Animation with a moustache

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

Animation with a moustache Blog

Open Season 1

Animation

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Open Season

I just went to see Open Season with my friends Richie and Trystan and we had a great time. I have to admit that the story felt a bit like a mix between Madagascar, Ice Age and Shreck. “Nature versus civilisation”, “there is no US”, “the main character and the sidekick”, you know the usual animation recipe. However the animation, character designs and environments were a pure delight.

The animation on Beth the park ranger especially at the begining was very weak but the rest of the movie was excellent. If you like strong poses then you will be very pleased. Shaw the vilain was very entertaining, Martin Lawrence as Boog was very Martin Lawrence and still very funny. The animators did a great job with Boog and managed to get strong poses for the 900 pound grizzly bear, and Elliot was your regular overexcited sidekick.

Contrary to Incredibles, the generic characters weren’t so generic and had a lot of appeal.

Great stuff.

3D Character Animation Comes of Age in the U.K 1

Animation

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3D Character Animation Comes of Age in the U.K

3D Character Animation Comes of Age in the U.K

I just found that very interesting article on VFXworld.com about the reemerging VFX industry in London.

You will need to register in order to read it but don’t worry it’s free and painless.

Open season Diaries
Great reading here too.

Also, you might want to watch those clips from Aardmann/Dreamworks “Flushed Away”
Ok it’s a pain to copy and paste all the urls but trust me this is really worth it and they are all quicktime files no crappy flash videos.

[edit] I actually created a page with all the links so go here instead.

One more model started 1

Sculpture

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One more model started

One night I saw the very cool looking character above and decided to model it on the spot. I keep hearing people talking about taking breaks from the computer but for me the problem is more about concentration than breaks. My girlfriend Alicia couldn’t believe it but I told her I would stay awake till late ;-). It has been 5 hours so far, let’s see how long it takes me to finish this guy.

Sculpture class old stuff unfinished 0

Sculpture

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Sculpture class old stuff unfinished

Here is a selection of work I did for the past few years in my little spare time. I always wanted to finish them at home but they usually end up drying on the shelves and break. Before throwing them away I thought it would be a good idea to keep a record of them. I don’t remember the name of the models and I feel terribly bad about it.

I uploaded a recent portrait some time ago Amanda

I completly forgot about that portrait until I found it hidden in a corner of a room. This portrait is one of my best. I am very pleased with the general shape of it. The foundations for a good portrait are already in place, I would just need to shape the eye lids and the ears and call it done. Pay attention to the sternocleidomastoid this is the stuff that will make a portrait more believable

For that one I had in mind to have a tiny woman on a huge plain box. I never closed entirely the box and the head fell on the floor hence the flat skull 😉

I don’t really enjoy poses where the model lays flat but I found that one very interesting at least for the lower part of the body. I really wanted to finish this piece but with no model it is always difficult and it ended up drying then crack. Too bad

That one could have been a very nice piece. As often for a full body I started to refine the legs, bum and back until the session finished.

I saw the light 0

Animation Mentor

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I saw the light

Today was the kick off for the European Animation Mentor gathering and let me tell you something….. This first day was AWWWWESOMMMEE 😉

We started by a 2 hours visit of Passion Picture, then Smoke and Mirrors, followed by MPC and ended by Double Neg. Now as Character animators what do you think was the highlight of the day? Passion Picture? Close but not exactly that 😉

Remember Animation Podcast number 10 and 11? Eamonn Butler, Disney’s Animation Supervisor on Chicken Little and Dinosaurs? Does this ring a bell. Well if you have a good memory you remember that he surprisingly left Disney to try different things?

Guess what? He now works for London based Double Negative!

Instead of giving us a simple studio tour he pretty much gave us a full animation lecture showcasing some of their recent work!

I lost a bit faith when I realised I wouldn’t be able to get an US visa that easily but having Eamonn Butler in London is a bit like having Brad Bird in town so I am not too worried anymore. Let’s just stay in London then!

Blue guy wireframe 1

Portfolio / Sculpture

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Blue guy wireframe

Here is a set of pictures of the blue guy in wireframe in order to get some comments from my peers modelers. Let me know if you see some weired edge flow.

Keith’s post “Breakdown can be such a drag” 2

Animation

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Keith’s post “Breakdown can be such a drag”

I read that one quickly few days ago but it resurfaced on my screen today thanks to Aja’s post on AM forum.

If you have read Keith tutorial on “Organized Keyframing” (refered as Pose to Pose tutorial by some) and don’t visit his website regularly, then you might have missed something very important:
His new Free web tutorial.

This is now the most important animation material for CG artists and everything you will ever need to know is there.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel, learn from 2d animation” I keep repeating myself.

You might as well jump onto Victor Navone’s new tutorial

As a summary, when planning your shots, think about the 12 principles again, think about what leads the motion, what settles first, where is the anticipation, and build all those informations in your poses. Drags, overlap must read clearly in your blocking.

After those 2 great posts, we have no excuse to do crappy animations.

Seat D4 0

Miscellaneous

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Seat D4

Autodesk was holding the Max 9 and Maya 8 roadshow yesterday at Odeon Kensington. This brought back some fun memories.

After a quick lunch with my fellow AM students, I rushed to the event. The room was already full and since I couldn’t see my friend Jamie Cardoso, I decided to take seat D4 at the front of the room.

This was the best decision I made for quite a while. Few minutes later, the ATI guy who was making a presentation of the new ATI FireGL cards started the draw for a prize.

For whatever reason, my seat D4 got choosen and I won the ATI FireGLV7200. I didn’t fully understand what it meant until I checked the documentation and realised that this card is one of the ATI top of the range graphic card.

For the kind of stuff I do in 3d, I was never really bothered with graphic cards in the past but that one will fit perfectly in my new Core 2 Duo system and it has already replaced my crappy Radeon X600.

I had decided to do a bit more anatomical modeling this term and this is just the perfect timing. 41.6GB memory bandwidth per second for Zbrush can’t hurt, can it?