Animation with a moustache

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

Category: Animation

Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation 4

Animation

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Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation

For those of you who still haven’t added Speaking of Animation to their bookmarks, SOA is a new blog focused on animation and specifically the work produced at Dreamworks.

SOA celebrates its first birthday this month and after the great podcasts with classical to CG animator Ted Ty, How to train your dragon directors Sanders and Deblois…. They are, this month, interviewing my AM mentor and Dreamworks Megamind’s Head of Character Animation Jason Schleifer.

Jason followed a very interesting path as he didn’t start in 3dstudio dos, Lightwave or even Imagine like most of us but instead went straight for SGI workstations and Wavefront softwares just before they merged with Alias and created Maya. What was supposed to be an initial training so he could teach the other students became the stepping stone that lead him to a solid career at Weta then PDI, the San Francisco branch of Dreamworks.

I could definitely relate that that interview as it brought me back to the years where Bay Raitt and Martin Krol were kicking ass and Mirai’s polygonal and edge flow paradigm gradually got adopted… (ripped off was the term used at that time) by all the major 3d software makers, eclipsing Nurbs and Patches for organic modeling. Some feature studios still use Nurbs and patches nowadays but this is mainly due to pipeline legacy than actual superiority.

Back in the day, Bay Raitt was running Spiraloid, the first “traditional CG modeling” forum dedicated to polygon modeling. The forum is now down but you can find a quick video of Bay Rait modeling Gollum on the Lords of the rings’ Two towers second DVD. There was also “One afternoon with Bay Rait”, one of the first timelapse modeling videos that shook the modeling community in 1999.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgvomRTW80[/youtube]

Regarding Nichimen/Izware’s Mirai and Nendo, I remember a great video by Martin Krol showing how revolutionary the software was but I can’t find it right now. I will post it when I get home , I have a copy on one of my hard drives back in the UK.

Jason is also mentioning a close up shot by my classmate John Comey where one of the characters from his short film is pressing a button. John hasn’t got his shot online unfortunately.

Having worked with Weta, Jason has had to face the usual question about Motion Capture to which he gave a good answer “in its place, it could be okay”. A previous SOA interview on Avatar was very enlighting in that sense. Most animation purist don’t like Motion capture but for certain things like VFX or realistic games there is just no way around. Staying away from those two is actually a good way to avoid using it 🙂

The interview is also about how he approaches his role as Head of Character Animation. Many leads, supervisors or anyone wanting to get into management in feature animation can definitely learn from.

At the end of the podcast, Jason brings up some very interesting points on performance, mentioning the “What if” game and how useful video reference can be, not really as a crutch, to use Milt Kahl ‘s legendary quote, but more to bring subtlety or ideas we would have never thought about.

Victor Navone had a very interesting post on video reference a while back where he first blocked a shot from his own imagination then shot video references in the Pixar hall. The video reference had so much more subtleties that he decided to integrate more of it into the final shot.

Speaking of animation, a great interview with Jason Schleifer

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Q&A with Jason

“Can you sing” first shot polished 4

Animation / Portfolio

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“Can you sing” first shot polished

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/17465710[/vimeo]

There is probably one frame of overshoot missing for the tip of the index and possibly a need of overlap for the other fingers but the next shots will be much harder to polish so let’s call that one DONE!

The lighting is temporary, I am now using Mental ray and this is foreign territory for me. A lot of testing and research will be necessary.

The Area light simulating the sky has been switched to a direct light to get a more realistic look but causing the loss of the soft shadows. I don’t know how to use depth map shadows in Mental ray yet. I will also try to frame the skeleton’s shadow a bit better and brighten it in the next pass. It would also be nice to get the guy’s hand shadow come into screen before the actual hand to prepare the audience for what is coming next.

Ah, I havent used any global illumination or occlusion yet, this requires much more testing than I have time for at the moment, my priority is to finish the animation before Xmas and have an amazing showreel for january 1st.

Regarding the materials. I am using a quickly customised misss_fast_sskin for the guy’s hand. It works fine for that shot but not for the next ones. I have in mind something similar to what they did on “Tangled” (gorgeous movie) or what Malcon Pierce used on his AM short film.

A tweaked leather procedural material has been applied as a bump map to the skeleton to give the feeling of a weathered material, this only shows in Full HD. I will probably need to add some 2d textures to create more dirt on the lower part of the skeleton unless I could use a procedural gradient, is that possible?

For the cinematography, I am wondering if I will use a cross fade at the begining then use a slowly focusing camera or maybe a slight pan, truck in…. we will see.

Ah ah!!! I was about to forget! I have in mind to have a shredded piece of cloth around the shoulder of the skeleton, some sort of bright blue hawaian shirt but I am not too sure how to go about it yet. A cloth simulation and a shredded looking opacity map could do the trick but I don’t know how Mental Ray handles opacity map with Depth map shadows.

[update]I am back to raytraced shadows and the cloth simulation was much easier than I thought 🙂

Rigging outside the box 1

Animation / Education

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Rigging outside the box

With the wide array of freely available Autorigging tools (abAutorig, zooCST, JTD rigging tools), commercial (The Setup Machine) and inhouse ones, rigging humanoid characters has never been so easy.

Unfortunately there is still an area where professional riggers, TDs and technical skills are required, stylised animation.

Here is a very intriguing rigging showreel I just found, I have no idea how he does that but that is very exciting!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/7684903[/vimeo]

and while we are on the topic of rigs and autorigs, check out a making of from a short I still haven’t found the time to feature and very similar to “Salesman Pete”: “Meet Buck”. A wacky looking shortfilm coming from Supinfocom and currently touring animation festivals.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/13957690[/vimeo]

Well let’s feature a short video of “Meet Buck” since I will never find the time to write a full article about it.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/13681161[/vimeo]

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Mike Walling walkthrough 14

Animation / Education

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Mike Walling walkthrough

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/17074941[/vimeo]

Jason Ryan just announced a very cool body mechanics walkthrough by Dreamworks/ex Blue Sky animator/Animation Mentor animator Mike Walling.

Even if I have enough experience with body mechanics, at $29.99, I couldn’t resist and bought it immediately. I just wanted to hear Mike’s approach to that kind of shot and confront it with my own workflow.


The video is also featuring Victor Vinyals and Oli Josman latest rig “Skyscraper” a very good looking heroic rig I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on, it is so appealing! I might actually join Ianimate next term and eventually get that rig.

Here are the links to Jason Ryan website and the direct link to the store
http://www.jrawebinar.com

Reading Victor’s blog I realised that he might give away his old Businessman rig very soon!

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Animation Beat-Box 6

Animation / Education

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Animation Beat-Box

Do you remember this documentary about Richard Williams in Soho Square timing out motion of people and animals around him? Amazing wasn’t it? This is where this project originates from.

Being able to time out an action just by looking at it can only be done by people with years of experience but with some training you could probably do the same much quicker.

In my quest to gain a better understanding of timing and to share my research with fellow animators, I finally created a video version of my Animation Beat Box.

This video is a beat box that hit a beep sound every 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14 frames. Each sequence lasts for 1 minute (1500 frames)

Click on the pic below and enjoy.

2s.jpg

oops I forgot to give credit for the timing examples to my friend Andy Knight and some notes he took from a conference hosted by Eric Goldberg back in the days 😉

Related posts:
Richard Williams documentary

Lip sync observations 16

Animation / Education

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Lip sync observations

Lip sync scared me for a long time but this was due to my lack of experience more than the actual job of animating lips and expressions to the audio.

For a while, I thought doing lip sync meant to choose a sequence of premade phonems and blend them more or less successfully as led to think by the Preston Blair animation book. To be fair, this is pretty much what you are supposed to do in most TV series but the result will always look very approximative and of low quality which is fine when your audience is preschool.

A good lip sync for feature animation should instead be done by focusing on other elements like the following:

1- open and close of the jaw
2- narrowing and widening of the mouth corners
3- asymmetry of the mouth (Mouth Left/Right, Rotation should blend shapes can help greatly for that)
4- lips roll
5- mouth Up/Down attribute to anticipate plosive sounds and create more contrast
6- lips translation, mainly drag for plosive phonemes such as Bb/Mm/Pp
7- appealing mouth corner arcs
8- good interaction of the tongue with the teeth and jaw
9- drag, overlap, rotation and translation of the jaw

A good rig such as the freely available Norman or Morpheus, despite the collapsing geometry for specific closed mouth shapes, should allow you to handle those criteria.

To illustrate this, here is a video I extracted from the Toy Story3 trailer and animated by Victor Navone. I added on-screen notes and a graphical representation of the audio waveform so you can compare the timing of the audio to the mouth shapes. (thanks Chris Cantero for the animation credits).

To read all the notes, save the video on your hard drive and play it frame by frame. Microsoft Windows users should play the video with KMPlayer to get the audio feedback while step framing.

I think one or two frames are missing for the bottom lip roll overlap but this should make it a very good start to your lip sync learning.

AnimationMoustacheFixBuzzNotes

As a side note, the final shot has been slightly altered in the theatrical release with Buzz holding Jessee’s left hand rather than her right, I would be interested to know what the reasoning was behind that decision. They are obviously going for a tighter shot so we can focus on Jessee’s reaction but I don’t like her new pose much as her arm gets in the way and is buried in her silhouette. Here is a screenshot from Victor’s Toy Story 3 showreel.

I hope you like it, I have a James Baxter pencil test coming up next.

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To twin or not to twin 8

Acting / Animation / Education

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To twin or not to twin

the W pose

[update] Simple tip to break a W pose: Have the character hold a prop!

As Frank and Ollie expressed it in the “Illusion of Life” in 1981, “Twin, is the unfortunate situation where both arms or both legs are not only parallel but doing the exact same thing”. (p.68)

The typical example of a twin is the most dreaded pose in animation, the W pose. A pose where the character is standing straight with both forearms raised up, forming a W with his arms.

Carson Van Osten, a famous Disney comics artist illustrated it very well in his 1973 “Comic Strip Artist’s kit” and the illustration was reused in “The Illusion of Life”

Having been taught by some of the best animators in the industry during my training at Animation Mentor, I always try to avoid the W pose and find it really hard. I sometimes find myself wondering if there couldn’t be some exceptions. Don’t we, “twin”, in real life? Aren’t there any situation where the W would be acceptable?

Ron Clements seems to be thinking the opposite and in the same chapter of the “Illusion of Life” was quoted saying: “If you get into acting, you would never think of expressing an emotion with twins anywhere but somehow, in a drawing, when you are not thinking , it creeps in time and again”.

That’s not of much help is it? So what to do?

Well, when in doubt, I usually refer to my masters, the good people from Pixar and other feature animation studios but doing a fair bit of research I didn’t expect such an outcome. What a shock, their work is full of twins or at least the trailers I found on Youtube.

I made a funny animated gif to illustrate my findings. I hope no one will be offended, this wasn’t my goal, I could probably find similar examples in other studio’s work but those were the only trailers I had on my hard drive. Ultimately who am I to make fun of Pixar.

The W pose

The most surprising is the Ratatouille trailer where Rémi is twining for a long series of gestures. Wasn’t Brad Bird, Milt Kahl’s protégé, directing the movie?

So what to think of it?

Well if a Pixar director who started at Disney when he was a teenager is not bothered by twins I don’t think they should matter much but I would still refer to Andrew Gordon’s Splinedoctors’s article about cliché gestures.

A gesture here, a gesture there

W poses, with the neck rub and the elbow hold, are some of those cliché gestures that first come to the mind when thinking a performance and we should try to avoid them as much as we can.

If after exploring other acting choices they still feel adequate, then, we can probably use them but they should always, be the last option, not gesturing being the first.

Like listening to music while animating, keep in mind that you should avoid it but if it works for you or if this seems like the most natural thing to do, just do it.

Norman world align FK spine 5

Animation / Education

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Norman world align FK spine


For those who would be interested, here is the Norman rig I am using.

The spine is in FK but as you will see, the spine controls are aligned to the world rather than their parent. This means that rotating the hips wont affect the rotation of the upper body. This seems a bit strange at first but this is proving really useful for walk cycles for examples as you dont need to counteranimate the upper body even after modifying the hips.

The file should open in Maya 2009 and up but also in older version provided you change the header.

One more thing you will notice is that the spine controls are transparent geometries instead of regular nurbs control. This makes the rig much cleaner and more user friendly.

[update]
It appears that I forgot to mention the constant use of a Xray hotkey with that kind of setup. Personally I use Alt+x to trigger Michael Comet’s Xray script (source “toggleXRay.mel”; toggleXRay();)

Download link

Related post:
So you want to be a rigger huh?