Trooper Backgrounds

Some background art that I've been doing for Trooper.

Some of the more interesting ones anyway. There's a lot of close ups and alternate angles not worth posting. In fact I've been painting that last one from many different angles and have more to go. Man am I sick of it.

Summer in the City

I wish I had the confidence to draw in my sketchbooks more rather than doing all my doodles in MS Paint. I can't wait for them to get a drawing programme on one of those e-books...

Geri

A little something for One Million Giraffes. Do check it out and consider constributing!

More Life Drawing

Animation

Sitting on a couch watching a DVD felt like a waste of time, so I had to do something. Ended up scribbling all the main characters from my year's animated films. All sketched from memory except Arron's and Damian's characters which I had to have a peek at online. I don't want to see any original art now for fear of seeing all the mistakes I've made...

Trooper's Room

Nearly finished working on layout and I'm doing some background paintings. Thought I'd share this one with you all.

Trooper Background Test

This is the first proper background I've taken from layout to colour. Until this point I wasn't entirely sure how the backgrounds would be achieved - particularly when I had a 3D interior scene that needs to look like the rest of the 2D backgrounds. There's also the tricky matter of giving the backgrounds depth and lighting without making them overly detailed or painterly - which takes too much time and contrasts too much with the animation style. I'm happy with the results however. I may go in a tweak a few things, add a little more detail to some of the boxes, but it's more or less done.

Trooper Deep Shot

This blog is doubling as a production diary for my film at the moment, so expect lots more posts like these in the future.

I've been experimenting on the models (which Rob has built for me) to create the 2D style I want that should hopefully match the backgrounds in my film. This is early days, but it's showing that toon shading, shadows and fog in 3D can produce some promising results...


Everything here is the same shader at the moment but that will change. A lot of the smaller and more distant things (like guard rails and small pipes) will have fewer leves of shading (either solid or with one shadow) to stop them look too complex and 3D. And it needs to be coloured too, obviously.

Cannon Ball Smoke Test 2

Paul and I have been tweaking the previous test animation and have come up with this. It's looking much better. A lot closer to the concept drawing. Didn't use it as reference mind you so the colour's a bit different.

Concept:

More Poses