Animation with a moustache

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

Category: Education

CG Studio Map, Jobs in Games 4

Education

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CG Studio Map, Jobs in Games

Because of my video games experience, I get asked once in a while what software should people learn to get a job in Video Games and unfortunately I don’t have a straight answer, it depends on the company and sometimes in even depends on the team.

At Microsoft/Rare we used Maya and since the company is now doing more and more motion capture, I have been told they also use Motion Builder on top.

At EA, the team I worked with on Spare Parts exclusively used Maya but the Harry Pottter team was also using a bit of Motion builder.

However, those two, with Sony, might be the exceptions as most companies use 3dstudio max. If you want to check this for yourself,  you just need to go to any of the numerous british Video Games agencies like Aaswift, OPM Jobs, Amiqus, Datascope and go through the jobs specs. The job columns of Industry websites or monthly publications can also be revealing, here are two for you:

Gamesindustry.biz

Develop Online

One thing I should also mention is that 3dstudio Max offers several animation technologies which have little in common so you might want to get confirmation whereas the studio you are targeting uses Biped/Character Studio, CAT or regular joint based rigs.

A website that could also prove very useful to find jobs in games but others industry related to animation as well is CG Studio Map. CG studio map is a website referencing all the animation studios and game studios. Some of the infos are not very accurate regarding the software used but it still remains a really good resource. Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think Ubisoft Paris uses Softimage as their main tool.

As a conclusion, I think you will probably have to learn all the softwares so don’t be a fanboy, don’t get too hung up with that software you have spent years learning. I know it is tough, I am also going through the same thing but that’s the way it is if you want to stay employed.

Exaggeration 0

Animation / Education

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Exaggeration

If you haven’t seen the Bluray version of Disney’s Pinocchio, you might not have realised how extensively the studio was relying on video references since their very first pictures but what I wanted to talk about today is Exaggeration in animation.

Someone just made a comparison video between some Alice in wonderland’s live action references and the final movie. It is a bit striking how close the reference for Alice is but all the other characters are way more exaggerated. A bit too much probably but this seem to work really well with the characters.

That video is really interesting as it shows two styles of animation, naturalistic versus broad, and how much a video reference can be pushed to create an entertaining performance.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZbOiv1Uf0s[/youtube]

via Spungella

Walk cycles from Disney Robin Hood 6

Animation / Education

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Walk cycles from Disney Robin Hood

A compilation of walk Cycles from Disney’s 1973 Feature “Robin Hood”?

What a great excuse to watch Robin Hood again! Robin, “Sword in the stone”, “Jungle Book” and “The rescuers” are my favorite Disney movies.

Does anyone know who designed the characters by the way? I think Milt Kahl did a lot of character design towards the end of his career but I think I remember Ken Anderson was doing them before him, any idea?

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

via floobynooby.blogspot.com

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Milt Kahl Disney family album
Milt Kahl the animation Michelangelo

Full Sail showreel 0

Animation / Education

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Full Sail showreel

At the beginning of Animation Mentor, AAU was kicking butt. It seems that other traditional brick and mortar schools, helped by the release of Norman to the public, have now upped their game. More and more great showreels are coming out of Florida based Full Sail university. I would be curious to know how high are the tuition fees though, French Gobelin’s nearly free tuition is long gone but we are still really far from north american’s costs.

If some of you are following Andrew Gordon’s website, you probably remember Drew Winey’s Pirate entry from the last Spline Doctors contest. I thought is other schoolmate should have won the competition but after watching Drew’s latest showreel I have to admit that the guy is really talented and I am not surprised he got hired by ReelFX.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11900014[/vimeo]

I would also encourage people to check out his blog and see for yourself how he might have gotten where he is. Many animators are concentrating on long acting shots where Drew seems to be favouring quick 1 to 2 days shots that have a lot of entertainment value.

Drew Winey’s blog

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What is AAU

Mike Walling … avec une moustache! 9

Animation / Education

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Mike Walling … avec une moustache!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22386291[/vimeo]

Mike and I have been working on a French version of his great animation tutorial videos for the past few weeks and they are now available on the JRWebinar store page.

It is not very often that you see a video tutorial with a top feature animator working in a commercial package so you must recommend the videos to all your french speaking friends!

Mike Walling … avec des moustaches!

Mike Walling et moi avons travaillé pendant quelques semaines sur une version francaise de ses vidéo tutoriel de mécanique corporelle. Les vidéos sont à présent disponible sur le magasin virtuel (store) du site de Jason Ryan.

Mike Walling a commencé sa carriére d’animateur en 2001 et a joint Dreamworks en 2010 aprés avoir travaillé sur des films aussi prestigieux que L’Age de glace, Horton, ou Surf’s Up.

Ce n’est pas tous les jours que l’on peut voir un animateur de trés haut niveau travailler sur un logiciel commercial, aussi cette vidéo doit étre recommandée à tous les débutants et les animateurs plus aguerris qui rêvent un jour de travailler dans un studio de cinéma d’animation. Rappellons que les studios Dreamworks et Pixar utilisent des logiciels d’animation propriétaire aussi, rare sont les animateurs de ces deux studios qui connaissent Maya sur le bout des doigts.

Pour la traduction, j’ai repris la terminologie utilisée par Richard Williams dans son ouvrage Techniques d’animation. Les termes Key poses, breakdown, inbetween et spacing ont été respectivement traduits par Pose clefs, intervalle principal/breakdown, intervalle et espacement.
Les termes Ease in, drag, overlap, overshoot ont quant à eux été traduits par amorti, retard, chevauchement et dépassement.

Jason Ryan webinar website

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Ianimate new promo video 0

Animation / Education

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Ianimate new promo video

I am surprised not everyone knows about Ianimate yet. Good thing Jason Ryan just released a new promotional video explaining how the school works and showing the work of the first batch of students. You can also see the rigs they are providing to the students and some of them are really really appealing.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21879011[/vimeo]

Ianimate is not as big as Animation Mentor yet so you might not be able to build up a huge network of animators friends as quickly as with the Berkeley based online school but all the Ianimate mentors are top Dreamworks animators which is perfect for someone wanting to work specifically in feature animation.

Ianimate.net

Related post:
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Mike Walling walkthrough
iAnimate Jason Ryan interview

Mike Walling walkthrough…. with a moustache 0

Animation / Education

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Mike Walling walkthrough…. with a moustache

Mike Walling sent me an email a while back but I forgot to post it 🙁 Here it is

“Hey Olivier, can you do me a favor and post a comment saying a big thank you from me to everybody who left comments or may have purchased the walk through? I can’t stress how thank full I am that people are getting something out of what I did. For me the walk through was a trial run for some bigger stuff I am working on and in fact I have a new walk through in progress that will cover advanced body mechanics, thought process, basic acting choices, constraints, graph editor work flow, better explanation on how I polish and camera cuts. I think this will be a really fun walk through and since nobody bought just part one or part two I’m going to make it just one purchase but two downloads to keep the file sizes a bit smaller. Anyway I wanted to give you a shout out for the support, it means a lot and I love seeing people out there that are passionate about what it is well do. So keep at it”

My french speaking readers might have a pleasant surprise in few weeks but I don’t want to say more for the moment 😉
Et je vais avoir une petite surprise pour mes lecteurs francais dans quelques semaines mais je ne veux pas en dire plus pour l’instant 😉

Related post:
Mike Walling walkthrough

Quicktime pro gamma shift bug no fix 7

Education

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Quicktime pro gamma shift bug no fix

[update] NONE OF THE TRICKS ARE WORKING but as I said it in the comments, there is nothing to worry about, it is only a problem with Quicktime when playing videos locally. If you watch them with a webbrowser like Google Chrome, the gamma doesn’t shift.

Some of you might have noticed a realllly annoying bug with Quicktime pro when outputting to H264. No matter what compression, the video looks “washed out” or covered by a white layer.

This problem seems to be due to the latest version of Quicktime pro that would assume the video you are importing has a Mac gamma (1.8) instead of the PC one (2.2).

A trick has been running around consisting in tweaking the Blend and Straight alpha settings but the most picky of us realized that the blacks still weren’t as black as they should be.

I found what seems to be the solution in the looooong series of comment following Andrew Krammer’s original post with the above trick.
http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2008/06/fix-quicktime-gamma-shift/

One of commentator is suggesting to fool Quicktime pro by first opening a Tiff picture then importing the video. This way Quicktime doesn’t apply that screwed up gamma.

1) Create a small (32×32 pixels or so) tiff or bitmap – doesn’t matter what color, just make it 8bit and RGB
2) Open a new player and ‘Open image sequence’ and select the tiff/bitmap. set the frame rate to whatever you’re going to be working in
3) Open your desired quicktime in another player, ’select-all’ and ‘copy’ the clip
4) Back in you ‘tiff/bitmap’ movie hit ‘add to movie’ – this will add the video over the top of the tiff/bitmap on a second video layer
5) Export using your desired codec
All going well the gamma will match your original video very closely

Thanks Andrew Stewart and Andrew Krammer

As a side note, I have a conspiracy theory on this but let’s not get into that 🙂

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1027614