Links added

Posted on September 14, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Miscellaneous

There are few websites I regularly visit and thought it would be a good idea to share those links with you. I have now updated my links on the right hand side and also added something that is supposed to help people to keep track of updates on the blog. I still have to understand how it works but I think I have done what I am supposed to do to make it work. If someone can explain to me how it works exactly I will be very happy. At the moment I use the Sage plugin for Firefox and I don’t really understand what the fuzz is about.

Now regarding blogger, the system works ok and does the job for many people but lacks of few features for me. Sometimes Blogger server takes for ever to upload my posts, there is no keywords option etc… I originally thought about developing my own solution but I am not too sure how to handle the archiving. I looked at other solutions like WordPress but couldn’t figure out where to put the settings for my ftp and don’t feel like having my infos stored on a third party server (well…).

Ok that’s it for today. I will create a new post with my latest AM assignment in few minutes.

[edit] I just realised that I plugged 4 PDI people. It’s not because I worship that company even if Madagascar was just the BEST CG CARTOON EVER 😉 but more because those talented people happen to share a lot about their knowledge.

Animation compilation 02

Posted on September 7, 2006 | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor

This is in no way what I would send to a company in order to get a job but I still decided to make a compilation of my animation work till now just for reference and for people who want to know what level I am at right now.

Once I get a chance to find a bit more time, I will go and rework all those assignments except the bouncing ball and the poses since I think that those are fine compared to the rest.

For the south park animation I am working on a new short with my friend Osagie and hopefully this will replace it.

Animation compilation Septembre 2006

My own VTS

Posted on September 4, 2006 | 4 Comments
Filed under Animation

Here we go. Today I had my first personal VTS. I don’t want to upset anyone so let’s just say that I am happy.

Olive

Showreel WIP

Posted on September 2, 2006 | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation Mentor

Here is the WIP of my Showreel.

Maciek has got a blog

Posted on September 1, 2006 | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation

I forgot to mention my friend Maciek’s blog

Olive

Mel scripts survival kit

Posted on September 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

Here is a list of Mel scripts you might need to speed up your animation process.

Tween machine by Justin Barrett
For people working in step mode, this will help you to create inbetweens between 2 poses and to favour one of those poses. Basically you don’t need to go into linear, set or copy a pose, move it around, go back to step, the script does it automatically and offers you a slider to favor a pose.

Pose2shelf not to sure about the url. I will probably post it on my blog. Allows you to save poses and apply them again. I use it to copy poses from one file to an other.

I will put some screenshot someother day.

Olive

tonight drawing

Posted on August 30, 2006 | 1 Comment
Filed under Drawings

I have decided like many great animators to start working on my drawing skills. Being able to sketch your ideas is the best thing ever when working in a production environment. My goal for the next few month will be to do one good sketch a day…

I tried to draw in photoshop but the best combination I found for sketching so far is my Wacom graphire 3 for the Hardware and PAP free version for the software. Too bad there are no layers and no colors but that should be enough to get me started. Oh and to get a better feel, I actually put a sheet of paper between the tablet and the pen. I found that the smooth feel of the wacom tablet didn’t work for me.

Olive

Youtube.com I hate you

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Life hack

Just to give a bit of balance with my previous post 😉

I can’t stand those crappy Flash encoded videos. First the quality is bad, second the colors are completly off and third, not being able to watch a video frame by frame is just plain silly for animators. [this is actually the reason why I ripped all my DVDs and now enjoy watching them frame by frame using VirtualDub]

Luckily some guys came up with a plugin for Firefox that will allow you to download the videos onto your hardrive as flv files that you will then reencode using some software whose name I forgot… Don’t worry I will give you the links when I come home.

Olive

Timing in Animation

Posted on August 28, 2006 | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

I still haven’t set my mind as if browsing Youtube.com is a waste of time or not but one thing for sure is that it allows us to find Animation Treasures that we would have missed otherwise.

A selection for this week:
9 Old mens’s Ward Kimball interview on Disney Channel

Richard Williams – I Drew Roger Rabbit Part 2
Take your time machine and have Richard Williams give you a lecture on walk cycles live from Soho Square in London.

Last but not least, Glen Keane.

And Roger Rabbit’s rookie animator James Baxter… I call that genius.

Let’s thank Sheridan’s student Alan Cook for all those treasures and don’t forget to check his blog, he has got an ton of animation student’s blog linked.

Olive

Understanding the graph editor

Posted on August 15, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

Here is an introduction to Maya graph editor. The video above is encoded in H264.

As you can see the “Spline tangent mode” is overshootint the curve between Peaks 2 and 3. We are loosing the control over the motion between the 2 poses.

In linear mode the motion is very robotic, very…. linear 😉

Step mode. This is the option we normally choose to block our animation. We go from one pose to the next with no transition.

In this example, Clamped, Flat and Plateau don’t present much difference. The difference we can notice is the kink happening in Flat mode on key 4 and the stronger ease in/ease out in Plateau compared to Clamped.

And here is a presentation of Michael Comet’s Autotangent mel script. The video below is encoded using Techsmith codec: