Animation with a moustache

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

Animation with a moustache Blog

Mel scripts survival kit 0

Animation

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Mel scripts survival kit

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 1

Drawings

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tonight drawing

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 0

Life hack

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Youtube.com I hate you

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 3

Animation / Education

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Timing in Animation

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 0

Animation

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Understanding the graph editor

understanding the graph editor

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:

understanding the graph editor

Next time I will post a presentation of Justin Barrett TweenMachine

Screenshots of the first video

understanding the graph editor

understanding the graph editor

understanding the graph editor

He came from outer space… 3

Animation Mentor

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He came from outer space…

I finally handed my fisherman final and already got my ecritique. Michelle is an awesome mentor who really cares about her mentees. It was crap as usual but thanks to Keith Lango VTS 17 freebie and our new lecture by ILM’s Delio Tramontozzi I feel like I know where I am going now.

If you haven’t heard about Keith Lango’s VTS yet, this is the missing link. This is what will allow you to apply the “Illusion of life”‘s principle into your favourite 3d package (3dsmax obviously 😉 ).

Delio’s lecture is a dialogue walkthrough. I got fed up with having mentors using crappy Macs and it was very refreshing to see him using Windows XP 😉

This week we have to choose 3 lines from movies we want to animate on. We already got our new rig Bishop and …… he is just sooooo cute.

Here is a quick and dirty walkcycle with our new Animation Mentor rig “Bishop”. It’s a really nice rig.

South Park 0

Portfolio

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South Park

Next week once I am done with the current shot, I am starting production of a short animation with my friend Osagie using the same technique I used for that South Park animation above.

To wet your appetite or make you wonder what goes on in our head, let’s say that it is the story of a guy and a schizophrenic vending machine 😉

We are gonna reuse Che Puchacho rig, story board is already done but will be tighten on the animatic pass. My friend Vincil will probably help us for the sound track.

session 304 This is getting better 0

Animation Mentor

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session 304 This is getting better

304 assignment

I am feeling better this week. After screwing up my blocking completly, I finally got to understand what animation is about.

This is a splined version of my failed blocking with some parts done with the new workflow. I have to put more breakdowns on the end bit and blend the poses a bit better on the jump sequence.

I am having a good time animating in Max but in 2 weeks it is time to go back to Maya in order to use the rig provided by the school (more later). Hopefully by then a new release on Maya with a 21st century arc tracker will come out ;-).

September is coming, I can’t hold my guns anymore and decided to splash out all my savings in what will allow me to achieve great work. I therefore bought a new Wacom Intuos3 for which I completly customized the “ExpressKeys”. I am able to animate entirely from the tablet. The “Expresskeys” have been remapped to do CTRL, ALT, Shift, Alt+W, open the Graph editor, go full screen, and navigate frame by frame using the slider. This is just heaven! The tablet will also help me to give life to my models using Zbrush and some fancy software just about to be released 😉

Last but not least, I have also decided to replace my Sempron 2.6Ghz with a decent processor in the shape of the new Intel Dual Core 2, due to come out this week. I have set my eyes on the 6600 for about £220 this is not cheap but reading several reviews and benchmarks… THIS IS A KICK ASS PROCESSOR!!!! 😉 I will also have to buy a new Mobo and some ram but the upgrade of my machine was long overdue.

What else… I am working on a new website www.monza-interiors.com the backend is pretty much finished with some fancy php/mysql oh I should actually give a link to this website we did a while ago. www.stagknight.com we got really disapointed when we saw the trailer and I am not sure we will ever see the colour of the money we were promised… Anyway the website is nice, only frontend stuff in flash.

303 0

Animation Mentor

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303

Here is what I handed in today…. bad workflow…. This was using my mocap workflow, I will probably have to redo it from scratch using a proper animation workflow.. I didn’t even have time to work on the eyes and with this technique this is gonna be too painfull so we will see what I decide tomorrow…