The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Brad Bird is a great director and story teller but I am a bit sick of his director’s interviews now.
Rejoy! Splinedoctors uploaded a great Podcast where Brad talks about his character animation career.
You probably didn’t know that but he was already working at Disney few years before CalArt. In fact he got his first desk at Disney aged 14. Yes, he is mister Incredible!
here is something i wanted to post for a long time but I was waiting to do something soooo fancy that I never posted it. Here is a rough version, at least it gets the idea across.
This is the layout of my hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts) for animation. I am missing the Frame all, use CTRL+F I guess.
I also allocated functions to Z X C but can’t remember exactly what they are. Probably related to playback forward an backward. I am toying with the idea of breaking my IBM keyboard in half so I can get rid of the right part of the keyboard and make it fit nicely next to my Wacom tablet.
[update] I don’t use the GI joe script anymore and now go with Mental ray GI preset. I no more use Lluis Llobera Reset Channels script anymore, I just zero things out in the Maya channel editor.
I created a set of icons for the mel scripts I use the most. Click on the picture to download them all and also a nifty Xsheet script someone created for me.
Gi_Joe lighting script for cheap Global Illumination
Michael Comet’s autotangent download the whole cometScripts.zip pack and only extract autoTangent.mel He also has some cool parenting scripts but that’s an other story. [update] I currently use a hotkey for that one since the only value I use is the magic 4.2
Luis Llobera Make button and Reset channels. LLMakeButton IS A MUST!!!!!!
Zoomerate great to zoom and pan into your camera view without moving your shot camera. Perfect when animating fingers or eyelids in the camera view.
Tween Machine by Justin Barrett. An other must have script!!! It allows you to create linear breakdowns while in step mode and favour the previous or next pose. I just upgraded to version 2. The new interface takes a bit more screen space but you now have the option to use buttons or a slider, great for people suffering from RSI.
An other script I use all the time is Aaron Koressel ackSliceCurves. I use it so much that instead of a button I just use “Shift + b” as a hotkey, b being the “set key” hotkey for me. This script is great if your default tangents are set to step.
ackSliceCurves
Xsheet is a little mel script someone on CG talk created for me. The script tells you on the viewport how far you are from the previous keypose. Great to learn about timing.
Related post:
Animation hotkeys
Instead of fighting against Pocoyo’s lovers who naively put episodes on Youtube and forgetting about copyright issues, Pocoyo’s production company Zinkia, has decided to put some episodes in much better quality on their own website.
If you didn’t know about the show. Pocoyo is produced in Spain and you can check Pocoyo’s production blog at http://pocoyo.blogs.com/pocoyo/
If you want to know a bit more about Ren and Stimpy’s creators, head to http://cin01.blogspot.com/ You will find some scans of a series of Articles about Spumco.
France culture is running a 20 25 minutes episodes series about the history of animation.
It is unfortunately only in french. Click here to find the previous episodes
Everybody knows the 12 principles of animation established by Frank and Ollie in the Illusion of Life but over the years many people have felt the need to add more principles.
Just to clear my mind I have decided to make a compilation of them based on Based on Leo Brody’s Walt Stanchfield compilation http://punchandbrodie.com/leo/stanchfield/
Chapter 7 Principles of animation page 155
1. pose and mood
2. shape and form
3. anatomy
4. model or character
5. weight
6. line and silhouette
7. action and reaction
8. perspective
9. direction
10. tension to extreme
11. planes
12. solidity
13. arcs
14. squash and stretch
15. beat and rhythm
16. depth and volume
17. overlap and follow thru
18. timing
19. working from extreme
20. positive & negative shapes
21. straights and curves
22. primary and secondary action
23. staging and composition
24. anticipation
25. caricature
26. details
27. texture
28. simplification
Things are still not very clear in my mind and as I go along I will refine that list with explanations and add ons. So far I am already thinking of adding
– Clarity
– Entertainment
– Sincerity
but also to take Adam’s variation in consideration:
4. model and character
11. planes of view
an interesting article I found today:
http://www.chloeveltman.com/features/arts/actingandanimation.html
It features Glen Keane, and other masters of animation
Here is a cool short I just found. Fairly entertaining, and very nice details.
here is an extract from an article found on electric-escape.net today. It is a conversation between Cars director John Lasseter and Animation supervisor Doug Sweetland during a daily:
At one point, McQueen must make a decision during a race, and he slams to a halt. As Sweetland, one of two “Cars” supervising animators, reviewed the rough animation in a screening room, Lasseter took out his laser pointer and circled McQueen’s eyes, which, like all of the film”s anthropomorphic characters, are built into the windshield.
Sweetland thought McQueen was trying to figure out what to do next, and therefore needed to close his eyes and collect his thoughts, the way the scene was animated. “Isn’t it about McQueen’s trying to decide what he’s doing?” Sweetland asked.
“I hear what you are saying. I just don’t agree with you,” the director told Sweetland.
Lasseter believed the character knew precisely what he was about to do next, and was only settling himself before acting. A squint, Lasseter felt, would show McQueen’s resolve. Closed eyes, he believed, would read as indecision. Sweetland saw it differently, and was concerned that McQueen would come across as arrogant, rather than confident. “I don’t want him to be full of his own narcissism,” he said.
Lasseter wasn’t buying it. “I think we are over-thinking this,” said the director, whose last film was 1999’s “Toy Story 2.” “We want the audience to say, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’ But McQueen knows what he is doing.” Sweetland still demurred. After a few minutes, the debate became, well, animated. Michael Stocker, one of the dozen or so other animators in the room, interjected that he could change the performance of McQueen”s mouth (part of the bumper), which might suggest that the character is sorting through his options.
“What if I just had him breathing?” Stocker wondered. Again, Lasseter considered the idea, and then — pleasantly but firmly — dismissed it. “That’s not the way the scene was conceived,” he said. Sweetland and Stocker finally conceded the point, and Lasseter came over to hug Sweetland. “Good discussion,” he said, patting him on the back.
