Animation with a moustache

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

Category: Education

Emotional beats – Star Wars Episode 03 4

Acting / Animation / Education

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Emotional beats – Star Wars Episode 03

When looking for great acting I usually refer to boring and austere black and white or pre-1970s movies but once in a while I am amazed to find great performances in contemporary blockbusters or mainstream shows. The “Lost” TV series being my first source of reference at the moment but more on this later.

I am currently working on a shot involving two characters and a story plot based on Star Wars Episode 03 and while looking at the original movie and a specific scene with the Senator Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker, I was amazed at the performance of Scottish actor/theatre director Ian Mc Diarmid. To be fair, a movie featuring a 60+ years old stage trained shakespearean actor is very likely to present some exceptional acting moments. Everything from his body posture to his face and voice are outstanding. Loot at that subtle hand shake on the wider dramatic shot. Hayden Christensen’s acting seems cartoony and, as my friend Richie would say, almost grotesque in comparison 😉

Here is the full keyframable quicktime video sequence between the sly Palpatine and candide Anakin followed by a series of screenshots to highlight the key moments of that very impressive performance where he reaches his goal after a series of tactical advances in the manner of a chess player.

Even without the audio you would be able to witness his emotional beats and get a good feel for his manipulative strategies, shifting between parental, authoritarian, cynical and sheepish attitude. What a little snake! 😉

Notice how much a head rotation, squeezing of the eye lids, contraction of the nasal muscles can affect the expression. It is amazing how much he is able to communicate within the same body posture.

You can also pay attention to the asymmetry of his mouth in 4b and 4c and finish with a good look at that priceless fake smile on 9c that can only be detected by the fact that the eyes muscles don’t get involved in the upward motion.

I would highly suggest you to check out the HD version at the following address:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSy7nvRZ1E8&t=1m08s[/youtube]

I think this could be a nice add-on to the Jeff Gabor interview I featured few days ago. If you don’t have outstanding drawing abilities, there is no way you could work out and plan a similar animated scene in sketches and thumbnails. Using edited video references seems like the best option for subtle acting shots.

Josh Carey, VES rigging submission 7

Animation / Education

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Josh Carey, VES rigging submission

Check this out! ReelFX rigging supervisor Josh Carey (nothing to do with my buddy Dan Carey except that they probably share the same good look) just posted his VES submission showcasing his AWESOME work on the Looney Tunes shortfilms.

I haven’t worked with the rigs so I don’t know how slow they are but they sure give the animators a lot control to achieve that crazy Warner Brother look.

It is finally possible to emulate the 2d cartoony look in CG and this will certainly push the medium to a new level leaving motion capture way behind or at least separating the two in a very dramatic manner.

Josh Carey is also the co-founder of rigging educational forum Rigging Dojo and seeing the tools he provided the animators with I immediately subscribed to their newsletter.

Rigging Dojo

Related posts:
ReelFX Looney Tunes shorts online
Ray Chase showreel

Jeff Gabor webcast recording is online 6

Animation / Education

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Jeff Gabor webcast recording is online

Jeff Gabor’s AnimSchool webcast recording is finally online and it is great. It is nice to finally hear him talk about his workflow and explain why his video progression reels regularly get pulled down. Check it out it is really funny and sometimes a bit politically incorrect so that’s very refreshing.

I want to highlight some of the gems he shares with us but make sure you quickly watch the video before AnimSchool removes it from public’s viewing.

Jeff obviously discusses the shot he animated for AnimSchool and goes frame by frame through it explaining his workflow.

He talks about acting in modern feature animation compared to traditional 2d one, the use of video reference versus thumbnailing for subtle acting, overanimation…

Interestingly enough, Jeff is one of those guys who animates exclusively in IK, I wonder if he uses Body Spaces or just regular unparented world IK….

TweenMachine! Yay I agree with version 1 being the simplest and the best, just like Facebook 🙂

Someone asked about Tradigitools… the answer is funny. Come on, Tween Machine, Michael Comet’s AutoTangent, that’s all you need in Maya really, and they are both free.

Here is the link to the AnimSchool blog post, you will need to register to get the link to the actual recording.

Jeff Gabor’s webcast

While you are on the the AnimSchool blog, make sure you also check Garrett Shikuma’s interview. It is pretty long and very interesting.

Garrett Shikuma’s interview

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Jeff Gabor

“Paths of Hate” cloud making 0

Education

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“Paths of Hate” cloud making

My old Spiraloid buddy Eugene Mishibinijima just posted a tutorial based on the fast rendering Cloud making technique demonstrated by Platige image and “Paths of Hate” creator Damian Nenow.

The technique is shown for 3dsmax but I am pretty sure it could apply to Maya as it relies on vertex colours and Vray, both available in Maya.

Here is the Siggraph presentation if you missed it, followed by Eugene’s tutorial.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBovH7_um_s[/youtube]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/28004567[/vimeo]

via Itsartmage

AnimSchool updates 2

Animation / Education

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AnimSchool updates

AnimSchool made some great announcements in the past few weeks and released some cool videos you might have missed in the craziness of Siggraph or just during your lazy summer.

To me and until now, AnimSchool was just some sort of “Blue Sky school” as most of the mentors are from Blue Sky and this would enable a quick comparison to an other school mentored by working professional animators for an other top studio, IAnimate, the “Dreamworks school”, but there is a bit more to it.

First, not all AnimSchool mentors are from Blue sky. AnimSchool made some changes to its blog which you will now find at the following url: http://www.animschoolblog.com/. (I think it would have been easier or more consistent to find it under blog.animschool.com or www.animschool.com/blog but it is always better than the previous url.

The new blog features some news related to the school, Animator’s interviews and mentors video critics. The latest one is from Pixar animator Mark Harris and I would highly suggest you to watch it as he is commenting on a typical 11seconds club entry that is well animated and rendered but lacking an underlying strong story. Watch it, it is really refreshing.

So AnimSchool has mentors from top studios which is a minimum requirement nowadays, and also teaches rigging and modeling. When finishing Animation Mentor, I felt graduates should be given the choice to pursue their learning and get some teaching in those two area and probably lighting too but this wasn’t an option. Instead, students are offered VFX related classes which is fine if one want to work in that industry, but some of us have no intention to join it and would rather make their own shortfilm. AnimSchool gives you that option.

What other announcement have they made? Well they also released a video clip extracted from one of the lectures the students are receiving and it looks really sweet! The animation examples are also provided to the students so they can study them in their 3d software. How cool is that?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEBlYUepC6o[/youtube]

David Gallagher, the AnimSchool founder also made a live presentation on the school so we got to fully understand what is the drive behind the school.

AnimSchool Live Presentation

The way things are going, a lot of previously keyframe animated project are now going the Motion Capture route. Motion Capture is great for that but what about for more stylised performances or unrealistic characters? What about a modern Goofy short film. How would you motion capture this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVsh9lymJsc[/youtube]

Obviously you can’t. AnimSchool seems to be teaching the exact art of making appealing cartoons and the examples shown are great demonstrations of that.

The rigs they are providing are also playing at a crazy framerate (close to 30fps). David didn’t explain what kind of CPU his machine used though, but he really emphasized the fact that framerate was one of his most important concern, and rightly so, this makes experimenting even more enjoyable.

The last crazy announcement he made was …. the release of Malcolm, one of their characters, to the public, for free!!! The rig will be free to use for any kind of project, even for professional work! There are obvious disclaimers but the “11seconds club” competition is a perfect example of recommended usage and I will certainly give it a go!

Related posts:
AnimSchool new trailer

Blender Sculpting tool 5

Education

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Blender Sculpting tool

If you ever wanted to try Zbrush but couldn’t afford it or were just put off by the interface, don’t despair! Blender comes to the rescue again!

Here are two really cool videos where you will be able to witness how awesome Blender, a FREE software is! This time you won’t have to listen to my silly comments or watch me looking for tools as a master modeler/sculptor will take you on a tour.

The first video is a sped up version of the second video, a teaser if you like. The second video is a 1h30 mins long sculpting walkthrough were you will be able to follow Roberto Roch and watch him work in realtime. Check this out, they are both in 720p!!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fxpQTO7f_w[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1DaPSV7isg[/youtube]

Blender Grease pencil 8

Animation / Education

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Blender Grease pencil

Even if you are a regular Maya, 3dsmax or XSI user, I think you should check out the following videos as I am sure you will be able to find a use for Blender pretty fancy tools.

The first one I want to demonstrate today is the Grease Pencil, a nice feature that allows you to draw on the 3d viewport and write notes but also make quick thumbnails animation! Sorry for the low framerate, I realised it too late but will record an other animation example very soon.

As you will quickly realise, I don’t have much experience with Blender but I keep wanting to discover more, remember Blender is a free software and the developers keep updating it to make it more user friendly. Version 2.5 has integrated a lot of improvements and the software will get better and better from that point.

Towards the end of the first video I am getting a bit lost trying to find how to enable the Audio Scrubbing so feel free to jump to the second add-on video so I can avoid embarrassment 😉

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27356629[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27358427[/vimeo]

To Blender experts reading this, how would you go about exporting the grease pencil notes/sketches to a video or even just an image sequence automatically?

So far I have two techniques that are not very user friendly but at least they work and will generate an image sequence which you can import into any 3d or editing software:

1. use a software like IrfanView to take a screenshot automatically every second and manually jump from frame to frame
Quickscreenshots might be an other simple alternative with an incremental saving hotkey CTRL + ALT + w http://code.google.com/p/quickscreenshots/

2. use the Blender Screendump function. Press CTRL + F3, press the + key to increment the file name and press Enter to Save.

[update thanks to Ljoel] Forget about all that exporting nonsense above, the solution is to use the OpenGLviewport capture 😉 Here is where you will find it

Jing screencapture freeware 0

Education / Life hack

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Jing screencapture freeware

Jing is a really cool freeware from Techsmith that allows you to take screenshots or 5 minutes videos, add notes and automatically save them to your FTP server, Youtube, Facebook and other social website. In the process it also feeds your clipboard with the web server path information so you can share it with everyone immediately.

The compression is not always the strongest but it makes things so easy by automating entirely the whole process. It is a bit like Dropbox from what I understand, but without the privacy issues.

Here is a screenshot example using a great pantomime shot by Brad Kinley. No, no there is nothing wrong with your shot, that’s only an example Brad 🙂 I encourage everyone to check out his website, he has a great showreel and nice tutorials.

Setting up Jing to automatically copy the FTP information to the clipboard takes a bit of fiddling so I made a PDF to help you out.

Jing FTP Setup pdf

Francesco Giroldini, lighting tutorials 9

Education

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Francesco Giroldini, lighting tutorials

I wanted to write a well thought post about Francesco Giroldini but my priority is animation and not journalism so a quick post should do it for now.

For the past few years students from Ringling have been producing some really nice shortfilms. Few weeks ago I did a fair amount of research to know the school a bit better and two things struck me. The first one being that Renderman is the default software they use to render their shortfilm and the second one that most shortfilms are a two, but more often, a ONE man job. Character design (based on a caricature of themselves, what a good idea!), modelling, rigging (using The Setup Machine), animating, rendering and even compositing! By the way, there is a mention of a software called Tsunami in their credits, anyone knows what this is?

Justin Sklar gave a pretty good breakdown for his shortfilm Helga on AnimatedBuzz
“All of the preproduction work was done over the course of about 8 weeks. Modeling, rigging, layout, and the vast majority of the animation were all done in about 4 months and then I spent another 4 months on lighting, final textures, and compositing.”

The good thing about this is that you can claim all the work yours. Most french schools have teams of 5 and upward people and looking at their showreels it is near impossible to know who did what.

Right, back to the topic, Francesco Giroldini!

Francesco is an Italian Ringling graduate who co-directed the gorgeous “The Monk and the Monkey” 2010 shortfilm. If you missed it, check it out here. It was so well received that an internship at Pixar and a Dreamworks lighting TD job followed.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14441514[/vimeo]

So Francesco is not only an amazing lighter but he is also a really nice guy and he posted loads of tutorials on his blog. I would highly recommend you to check them out as they are directly aimed at people wanting to make their own shortfilm. They deal with dynamic simulation, cloth, hair and he obviously made several tutorials on lighting that are far more interesting than those crappy DVDs explaining every single buttons but don’t tell you how to make the magic happen! Here, Francesco shares his thought process on how he creates light sets and cheat things so they look more … magical.

Watching his tutorial made me realize that more than one light should often be used to create the effect of a rim light for example. Saying this, a Pixar lighting TD told us few weeks ago that they always have a different light set just for the eyes. Light linking and light breaking are your friends!

I hope I tempted you into browsing his blog so here are several posts you should start with.

Ah, I have few Lifehacking tips for you when watching video tutorials:
– always take notes and write down the timecode so you can refer to them at a later time without having to watch the whole thing again, I write all my notes in Microsoft OneNote, OneNote is a great software to centralize and synchronize notes automatically. I keep my source files on my USB stick and they automatically update my desktop and laptop as soon as I plug the USB key.
– KMPlayer, Quicktime and probably other video players allow you to speed up the playback of videos, I often watch videos between 110% and 120% speed depending on how dense the information is.

Lighing video tutorial
New Lighting Tutorial Stewie
Renderman for Maya lighting and compositing video tutorial
Eye shading and rigging video tutorial

He has plenty more on Mental Ray and Renderman so make sure you bookmark his website and thank him for sharing his knowledge.

Francesco Giroldini

And while we are at praising Ringling, here are some interesting Ringling short films:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25541923[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/4493509[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14219605[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23616948[/vimeo]

Ringling Vimeo Channel
http://www.vimeo.com/channels/ringling2011

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KMPlayer, best player ever!
Microsoft OneNote 2007