Animation with a moustache

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

Monthly Archive: September 2007

Rare 14

Animation

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Rare

rare-logo.jpg
Just a quick post to inform everyone that I just accepted a job offer from Rare limited, in Twycross, 120 miles north of London. I will be finally be paid to give life to funny characters on the screen.

Rare www.rareware.com is the house that gave birth to the best game on earth “Donkey Kong Country” but also the excellent “Viva Pinata”.

I will be starting on monday and I must admit that I am really thrilled! I will be joining AM students Peer Lemmers and Richie Prado so I should feel like home.

I have heard that the guys in the concept art department work on Cintiq so they d better keep their door closed! 😉

Moving house 1

Miscellaneous

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Moving house

timelapsesept07.jpgToday was my last day at my current job which meant moving house too.

It would have been much better if I started recording it from the begining but I only thought about doing this at 5am. Too bad you would have been able to see the bed and furnitures flying around and alos notice a terrible slow down around 10 am 😉

Memorable moments are when my girlfriend took pity and decided to get some breakfast from Mac Donald but a manager interrupted me in the middle asking why half of the Internet Café was closed? I started laughing since I wasn’t in duty anymore for the past 9 hours. She wasn’t very happy 😉 An other one is when I decided to get changed but the best is probably when I found a fully equipped mother board, a computer case and decided to build a PC 😉 what was I thinking!!!!

Phantom shot refining 3

Portfolio

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Phantom shot refining

phantom_refining.jpg After few days I finally reached a refining stage of my shot.

The lip sync is already much clearer, the body is less poppy, the facial work is a bit tighter.

This would be enough for commercial work or TV but I am gonna push it even further to try to reach feature quality.
I still have to get in and polish some of the motion like the standing up and the “he was just” section but the rest is looking fine.
Regarding the render, I would need to get rid of those nasty shadows cast by Bishop on the back wall but since I have to use Mental Ray to display the displacement maps, I will have to redo the lighing work anyway.

Phantom test render 0

Portfolio

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Phantom test render

phantom_test_render.jpg Because of a discussion with my friend Arno yesterday, I decided to try some renderings with Maya.

After about 3 hours, here is what I came up with.

Interiors shots are the hardest thing to do for me but I think that I managed to do something pretty decent.

As you can see I enlarged the window and moved it screen right in order to make Bishop’s body stand out a bit more. That’s a classic composition trick that Glen Keane used heavily when storyboarding Pocahontas.

I also tried my luck with colour harmony using Pink, green, blue and white. That should be alright don’t you think?

Acting shot 1 char (getting there) 0

Portfolio

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Acting shot 1 char (getting there)

01-09-07.jpg

Here is my latest version just before going for dinner.

I still haven’t done much changes on the body mechanics (I actually made things worse;-) ) but decided to focus on my lip sync and the facial work instead. I never managed to get into that kind of stuff before as I normally get stuck just before.

This time was a lot of experimentation and I am really enjoying it. I am mainly working in linear and keying all my eases and overshoots. I will clean the redundant keys later using the G buffer curves in the graph editor. Some people like Victor Navone would have done it all in spline but I still don’t trust maya or I haven’t quite reach Victor’s level yet 😉

Ideally I would need to learn how to import and render displacement  maps in Maya so I could use a low level hat wrapped deformed to Bishops head instead of this million polygon hat straight out of Zbrush. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know!