building this detailed model that you see below, I decided to spend two weeks locked in my room learning the basics of 3D rigging, modeling, texture, lighting, and animation. After two weeks I came up with a very simple 3D film, about a minute and a half of animation that I did in my self teaching adventures of Maya. It's not the best film in the world but seeing as how I did it in about two weeks, I had no idea how Maya worked, and I taught myself how to use Maya with that film... I think I did a pretty damn good job.

Well seeing as how I never finished the film the way I wanted to finish it, I never showed my simple Maya project to anybody. Another friend at Cal Arts (Lissa) was on my case about wanting to see my sperm film and how I HAD to finish. Well I promised her that I would finish it, but I never did. So I decided today to start modeling my sperm character the way it was intended to look. Below you'll see what I have of the character so far. I think I'm really diggin' the fleshyness under the eyes. Below you'll find the drawings of the sperm character that I did at Cal Arts, and then below that you'll see the model I'm working on. It took me about an hour or two to get to the point that I'm at right now with the model using Maya 8, and doing a Polygonal modeling.

Above is the original drawing I came up for of the sperm character during my sophomore year at Cal Art.

The four pannel view of the CG model : Top, Perspective, Front, Side

The image above shows the topography of the face so far demonstrating the possability for facial animation in the eyes and lids.

Comments and suggestions are happily accepted and appreciated. Enjoy.

Ursula Finished (Somewhat)

So here is the Ursula update. I actually finished modeling her on Saturday night, but I haven't had time to take rendered images of her and post them. Here they are now. This entire model took me about four full days on non stop work to finish. I really learned a lot about Maya just from doing this model. I think I'm becoming obsessed with the program... ha ha. I was going to model Ursula's hair in Maya, but as it turns out, her hair has to be done with Maya Dynamics which means I would have to create the hair on a separate cloned polygonal object layer copied from her scalp and using the Maya paint effects to paint the hair on and sculpt the hair curves that are created. Then I would have to render the hair as a separate layer from the body and composit the final rendered hair object , using Photoshop CS3, onto the final rendered body image of Ursula. I'm still going to do that but I wanted to move on to other models that I want to work on for my portfolio. I also still have to model the teeth and jewelry on Ursula; but I got the main part of the character here. I hope you like it. The lighting is done with one spot light which is the main light casting the shadows and two point lights. I turned on the ray tracing for the shadows and I think came out with a fairly decent render. I'm not really all that good with rendering or lighting, but given the fact that I'm still pretty new to Maya, I think I did a pretty decent and ambitious job here. But that's for you to decide and not me. My next project is going to be really fun actually. I next plan to try and recreate a realistic CG model of myself. I was going to do a full body model of me, but I decided to just do my face and maybe my torso. After that's done, then I may go in and do the legs... it depends on how much time I have. Anyway, here's is Ursula.

A four panel View of the model : Top, Perspective, Front, Profile

Rendered Images along side the image plane that I used

Demonstrating the model the with the wireframe

showing to give an idea of how animatible she is

Two close up images showing the eyelash detail.

Thank you for stopping by and looking at my work. I would appreciate comments, tips, suggestion if you have any of them. I accept good and bad comments so don't censor yourself. Thank you. Enjoy.

Ursula Update

So Ursula is gonna kill me... ha ha. But I'm having fun modeling her. It's been about two days of work and I've already got pretty far. I just have to model her hand, tentacles, hair, and jewelry and then she'll be all done. I'm still not sure how much time I'll have to rig her or create blend shapes for her. But I'll do my best. For now, enjoy what I've done. This is the result two days of non stop CG modeling. This is only a temporary basic texture that I added to her model using the basic Maya colors. I just did it to give this model the Ursula feel. Comments and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated. Enjoy.

"Poor Unfortionate Soul" - CG Ursula

So this week I decided to try and model Ursula from TheLittle Mermaid and this is what I got. It took me one day to model Ursula's head. I still have to do her ear and hair, but you can see what I have so far. This week I'll be modeling her body, and hopefully I'll have a chance to add some blend shapes to this model and make here blink talk and squint. We'll see where we go with this. But so far I'm having a fantastic time. Enjoy.

A four pannel view of my Ursula Model - Modeled in Maya 8

Front and Profile view of my Ursula model - Maya 8

MAYA will be the death of me!

So in my efforts of trying to keep my progress up to date on my blog, I'm posting my accomplishment on my CG model since last I posted which was two days ago. I spent ALL of Sunday creating and refining that eye which was posted. And I spent ALL of Monday, again, locked in my room trying to further my CG character along as much as possible. One thing about working on the computer is that nothing is ever predictable. The act of actually modeling and creating a character isn't what's slowing me down. The bugs and errors that I encounter on Maya is what's slowing me down. But, non-the-less I suffer the love/hate relationship with maya and must carry that burden. I'm actually having a lot of fun with this character and learning a lot. One thing I love about maya is that it allows me creativity with how I construct a, or part of, a character. It allows me to see the body and certain material as shapes and forces me to decide on the quickest and most effective way to build that shape either by manual polygon building, or by cheating and constructing those shapes by importing already build shapes in maya and refining them to match your image. So yeah. I'm having a good time even though it's a pretty slow process. Today, however I'm not going to work on Maya... I'm giving myself a break and am going traditional and old school. I'm gonna go around with a sketchbook and draw. So maybe tomorrow I'll have one or two new drawings to post. Anyway, enjoy. And as always, comments are welcome and appreciated. Thank you so much for stopping by. There's a LOT about this character which I hate right now, so let the viewer of my work know that I will be refining and rebuilding a lot of things on this character that I don't like (such as the nose and mouth).

A quick Render of Half of his untextured face with the glasses on.

The four panel view of him : Top, Perspective, Front, Side

A closer view of the Front and Profile view. I kept the wire frame on shading so you can see how the character was built.

A simple pair of glasses that I made for my character. I'm still gonna tweak a few things on these glasses, but I added a few details like a small screw in the hinge which you can't actually see from this perspective.

The four panel view of my simple glasses. You can see the screw better with this image on the side view panel.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy

Too many things on my plate!!!

So I've been extremely busy for a long time now and I've just gotten even busier. Let me give you a brief run down of my busy life:

1. Working as a substitute teacher bribing the children with drawings of Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, etc... if they don't give me a rough/hellish time.

2. Working freelance graphic design stuff for friends when they need it.

3. Taking two, online, flash animation class which requries for me to dedicate about five houres to each lecture and assignment.

4. And this week I decided that I'm going to try to build at least one CG model per week to help build my CG portfolio. Once the models are build I will either try to make time for rigging them that week, or slowly rig them within a few weeks after comleting them... unless rigging is giving me a hard time which I KNOW it will... then I may have to pick and choose which models I want to rig.

5. And finally, the big thing that is also keeping me busy is... LOOKING FOR A JOB!!!

so if anybody has any leads on jobs, I would be most greatly appreciative.

So I thought I would try to update this blog more regularly with my progresses in art, and CG stuff. I will start off with showing you the progress for my CG model I'm currently building.

I came up with a quick design of a silly angel character. I spent all of today modeling the eye and glasses and smoothing things out. The texture that is currently on them is just a temporary texture until he is finished. After that, I'll apply a nice UV texture map which I'll create on Photoshop CS2. Good times... As always, comments are encouraged and appreciated. Thanks for looking.

The Drawing above is my template for my model

And here is the day one of his construction.

And here is the front and profile view against the template.

Enjoy,

Taking online Flash classes

So I finally caved and decided to fork out the massive amount of money to take a few online classes and learn Flash animation. I must admit that I'm actually having a really good time with the program so far. I'm using Flash CS3 and it's actually a great tool. I figure that learning flash will make me more marketable to not just film and TV animation, but also to web sites and graphic design companies. So I forked forth the money and voila, here I am showing you my very first flash assignment so far. Granted it's nothing special and to many, it might not even be very pretty. But to me it is my baby hand print that I will be able to look at later in life and assess my growth and development within Flash. So for all the world to see, I give you two pandas and a Rhino. The first panda with a shocked look on his face is an image that was given to me from my flash class to duplicate as closely as possible to the original. For the second image, the online instructor wanted us to create our own version of that same panda. And finally, the online instructor wanted us to create our own completely new character from scratch and that's when the Rhino came to play. I wanted to keep his look very simple and close to the two Panda characters that I had done. So enjoy.

Eternal Re-Birth

So I finally did the colored version of my "Eternal Re-Birth" drawing. Below you will find the original uncolored version, and then the finished colored version. Any suggestions are welcome. Let me know which one you prefer.

I have to thank my friend Luke for naming the drawing "Eternal Re-Birth" for me.

Above is the original uncolored version of the same drawing that you see below. Which one do you prefer?

Enjoy!

Blue Sky Storyboard Test

A week ago Blue Sky Studio sent me an e mail asking me if I would take a storyboard test for their studio. I gladly accepted the test. The scenario that they gave me was as follows: Scene:

Two characters are in a waiting room. They are strangers. One characters' actions annoys the other one.

Considerations:Make sure we can understand the characters' personalities. Include some action and comedy. Think cinematic too and have fun!

So this entire week I've been locked away in my room working on this test. I had a lot of fun with it. Below you will find the test that I took. Opinions and comments are gladly accepted. To give a general time line of the work that was done: I spent about 3 days thinking about the scene and what I wanted to do with the characters. In those three days I also did some small thumb nailing of ideas. I spent 2.5 days drawing, coloring, and scanning all of the storyboard panels. And I spent about 2 or 3 hours arranging all of the panels onto several pages. All of the drawing was done using a ball point pen, a felt tip pen, and a sharpie. The coloring was done using mainly Prismacolor and Tria Markers, but for the green color of the frog frog and for the yellow "Do not touch frog" sign, I used Photoshop CS2. All of the editing together was done on Photoshop CS2 as well. Enjoy.

Blue Sky

The other day I got an unexpected E-mail from Blue Sky Studio asking me to take a story test for their studio. Well I was SUPER excited and of course I accepted the test. They sent me the whole scenario that I have to storyboard and I have one week to finish it. Officially that week is up on Tuesday and I've been working like a mad man this entire week trying to come up with a good story that fits their criteria. The drawings above are some thumbnail rough sketches that I came up with for the story I am boarding. When my storyboards are finished and scanned, I will create a new blog entry and update you all with the final product. But for now, enjoy the thumbnails. Kids and Frogs should never play together!

School House Bulley

Here is another drawing that I did while substitute teaching for a High School math class. The students were all taking a math test, so I figured that while they were doing that quietly, I would draw something. And this is what I cam up with. It's a drawing of a bully fifth grader taking the lunches and the lunch money from the smaller Kindergartners. They're in line waiting to hand her their money/lunch. The actual drawing was done using a regular ball point pen. The coloring was all done on Photoshop CS2. I hope you like it. - Sergio

School Kids and nothing to do

Here is a drawing I did during the prep. period of a Middle School Art class that I was substitute teaching for. I did the whole thing with a regular ball point pen on white paper and then I colored it using Photoshop CS2. There isn't

really a back story to the characters other than they're just regular middle school kids. I felt like drawing a kid and so, I did.

Enjoy!

P.S. On a side note, down below is a drawing that my beautiful niece, Silvia, drew. She's only 5 years old. I think she's gonna be an artist. It runs in the family.

Bored in High School

Last week I started substitute teaching and it was a fantastic week. I really enjoy working with the kids. Today was my first time subbing for High School Students. It wasn't just any high school; It was the high school that I graduated from ten years ago.

I went into the job a little nervous about how the students would treat me as their substitute. After all, I was a student once also and I remember what it was like when we had a sub in class. Then I started remember back on my high school days and noticing the difference in the school now from what it was like back then.

To make a long story short. I had a great day at the high school. It was a VERY easy day since I didn't really have to do much. The teacher left the students their work written on the white board and all that I had to do was take role, then explain the work. The rest of the time there was basically baby sitting. While I was just sitting there in class doing nothing, I decided to do a few drawings/doodles. Here are the doodles that I came up with. Enjoy.

Nature's Elements and how they connect us

I was talking with a friend the other day and we were touching the topic of the four elements of nature which are Earth, Air, Fire, Water. And we started connecting it to life and creating a giant circle. Anyway, in our chat I became inspired in how he explained the elements and I wanted to turn that explanation into an illustration of some sort. The drawing above is the result. I will be adding the final colored drawing some time this week, but for now enjoy the rough. The idea is that Fire breaths Air, Air breath water, water breaths earth, and earth creates life which is the heart of the person and where the circle connects back in full. I try to show the circle through morphing each element from flam to fluttering leavs in the wind, to water and vines wrapping around the human form.

Progress Report

So after SIGGRAPH I got inspired to continue playing around with MAYA and I also figure that I should refresh what I know about MAYA, modeling and Rigging. So I started modeling a character from Iron Giant last night. So between a few hours of work last night and a few hours of work this morning this is what I have so far. I'm still tweaking a lot and refining it a bit. But I'm actually having so much fun character modeling. So here's what I have so far. I'll show you the finished product as soon as it's done.

I decided to try to model this Detective character, above, from "The Iron Giant"

Here is what I have so far after about 6 hours of work. I'm still finishing it up and tweaking it, and I'm kind of slow right now since I haven't actually touched MAYA in almost a year. But It all came back to me pretty fast considering. My work flow is starting to get much quicker and I'm happy so far with results. Hopefully the final model will look good. I'll keep you posted once it's finished.

September 10, 2007 (Progress update)

So I haven't really worked on my CG character for a few weeks. But I did get further along with him and I figured that I should post a progress of the model. And here he is. There is still a lot that I have to tweek and fix on him. But you can see that he's coming along. Anyway, enjoy.

SIGGRAPH 2007

So this coming week I'm going to be going to SIGGRAPH 2007 to meet people, network, and hound someone for a job... LOL... I'm kind of nervous about it but I think I'm ready for it. So wish me luck. in the mean time here is a drawing I did about a society of kids who live in tree houses... it's for a concept I may try to develop later on. Enjoy.

Organic Doodle

The drawing above is of a monster grabbing for a butterfly. I did the drawing on paper and the coloring and details with Photoshop CS2. I wanted to give it a migical fantasy feel. Above a drawing that I did while sitting at a book store trying to get inspired. I thought it came out looking pretty cool. It's supposed to represent a connection of Earth, Air, and water. The coloring was done using pen and Prismacolor Marker, and color boosted and finalized on Photoshop CS2.

My Demo Reel

Here is my Demo Reel of the Animations I have done in 2D and 3D. A DVD reel comtaining the Demo Reel as well as the full length animated films will be sent upon requests. All 3D animation was done using Maya 6.0 or higher. The Demo reel was put together using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop CS 2. ">

Character Designs