Animation with a moustache

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

Category: Education

How to assemble an animation crew 0

Animation / Education

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How to assemble an animation crew

Messy goes to Okido office

Here is a great post by Keith Lango that should reassure fresh animation graduates who think they will never make it into feature animation or just in the animation professional world.

As a summary, companies can’t afford to have a staff of 100% senior animation ninjas and those are not needed for all the shots. Less experienced animators can cut their teeth on those background characters, props animation, reaction shots and “helicopter shots” before becoming a more expensive seasoned professional.

How to assemble an animation crew by Keith Lango

Thanks to several great posters and a wealth of passionate animators, the 11 seconds club is establishing itself as one of the best website for animation related discussion I am finding.

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]

Related posts:
So you want to be a rigger huh!
Pyro abAutorig tutorial

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!

Related posts:
Mike Walling … avec une moustache!
So you want to be a rigger huh?
Who is Jason Ryan
Jason Ryan “Speaking of Animation” interview

Education section added 0

Education

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Education section added

I just modified the Tutorial category and created an Education section instead. I felt that the last items I posted fell more into a broader Education category since they are more observations than actual tutorial.

This also a tribute to Neil Blevins (Soulburn 3d). With Michael Comet and Keith Lango, he is one of the first CG online educators from whom I learnt a lot.

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.

Related posts:
Norman FK world aligned spine
World orient head and shoulders
What is AAU
KM Player best video player ever!

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?

so you want to be a rigger huh? 9

Animation / Education

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so you want to be a rigger huh?

Keith Lango Zootrigger setup

The same way it is important for a modeler to understand part of the rigging process, a rigger should also get a grasp of the animation workflow.

So how can you become a rigger that animators are happy to work with.

Well you can obviously start with a good attitude. Ask for feedback from the animators and be willing to discard that crazy automated function you created but animators find unusable.

Read rigging books and dvds, post on forums, check other rigs and even students showreels, talk to people. Personally I have learnt rigging through several dvds and those should be compulsory if you want to be a good rigger so here they are:

Jason Schleifer “Maya Fast animation rigs”. The DVD is well over 5 years old and only 1h20 but still is a must for someone who want to be liked by his peers.

Jason Schleifer “Animator Friendly Rigging”. That set will take few hours to go through but expose the most important concepts.

Fahrenheit DVDs. I actually started with those which was really hardcore but that was a very good experience.

Jason Osipa “Stop starring, facial modeling and animation done right”. A third edition just came out and I should probably get that one too. Jason goes in length about facial rigging and you should definitely spend some time understanding what he is talking about.

So you have ordered them all? okay while waiting for them I want to mention few things that irritate me when I use a new rig.

1. Slow rigs.
If your rigs are very slow, make sure it is not because you are using expressions where you could use nodes.
Create a low poly or proxy version the animators can work with otherwise.

1.Weired and default rotation axis.
Head and torso should have the Y rotation carry all the other axis, X should be carrying Z and Z the last one. Basically, the rotation order should be something like ZXY but certainly not the default XYZ (remember, you read the axis order starting from the end)
Jason Schleifer pays special attention to the rotation orders in his DVDs so take notes when watching them.

2. GUIs
Well, not everybody will agree with me but ….. I can’t stand GUIs. Maya viewport is so poorly designed that I can’ t see the point of adding an other window cluttering my screen real estate even more.
I will share with you one of my latest setup very soon. It is a rig where instead of hitting the usual nurbs controls, you select an invisible polygon encompassing the surface of the limb. Keith Lango posted a similar setup a while ago using Zootrigger,, myself I just parent constraint the Nurbs control or the joint to an invisible proxy box instead.

[update]GUI are not so bad when they are truely necessary. To drive complex or additive blend shapes for examples (ala Jason Osipa joystick) but certainly not for selecting the lower or upper arm.

3. IF/FK switches WITH no-pop
It is obvious that animators need IK and FK for legs and hands but you should also consider a script that would allow the animators to switch very easily from IK to FK and reverse without going back to the T pose

4. Elbow and Knee lock. The animators should be able to lock an elbow to a table

5. Scaling! The rig should be scalable!!!!

6. World orient head, spine, arms. I want them all or I want to be able to set this up using constraints

7. Bend bow and noddle arms. I am liking this more and more and should certainly investigate into that

8. cluttered vieworts. Nurbs controls don’t need to cover the entire model, make it clean and simple, if possible, make it invisible (cf GUI)

9. non consistency in the boolean channel control. 0 should mean no and 1 should mean yes. ie Shoulder parent 0 should mean that the IK hand is not parented to the shoulder. You could actually do the opposite, but as long as it it consistent throughout the rig.

10. Set me free. Animators are artists and they might want to break an elbow or pull fingers to stylise the motion so don’ restrain them to what is anatomically possible unless you want them to come up with really stiff animation.

Alright, that’s it for now and as a treat for reading such a long post, check out some really cool rigging showreels and making of

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15396945[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/3265412[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/5344666[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11648356[/vimeo]

Related posts:
Kaelou
ESMA
World orient Head and shoulder
Norman World Align spine

Alright, that should be enough for today. I will come back to this post an other day.

Have fun rigging!