A couple of days ago we got an email from James Johnson aka PencilWhipped from the USA. He describes himself as ‘an accomplished life-size sculptor, a ZBrush artist, a mechanical part drafter for farming equipment, a physical simulations creator, and, yes, even a character animator from time to time.’ He is currently attending the University of North Texas, where he majors in sculpture for the expressed purpose of teaching at the College or University level.
This sounded really interesting to us and to show his skills he sent us a video of our well known character model PiratePad, but with a complete new set of animations. After watching the video we were really impressed by the stunning animations and felt like we found the right person for the job, but a little late on track for a WoP 1.5 release.
PencilWhipped is a very talented artist, a highly inventive sculptor who is able to transfer his experiences with clay into the digital world with breathtaking detail. Combine this ability with a deep understanding for classical animation techniques and we had to include him on the team for our characters. Immediately he started to work on new character models which will be hopefully shipped with WoP 1.5. Furthermore he tries to fight out issues with the existing ones. We are really happy about him joining the team. For more information about Pencil’s work check out his gallery on Facebook.
Welcome on board.
Image sources
- James Johnson aka PencilWhipped: James Johnson