Animation with a moustache

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

Monthly Archive: September 2006

I saw the light 0

Animation Mentor

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I saw the light

Today was the kick off for the European Animation Mentor gathering and let me tell you something….. This first day was AWWWWESOMMMEE 😉

We started by a 2 hours visit of Passion Picture, then Smoke and Mirrors, followed by MPC and ended by Double Neg. Now as Character animators what do you think was the highlight of the day? Passion Picture? Close but not exactly that 😉

Remember Animation Podcast number 10 and 11? Eamonn Butler, Disney’s Animation Supervisor on Chicken Little and Dinosaurs? Does this ring a bell. Well if you have a good memory you remember that he surprisingly left Disney to try different things?

Guess what? He now works for London based Double Negative!

Instead of giving us a simple studio tour he pretty much gave us a full animation lecture showcasing some of their recent work!

I lost a bit faith when I realised I wouldn’t be able to get an US visa that easily but having Eamonn Butler in London is a bit like having Brad Bird in town so I am not too worried anymore. Let’s just stay in London then!

Blue guy wireframe 1

Portfolio / Sculpture

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Blue guy wireframe

Here is a set of pictures of the blue guy in wireframe in order to get some comments from my peers modelers. Let me know if you see some weired edge flow.

Keith’s post “Breakdown can be such a drag” 2

Animation

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Keith’s post “Breakdown can be such a drag”

I read that one quickly few days ago but it resurfaced on my screen today thanks to Aja’s post on AM forum.

If you have read Keith tutorial on “Organized Keyframing” (refered as Pose to Pose tutorial by some) and don’t visit his website regularly, then you might have missed something very important:
His new Free web tutorial.

This is now the most important animation material for CG artists and everything you will ever need to know is there.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel, learn from 2d animation” I keep repeating myself.

You might as well jump onto Victor Navone’s new tutorial

As a summary, when planning your shots, think about the 12 principles again, think about what leads the motion, what settles first, where is the anticipation, and build all those informations in your poses. Drags, overlap must read clearly in your blocking.

After those 2 great posts, we have no excuse to do crappy animations.

Seat D4 0

Miscellaneous

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Seat D4

Autodesk was holding the Max 9 and Maya 8 roadshow yesterday at Odeon Kensington. This brought back some fun memories.

After a quick lunch with my fellow AM students, I rushed to the event. The room was already full and since I couldn’t see my friend Jamie Cardoso, I decided to take seat D4 at the front of the room.

This was the best decision I made for quite a while. Few minutes later, the ATI guy who was making a presentation of the new ATI FireGL cards started the draw for a prize.

For whatever reason, my seat D4 got choosen and I won the ATI FireGLV7200. I didn’t fully understand what it meant until I checked the documentation and realised that this card is one of the ATI top of the range graphic card.

For the kind of stuff I do in 3d, I was never really bothered with graphic cards in the past but that one will fit perfectly in my new Core 2 Duo system and it has already replaced my crappy Radeon X600.

I had decided to do a bit more anatomical modeling this term and this is just the perfect timing. 41.6GB memory bandwidth per second for Zbrush can’t hurt, can it?

Back to 3dmax 1

Portfolio / Sculpture

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Back to 3dmax


Since I started AM I had to give up on many things and 3d modeling is one of them. Since we are at the last week of class3 I finally found a bit of time to work on this little guy. The design is from Daniel Martinez Lara www.pepeland.com from his short “Changes” which I highly recommend.

I am pretty much done with the head and will probably start the rest of the body tomorrow night. If anyone is interested I used the edge loop workflow with the basic 3dmax7 tools.

Class 3 Last Q&A 2

Animation Mentor

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Class 3 Last Q&A


Robbie’s impression of Princess Fiona

This Q&A was the last one, the longest one to the point of nearly getting booted out by the website and the funniest ever.

We had the frustrating echo problems again but we got to hear Robbie sing a song at the guitar then do an impression of Princess Fiona. Michelle went through everyone’s work for this term except for the missing in action Salem. Carmelo couldn’t stay too long because of his TV work and eventually got booted out from the website just before his turn.

Too bad I didn’t manage to record Robbie’s song, it would have easily ended up on Youtube.

I want to thank Michelle for this great term and all my classmates. I was with most of you since Class1 and will miss you dearly for the next 3 month. Luckily some of use use Skype and the flashmeetings to stay in touch.

This term didn’t go according to plan once again but with Keith Lango’s training I should be ready to kick some butts by January. This break will allow me to strengthen my animation workflow but also to go back to modeling and lighting in my favourite package and also to get back to life drawing and sketching.

I am hoping to come back very strong and even have my own character designs for the Short Class.

Rock on!

test 1

Miscellaneous

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test

This is just a test to try Talkr functionalities. You don’t know about Talkr? well let me tell you something… THAT ROCKS!

“blogging software vendors (hereafter called “vendors”) will allow you to change your blog template so that certain links will appear every time you post (with no additional effort by you). This step explains what the link to Talkr.com needs to look like. Note that the steps you need to take will vary slightly for each different blogging software vendor, and that the person that makes this change will need to be comfortable editing HTML”

Video game fair in London 0

Miscellaneous

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Video game fair in London

Ok this is my new deadline. http://www.gamecareerfair.com/. As the name suggest, a game career fair in London 😉

I don’t play games, I don’t like games (except Jail Break, Ghost and Goblins, The Maze of Galious, Knightmare, you see 1980’s games…) but who knows, maybe they will like me!

I have 2 weeks to improve my shots. Thats quite tight but who knows….

First acting shot blocking + 2

Animation Mentor

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First acting shot blocking +

Here is the blocking+ for my first acting shot. Except the mouth open/close we don’t have any facial controller yet. He is supposed to be holding a towel with the right hand but I don’t really know how I am gonna go about that yet.

Links added 0

Miscellaneous

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Links added

There are few websites I regularly visit and thought it would be a good idea to share those links with you. I have now updated my links on the right hand side and also added something that is supposed to help people to keep track of updates on the blog. I still have to understand how it works but I think I have done what I am supposed to do to make it work. If someone can explain to me how it works exactly I will be very happy. At the moment I use the Sage plugin for Firefox and I don’t really understand what the fuzz is about.

Now regarding blogger, the system works ok and does the job for many people but lacks of few features for me. Sometimes Blogger server takes for ever to upload my posts, there is no keywords option etc… I originally thought about developing my own solution but I am not too sure how to handle the archiving. I looked at other solutions like WordPress but couldn’t figure out where to put the settings for my ftp and don’t feel like having my infos stored on a third party server (well…).

Ok that’s it for today. I will create a new post with my latest AM assignment in few minutes.

[edit] I just realised that I plugged 4 PDI people. It’s not because I worship that company even if Madagascar was just the BEST CG CARTOON EVER 😉 but more because those talented people happen to share a lot about their knowledge.