Animation with a moustache

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

Category: Animation

Anim Dailies 0

Animation / Friends

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Anim Dailies

My friends Alfonso Sicilia and Andrea Castagnoli with three of their co-workers just set up Anim Dailies, a pretty cool webiste with a very simple premise: Five senior animators from top VFX studios, will have a look at your work and give you comments, for FREE!

There is no BS here, none of them got credited for work they never did and none of them are trying to fake some sort of expertise. Their Linkedin profile and their showreel is freely available so YOU know THEY know what they are talking about.

Several crits are already up on the website, go and have a look, submit your work and feel the love! 😉

Anim Dailies

“Dumber” July 11 secs club 2

Animation

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“Dumber” July 11 secs club

I was supposed to attend the Paris Sketchcrawl today but the rainy weather put me off.

Instead I played around with the Morpheus rig as it allows for easy customisations so no two rigs look the same and many people recommended it to me.

The customisation options are pretty insane and surprisingly the character stays very appealing but I must say that I am not too happy about the facial rig which I am finding very limiting. The lips don’t give much freedom especially the bottom one and the geometry collapses on itself too often when hitting asymmetrical extreme poses. It is possible to tweak the blend shapes but I don’t really have time for that. The nose and ears controls are really cool though, I have never had that before.

Does anyone know where the head squash and stretch is? I just can’t find it!

Here is the blocking for this month 11 seconds club. I don’t intend to spend too much time on this piece as I just want to test Morpheus but let’s see where I am tomorrow evening.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26806810[/vimeo]

I have gone a bit further and did a quick blocking + pass but I am not liking the mouth rig at all. Instead of thinking “what do I want to do?” I am finding myself pondering “what can the rig handle?”. Too bad it is a really cool rig, I will probably use it for background characters or physical test but not for close-ups anymore.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26817601[/vimeo]

and Final!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/26844844[/vimeo]

Aardman “The Pirates” trailers 1

Animation

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Aardman “The Pirates” trailers

Great! Aardman finally released the trailer we saw at Annecy last month. Ah the Brits, don’t you love their wacky sense of humour! I can’t wait to see this in cinemas!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnYpfvbmGGo[/youtube]

Hold on, there is a second trailer!!

Make it extra gruesome!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw[/youtube]

The history of 3d Computer Graphics 0

Animation

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The history of 3d Computer Graphics

If you wanted to learn the history of 3d Computer Graphic, I would suggest you to start with that great series of interviews with the creators of 3dstudio (the DOS version of 3dstudio max) and José Maria De Espona, one of the first 3dstudio artist to make the switch from Silicon Graphics based solutions to Intel based desktops.

“It was not however an easy task to convince my partners to adopt 3DStudio, and even harder for my clients to accept the fact that something could be produced with household PCs. We had additional problems, such as the need to keep PC boxes always open and put small fans over the CPUs, because we had literally melted some 486 PCs. Every time clients walked into our office, they would stand there with their mouths wide open looking at the atrocious spectacle of all the disassembled PCs, with their chassis and metal guts in open air, accompanied by the loud noise of the fans. I have to say we lost some clients due to this, and also because rumor spread among the competition that we used home PCs for producing TV ads”.

Tom Hudson interview
Gary Yost interview
José Maria de Espona on the Max Temple image

The Gary Yost interview contains a little gem that Character Studio and Chuck Jones fans will love. I let you read how this came about.

I should also add that great video to this post: Pixar – A human Story of computer animation, a panel with Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjSExqtiIyg[/youtube]

Related posts:
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation

La Seine 1

Animation

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La Seine

I am such a fan boy 😉

Here is a music video clip from French animated feature “Un monstre à Paris” and performed by Vanessa Paradis and composer M, who are respectively voicing Lucile and Francoeur (the creature). La Seine is the river that flows through Paris and also the french for stage. The lip sync is not very accurate but the video is gorgeous.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z-NbQvhzKM[/youtube]

I love that track…

Related posts:
Monstre à Paris

Brave concept art and teaser 11

Animation / Character design / Modeling

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Brave concept art and teaser

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYg0VgPy6Uk[/youtube]

Pixar just released a teaser for next years feature Brave (previously titled The Bear and the Bow) along with some character designs.

Those designs have definitely a Pixar feel to them as they immediately remind us of The Incredibles or Up. Some commentators compared Lord Macintosh to Muntz and the Wise Woman to a Carl Fredericksen in drag 🙂

My favourite are actually Lord Macintosh and the Wise Woman as they are much more graphic than the other character. As a matter of fact I have decided to model those two in order to better understand the Pixar style and improve my modeling skills.

Updated version after the release of the movie

I modelled Lord Macintosh in Maya starting from a plane and using the edge extrusion technique in order to quickly create some edge loops then refined the base shape by cutting faces, merging and moving vertices around. Nothing too fancy. I have some experience with that type of modelling but I think I will try the Zbrush approach for the Wise Woman. My friend Richie just showed me the work of Tom Parker, an incredible Zbrush modeler that can knock out a piece in less than two hours.

Here is the timelapse, I only recorded the first few hours as the final “vertex cleaning/edge rerouting” pass is too tedious to watch. I hope you will find this interesting, the video is a sequence of automated screenshots hence the choppiness.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25620952[/vimeo]

via http://www.cartoonbrew.com/pixar/brave-characters.html

Related posts:
Lord Macintosh update
Modeling blog category

animSchool new trailer 3

Animation

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animSchool new trailer

Still wondering if you should be attending Ianimate or Animation Mentor? Wait, you are forgetting Animschool! 😉

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDN1qZPzasw[/youtube]

I really want to like that school and the rigs seem like a lot of fun but I am finding the concept difficult to understand at the moment, is it an animation, modeling, rigging or a generalist school? As a graduate from Animation Mentor I might be interested to join some of the animation classes but the website is making it pretty difficult to understand whether this is possible. Also having two separate domain names 3dappeal and AnimSchool is not helping.

One thing for sure is that the guys are uber talented though and those following videos they recorded are very interesting.

http://www.3dappealblog.com/
AnimSchool, animating Appeal and Entertainment

Ken Fountain basic acting shot 0

Animation

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Ken Fountain basic acting shot

Hehe, Jason Ryan Webinar animation already announced a new Video tutorial with my fellow Animation Mentor student Ken Fountain. During Animation Mentor, Ken always shown a great understanding of performance and entertainment so it wasn’t a surprise when he landed his first character animation job at Dreamworks in 2008.

For those who can’t afford Animation Mentor or Ianimate, here is one new video you should and I should be saving for!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObP6064QjGo[/youtube]

Related posts:
Jamaal Bradley acting shot walk-through
Mike Walling …. avec une moustache
Mike Walling Walkthrough
Ianimate new promo video

Monstre à Paris french trailer! 4

Animation

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Monstre à Paris french trailer!

via Monstre à Paris Facebook page

That’s it! There won’t be any more delays, the movie is coming out at the end of the year and Europa corp finally released a trailer in french. I feel that “Monstre à Paris”, a movie that was first started in 2007, is showing a bit of age compared to animated blockbusters like Kung Fu Panda 2 but hopefully the very stylised art style and european flair will make the movie stand out from the competition.

I wrote several posts related to the movie in the past, you should be able to find them all by doing a search on my blog . I am really liking that trailer and the music is very catchy. CG animation lovers are really being spoilt those days!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et1T4c-BNUk[/youtube]

Some more videos on Catsuka.

Related posts:
Monstre à Paris
Monstre à Paris short clip