Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Monthly Archive: May 2006

DV card anger – Pyro Basic DV vs Pinnacle DV 0

IT

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DV card anger – Pyro Basic DV vs Pinnacle DV

I will elaborate a bit more on this soon but as a summary, I bought the Pinnacle basic DV card last week and after trying to get it to work for more than 6 hours I gave up and decided to try to return it to Dixons on Oxford Street. Guess what, the shop changed name and is now called Curry. The DV card was bought 18 days ago which would normally exclude it from the Refund/return scheme. Surprisingly it was very easy to have it swapped for a Pyro DV card, I just said the product was faulty when it was probably a problem with shitty drivers. Since 95% of PC World/Dixons/Currys staff has no clue about the stuff they sell (except expensive Insurance covers), they just accepted the return. No clue about what they sell? Ask them if their DV camera can shoot full frame or if there Tape player do NTSC playback.

Don’t be fooled and buy a Pinnacle product thinking that with the forum they have if you run into a problem it will be quickly sorted out. I plugged the Pyro card and XP recognised it righaway, no drivers needed. Altogether that was 8 hours wasted instead of 8 hours of animation.

Ice Age 2 Q&A 0

Animation Mentor

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Ice Age 2 Q&A


We have been lucky to have a Q&A with Blue Sky’s Ice Age 2 crew tonight. 650million dollars at the box office in few weeks, they must have done something right, the “story is everything” thing has been challenged again…

That was very fun and we learnt few things. They looked half the age of most of AM students so the pressure is on.

Ballie goes skateboarding 0

Miscellaneous

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Ballie goes skateboarding

Here is something I am working on, this is gonna be good if I can pull it through!!

Regarding my renders, why do they always look so ugly? Well blame Maya for that. Maya is a highend animation software so it doesn’t do what 95% of 3d animators need: A RENDER TO QUICKTIME THAT WORKS!!!! Maya doesn’t even render to Quicktime 😉 you actually need to render an avi playblast first then import it in an editing software then export it to quicktime. Talking about an artist friendly software 😉

Arcs and overlap 0

Animation Mentor

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Arcs and overlap

This is an example to illustrate Arcs and overlap between the body and the foot, use the left and right keyboard keys to flip through the drawings.

Illusion of life 0

Animation Mentor

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Illusion of life

It is finally here !!!!

I thought it would be a clever move to order it through the american Amazon but it took 5 month for the book to arrive in my hands!!! At the end of the day I got it just before the acting class which is good and I only paid $44.53 for it, shipping included! Not bad eh!

“The Illusion of Life! is regarded as the Bible of Character Animation, so what is all the fuss about? I will tell you in my next post.

Animation Mentor session 205 0

Animation Mentor

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Animation Mentor session 205

Long time no see. Last week was a very important week for me. After failing my walk cycle assignment last term I didn’t really get the chance to experiment too much with animation workflow so this week was the time to get my hands dirty.

This term is about body mechanics but also the time to find our animation workflow. We have been shown different refining techniques from the entire GE (Graph Editor) workflow (Pixar’s Victor Navone) to the 2d animation one (Chicken Little’s Jason Ryan) and it is time to apply them and pick the one that makes more sense to us.

I was very busy last week so couldn’t really push the refining as far as I wanted but I think that I am seeing the light now.

Watch out that space and you might get to see some interesting stuff in here very soon.

So what have I got for you this week.

180 turn partial refining:

Jump up onto a box and off the other side video ref.:

Week 205 blocking, animating in 3d is doable, you just have to check your perspecive, front, back, left and right view but what about animating in 3d for a locked camera? This is this week challenge, I haven’t found the answer yet but Robert will probably share is thought on thursday.