Picker – Animation with a moustache

January 19, 2020

dAnimPicker (part 2)

This is a follow up to my previous post and once again, I don’t have access to the Disney Feature animation tools so those findings and screen captures are only from various popular behind the scenes videos, some of them are posted below. This said…. I never ever managed to see any pickers from BlueSky studios!

Disney animation fans and especially animators, are very familiar with dAnimPicker, the Disney animation picker, a good looking and very functional picker with some really cool features (zoom and pan), similar to the AnimSchool picker and the good old abxPicker.

The dAnimPicker has some great additional features like the pickwalk, to easily navigate from control to control, and anchors, to quickly jump to predefined position like the face picker, or body picker.

Kristof and Anna facial and body pickers

You can see the interaction between the animator and the picker, 9:03 into the following video:

Having never seen that sort of picker in past researches, I was really surprised when I came across two similar looking pickers: Locus and Character Toolkit Designer.

After bumping on Locus through Pinterest with a totally unrelated research, I was finally able to track a video demo of the apparently commercially available picker from Korean based Locus Animation studios. (there are more demos on the Vimeo channel).

The similarity with dAnimPicker is pretty striking but wait until you see Character Toolkit designer!

The resemblance is stricking right?

I am not sure if ILM TD Davoud Ashrafi, the creator of the tool, is the actual creator of the Disney picker or if he just got inspired by it as he keeps mentioning, but the demo on his Vimeo channel is fascinating. The creation part of the tool very exciting compared to other tools and I especially love the mirroring feature, this would have saved me a lot of time.

Let’s finish up this post with more related Disney behind the scenes videos and don’t skip the Wreck it Ralph videos where you can also see the body controls visible in the Maya viewport. Pickers are good when the screen is too cluttered but on-screen controls are preferable.

In 3:02 of the following video, you will see the eyelashes controls. Crazy right! I already mentioned that the animators shape the eye lids at Disney in a previous article.

In the following videos, we can see how the animators (here Disney guests) interact with the body parts directly in the viewport.

Related posts:

http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2020/01/17/disney-gui-picker/

http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2020/01/06/tangled-notes-on-eye-lids-and-eye-lashes/

Previous articles related to Tangled:

http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/index.php?s=tangled

Disney GUI picker / dAnimPicker part 1

Disclaimer: Much to my regret, I don’t work for Disney Feature Animation but DTVA (Disney TV) so I don’t have access to any of the tools demonstrated here and as such I am not breaching any NDA. The content is just extracted from publicly available material.

If you are interested in dAnimPicker, the Disney character picker, and if you want to know how the brows are controlled at Disney, here is a short clip I extracted from a Moana Behind the Scene video.

I think I am recognizing Disney head of animation Malcon Pierce here, and if you pay attention, you will probably notice that he is shaping the brows using only a main control, 3 secondary controls and probably navigating between them using his keyboard using a pickwalking feature.

The light blue control is the main brow and the darker ones are the secondary (inner and mid brow). The dark circular just above is probably the outer brow.