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:

Next time I will post a presentation of Justin Barrett TweenMachine

Screenshots of the first video

305 Gear change (kind of final) and audio clips

Posted on August 12, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor

Here is my “gear change” shot. Still a lot of work to do on this but Michelle has been very positive and there is a chance this could look great with a bit more work

This is my selection for my first dialogue shot. Youhou! Dialogue shot!

He came from outer space…

Posted on August 7, 2006 | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation Mentor

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

Posted on August 5, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Portfolio

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

Posted on July 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
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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

Posted on July 23, 2006 | Leave a Comment
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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…

Sculpture class Amanda

Posted on July 21, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Filed under Sculpture

Here is my last sculpture of Amanda. It was done in about 10 hours I think. I didn’t have time to finish the right hear.

It is easy to get carried away doing hair so I left it till the last hour. It doesn’t look like Amanda but I am fairly pleased since it looks like a real woman. Learning Anatomy at Escape studios with Scott Eaton helped me a lot to gain a better understanding of what goes on under the surface of the skin and my sculpture teacher Paul helped me to transfer that knowledge on the clay model.