Pink Fluffy Bunnies And Dog Farts

Demo Reel

2011-02-25T22:57:00.001-08:00

GDC is right around the corner and I have updated my website and put together a reel.

Demo Reel 2011 from Stephen Dautner on Vimeo.

Jail Break Hack Job

2011-02-22T10:05:00.001-08:00

Hello again!

Everyone lets get animated! I am now in the middle of class 4 at animation mentor and I am still loving every minute of my experience with the school. Great mentors, great classmates. I have not up until now posted any of my animation mentor work on my blog. I would like to share with all of you some of the things I have been up to. Just recently I polished up my class 3 work into an anim jam. My mentor for class 3 was Disney/Bluth alumni Mark Pudliener. It was a great experience to work with Mark and I learned a lot while I was in his class. I sent a link of the latest version of my anim jam to show him the progress I have made, and Mark was nice enough to feature my work on his blog. I am very humble and thankful for such a kind gesture! Thanks Mark! I also should note that a lot of the progress I have made so far as an animator has been in part due to my friends over at Firaxis. You will find their names, and the name of several other awesome people that helped me out in the special thanks. Thanks guys for all the help and feedback!

Please visit Marks blog!

http://markpudleiner.blogspot.com/

Jail Break Hack Job from Stephen Dautner on Vimeo.

Dinner for One

2011-02-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

It is a new year, and let me celebrate my newest post with a little dinner.

Dinner For One to be precise.

I was watching an episode of QI today and was introduced to this wonderful little bit. According to Stephen Fry (and QI) this sketch is the most repeated television broadcast of all time. My American sensibilities find that hard to believe. Every year since I can remember, Marry Christmas Charlie Brown, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas have been broadcast on American television.

Im sure few Americans have ever heard of Dinner For One, but if you are from Germany this might be a different story. The sketch is broadcast on every German television channel on December 31st, and it has been since 1972. Like David Hasselhoff, this British sketch from the 1920's is truly a German cult phenomenon. I couldn't imagine every television station broadcasting the same television show at the same time on the same day every year. I find that aspect of the tradition a bit creepy.

There are a few things that really appeal to me as an animator. The sketch involves a lot of repetition. To a point where some of the actions become a bit stale. Especially when the butler trips over the head of the tiger skin rug. But that repetition forces the actor playing the butler to vary his acting choices in order to keep the actions fresh and interesting.

Another thing I find really intriguing about the piece are the choices that the butler makes when he embodies each of the dinner guests, and how they change as he becomes increasingly more intoxicated through the scene. The different gestures and mannerisms are fun and interesting to watch.

I have uploaded the sketch in full. Enjoy!

Zbushed

2010-06-27T14:46:00.001-07:00

Okay. So remember way back when I first posted a concept that looked something like this?

Well its been a while, but I have not completely given up on it. As I mentioned previously, I made the concept for an in office character competition. Everyone was tasked with modeling and texturing a dictators bust.

Unfortunately the deadline for that has come and gone, but I decided that I am not going to simply give up. I have put a lot of work into this project so far and I feel that it deserves to be completed. Recently I have had a lot of things on my plate. For the past few months Animation Mentor has occupied most of my attention after work. Since the completion of class 1 I have had a week to myself. It has been a productive week and I am now happy to share some of my progress.

Delorean Second Pass

2010-06-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

Second pass.... well, not really. I am making a concerted effort to learn more about lighting in Max. Fortunately I found out that the materials that I originally created worked pretty well (But they could be a lot better. :D) Who knew what a little lighting could do to help out a render? Go back and look at the older delorean post and see for yourself how much it improved. Well its really early and it is time to pass out!

More Figural Work

2010-05-31T21:36:00.000-07:00

Moldy oldies are fun. I made this a few months back and it has been sitting around on my hard drive. Not a bad attempt, but it still needs some work. It isn't finished, so don't be too hard on it haha.

Apple, Orange, Ipod Lunch Spectacular

2010-05-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

Still life I worked on during lunch. 1 hr.

Apples and onions

2010-05-12T06:56:00.001-07:00

Still life color study. 45 min

Here is a quick little painting. I think that I should start painting more still life. Previously I mentioned that I need to work on materials and I believe this will probably be the quickest way to improve that ability. My perception of color has come a long way since a year ago, and I have a few pieces in the pipe right now that I think have a lot of potential. I will post them as soon as I think they are reasonably presentable haha. Now that more people are actually following my blog I have a greater fear of posting sub par work, and hastily writing really awfully composed entries. (which I did quite often in the past)

Death Becomes Him

2010-05-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

So here it is. The final version. As you can see it has gone through many, many changes. I think for the better. I decided the pose was not very dynamic, and chose to change it. As I mentioned previously there was another color version of this. I am not going to post it for fear that I would only embarrass myself. haha.

Clearly I still have a lot of things to practice. Such as material differentiation and rendering folds in cloth. I have come a long way though, and maybe someday in the near future I will be able to call myself a proper illustrator. I would like to thank everyone who has helped me out so far. Some people I feel need mention are the great and wonderful Don Seegmiller, Piero Macgowan, Kevin Bradley, John Stewart, Andrew Curry, Steve Jamerson, Justin Thomas, Bryce Homick, McClean Kendree. I linked to a few of their blogs so check their work out. They are all incredible artists.

Till Death do us part.

2010-04-19T05:30:00.001-07:00

Hey Everybody,

Here is an illustration I am working on. I have been looking through a lot of great books lately. A majority of them dealing with subjects that pertain to animation in some way. This illustration was inspired by a wonderful book called the artists complete guide to facial expression. There was a lovely picture of a Edwardian man. I think that the macabre and the late 1800's go very well together. I personally think this piece is pretty awful in its current state. There are a lot of things I would change. The poses of the characters is very stiff, and the skeleton in the background needs work. I originally took this to color pretty quickly and then decided to go back and re-approach it focusing purely on the value spectrum. I have always had trouble working with color and getting rich values.
Its a start, and I have some ideas on how to improve it. Ill be back with a better version in no time.

Figure Painting

2010-03-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

I have not posted something in a while. So here are some of my figure painting studies. They have been sitting around on my hard drive for the past few months and I have been meaning to post them. The character I was working on in my previous post is coming along nicely and I will update you all on him really soon.

Last week was probably one of the most exciting weeks I have had in years. I finally attended GDC and I think I would like to make it a yearly tradition. If you have never gone to the Game Developers Conference and you are in the games industry, and/or, like games, it is certainly worth going to. Some of the highlights of the trip were; the amazing panels, getting to meet/talk to people that have made my favorite games, hanging out with old friends, and San Francisco. Perhaps I will go more in depth about GDC in the near future.

I have not been adding too much text to my posts in recent times. I am not much of a writer and I do not think there are enough interesting things about myself to reflect on. For those who take the time to read the grammatical mess I call writing, thank you. I hope everything is going well and I look forwards to updating you soon with more artwork.

nearing completion

2010-01-26T19:38:00.001-08:00

Update

2010-01-23T15:03:00.001-08:00

Wherever he may go....

2010-01-20T22:03:00.001-08:00

In progress, more to come.....

High Five!

2010-01-14T16:38:00.000-08:00

Update... More to come

2010-01-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

Following the leader

2009-12-19T22:08:00.001-08:00

Monica Finished

2009-12-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

2009-11-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

2009-11-09T23:02:00.000-08:00

2009-11-05T23:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-29T21:03:00.001-07:00

Photoreal texturing.

Texturing: ME
Photography: Paul Fedore
Model : Hong Xazu

Photorealistic Hand First Go

2009-10-27T11:02:00.001-07:00

2009-10-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

Door Update

2009-10-20T23:24:00.000-07:00

2009-10-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

2009-10-15T20:47:00.000-07:00

Unreal Fun

2009-10-14T22:22:00.001-07:00

Self Portrait

2009-09-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

Need to paint. Bored. Made a self portrait. Nuf said.

For Fun. For Free

2009-09-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

Hey there,

Yet another post, and one that came so fast! A few nights ago I felt an urge to draw something. I was looking through a wonderful book of photographs and I came across a picture featuring three young girls who were part of a Brazilian native culture. They were sitting on a bench waiting to pick out the man who they were going to marry. I was inspired looking at each of their varied expressions at the prospect of their future.

On a different note. FOLLOW MY BLOG! Even if you never comment on anything it would be nice to know who regularly checks in to look at my work. It will be a motivator for me to post here more if I know there are people who visit. :)

The building is finally DONE.

2009-09-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Thank God. This building has been theI bane of my existence for the past few months and looking back at it now I have no idea why. It was something that I would work on for a few days and then lose interest in to work on something else for a while. It was a vicious cycle of starting a bunch of new things that I am pretty sure I will never complete. But here we are now. It is done. So let me explain the background to the building.

I was approached a few months back by a former coworker of mine asking me if I could build a city street scene for an animation he was working on. I gladly agreed because I was really looking forwards on working on something with another person. So I began the project by grey boxing out the entire street scene which was comprised of about 4 fully detailed buildings and a bunch of background buildings that I would later put some kind of rudimentary texture on to give them form in the background. Throughout the construction of the piece I was torn because the animator i was working with was pushing me to create a building that had a high amount of geometry with very simple textures. At the same time I wanted to have something that would eventually be a good portfolio piece on its own.

When I finished grey boxing the buildings I decided that I would pick this building to texture to fruition in order to have a portfolio piece and leave the other buildings simple like my friend requested. This is where the trouble started. I ran into a motivational roadblock halfway through the project was because I told by my friend that he was going to be switching back to Maya for the project and that he might not need my models. :( I was also not sure how detailed I wanted to make the building myself, and how much effort I wanted to put into creating high poly elements in zbrush that I would later bake down. About half way through my initial texturing I decided that I wanted to use zbrush and that ended up taking more time than I expected. I found myself focusing on little things and not looking at the big picture. It was tedious and my computer was not cooperating with me through the whole ordeal. This is about the time in the project where I discovered a great program called Body paint. Body paint is an element of the program Cinema 4D and if you have not tried it I suggest you find yourself a copy and do so.

The first project I tried cinema 4d on was a art test that I had nearly completed and wanted to eliminate texture seams. But I didnt know what I could do with the program when it came to making a strip texture sheet and other textures that I would have to use over and over again on the model. I ended up exporting low poly elements of the model that represented pieces on the strip sheet and after making high poly versions in zbrush i would go into BP and make the diffuse maps. BP works a lot like photoshop. It allows you to paint on layers and use layers to multiply, overlay to effect layers that lie beneath. I found a wonderful plug in for 3Ds Max on C4D's website that allows you to export any selected model and textures directly into BP at a click of a button. Extremely convenient. :) Another great feature of C4D is if you use PSD's as your textures in 3DS max, BP will read maintain the layer information from the PSD and update it when you save so that you can work with your original texture between BP and Photoshop and not worry about having to make a million different versions of your original. Anyways enough gushing about C4D.

I ended up making about 2 different versions of many of the textures on the model because I was not liking the way certain things were looking. In the end everything came together pretty nicely. I think the biggest issue I can still see with the piece is that there still is no grime detail where the fire escapes meet the surface of the building. I think it is a small detail that might make a big difference in close up renders of the model. I should come out and say that I did a lot of things wrong on this model. Many things were not done in as efficient a manner as I would have liked, but this was a learning experience and I am going to treasure it for that if I do not for anything else in the future. Thanks for reading, and keeping up with my work. Ill try to take on smaller projects in the future so that I can post things with more regularity.

Delorean Update

2009-06-27T13:55:00.001-07:00

I promised a little while ago to give another update on my progress and there has been quite a lot of progress since my last post. For the last few weeks I have been in the process of unwrapping, mesh tweeking, zbrushing and texturing and it has been quite an experience. I have never made a car before in 3d and I have learned quite a bit about the do's and donts. Needless to say, I am not going to get into the nitty gritty of it, ill just let you look at the progress. Enjoy! :)

My Car Will Always Be Better Than Yours

2009-06-09T23:08:00.001-07:00

What can I say? I love the DMC-12. You might think that I am some kind of Back To The Future fan boy, but my attraction to the DeLorean is far deeper than classic movie memory. I know what you might be thinking; "Hey its just a car, get over it." But there are few vehicles that are as beautiful and controversial as the DeLorean. Anyways, Im not going to defend my love anymore, simply bask in the light of my most recent 3D effort.

Check back to see further updates on this model.

-Steve

Second Pass

2009-03-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

This piece is still in progress, I want to play some more with the composition and some of my color choices. I think that I might play with the color of the delorean and add some point of interest in the background where the road terminates into the horizon. One of my goals was trying to create a horizontal composition that would lead the viewer's eye from the background to the foreground. Ill post another version of this again when I have made some more progress on it. :)

Color study sketch

2009-03-01T00:19:00.001-08:00

I shall never give up! Until the day is mine!

2009-02-22T21:04:00.000-08:00

2009-02-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

Assignment one. Happy Box.

This is an animation of a happy box!

Another Rough Light Study

2009-02-16T20:53:00.000-08:00

I realize that I haven't been writing any commentary to accompany the work I have been posting so far. But I figured that no one really looks at this blog anymore since it has been so long since I have posted here. So without further delay let me update you and the rest of my non existant reader base. The past few months I have been making it my goal to improve my ability to comprehend and render color. I have been looking at a few books and getting some really nice tips from my office buddy McLean Kendree. He is a wonderful fellow from the land of Ringling. McLean is proof of why Ringling has such a great reputation for preparing their illustration students for the real world. Check out his blog, I bow to you good sir.

This is yet another light/color study. In the past few images I started to realize that I wasn't pushing the saturation enough, making my paintings look a bit chalky. I tried to push that aspect of this piece. Looking at this piece now I realize I am not using enough color variation within the piece and I believe that could be flattening the overal look of the piece. I have been trying to understand how to effectively us the concept of a triad color palette in a piece. In future pieces I will have to conjour up some reference if I am going to get into more detail. Right now I feel that the lack of detail makes the picture look bland. But hey, another painting awaits to explore and improve!

-Stevo

In Florida. I figure I should paint something tropical

2009-02-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

based off of reference

at some point I am going to get this right

2009-02-12T19:17:00.000-08:00

based off reference

More light and color studies

2009-02-03T22:19:00.001-08:00

Color studies based off of photographs

2009-02-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

based off reference

Based on reference

Nisky High Carmina Burana... Epic

2008-05-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

Publish Post

Landscape...... OF THE GODS!

2008-04-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Ok, so why are there six randomly placed images in this post.... well Ill tell yah. This is a large background I made for an animation I am producing. The scroll is about 150 inches in length so I had to break it up to post it on this blog. Sorry that you cannot view it in its full grandiosity, but if you are really interested, you can piece them all together in photoshop for a real surprise.

card stock

2008-04-03T06:49:00.001-07:00

So the Illustration Commencement Show is coming up. This is an example of the business cards and post cards that I will be using to promote myself. I think they are crap, haha, I will need to make some new ones soon.

Cuteness

2008-03-31T20:36:00.000-07:00

I decided to try my hand at using the hair and fur modifier so I modeled a character to experiment on. This is an animation I made with the little penguin I made.

2008-03-01T00:21:00.001-08:00

Hello again,

I am currently enrolled in a 3d character class being taught by Firaxis Lead Artist Greg Foertsch. Unfortunately since I am acting as the class teacher assistant I wont be officially producing any work for a grade, but I wont let that stop me from producing my own characters for the class. The first two images are a few concepts that i came up with at beginning of the semester. After presenting them, the class decided that they would prefer to see the scarecrow modeled. Below the character ortho are some renders from the completed scarecrow model. The scarecrow is still a work in progress, but I have him unwrapped and I am prepping him for export into Z-brush to create normal maps. I will post again when I begin texturing and complete the normal maps. I would like to thank Firaxis Lead Character Modeler Chris Sulzbach for his wonderful suggestions and help.

2008-02-26T12:26:00.000-08:00

Hey Everyone,

Antonio had asked me to post some of the work I have been doing in thesis. So here is some of the work I did last semester.