Sketchbook: AndrewHelenek
polycounter lvl 6
Hello fellow polycounters! I've been around polycount for a while and never wandered into the sketchbook section but I'd like to document my progress as I continue to work within the industry. I thankfully landed my first job over at Lukewarm Media and am having an absolute blast! Lets get this show on the road! I am an animator and have recently began teaching myself how to rig. I'm also always welcome to comments and critiques, the more the merrier!
As a recent graduate without a job or an internship and a crazy drive to work I decided to dive into the DOTA workshop and teamed up with a few friends to create assets for the game. Valve accepted four of my items, two of which are very popular couriers. Thankfully the workshop is earning me enough money to pay for my student loans, words cannot describe how grateful I am with the success I've had.
As a recent graduate without a job or an internship and a crazy drive to work I decided to dive into the DOTA workshop and teamed up with a few friends to create assets for the game. Valve accepted four of my items, two of which are very popular couriers. Thankfully the workshop is earning me enough money to pay for my student loans, words cannot describe how grateful I am with the success I've had.
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You can check it out at <www.andrewhelenek.com>
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I also finished up a contract with Andrew Arcade. This character was an absolute blast to work with. I plans to do some additional personal animation with this character, the potential is limitless with it. Plus I have the wild urge to make him play with himself. :poly124:
Keep up the great work! I'd love to see more!
(someday I also want to learn rigging and animation... someday...)
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Tinkbot and Ocula were both recently accepted into the DOTA 2 Store! I've been on a roll recently, puts me up to seven works added. I also finished up work on another project. Also have a few more in the pipe, busy busy busy
Keep up that ambition along with all those rigs your doing, and your bound to find a full time position. Really my biggest piece of advice is just be open to moving locations. If your able to do that, just start applying at all the studios you can. (most companies small and medium like to see the effort that your putting in, especially being active in forums)
Thanks for the advice! I'm more then happy to move to new locations, new sites, new stories, all good times!
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But the stuff I am very proud of was having the oppertunity to work along side of Nexon in order to produce some cosmetic items for their players to celebrate the launch of Dota in Korea. We wanted to make something special for them so we decided to also create some new animations that will ship with this asset. We also created a Korea inspired Sotdae to put a little more culture into the game. Looking forward to seeing both of those in game soon!
And finally, I also started to build control rigs for the characters in DOTA. It a little over a hundred control rigs, so they aren't done yet, but I'll be working my way through all of them over the next few months. I hope these will encourage more animators to join in the workshop madness, there isn't enough competition right now! These rigs are free to use for whatever you'd like, so download them and get animating!
I have two links for that, my rig dump on polycount located --> HERE.
Or a slightly more organized using the steam guides feature, their formatting makes it very easy to find the specific character you're looking for and that's found --> HERE.
It's been a busy month! Cheers everyone!
These are mainly blocked in, I still need to do a few passes on these, these are works in progress.
Our team worked with Nexon again to bring one of their ideas to life for their large Nexon Sponsorship League, this cosmetic was bundled with their online ticket and also given to those who attended the event live. I put together a little video to showcase our work.
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We also did another peice for a smaller organization called NEL, or NADotA Elite League which is run by a few profession esport players, they wanted similar treatment to Nexon in a being able to sell some virtual merchandise within the game.
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The community wasn't a big fan of the original design, it's been slightly altered now.
Here some more character peices
Did a little hand animation, note this animation is a work in progess animation, the finished polished animaton is in the video. Ignore that very stiff eyeball hah!
And made a small video for the workshop
Sadly don't have a video I put together to showcase the animations but I do have this gif and a video put together by my partner in crime on this project, Ill link that below since he does showcase the animations off, I'll try and get that thing where it loads at a specific time during the video.
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Well that's all I got this time! Cheers guys and hope you had a merry christmas!
This was my first attempt at using source film maker, and only having three weeks to learn and create it proved to be quite the challenge, but a fun one nevertheless! SFM is one hell of a powerful tool.
I also did some new remnant animations for Storm and Ember Spirit. The way their ablities is quite interesting to say the least. I'll get breakdowns of those sometime soon. Until then, all I have are the key pose rendered out for each of the poses.
Although, being honest, I want to rework some of the ember poses, I'm not quite happy with all of them yet. Cheers!
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Seeing Mac spotlighted on polycount was absolutly incredible, I honestly never thought in a million years that I'd pull that off! Even though I shared the work in progress gifs in an earlier post, I didn't share the video in SFM that I put together. Source Film Maker is one hell of a drug, while it's not perfect, being able to pull animations back and forth between there and in game is so helpful.
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I did the animations on the serpent ward in the background of the video. Sadly I don't seem to have any gifs of it, I need to find them!
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*Bonus Gif*
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Just vomited all over the screen, I think that's all I got. For now! Sorry if the thread makes your computer cry with all these gifs. :poly124:
This made my evening.
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Then to change things up we decided to put together a pugna ward, Oroboros came up with the awesome idea of turning into a tenticle creature from the nether. It was a very interesting creature to animate.
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We also decided to put together a death prophet ghost.
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The hanging animation seen in the SFM render is also planned for the loadout of the ghost, hopefully if the item is implemented it gets implemented that way considering all the other ghosts default to the run animation.To give some extra value to the item I also put together a custom ultimate animation for her.
I also put together a custom Kunkka animation for his Torrent ablity where he takes a swig from the bottle.
Onto the ward! The candle ward!
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Once all the animation was out of the way I also put together all the SFM showcases that you've been seeing in this post and the previous, as well as the big finale one that included all of the single items in the collection.
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Thanks for checking out the most recent update! Cheers!
Almost forgot all the ESL stuff as well. I did the animations for the ward, and did all the showcase SFMs
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Here the Djinn running in engine with the custom particle.
He got included in a community treasure organized by Oroboroosorosrosos. Which turned out great.
Shortly after we started working on "The Summit Two" Bundle. We decided to create a courier and ward following a tundra theme. Oroboros came up with some awesome design that were a blast to animate.
Firstly the ward, Arctic Watchtower;
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That fish was so much fun to animate flopping around and everything. The portrait was an unexpected suprise with the fish flopping into frame every so often. Was really happy with how that turned out.
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The crazy thing about the rare idle is I wanted to see how long I could have an animation, I also couldn't decide on what to do for the animation, so in the end I decided on doing all of them combined within a idle animation. That turned into a ~50 second animation, I think in the end it really makes sure that you'll always see something new while its on the field.
The other cool thing is there are animation styles, we included two different styles, the dog can have a traditional dogtag or have a keg around his neck. In doing that I had to have two animation sets that function properally to each nextpeice. I want to expand on this more in the future, this was a little test to see if I could do it to begin with.
Then we put together some new Treants that gave off a real oddworld vibe which really got me excited.
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The spiderling was a nice creature to revisit;
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Now the beast was something really special to me, our goal was to do something really different. Oroboros designed this really awesome two legged beast equiped with a huge tongue which was a blast to animate and play with.
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It's been a wild few months, finally most of the work is done, but not all. I still have a courier in the pipe, as well as several wards for a larger commmunity project that I'm not 100% ready to announce to everyone just yet. After I get back from my trip in New York to visit family and attend ESL One NY, I get started with all of that and prepare for another hopefully large drop in a few months. Stay tuned, thanks for stopping by, and sorry if I exploded your computers. Cheers!