Showreel
About me
Contact
Rss feed

Aaron Hartline Chiustream

Posted on November 4, 2011  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

I mentioned that great interview with Pixar animator Aaron Hartline a while back but loads of people seem to have missed it.

Make sure you watch it this time as it is really good.

Aaron was a Blue Sky senior animator until he finally made his dream true after years of effort and attempts despite many hurdles. A great lesson on persistence.

You might as well be interested in watching the following interview I just found:

Pencil Kings recently spoke with Art Directors, Animation Supervisors, Layout Designers, etc. from the most notable studios in the world. Pixar, Walt Disney, Sony Imageworks and Blue Sky Studios were all represented and some of their top artists provide insight and share their story on what it took to reach the top of their profession.

http://www.pencilkings.com/2011/07/17/how-to-become-a-professional-artist/

Aaron is currently a tutor at Animation Collaborative.

Related post:
CTN Animators tool of the trade
Aaron Hartline “Vlad”
Dice Tsutsumi on the Chiustream

Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial

Posted on November 2, 2011  | 2 Comments
Filed under Character design, Drawings, Education, Painting

Bobby Chiu is a very good artist, a very good businessman and still a very generous guy.

I hadn’t followed him for a year or two and while looking for Photoshop painting tutorials for a friend I found that “new” video he posted well … last year.

Unlike his old painting videos, in that 190 minutes long tutorial (9 parts video) he explains his whole painting process from the original scanned sketch to fully rendered. This is probably similar to the paid videos you can get when attending his online art school Schoolism.com.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dib6oA3in0[/youtube]

Since this is a free video, I am also posting my notes, feel free to add comments to these.

Water creature fishing

1. Bring the scanned sketch onto a layer in multiply mode, Bobby work at 33% of the final res
2. Open a second window not the navigator in a corner at about 12% to get an overview
3. Create a backgrond layer in dark grey
4. Add a new layer inbetween sketch and background and work on the tonal values of the character, we establish the base tone.
5. We create a new layer for the cast shadows
6. We create a new layer for the Colors in Color mode

Part 4 Lets bring the lights in:
1. We have been roughing out until now but it is time to zoom in, to add more detail in normal mode
2. Upmost layer in Normal mode we add the light so the sketch disappears

Part 7 Adding a secondary rim light

Part 8 Make an overal Levels change to make the painting much lighter. I would actually do the exact opposite so the dark area would have more details rather than creating flat dark areas… strange workflow

Ah and while I was getting ready to post this….. I just received a notification that Bobby Chiu posted an other AWESOME video interview with Pixar story artist Alex Woo. Alex was Tom Gately’s substitute teacher at AnimC last week and the class had a really fun time with him. Alex is a gesture drawing teacher in San Francisco and his class is usually sold out month in advance, he also holds a very popular class at Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism

As a side note, using the 75qs0 promo code when registering on the Schoolism website, you should get a nice discount and it will also help to fund my Philz coffee addiction 😉

Related posts:
Dice Tsutsumi interview
Bobby Chiu interview

Sketchtravel shortfilm

Posted on October 29, 2011  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation, Painting

Dice Tsutsumi is a machine!!!! Look at the pretty cool Sketchtravel short film he created while working full time and preparing for the Sketchtravel auction event.

I was able to see some real size reproductions of the pages at Pixar few days ago and it looks great. That Miyazaki’s double spread is pretty sweet I must say…

I have been told the book is sold out in France and I am not sure when it will arrive in the US and other countries. Who was lucky and already bought one?

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/30312312[/vimeo]

Here is some further discussion and infos on the Cartoon Brew blog.

Cartoon Brew Sketchtravel film

Related posts:
Sketchtravel – Frederic Back
Dice Tsutsumi on the Chiu-stream
Lights and colours

Low polygon modeling

Posted on October 28, 2011  | 7 Comments
Filed under Education, Modeling

Low polygon modelling, opposed to “high frequency modeling” (the stuff done in Zbrush or Mudbox), is the basics of modelling. Any software can handle that type of work nowadays, from the free Blender to the extremely expensive Maya, 3dsmax or XSI packages.

There are two approaches to low polygon modeling:

1. A top-down approach where you start directly with a square plane whose edges you extrude following the final edge loops.

2. A bottom-up approach where you start modeling from a cube that you gradually subdivide by adding edges or extruding faces.

Both techniques are so simple that they only require a subdivide toggling hotkey (3 in Maya) and a handful of tools which I featured in my ‘Low Polygon modeling tools’ post.

The Edge extrusion method was extensively demonstrated by Kolby Jukes back in the days he used XSI as his primary modeling software. All his videos are offline as he only does Mudbox “High frequency sculpting” nowadays but the Edge extrusion technique is the technique I featured in my latest modeling timelaps video based on Brave’s Lord Macintosh character so have a look at this:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25620952[/vimeo]

If you are not familiar with modeling, what I did here was to put the original concept art on a plane in the background then create a second smaller plane whose edges I extruded following an edge flow mental picture I had. The edge flow being the minimum amount of flowing edges necessary to describe the muscles, skeletal structure or deformation of the surface. Whaooo that was complicated! Well instead of just projecting a grid of edges on the surface of the head, I am creating a minimal amount of edge loops and rings that follow the creases facial expressions will produce. Makes sense?

Bay Raitt was probably the first one to fully demonstrate the Cube approach in that ground breaking 1999 “One afternoon with Bay Raitt” Mirai timelapse video.

This is the one I used in my Rickshaw modeling timelapse video:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6857488[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6825067[/vimeo]

I think the video is self explanatory, if not, post a comment and I will add more explanation in my post

Related posts:
Pixar “Brave” concept art and teaser
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation
Posts in the Modeling category

Dr Seuss’ “Lorax” first trailer is out

Posted on October 27, 2011  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

Interesting, the first Illumination’s “Lorax” trailer finally came out. You will probably find some visual similarities with “Horton hears a Who” as “Lorax” is also based on Dr Seuss’ illustrated books and Maurice Nobel’s interpretation in that 1972 short film.

Now “Lorax” seems to have a more lighted tone that the book and short film but it definitely looks much more serious than also Mac Guff produced “Despicable Me”. I hope it gets a good reception by the public. As noted by Sergio Pablos in that recent “Frame by Frame” interview, comedies are much safer to market and sell to investors and the wider audience.

Illumination is taking a gamble by adapting the long time seen controversial Lorax book to the screen, let’s see if the aura created by Despicable Me and soon coming Despicable Me 2 will help to propel “Lorax” and Mac Guff to the level of an other studio known to regularly take similar gambles, namely Pixar, and establishes Mac Guff as a new solid player in that feature animation top 5.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_PZr1rqOR0[/youtube]

And here is the Maurice Noble’s art directed short film if you haven’t seen it yet.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5jnJdnQPr8[/youtube]

Related posts:
Sergio Pablos – Frame by Frame interview
Despicable Me triumph
Mac Guff tour

Aardman “Pythagasaurus”

Posted on October 26, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Character design

Check out that great and probably new Aardman CG shortfilm, it is so funny! Great visuals, funny quirky dialogues and sounds (cavemen with zippers, who would have thought!). I hope they do more like that one.

“Outside a volcano has happened!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5cab4NMHsY&noredirect=1[/youtube]

This reminds me a bit of an old but great shorfilm by an other British studio “Studio AKA”, for the Natwest campaign.

I can’t stand Flash websites…. how am I supposed to embed anything?

Here is a link then… very sexy…:

Marc Craste’s “Mr Lucky”

Related posts:
Studio AKA keyword search

My Maya settings and preferences

Posted on October 24, 2011  | 5 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

[update, I have a new post related to my Maya hotkeys with a great downloadable hotkey map over here
http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2013/05/25/rethinking-mayas-hotkeys-for-animation/]

Out of the box, Maya is probably the most animation unfriendly software ever so every animators have their own set of scripts and hotkeys to palliate for Maya shortcomings and speed up their workflow.

To be fair, I don’t use many but the following ones are true “life saviours”. Some of them are shelf script, others are triggered by Hotkeys.

my Animation Shelf

I haven’t cleaned up my Maya animation shelf for a while, the two first buttons were customized windows layout but I don’t use them anymore. LLuis Lobera’s make button, Justin Barrett’s Tween Machine, Zoomerate and Xsheet are the ones I mostly use. Michael Comet’s Auto-tangent is now a Hotkey as follow (bare in mind this is with my french keyboard, I use A on english keyboards).

Auto tangents and other scripts triggered by Hotkeys

As I have been travelling a lot lately, I can only carry a 17 inch equipped laptop with me so full screen viewport and Hotkeys are a must.

Here is my current full screen viewport when in Blocking and first pass spline, I would normally create an other set of selection buttons for the eyes and facial controls when polishing. As you can see I don’t use any GUI but instead I toggle the Nurbs controls (avars/movers) with a hotkey (alt+c)

Full screen viewport

This is the script I use for Full screen switching by the way, the Maya built in hotkey (CTRL+spacebar) has been buggy on all the Maya versions I have used so far. The Hotkey is alt + z on french keyboard, alt + w on english keyboard.

Full screen script

This is my working window layout on a 17 inch screen in 1440×900 (yep it is a cheap laptop, no HD res here ;-)). Camera view on the top left, Graph editor top right and perspective view underneath. The TweenMachine window is taking a bit more space than required but hopefully Justin will soon post a leaner version or maybe Autodesk will pay Justin to integrate his script to the next version of Maya 😉 The graph editor channels column is also taking more space than necessary, Maya doesn’t allow dragging the divider further (antiquated Unix legacy….).

Right, that’s all I have time for today, I will add a Hotkey description in few days.

update with some of my hotkeys

Related posts:
Rethinking Maya hotkeys for animation
Maya, Mel scripts for animation
Wacom settings
Animation hotkeys

Spare parts cute designs

Posted on October 15, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Character design, EA

My ex-coworker Ross Burt posted some of the character designs he created for Spare Parts.

The cute robots weren’t selected for the final game but I really loved them. We did model one of them and I got lucky to animate the green one with spray can nozzle head on the far right. Those who know me will rightaway understand why I fell in love with that little fellow 😉

Spare Parts Heroes and Villains

Related posts:
BAFTA Young game designers
EA (category)

Things change, new opportunities arise

Posted on October 14, 2011  | 4 Comments
Filed under Education, Miscellaneous

I was reading some articles this morning and realised few things.

Five years ago, a successful game career involved joining a big corporation like Microsoft, EA, Sony.
Five years ago 2d animation was dead.

With the current recession, gaining full time employment at a major studio is pretty unlikely nowadays. At best, most of them prefer to stick with contract workers as the market doesn’t allow a long term strategy at the moment but on the other hand, thousands of independent game developers are producing XBLA and smartphones games and applications, creating hundreds of jobs for senior and even fresh graduates in the field of, 2d animation, UI and concept art.

As recalled in that ex Rare employees interview, if it wasn’t possible to make games for less than $10 millions and a team of 70 and upwards in the past, things have changed. Even the tools are now available and affordable making it possible for anyone to make their own independent games. What an exciting time!

Most of those companies will soon grow to become the next leaders or get bought by the former ones hoping to get their glory back.

Not all big corporations are taking the back seat though, Microsoft with XBLA was probably the first one to create an independent game developer ecosystem and empower creative artists and programmers. Without XBLA, Behemoth’s “Castle Crashers” would have probably never known the success it received. How many people had heard of Alien Hominid before Castle Crashers?

An other thing I wanted to mention today is a very interesting move by Valve and Jagex. With the release of Team Fortress 2 for free to the public, I was wondering how the company could still pay for their servers but their strategy seems to be paying off as they recently announced a hefty profit for items creators.

But what is in for the very independent artist?

Well check out this article featuring legendary Bay Raitt. Ok there is nothing groundbreaking like his work on Gollum but one sentence at the very end of the article raised my interest for Team Fortress 2.

Making of a Skull hat.

“If this was a community-made item, the money from item sales would get split between Valve and the item maker!”

As much as I love the art style I don’t have time to play the game. Creating items for it could however become a source of revenue for the most successful artists. Imagine if your item became viral as Bay’s hat probably became?

Unemployed 3d artist? Make CG hats! 😉

Interesting read:
This is what the Transformers MMO will look like
Why the Next Game From Braid’s Creator is Skipping Consoles the comments are funny as usual
Steam Workshop

Related posts:
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of Animation

“Paper fox”

Posted on October 12, 2011  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

Paper fox

Check out that cool project from one of my australian subscribers, Jeremy Kool. Jeremy is looking for funding for “Paper fox”, an interactive short film with a very non CG look.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/28337832[/vimeo]

You can also follow “Paper fox” on Jeremy’s blog

http://thepaperfox.blogspot.com/

This is looking really nice. There has been several project in that style lately but I can’t get enough of it.

Also check out that fun TV show teaser that emerged on the internet half a year ago. A really nice show in a similar origami/cut out style with a pop-out twist: “Quick Quack Duck”

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

← Previous Page — Next Page →