WILLIAM NIU

Thesis - Shot 2

2012-01-08T19:56:00.000-08:00

Here's my current progress on the thesis. I changed the storyboard a little bit and instead of having the camera do a long spinning descent from the top of the tower into the interior, I decided to just have side scroll to avoid having to deal with too much extra detail. Over all this shot took 11 individual paintings to complete along with a 3D set up. The 2nd shot of the thesis has been by far a big challenge for me because there were so many technical problems along the way. Although at first I thought that this technique was some kind of dream trick that allowed me to do anything I imagined, I soon realized it had limitations. In the beginning I planned to have Tiger's head in the shot and the camera would pan sideways across its head. But I realized that this was almost impractical due to the amount of time it would take me to model a surface for the projection and painting the tiger texture from multiple angles. The ears of the tiger became a big issue because for it to look fully projected as the camera slides across, I would need to break apart the model into smaller parts and draw textures for left side and the right side of the ears, not to mention there are two ears and a whole face to worry about. So the solution I came up with is to get rid of the head all together. Instead, I just had the tiger's body in the shot and thankfully that was manageable. Still, modeling a mock up of a donuts shape and then painting in two sets of textures from different angles was not as easy as I imagined it to be.

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Another thing I had trouble with is the discontinuous work flow. So far my workflow for projections have been 1) building a primary 3D set up from a sketch, 2) drawing in basic forms to fill the environment, 3) camera test, 4) painting in final details, 5) repeat 3-5 until everything is filled. This allows me to make sure each projections works properly but since I had to paint in everything by parts, keeping the color work together as a whole was a challenge. This shot took me almost 2 weeks and it probably took too long considering the amount of time I have left to finish this project. So far I would like to have at least 1 shot a week. I have around 23 shots total so I might be in a bit of trouble if I want to get this done by May. I'm just hoping that some shots wont take as long and that I would get faster. If worst comes worst, I may have to cut down a few shots and make a shorter animation. I hope I won't have to do that. Crossing fingers.

LAIKA works

2012-01-08T18:11:00.000-08:00

Here are the links to the LAIKA commercial works I did over the summer. The clients include: Toys R Rus, Honda, and Orville Redenbucker. I was working as a concept artist making characters, environments, set designs, layouts, and colors. Unfortunately I cannot show the raw drawings I did at LAIKA but here are the final products!

LAIKA - Toys R Rus Big Book from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus EX from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus BCSE from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Honda Pilot from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbacher Adios Trans Fat from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbucker Whole Grain from William Niu on Vimeo.

Thesis - Panoramic Shot

2011-12-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

Now that storyboarding and a whole bunch of pre-production designs for my thesis have been solidified, I can finally painting in finished backgrounds! It has been so long since I worked on anything finished so this was such a great feeling. This is a panoramic shot that is going to be the first establishing shot for the whole animation. I'm going to camera project this image to emphasize depth and see how it looks. Over the winter break I'm going to be working on more finished backgrounds in order to catch up on my thesis. Its going to be fun!

Thesis Progress

2011-11-16T20:49:00.000-08:00

So here's my progress of the thesis so far. Instead of 20-30 sec animation as I initially planned, I will be extending the time to a minute long short animation about two rollerblade kids racing each other in a 3D city. As I have mentioned before, I will be using camera projection technique for the background city and then go over on top in 2D for the character animation. Here I have a primary animatics, camera projection test (for full rotation camera angles), shot study, and then character sheet. At this point I'm close to having all the pieces I need for start painting in the backgrounds which is going to be fun and finally doing something fully rendered. In the coming weeks, I'd like to have a more realized animatics as well as character sheets. I will be attending CTN expo this week and I'm super pumped!

Preparing for Thesis

2011-08-24T01:31:00.000-07:00

For my senior thesis, I am planning to make an animated short which incorporates 2D painted background projected onto 3D space. I think this would be a great way to present my environmental paintings and after doing some quick experiments, I'm pretty exited for its potential. I did these to get the hang of the process. After some trial and error, I feel like I'm finally at the starting line. More to come for sure!

Aqua City

2011-08-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Here's finally something I spend time on outside of work recently. I really wanted to mess with color and be aware of how lighting affects it so I picked to do a city with loads of colors. Tekkon inspiration all the way across the sky.

Animated doodle

2011-07-15T01:58:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to make drawings outside of work lately and also been feeling slacking off with animation so I tried to get back to it with this short sequence. I was originally doodling some random action scene and thought it might be fun to make it in animation.

Bangs Bean Booble

2011-07-13T02:13:00.000-07:00

Its been so long since I made an update. I'm currently interning at LAIKA in Portland, OR as concept artist and the work has been taking most of my time. I manage to slip in a quick drawing here that started off as random geometric shapes which then was interpreted into this drawing. Since most art I make at work have constraints in response to different needs, I wanted to do something I miss; painting for myself. I was definitely thinking James Jean as I was drawing. I wanted to play with soft gradient feel combined with painterly rendering. It was fun :)

Environment Design - Pit City

2011-03-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

After another update slacking, I'm back on track with lots of new images from classes. First up is world design from concept art class. For my semester long project, I'm doing an imaginary world called pit city, an industrial-heavy city in a giant pit where digging for resources and rich human cultures exist. The people in this world lives on the wall of the pit by stacking buildings on top of another, forming a massive network of structures that elevates high in the air.

The first image is an over all shot of the city. The big pipeline in the center takes all of the labored materials from this city to the upper oppressive world. The pipeline goes down through factories where they process the resources and then deeper into the bottom level, where the mining take place. The second image illustrates the market area of the city alongside the wall. And then the third shows the mining station at the bottom of the city.

Cat Robot - Character Design

2011-01-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

A character I designed for 3D Character Animation class which I will be modeling in 3D Studio Max. Because I haven't touched modeling in a while I figured I should design a character with simplified shapes so that I wouldn't have to struggle too much translating it into 3D. At the stage of animating the character, I want it to have potential for great mobility as well as action performances. So I gave him a set of giant claws that he can swing around, and also animal legs that suggest speed and great jumping abilities.

Air - In Progress

2011-01-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

Here's an experimental animation that I had started a year ago. It has been a while and I haven't had a chance to touch it since last summer so I figured I would upload at least what I have. The whole animation is done in Flash and Photoshop. I wanted to incorporate a punk feel to the animation so I tried to show that through exaggerations and character designs. Speedy and dynamic action is another thing I really focused on with this short animation. With fast cut and camera angles, I think I'm getting close to what I want. Although the animation is incomplete, it has most of the beginning finalized as well as some action sequence. The drafted keyframes are also set so the over all feel of the action should be laid out properly. I'm going to work more on this when I have time. For finalizing, I'm planning to make a few adjustments using After Effects.

Pre Production - Color Studies

2011-01-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

These are sketches for my original story as part of Pre-Production. I was exploring the borderline between volumetric and flat sketchy styles that I wanted for this particular short film. The story has a lot of emphasis on the environment so I spend a lot of time experiment with different ways to make the space that I imagined. Keeping the overall simplicity while conveying that there is a lot of information in the environment was a challenge. The distortion was another thing that was on my mind while drawing these. I wanted the film to have a children's book feel so I focused on skewing some of the angles and lines to push that playfulness. The designs for the environment are inspired mostly by European architectures. While retaining some of the details from original European buildings, I tried to invent new patterns that still does the same job. Because the story takes place in a kid's imaginary city, I tried to mimic how a child would design his own world; how buildings are stacked on one another or that there are different doors and windows and secret passageways.

Onigumo

2011-01-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

Oni(demon)Gumo(spider) is another character design for the story of Yamata no Orochi. In this project, I chose to design an invented character that does not exist in the original plot line, but could be inserted into it while being believable as part of the story. In this concept, I wanted to make a character who's thought to be a human in the village but is later revealed as a disguised spider demon that responsible for a number of missing villagers. He is normally a mysterious elderly in the village serving as a fortune teller. The way he sits gives out a heavy and stationary feel to the character. He is often hunched down looking down at his fortune telling items (the stones and a clothe on the floor). Once he transforms into the spider form, his character undergoes a drastic change. He is fast, sinful, and wild. The main character of the story Susanoo must face the spider demon (Onigumo) while he visits the village.

Videogame Map

2010-12-24T15:55:00.000-08:00

This is a piece that I probably spend most amount of time on throughout this semester. It is a map of many videogames I played in my life all mushed in one composition. In it, I tried to incorporated as much game references I can think of so when I first began the piece, I listed out all the games I've played up until now. Here's the list: Pong, Packman, Pokemon, Super Mario, Sonic, Bomberman, Tetris, Street Fighter, Donkey Kong, F-ZERO, Pikmin, Space Invaders, Megaman Zero, Okami, Megaman Battle Network, Megaman, Zelda, Ace Combat, Smash Brothers, Shadow Colossus, Final Fantasy V,VIII,X,XII,XIII, God of War, Star Craft, Katamari, Metal Gear Solid and more.

In many ways, this piece was a challenge. Coming up with a composition that could encompass a large amount of information took time and planning. I took in consideration of the spacing of the composition so that when I placed each games, they were spread out evenly. Compiling all the different games, each with unique style, in one was another difficulty I faced. The scale had to somehow make sense even though each games had its own proportions so converting all that into a single believable manner took some calibrations. The biggest challenge for me in this piece though, is the method I used to create it. The entire thing is done in pixels with Photoshop 1000 x 1000. After getting into 20% of progress, I knew I was in trouble because each objects, characters, and architectures took so long to make. So the amount of efforts and lack of sleep that went into this piece is probably the greatest amongst other pieces that I've done. In the future I'm planning to go back and refine some details and add new stuffs But for now, I'm pretty content with how it turned out. I had lots of fun with this project. After all, I was drawing the stuff I liked the entire time. Good times.

Demon Gate

2010-12-21T21:09:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since my last update due to finals but I'm finally free from school now that winter break has started! I'm going to be putting up the stuffs I've done over the course of multiple updates.
First up is an environmental design I did for Character Design class. The assignment consists of designing an environment that my character from last project (Orochi) could interact in. So I decided to make the entrance to the Eight Headed Serpent's lair. The main things I kept in my mind while designing this environment is scale and mood. Orochi is the final boss character in our group's story so I wanted him to be really big. In order to enclose such figure, the gate must be over-sized as well. To push the sense of scale of the character, I made the gate somewhat fractured and destroyed, implying that the master of this place is too big for its own lair. With color, I think making the general pallet cold was a correct choice. Although I lost the opportunity to push the elegance of the architecture with vibrant colors, I think this is the right way to convey a sense of evil and dark mood.

Character Design - Orochi

2010-10-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

For my character design group, I was assigned to make Orochi, the eight headed serpent from a Japanese myth. I initially had 30 different ideas for the Orochi design, each with unique attributes. For the final design, I made each heads unique from one another by associating their faces with masks.

Hands and Figures

2010-10-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

Some hands and figure drawings I did recently. All done in ball point pen and some pencil. 10 min pose for figure drawing.

Pre Production Character Design

2010-09-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

For my semester long pre-production project, I am working on a personal animated short about a boy who has a magical sketchbook in which everything he draws in the book comes to life, and a giant monster that the boy has created. I focused on simplifying the creature down to essential shapes so that it is easier to animate, but also retaining some traits that will help define the character. The overall large size, hair on the side of the face, the back, and the tail should help reinforce the flow of movements. The boy's design has two versions, with and without his hat. In the beginning of the story, the boy is somewhat emotionless so I gave him a hat and long hair to obscure his personality. When the boy meets the creature however, he starts showing more emotion so in the second design I drew more facial expressions and gestures. These are preliminary sketches for the characters so the final design may change, but for the sake of story boarding I think they are fairly solid.

Wikipedia

2010-09-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is an assignment I did for my illustration concept class. For the project, we were asked to make a modern interpretation of zodiacs in a group. We picked websites as overall theme in our group and for mine I chose wikipedia. With this one, I tired to mix up my rendered and graphic styles. I am fairly happy with this piece as I was able to experiment and explore further with perspective, color, and rendering.

Character Design - Kama Itachi

2010-09-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a design I did for my Advance Character Design class. For this week, we were assigned make a sub-character design for our group's story Yamata no Orochi so I chose a Japanese ghost called Kamaitachi. Kamaitachi is a family of weasels that is thought be the cause for small cuts when people walk in the grass. Each family member has different roles. The father blows the wind while the mother cuts people and then their child heals them. Although Kamaitachi is ghost, It is considered relatively harmless.

Hand Studies Continuted

2010-09-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping up with doing hand studies everyday and here's a page that I did during class today. Although there are still more to improve on, I'm pretty happy with the progress I am making with understanding as well as awareness to the details in hands. I'll continue with the hand study and keep on updating this series.

Pasta City

2010-09-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

This piece was done for my Illustration Concept class where the assignment was to design a cover for an Italian restaurant's menu. With this piece, I tried to capture the feeling of wonder when choosing a dish in a menu so I incorporated numerous individual characters and narratives within the composition to push the appeal of the image.

Character Design

2010-09-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been designing a ceremonial creature with a shrine on its back. I wanted it to have a huggable quality while retaining the beastly look. With this piece, I experimented with textured brushes to fight against smoothness that is associated with digital painting.

Commission

2010-08-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick commission I did recently. The assignment was to take a photo and make the person do something epic. I was also told by my client that he was looking for a piece similar to the dragon self portrait I did back in the tablet fig drawing class. Because the assignment was open ended, I was able choose one of my favorite subject matters(dragon!). I <3 dragons :)

The Street - Designing World

2010-08-22T21:22:00.001-07:00

Here's some sketch I did that is continuation of the pit city concepts I did earlier. Instead of designing a broad structure of the whole thing, I decided to dig into the detail of the city, especially where the people live. The people in this world lives around the giant pit wall forming a massive network of jumbled buildings filled with tight spacing and routes to get to different levels. I had a lot of fun coming up with the maze-like structures as well as the playing with perspective.

Concept Sketches - Designing World

2010-08-19T14:28:00.001-07:00

Recently I've been doing some concept works for fun. At first, I was doing some city/space designs in my sketchbook and I liked one of the thumbnails so I decided to elaborate a little bit further. I liked the idea of city inside of the giant pit that is connected to the upper level by pipelines so I did other sketches that shows different angles and other objects in the surrounding environment. Although I didn't have any storyline involving this design, as I got into designing the details of this city, I started to incorporate rooms for potential narratives. For example, when I was designing the pit city, I had an idea that I wanted it to be the labor place that is kind of slave to the upper, luxurious world. So when I got into designing the tower on the upper level, I wanted it to be utopia for the humankind and maybe at the same time, represent power and control over the labor level in the pit. In addition, I designed the tower so that when it is seen from the pit level, it cast a silhouette of tomb cross, symbolizing an evil figure. So far this is all I have but I'm planning to go further with this one. Maybe in the future, I will post more character designs and other environmental objects I could come up with.

Hand Studies

2010-08-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

One of the things I heard frequently from many artists regarding my works this summer is that I need to get more familiarized with hands. Not only are hands gestural, they also convey loads of emotions and serve as reinforcement for any compositions. I've always been thinking about doing hand studies but have never done much until people actually put it out in words. So here I am working on hand studies. I started off with structural studies and then as I got more familiar, went into gestural. I think I learned quite a lot about hands through this study and I'm glad to see some improvements form the earlier studies to the later ones.

Ryu Gu Jo

2010-05-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

Final Project for Illustration II class. We were assigned to pick a myth and make narrative pieces that depict the original story. The story I chose is called Urashima Tarou, a classical Japanese kid story which tales about a fisherman who rescues a turtle and is rewarded with a visit to the Palace of the Dragon God under the sea. There, he meets a lovely princess and upon the third day of his stay, decides to return to his village. As he leaves, the princess gives him a black box, telling him not to open it. The fisherman finds himself 300 years in the future when he arrives back. Grieving for those who perished in time, he opens the box and turns into an old man. For this project I decided concentrate majority of my time into one piece, the scene where the fisherman arrives to the undersea dragon palace, Ryu Gu Jo. I had loads of fun designing the building, creatures, and flow in the composition. I also noticed that I have been repeatedly using warm palette in my works and therefore with this piece I decided to break out from that tendency. Unfortunately, this piece is incomplete at this stage and will be turned in as current state. I am planning to go back and refine more details and add textures.

Drawing from Tablet

2010-04-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Now that the semester is approaching its end, I think its about time to post some works from Drawing from Tablet class. These works are from assignments of the class and many are done from observation, except for the obvious one. We started off the semester drawing in grayscale and after midterms jumped into exploring colors. I am glad that I took this course as it gave me tremendous practice as well as improvements in digital painting.

Skateboard and t-shirt design

2010-04-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

Assignment for Illustration II class to design skateboard deck as well as t-shirt. We were given several topics to illustrate, and I picked "Food Chain".

More Animation

2010-03-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

Experimental Frame by Frame Animation done for Advanced 2D Animation class. In this piece, I explored moving figure with camera rotation, particles, background interaction, perspective, and morphing. The animation consists of roughly 350 frames (excluding the 2nd loop) ...and runs at 16 fps. The animation was created in a week and during these days, I tasked myself with drawing 40 frames a day in order to meet the norm of completion.

Doodle

2010-03-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes mindless doodling produce surprising results. In my class today, I was struck by a sudden impulse of drawing jumbling buildings with emphasized perspective. I'm fairly satisfied with this piece as it reflects my personal interests of subject matter, something I didn't have opportunity to explore in my recent projects.

Valentine Project

2010-03-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

Assignment for Illustration II, illustrating two quotes selected from a pool that associates with Valentine's Day. The quotes that I chose for my pieces are "Never break up with your BF/GF on Valentine's Day" and "Always go out shopping with your best girl friends"

Massacre

2010-02-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since my last update but here is the new finished work. The piece is originally assigned for Narrative Illustration class in which the objective was to pick a magazine article and then to create an editorial illustration based on its topic. I chose an article about arrest made due to PETA's extreme protests. In this piece, I tried to capture the self-damaging nature of the PETA protests in a dynamic composition.

Reset

2009-12-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

Final project for my Narrative Illustration class. The assignment was to create 4 pages graphic novel which incorporates an original story and text elements. In this piece, I created an original story that is simple enough to fit within the 4 pages while conveying the a complete story and message. I had most fun doing the 3rd page, mainly because of the amount of details as well as the factor of destruction, which we all love. The piece took me 3 days to execute, with one day of sketching and two days of Photoshop coloring.

Luring - Illustration I

2009-11-24T21:28:00.000-08:00

A piece done for Illustration I class. The assignment was to choose a mythological story and then visualize it through our own interpretations. The story for this piece came from part of Odyssey, in which Circe, a witch who can magically morph people into pigs, attempts to bed with Odysseus who was trying to save his morphed crews. In the piece, I tried to capture Circe's temptation as well as Odysseus' sense of retaliation. Over all, the piece focuses heavily on expressing realism and thus it sets a high ground for critical eyes as to how well the realism was conveyed. In that sense, therefore, there are many formal elments that are still available for additional renderings. The original size of the piece is 7000 by 4300 pixels, which is much larger than the my normal working dimension. Throughout the work, I experimented with ways to convey detail while allocating sufficient amount of care to each parts of the painting.

Animation works

2009-11-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

2D frame-by-frame animation created in Flash. The animation consists of 475 frames and runs at 16 fps. The animation consists of visual experiments including dynamic camera movements, easing, scrolling, perspective, explosions and particles.

In this short animation, I utilized both 2D and 3D tools to convey a comical sequence. The animation is stylized to be simple, which compliments the practicality of 2D animation using Flash and most importantly, it allowed the completion of the entire 106 seconds of animation within 6 weeks.

Activity restored

2009-11-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

There has been a long period of inactivity to this blog because it was originally made for a class, which was completed long time ago. Starting now though, this page will become a record keeper to my recent works. To start off, I'm going to post some older works from last year followed by newer ones from this academic semester :)