Disclaimer: Much to my regret, I don’t work for Disney Feature Animation but DTVA (Disney TV) so I don’t have access to any of the tools demonstrated here and as such I am not breaching any NDA. The content is just extracted from publicly available material.
If you are interested in dAnimPicker, the Disney character picker, and if you want to know how the brows are controlled at Disney, here is a short clip I extracted from a Moana Behind the Scene video.
I think I am recognizing Disney head of animation Malcon Pierce here, and if you pay attention, you will probably notice that he is shaping the brows using only a main control, 3 secondary controls and probably navigating between them using his keyboard using a pickwalking feature.
The light blue control is the main brow and the darker ones are the secondary (inner and mid brow). The dark circular just above is probably the outer brow.
I would be really curious to hear what are the controls right underneath though…. tertiary controls?
I don’t know where I got this from but here are some notes I had buried in my hard drive. I am guessing this is an answer to a Q&A with Disney animators who worked on Tangled.
Having attended Animsquad, I am aware about the importance of eyelashes and I had been told a while back that eyelashes could be animated on a show like Tangled.
Without further ado, here are the notes :
As far as eyes are concerned, for Tangled, We Payed HUGE attention to eye lids. every frame was tuned to Glen’s drawings for the max appeal. Another HUGE things we really spent time on were the eye lashes, Mainly Rapunzel and Mother Gothel. Glen stressed the importance of the lid shape, the tension in the lower lids, the shape of the lower lids, and where the eye lashes were pointing. In Alot of cases we would point the lashes where the character was looking, to help guide the viewer’s eye and boost the appeal of the character. I think the eye lashes and lid shapes are something really overlooked alot of the time, But these are HUGE tools that can be used to gain appeal and to show what the character is feeling.
Also some people think its the rigging. The rigs for these characters were very simple when it came to mouth and eye shapes. For the eye lids we only had three controls for the edge of the top and bottom lids, two corner controls, and open and close rotation controls. sometimes Less is more with controls, It makes it harder to get lost in the rig.
Hope that helps!!! On behalf of the crew, Thanks for the great comments!
I don’t think I ever posted that old video where Supervising Animator Scott Clark, takes us behind the scenes and quickly features Pixar’s animation software, Presto, and Sulley’s dance shot from Monsters University.
I love the little aparté on Motion Capture and I can only agree:
“It isn’t realism that we are trying to get in animation, I would just be a Mocap artist (otherwise), I wouldn’t be an animator.”
Great example of live action “slow burn” from British TV show “Eastenders.
The context of that sequence: “Vanessa’s fiancé was cheating on her with his ex-wife (soap opera’s for you 😉 ). He booked a betsit for them to have their affair but she (Vanessa) found out, went to the bedsit and found a note on the table saying ‘bubblys in the fridge’ basically telling the woman he was cheating with, that there was champagne in the fridge for her to help herself to.”
I was lucky to have Albert Lozano as character design teacher while attending Animation Collaborative in 2011 but my drawing abilities didn’t allow me to make the most of that great opportunity.
Albert rarely appears on social medias so it was great to find this little video insight into Albert’s thought process when designing characters, starting from simple shapes based on the personality of the characters.
Few month ago I was joining Dwarf animation in sunny Montpellier to work on the Monsters Inc TV series and today, Disney finally announced “Monsters at work, the TV series based on the Monsters inc universe.
The project is looking stunning and obviously I can’t say more than what was made public so if you are eager to know more about it, head off to the Pixar Pod where T.J. and Julie did a brilliant detective work! 😉
Ideally, you want to download the video and play it frame by frame with a media player like KMPlayer, Keyframe MP or RV for the lucky ones.
It is also possible to play the videos frame by frame in Youtube and Vimeo after pausing the video. Use Shift + Left or Right arrow in Vimeo, coma (,) or dot (.) in Youtube.
I have just found a very old Pixar presentation where Pete Docter demonstrates an antique version of Pixar’s animation software Menv (Presto) running on Silicon Graphics.
The concept hasn’t changed much but the software allows much more finessing nowadays.
Have a look and compare to the latest iteration of the software featured in Part I and Part II below.
I just found one of those rare Joe Moshier interviews. It is in French but Google Translate should do the job.
Joe Moshier is one of the greatest character designer but similarly to Paul Felix, his life is pretty secretive. If it wasn’t for his credits on some of the most visually interesting Disney movies like “Emperor’s new groove” or “Home on the range”, you wouldn’t know about him.
Joe joined Dreamworks few years ago to work on several projects. Here is the French article followed by a quick video interview. Sorry the new version of WordPress breaks the layout of my blog 🙁
