Mike Dietz

Here’s a little short-short I did that appeared in the latest Animation Wild Card episode. Just wanted to keep it short, simple and fun to animate, so mission accomplished in that regard.

This is an old one... reposting for Kermit's 68th birthday! Happy Birthday Kermit!

These are a few character designs I did for the unpublished mobile game I've mentioned in previous posts. Sadly none of these made it as far as the cg modeling stage… I would have loved to rig and animate some of these!

A while back I was hired by a now-defunct game studio to do some superhero character designs for a video game they were considering for development. I’m kind of glad the game didn’t go forward because the concept was feeling too close to the Incredibles universe, but still, these were a blast to draw. I should note these were done well before Incredibles 2 came out, where Pixar was clearly having fun with goofy superhero designs and names too. All in all my pal Ed Schofield and I busted out about 100 of these characters, this is only a small sample of the silliness.

Here are a few more life drawings with some longer poses thrown in. My proportions do tend to get a bit funky… I definitely much prefer the quick sketch!

A few somewhat recent drawings from live models. As much as I enjoy life drawing, especially quick-sketch, it does keep you humble. Need to keep practicing…

This is another little orc I rigged and animated for the unpublished mobile game I mentioned in my last post. Super fun to animate even with the limited bone and poly counts required by mobile. Again, character design by the talented Danny Beck and cg model by Sameer Yamdagni. For rigging I’ve been working with the Hive auto-rigger included in Zoo Tools Pro from Create3dCharacters.com. Check them out, there are a ton of great tools and tutorials available and their support is awesome.

Here’s a little orc dude I recently rigged and animated for a mobile game that unfortunately didn’t get the green light. Characters for mobile are always a fun challenge because they’re often low-poly and the number of joints you can use in the skeleton is limited. For instance, I would have loved to add some overlap to his ears, eyebrows, hair, etc. but there weren’t enough bones to go around. I ended up weighting his ears to his neck joint instead of his head so you get a little bit of counter movement, but it’s very subtle. The character was designed by my pal Danny Beck and modeled by Marco Gutierrez.

Happy Holidays to all!

Following up on my last post, some behind the scenes pics from "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!"

If you haven’t watched the stop motion animated “It’s a SpongeBob Christmas!” go watch it now. It’s pretty funny with lots of eye candy. Season eight I think. I believe this was the first project I animated on for the Screen Novelties guys. Those puppets were super fun to animate and worked well for cartoony action like multiples on the limbs. Happy Holidays!

I did a bunch of work on the stop-motion animated trailer that kicked off Fortnite Winterfest ‘22 yesterday. I came on toward the end of photography so I only got to animate one stop-mo shot, but I was responsible for all of the hand-drawn vfx throughout the entire piece. Lots of sparkles, embers, tears and puffs of snow. All stuff you don’t necessarily notice but they add a lot to the look and feel. The great Marty Davis helped me out with the swirling snow and wind shots. The trailer was produced by the folks at Screen Novelties. Love working with that crew!

Following up on my last post, these are some of the model sheets I created for the final designs of the three main characters in Battletoads. For the uninitiated, model sheets are used to insure all of the animators understand the design and construction of the characters and are able to draw them consistently no matter what the characters are doing or what angle we are viewing them from.

A few years ago the folks at Dlala Studios hired me to do some character design on their new Battletoads game. One of my favorite parts of the character design process is the initial exploration phase where you just sort of let it fly and see what comes out. I’ll often do 50 to 100 quick designs at this point to get the gears turning and the juices flowing. I find this useful because after the first 20 designs or so I get past the obvious solutions and start thinking more outside the box. These are a few examples from my first pass at designing the new Battletoads. None of these ever made it into the game, but they did help inform various elements of the final designs.

Here’s a fun commercial I did a TINY bit of work on. I only animated two shots: the one where the Elysian brewery and the surrounding buildings are constructed, and the one where the dude lights the jack-o-lantern and then falls into it. I didn’t get to work directly with the papercraft artists, but it was amazing to see what they created for this spot. The animation was produced at @screennovelties and I believe all the papercraft was handled by @papersmith_studio.

Here’s one of a series of fun Black Friday commercials I worked on a few years ago. I stop-motion animated everything you see working on my hands and knees on a huge white seamless background stage, including the hand models who were very patient as I moved their hands and arms frame by frame. I even hand animated the big boom-down/tilt-up camera move about halfway through the ad because the motion control rig stopped working. The ad was directed by Duke Johnson at @starburnsindustries-blog for @buckdesign.

Random sketchiness. #sketching https://www.instagram.com/p/CJhdjaZDvHO/?igshid=4x4h48g61zj4