Posted on February 25, 2006 |
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I was chatting with my friend Julien today and he was telling me that he was going to the mountain twice this winter. This made me realise something.
Since I moved to London 6 years ago, I only went snowboarding twice. Can you believe that? At university I used to teach Snowboarding and skiing every weekends!!!! Bummer. Yes I can snowboard 😉 here is a pic I found on my old website. My friend Andy is in Vancouver and if I didn’t have so many responsibilities here I would definitely go to visit him.
that was pretty much the last time I used that board… some of you know the terrible story that followed :-
Posted on February 25, 2006 |
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did you see my face on the screenshot from Animation Mentor Q&A? yes I have a big issue with the 5.30 AM Q&A…. I just can’t do it! Once again I missed this week Q&A… It is not every day you have the chance to speak to someone who has worked on movies like Shreck 1,2,3, Madagascar, Shark Tales. It is not every day but for me it is meant to be every week and unfortunately my internal clock just can’t do it. Cassidy is a great animator and also a great mentor who wants to share all his knowledge with us so that really sucks….
There’s also this big weight I am dragging with me at the moment… Hopefully this will be resolved in few weeks and I won’t need to work that hard anymore. Well… I am not actually known for being someone who takes it easy but we will see 😉
Posted on February 25, 2006 |
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for those of you wondering what kind of equipment you need for Animation Mentor, here is a picture of my current computer. Yes it is fancy but not really in a cosmetic kind of way 😉
What you need is basically a motherboard and CPU for less than £100. £50 worth of Ram, a £50 Gforce graphic card, a £40 HD, a £15 power supply and let’s go a bit crazy with a £25 DVD burner dual layer 😉
You might want to get a trolley to be able to move the pc around without disturbing the layout! For the people with very sharp eyes, yes it is resting on an old VCR and a piece of cardboard for insulation and yes the MOBO is a bit big so the DVD burner is laid over the PCI port…..
behold the fancy equipment
Posted on February 21, 2006 |
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Filed under Animation Mentor, Business of animation
There is a bit of discussion going on about the state of the animation industry at the moment so I have decided to upload some figures collected on www.boxofficemojo.com website for people to think about. Have a look at them, this is fairly interesting and will be the material for a future post about the so-called “demise of 2d animation“.
Wordwide total gross of the major Animation features
correction for Emperors’ new groove, read 169 gross wordwide
Wordwide total gross of the major CG productions since 1995
Wordwide total gross of the major 2d/Stop motion productions since 1995 and before.
Olive
Posted on February 21, 2006 |
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This is reply to one of my Animation Mentor classmates and I thing it could be usefull to other people. I was worried to post my grudge towards Maya since future employers could think that I am reluctant to use Maya but I now got used to its issues and tamed the beast
“I started using Maya with version 1 or 2, can’t remember, I also bought the book, bought the Tshirt ;-).
Being Power Animator’s successor I thought it would be an amazing software but very quickly came to hate it: Unix kind of ugly interface, no polygon modeling at that time (just Nurbs) and other weired issues that 3dsmax didn’t have. People were doing amazing stuff with it though, just look at Bingo!
So yeah, I went back to 3dsmax and have always been happy since especially for rendering and polymodeling work but I am not closed to other softwares.Let’s face it, Maya is king (or Queen) in the feature film industry.
After so many years using Max I realised that 3d softwares are so complicated nowadays that if you don’t have someone to show you which button is really usefull and which one is useless, you are gonna waste your time.
That’s why I am trying Maya again since AM provides training and support for that very ackward software. I give myself few more month to learn all the stuff I need for animation, then I will try XSI. There is more work in commercial and feature film on XSI in London and pretty much all the AM students based in London use XSI.
Maya really failed to impress me, so far, for the reasons I mentioned in the forum and in my workspace. Lack of full Avi and Quicktime support. Clunky default interface, inconsistents shortcuts (why can’t we move keys with a left click in Translate mode while in the graph editor?).
The funniest of all is definitely the fact that I had to define the front camera in the Global render settings when I wanted to render the side view for the Obstacle course.
Has anyone had fun trying to install LowMan rig? My impression so far is that Maya is targeted more for TD people than artists. If you don’t know Maya inside out before tackling a full project, you might run into a brick wall. I now wear a helmet, that helps 😉
One note before I finish my ramblings 😉 I am not saying Maya is a bad software, just look at Pixar’s work …oops no they use Marionnet, look at Dreamwork’s work …oops no they use Emo 😉 well any blockbuster, but once you know the software well, try to learn an other one with someone who knows it, and you could be surprised to see the the grass can been greener on the other side!
Maya is not a bad software, it just very clunky, I will put my troubling experiences on my blog when I find the time.”
Olive
Posted on February 20, 2006 |
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the animation looks okay, I am surprised Cassidy didn’t talk about the slight slowness of the base in his E-Critique.
looks pretty good, Cassidy gave me few things to work on, THIS WILL NEVER END!!!! ;-). Yeah, this is what I have experienced so far, learning animation is a never ending process. I have spent nearly 40hours on that animation so far… Could that be the reason why we, as Animation Mentors’ students, only upload our assignement at the last minute? It could be the fear of people pointing at our mistakes which would mean more work to do. Well if you only have 20 hours to devote to Animation Mentor a week, make the most of it and take eventual revisions in consideration. If you don’t have time you don’t have time.
