CG-Artist Nikki Starostka

John concept sculpt

2011-10-09T04:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a little sculpt i made of John's head, for the short film, Out Of the Ordinary.
(Sculpted after a sketch made by Tommy Kinnerup.)

Dyna Sketching

2011-10-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

I Just got ZBrush 4 R2, and omg it's sweet!

The new dynamesh and bpr improvements are just awesome. So I made myself a little sketch today. I hope to work a little more on it. :)

First Dyna-sketch WIP from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

Speed Sculpt of the Day

2011-09-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with a sculptris to zbrush workflow.

sculptris

2011-08-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

Guess what!? I just got sculptress for mac, and it's really fun! here is a little speed sculpt I made as warm-up for another project.

showreel 2011

2011-07-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

So here is my showreel of schoolwork from 2010-2011.

Enjoy!

showreel 2011 from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

And here is the breakdown.

"In His Shirt"

2011-07-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I'm on summer vacation now and I am just soooo relaxed right now. No stress and no worries.. So I have been doing a lot of jogging, mountainbiking and bujingkan lately.
Yes, I actually like to treat my buddy with a little bit of exercise when I dont have any homework to do. :)
But even more importantly, I've been working on a couple of paintings recently.
Here is one of them. "In His Shirt"

Commercial project

2011-05-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

Just finished a 5 week commercial project for the danish animal welfare society. Here is the outcome:

Thanks to Kay Delventhal And Peter Peake

Fantasy Creature Design

2011-05-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

A little creature design i made for a video at www.poly-face.com

Sculpt upcoming. :)

VFX with Chris Smallfield and Project Q Finished.. for now

2011-04-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

Chris Smallfield was a very good teacher, and he showed us a lot of things that I didn't get to try out yet.
But this is what I showed for the presentation this friday. Hopefully I have time to work on it some more. A lot of fixes has to be done and some extra cool effects would be nice to put in there. :)

And once again, thanks to Tine for the awesome animation.. http://tinerinberg.blogspot.com/

update on project Q. WIP

2011-03-22T04:59:00.000-07:00

Here is a little update on how far I am with the Quadruped.

Tine finished the animation this weekend, and i am really happy with it!
It looks awesome! Thank you Tine ;)
Here is a little playblast:

Animation: Tine Rinberg

Modelling, Ringging and so on: Nikki Starostka

And here is a little shot of the render WIP
so that you can see the texture and stuff.. well some of it at least.. :)

Sketch of the day! HiiiYAaaaaAh!

2011-03-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Kung Fu Squid
Character design/illustration

Did this to take a little break from my colour-study.. :)

self-study

2011-03-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

It is time for two weeks of self study, and i have chosen to focus some of my time on a one-week colour-study.
Here are some of the first studies.

This one I copied from a picture. (No tracing, eye-dropping or colour-picking) I had the picture on a separate screen while working.
The wolfs were very hard to paint since white is never white, but every nuance of the light..

This still-life/stilleben was also pretty hard. The hardest part was the pealed garlic, which i still think did not turn out that well..

And here we have a little behind the art picture. :)

Holiday pictures

2011-02-23T18:01:00.000-08:00

During this holiday I went to my dad's place in Copenhagen where I shot some photos.

here are a few of the images that I took for a spin in PhotoShop

sketch of the day (on iPhone!!)

2011-02-23T15:52:00.000-08:00

I drew this in the train on my Iphone with help from the amazing "Brushes" app.
Incredible what todays phones are capable of doing..

project Quadruped: Work in Progress..

2011-01-27T19:29:00.000-08:00

At the top you see what I showed for the concept presentation. A concept I made in collaboration with Tine Rinberg. at the bottom you see a "WIP" sculpt/model, (maya/zBrush) But it is gonna be waaaaaay more pretty/dreadful when i'm done with it. ;)

More stuff comming up soon.

matchmoving with Leigh Russel

2010-12-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

I tracked a little shot I made at home and put in some really bad animation.

practice matchmoving from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

And here is a shot with some really bad keying (since I didn't have a greenscreen, and the alternative wasn't that effective)

practice matchmoving from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

Jules ét Jim - The Trailer

2010-12-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

Finally the project is over. Here is the result. :)
feel free to give a comment of you like it or dislike it. Anyway.. we used around three months on this project.

Jules ét Jim from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

release announced! ;)

2010-11-20T08:40:00.001-08:00

Final designs

2010-10-07T03:19:00.000-07:00

Concept art/character design

2010-10-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

After analysing the film, we decided (for many reasons) to make the characters insects. But to make it easy for the animators we then decided to make the insects biped.

At first we all came up with some sketches and ideas, and then it took it from there, and melted it all together and tryed to make everything pleasing and eastetic.

We had style quides for colour, texture and form/shape. We also made styleguides and referencefor each character.

some of the first sketches:

animatic

2010-10-07T02:45:00.000-07:00

The first two weeks of this project is only preproduction, which means that we had to make an animatic and design all the concepts.
I mainly had responsibility for the design, as we decided that I would be the Technical Art-Director. So while I was designing, Martin and Fie took care of the animatic, although I was pretty involved in the process too and vice-versa.
Here is the animatic:
As you can see we decided to put some weight on the dramatic parts of the story and give it a more action-packed feel.
Trailer Project animatic from Anne-Sofie Tholander on Vimeo.

Trailer Project (begining of semester 3)

2010-10-07T02:27:00.000-07:00

Throughout the whole third semester we are only going to be dealing with one project, concerning a 30 second trailer. The assignment is to, (in groups of three) re-artdirect a chosen movie and make a 30 second 3D-animated trailer for it. Later in the project we are also going to join up with three animators from the 2nd year of bachelor in animation.
My group is CGA: Anne-Sofie Tholander, Martin Hjelholt Brun Pedersen and Me CA(animators): Stine Frandsen, Kenneth Ladekjær, Benny Søhave.
And our movie is Francois Truffaut's Jules ét Jim.

mr. squid

2010-08-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

since I've had a long vacation now, I felt that I had to do some actual work for once.. So I've just got the new ZBrush 4, and I wanted to try Zsketching since I've never tried it before.

So here's what I got after less than two hours of sketching and texture painting.
I hink the result would have been better if I modeled the base-mesh in maya. But this way is waaay faster and more intuitive.
I think/hope my next project with Zsketching will be more interesting than this. :)

new camera

2010-08-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

Just recieved my new DSLR, and here is a shot with colour correction.

Branches CamTest from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

photoshop mess..

2010-05-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

Played around with soe brushes in photoshop, and decided to post the mess.

Quick sketch

2010-05-12T15:12:00.001-07:00

felt like throwing out a little sketch/concept.

Presentation, with Anna Kubik

2010-04-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

The week of presentation was very stressing for me, because the normal and displacement maps i extracted from mudboxwas full of errors. So if I used 5 hours on sculpting the face, I spend 10 on fixing the maps.
Adam recommented the program, Cyslice which I now really hope the school will invest in.
But in the end I managed to make the presentation in time, and I am pretty satisfyed with it.

Design and modelling: The Vampirate - Nikki Starostka from Nikki Starostka on Vimeo.

Design and modelling reel from a 5 weeks (+one week making the reel) project. Throughout the project I was beeing tought by Craig Kellman (character designer), Damon Bard (sculpter), Adam Dewhirst (modeller), Anna Kubik (Layout artist)

Modeling And Digital sculpting with Adam Dewhirst

2010-04-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

These 3 weeks were really great. Adam is such a nice guy, and really skilled. He has worked on films like The Dark Knight, The Golden Compass and games like Battlefield.
I think I ended up with a very nice and clean mesh with a fairly low amount of polygons, And I'm really happy that I moved closer to the original concept again.
Here are some WIP renders from mudbox. You can see the full turnaround in the "presentation post".

Sculpting week, with Damon Bard

2010-04-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

Damon has an awesome CV, including Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. He learned me a great deal about posing and flow. Sculpting for film is a tricky business, but i find it very facinating, and it is really satisfying to end op with a physical product that you can actually feel. I really like working with the clay, it is much more stimulating than working on the computer.
After this week I could easily see myself as a sculpter within a few years.

Here are some pix of my sculpt. I am very happy about the pose, But I am not so happy about how it moved a bit away from the concept concerning the upper body. I think that i worryed too much about anatomy in the torso. But I can fix those things. After all, the sculpt isn't finished and polished yet.

Charcter Design, with Craig Kellman

2010-04-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

This week was the start of a six week project, about character design and modelling. Craig (lead character designer on Madagascar 1, 2, 3 and Monsters vs. aliens) is an awesome guy with loads and loads of humour, and it was really great to have him. He tought us a lot of stuff about generic character designs, and specific character designs. The course was mostly about getting personality into a character, so that the design doesn't become an icon rather than a real character. But we also learned stuff about how to make clear silhouettes and how to make the design readable.
Here is my character

Quick sketch

2010-04-17T05:17:00.000-07:00

I got my new Cintiq the other day, so here is the first litle sketch I made with it.

Light and render, timelapse project with Oliver Kirchhoff.

2010-03-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

The timelapse is done. It took a long time to render and I am not fully satisfied with it. I would have liked to put some animation in it, but time ran out.

2010-03-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

A little design I made in the weekend

a little something

2010-03-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

A little design I made while installing Maya 2010. I've desided to sculpt a maquette in clay, and this might be the design I wanna go with.

Light and render: Time Lapse, week 1.

2010-02-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

So this is the first week of a three week project, which will end out in a 5-10 seconds 3D timelapse.
Oliver came back to teach us during this project. He tought us about all kinds of indirect lighting and raytacing, and even though I already knew alot about this, it was nice to get it refreshed.
In this first week of the project we were supposed to make a render of an interior scene with sun light and different materials in mentalRay. We were allowed to take use of preproduced 3D models, but I chose to model all the stuff myself.

So this is what I got. The cityscape in the background is (c) Mirrors Edge, EA.
I chose to go futuristic.

Film Jam - "The Outsider"

2010-02-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

Here you see the result of this week.

The Outsider - Film Jam from Magnus elvstrøm Myrälf on Vimeo.

This week we were visited by 6 amazing directors, Tod Polson, Amy Winfrey, Pritt Tender, Max Hattler, Alexei Alexeev and Jamie Caliri. We had to choose which director to work with and I chose Tod Polson.
I worked together with both first years and second year, animators and CG artists. Tod came up with the idea of showing the life of a claustrophobic guy. And from there we had to come up with the storybeats and make a film in 5 days.
We had four animators and four CGA's on the project, but two of the animators didn't know the programs we used for animating. So after we finished the storyboard, their main focus was to supervise us and make shure that everything got done.
I was in the design team, so I helped developing the style. I thought that the projects main inspiration should come from something between old UPA stuff, and Samurai Jack (which has aaaawesome designs). After the storyboard was finished I started making layouts for some of the scenes.
Once the layouts were done and handed over to the animators, I began making colourschemes and thumbnails for the different scenes.

(above: the colourschemes I did)

Together with Ole I developed a graphic chart showing how the colours should work throughout the different storybeats. The purpose of the chart was that it should guides us making settings that would fit together and make the story mor interesting and exciting where it had to be. Example: We had to make sure that the scene with the atomic explosion had more contrast than the scene with the school bus.
And then the painting work began.
The last day I spend compositing the last scene in After Effects.
In the end it all came together. Everyone did a fantastic job on this film, and I think we worked great together.

(above:some of the backgrounds I painted)

Tod's help was so good, we couldn't have done it without him. Everytime the man opens his mouth, ideas just come streaming out.

2010-02-08T14:23:00.000-08:00

It's been some time sinece I last blogged. But in the meantime I've had a week of layout with Uri Kranot and a week with storyboard, with Tod Polson as the teacher.
It has been great and I think I leaned a bit more about the art of storytelling.

this is a layout I did. The assignment was to make a layout of a mastershot in the Bonnie and Clyde scenario (not the actual film).

"From a layout for a Batman episode". We got a part of a storyboard from a real batman tv-episode handed out, from which we had to make a layout. This is missing all the cameramovements and characters I drew on it though.

And this is a popsicle animatic Dennis and I made over a day.

reeealy sketchy.

And I also made this in layout class.

And then a little raw storyboard for a story called "The Hound".

And finaly, a little sketch that didn't turn into a storyboard.

2010-01-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

This weekend I made a 3D visualization for Björklund Design. The project was a minimalistic cider can, which Jan Inge Björklund designed.

http://www.bjorklund-design.dk

Colour

2010-01-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

After a week with architecture (where from I don't have any interesting artwork to show) we had colour lectures with Lawrence Marvit once again. We used acrylics the whole week, which gave a much better understanding of how colour works. I don't wanna get into detail about all the stuff we were presented. But I can say that we learned a lot about lighting and gradients. We also spent a whole day making thumbnails.

Here's a thumbnail

Here's the image I worked out of the thumbnail

Design #2 with Lawrence Marvit

2010-01-10T15:11:00.000-08:00

This week was a bit exhausting, because of the homework we had to do. But I also learned a lot this week. We were tought in values, space, volume and rendering this week. Lawrence is a great great teacher. I can't agree on all of the stuff he is saying, but most of the time he is right, and the guy really understand how to pace his students. Here are some examples of what I did the last 2-3 days of the week.

This first topic was, giant attacks ancient Rome.

It didn't go so well at the presentation. Values and contrast was "fucked up".

"Junkyard romance". I sat with this from 22:30 to 05:00.. so tough night.

This didn't end so well at the presentation either.

The great things about morning presentations with Lawrence is that you always end up knowing what to improve and what you could have done better.

"old photo kinda' look"

2009-12-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

Kinda' like the effect..

2009-12-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Finally I'm done!

This is THE FINAL IMAGE.
With ambient occlusion, depth of field, filters and colour grading
(click big please) ;)

Over all I'm pretty satisfied with the result. I know it's not like Pixar quality. But it's okay. :-)

Okay I didn't solve the circus freak theme that we had to have in our images. On that point I failed (big time) But I did however think that I solved the vinyl-toy-style-guide for the character.

Once upon a time there was a turtle called Herman, whom lived with a poor family, in a poor neighbourhood of London. He lived in a small terrarium in the familys living room.
One day he ate some green liquid stuff, that dripped down from the sealing.
After that day he seemed to grow bigger and bigger very fast. He grew so big that he couldn't live in the terrarium anymore. The poor family had very little space, and only three beds, so they had to throw him out (even though I don't think a turtle needs a bed... huh..). He wandered around the snowy streets for days. It was cold, very cold.
luckily he was found by an old man. The old man had an antique shop on bakerstreet, where he took the turtle to. Herman got he's own corner in the shop, where he would sit and read loud for the children that came into the shop with their parents.
The shop became very attractive, because of the "big human turtle", and people came from everywhere to hear Herman read. After a year or two the turtle became yesterdays news, and the customers becamer fewer and fewer.
Now he is forced by loneliness to read for his imaginary friends, made of random products from the store.

turnaround..... again

2009-12-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

Our teacher made a beautiful render/comp of my turnaround today.
here it is

Model: Nikki Starostka
Light render and comp: Anna Kubik

2009-12-07T03:08:00.000-08:00

So now I have worked out some lighting. And i'm almost happy with it.

I also changed the composition a bit.

2009-12-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

This last week with André, we worked on modelling our sets and posing the characters. Not to mention uv mapping.

This is what I've got ;)

2009-11-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

This week and the last week we worked on our 3D characters with uv's and everything.

2009-11-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Finaly! Here is the final version of my concept for the project :)

2009-11-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

Week 45. This week we were tought 3Denvironment and layout by Anna Kubik.

This week was more relaxing than the last two weeks. The layout process is really fast. We only had to block things out, place them in the right spot, take care of sizerelations, camera angle and camera lens.

While working on our own projects we also got other assignments like, storyboarding in 3D and set construction.

Concept design

2009-11-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

This week we learned concept design with Kevin Dart and Chris Turnham.

This was probably the hardest week up until now. I would have been a lot better if this course was a two week thing. But anyway, I learned a lot and the result was great, and we realy got to use the tricks we learned with lawrence last week.

This week was the beginning of a seven-week project where we in the end have to make a final rendered 3D-image with a character and an indoor invironment. The style guide for this project is a bit complicated i think. The style for the character should be a bit like these vinyl-figure toy where everything is very simple and within the basic silhouette like this: http://dopefeast.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/gama-go-yeti.jpg

And the topic is circus freak, so it has to relate to that.

We had to do all sorts of hand-ins in the process and it was really hard, but also very nice.

My first design for the character looked like this.

But the look didn't feel right to the character and his story.

So then he came to look like this.

But then Kevin told me to make it alot more simple.

and so, my final design came to look like this :D

And for the invironment i came up with this thumbnail

And later this linework

Design with Lawrence

2009-11-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

This week we had to learn the first three of "the seven elements of design". It was all about design and composition, and Lawrence really knows his "shit" when it comes to composition in an image.
It was a hard week. Everybody tryed really hard to understand this whole new way of thinking, and i came to think why I haven't learned this stuff before.
Anyway.. The first assignment was to draw 3 rectangles and a line.. well this sounds really easy, but the line had to go from one edge of the paper to another and it had to be 90 degrees. The boxes should also be 90 degrees. Here comes the hard part; none of the lines should be the same length, and none of the space (both negative and positive) should have equal distances. Turns out the assignment was imposible, we just had to make it the least crappy as posible.
The following day we tasted some strwberry ice. The assignment was to draw the feeling of strawberry ice (abstract) but only with lines, and only black and white.

The next assignment was to draw champaign, but now only with shapes.

the next assignment was to draw some good old jazz musik, but this time we cold use both lines, shapes and values (graytones).

Friday we had 90 minutes to draw hell, with the same rules as the jazz thing. Turns out I worked best under preasure.

Rigging

2009-11-01T16:19:00.000-08:00

The first week with Oliver we had to rig a vehicle, to just learn the basic machanics of rigging.
The second week we had to rig a character, and to make it easy for myself I rigged the character i made in the second week with Karla.

Introduction to Maya

2009-11-01T16:13:00.000-08:00

In these two weeks we had Karla (a very goog modeller and rigger) as teacher.

She learned us the basics of the 3D application, Maya.

Eaven though I had some experience with Maya before I came to the school, I learned a few basic tricks in these weeks. The first assignment was too make an invironment in 3D and have it rendered. The assignment for the following week was to make an invironment and a character. In this week we were in groups (2n2). For this assignment I made the character while Karen made the invironment and the lighting.

Exquisit corpse

2009-11-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

After we had Sunit, we were introduced to Julia.

Julia is very original in her way of thinking, and she tryed very hard to teach us original ways to work with character design. In the middle of the week we made som small silhouette films.

One of the days we had to hand in 15 character designs, and in the end of the week she gave us a bunch of tools and a big block of clay, so we could make our designs in 3D.

Introduction to CG

2009-11-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

The first two weeks at the animation workshop we had a teacher, (Sunit Parekh) who worked on films like Matrix and Hellboy.
He showed us some cool stuff and supervised us on a project.
During the project we were devided into 4-5 person groups, and we had no teaching in the software.
this is what my group came up with.
(please click the window an ekstra time to open it in youtube, so you can see the whole frame)