The assignment in my Drawing for Animation class was to make an image from the Deep Sea emulating the style of illustrator Charly Harper. Once I looked at this style what I noticed, besides the breaking things down to simple shapes, was the textures, and that made me think of 3D paper cut art and so that’s the direction I took. I don’t think this would be mistaken for Charly Harper art, but I kinda like it. With a little more time I would have liked to have tried to do this in Maya so that it might look a little better, but instead it’s all in Photoshop.
Category Archives: BYU Animation Project
Star Trek Lego – Kirk vs Gorn
Well, here is my first foray into animating in Maya. The assignment was to take our Lego project from last year and animate it. Since I did Star Trek Legos for that project (something that is sorely missing from the Lego Universe) I thought it would be fun to do a memorable scene from the original series. This is from the episode “Arena.” I assembled the image sequence and added audio in Adobe After Effects. Kirk’s hair and the Gorn’s head were sculpted in Mudbox.
Lego Star Trek – Kirk vs Gorn from Dennis West on Vimeo.
I’m pretty happy with it. There are a couple of things that I would like to fix, which I’ll probably work on for our next assignment which is adding dynamics. I think I’ll just add them to this scene.
Monster in my closet
Here’s a fun little project I just turned in. This was for my Drawing for Animation class. We were supposed to focus on shape and design something that could work as a toy also. The theme was “Monster in the Closet.” I’m thinking it might be fun to make a little short out of it someday.
[UPDATE - Feb. 6, 2012] – I’d like to start participating in Illustration Friday again and I thought that this fit the subject “Suspense” for this week. So here you go!
Great Expectations opening animatic
Here’s an animatic that I did as my final project for Basic Storyboarding. It is the very first scene of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The requirement was that we only do a 30 second clip of whatever we wanted.
Great Expectations from Dennis West on Vimeo.
Shakespeare still life
Here is my final project for my Intermediate 3D Graphics class. I’m happy with the way it turned out although there are a lot of things I’d still like to do with it like increase the wear on some of the books and work out some of the kinks I was running into while trying to import the Shakespeare bust into Maya from Mudbox.
I’m sure I’ll go back and tweak more someday, right?







