I finally handed my fisherman final and already got my ecritique. Michelle is an awesome mentor who really cares about her mentees. It was crap as usual but thanks to Keith Lango VTS 17 freebie and our new lecture by ILM’s Delio Tramontozzi I feel like I know where I am going now.

If you haven’t heard about Keith Lango’s VTS yet, this is the missing link. This is what will allow you to apply the “Illusion of life”‘s principle into your favourite 3d package (3dsmax obviously 😉 ).

Delio’s lecture is a dialogue walkthrough. I got fed up with having mentors using crappy Macs and it was very refreshing to see him using Windows XP 😉

This week we have to choose 3 lines from movies we want to animate on. We already got our new rig Bishop and …… he is just sooooo cute.

Here is a quick and dirty walkcycle with our new Animation Mentor rig “Bishop”. It’s a really nice rig.

I am feeling better this week. After screwing up my blocking completly, I finally got to understand what animation is about.

This is a splined version of my failed blocking with some parts done with the new workflow. I have to put more breakdowns on the end bit and blend the poses a bit better on the jump sequence.

I am having a good time animating in Max but in 2 weeks it is time to go back to Maya in order to use the rig provided by the school (more later). Hopefully by then a new release on Maya with a 21st century arc tracker will come out ;-).

September is coming, I can’t hold my guns anymore and decided to splash out all my savings in what will allow me to achieve great work. I therefore bought a new Wacom Intuos3 for which I completly customized the “ExpressKeys”. I am able to animate entirely from the tablet. The “Expresskeys” have been remapped to do CTRL, ALT, Shift, Alt+W, open the Graph editor, go full screen, and navigate frame by frame using the slider. This is just heaven! The tablet will also help me to give life to my models using Zbrush and some fancy software just about to be released 😉

Last but not least, I have also decided to replace my Sempron 2.6Ghz with a decent processor in the shape of the new Intel Dual Core 2, due to come out this week. I have set my eyes on the 6600 for about £220 this is not cheap but reading several reviews and benchmarks… THIS IS A KICK ASS PROCESSOR!!!! 😉 I will also have to buy a new Mobo and some ram but the upgrade of my machine was long overdue.

What else… I am working on a new website www.monza-interiors.com the backend is pretty much finished with some fancy php/mysql oh I should actually give a link to this website we did a while ago. www.stagknight.com we got really disapointed when we saw the trailer and I am not sure we will ever see the colour of the money we were promised… Anyway the website is nice, only frontend stuff in flash.

Here is what I handed in today…. bad workflow…. This was using my mocap workflow, I will probably have to redo it from scratch using a proper animation workflow.. I didn’t even have time to work on the eyes and with this technique this is gonna be too painfull so we will see what I decide tomorrow…

I finally decided to go for 3dsmax again for this assignment. Here is my blocking in spline mode so far.

Blog dear blog, sorry for not updating you more often but Animation didn’t go very well lately and I just came back from holidays.

In brief, new mentor: Michelle Meeker (check IMBD). She looks really cool and seem to be a very hands on mentor so this term should kick some butts 😉

Here is my video ref for the new assignment (Gear change)

3am. My mobile phone starts ringing. What was the reason I set up the alarm so early? A guess, just a guess, the guess that we would have a special guest tonight for the 10th session of the frame grabbers.

Missing the one with Victor Navone told me that if on monday morning you receive some thumbnails with the regular videos then it is very likely that the author of them will be discussing the shot with us and if you receive Chicken Little preparation thumbnails then there is a great chance that you are gonna be talking with some freaking awesome animator!!!!!

Bang on! A 3am wake up is really a tough thing especially when you are helping your girlfriend Alicia moving house but I was really curious and I can say it was reallyyyyyyyy worth it!!!

Ladies and gentleman! clay kaytis

You see Animation Podcast? Well the same guy was tonight discussing his shot for the 10th session of the Framegrabbers. Clay happens to be a 2d guy who jumped in the 3d band wagon just like Disney animation supervisor Jason Ryan and Pixar Michael Wong senior animator and to me the 2d guys are just the most inspiring animators on earth.

From the Animation Podcast you can probably realise how much the guy wants to share animation knowledge and at school I was so gratefull to him for giving me an answer that probably took him about 3 hours to write.

Important moments of the Meeting:
45 mins -> about Graph editor
1h05 mins -> about Workflow.

Clay hung out with us for the rest of the session and gave us his view on the second video. “Sylvester Unbalanced” from ‘Gift Wrapped’

I had to go to bed soon after and will check the rest of the framegrabers offline tomorrow or the day after. The third video is from Madagascar, animated probably by PDI Jason Shleifer or my ex mentor Cassidy Curtis: “It’s Friday” from ‘Madagascar’

Olive

Bobby “Boom” Beck was in Paris on monday, too bad I couldn’t make it.

Here is a pic of the French AM team