The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Great CTN Pixar roundtable during showing diversity at Pixar. Hosted by none other that Luis Gonzalez, the talks centers around how Pixar artists Paul Abadilla, MontaQue Ruffin and Mike Yates got into animation, and they kindly share their journey up to joining Pixar.
Related post:
http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2012/11/26/back-from-ctn-part-i/
Back in 2008, I was privileged to attend Ed Catmull’s keynote at Siggraph as a Microsoft/Rare representative.
During his talk, Ed Catmull looked back at the mistakes Pixar did in its early years and the secrecy surrounding their technologies was one of them.
Instead he explained, everyone would benefit if studios became more open about their projects and technologies.
Fast forward to 2020, Ed Catmull stayed true to his words and everyone is now fully acquainted with Disney’s Ptex and other Pixar’s USD but did you know that Blue Sky and Dreamworks have also embraced the idea of sharing their ideas?
Few days ago, I shared an old article from the Blue Sky’s tech blog on Linkedin and I was astonished by the success it received. In the space of few days, my post, received a little bit less than 3.5k views on a blog post I had assumed everyone had already read and no, the article became viral.
Most animation related websites are too mainstream those days and not technology focused enough so it is easy to fall out of the loop. When using a 3d software, yes you can pretend you are working like a 2d animator but realistically, you are more like the pilot of a fighter plane and need to keep an eye on your memory use, processes and autosaves.
For anyone wanting to stay up to date for at least what the main Feature animation studios are doing, I would highly recommend to bookmark the following links and keep an eye on what is being discussed.
The Blue Sky tech blog is a fairly new one and I read some really interesting articles there, one of them regarding the gamification of Quality Checks (Introducing achievements into QC).
This is the historical animated feature tech website that goes all the way back to 2009.
Last year’s “Optimizing rig manipulation with GPU and parallel evaluation” Siggraph paper doesn’t appear though. It will eventually I am sure so use the link just above to read an abstract and watch the accompanying video.
Dreamworks research and development:
This is the Dreamworks treasure cove. Loads of information about their proprietary software and other tech.
Where it all started!
I hope this is useful to you. Don’t hesitate to share.
Short but insightful video where Sharon Calahan and Adam Habib walk us through the cinematography of some of the sequences from Pixar’s latest movie “Onward”.
Animation Collaborative or AnimC for short is the brick and mortar animation school situated right opposite Pixar in Emeryville.
Having personally witnessed the awesomeness of the school in the past, I mentioned the school few times already on this blog and what some of you might not be aware of, is that Pixar’s Directing Animator Michal Makarewicz and the AnimC crew, post a series of insightful tips on the AnimC facebook page which you might want to check out:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/AnimationCollaborative/posts/?ref=page_internal
Having been out of animation school for quite a while now, I tend to forget or might not be aware about the latest tips and tricks of the industry so it is great to be able to stay in the loop from the comfort of social medias.
Here is one of the latest tips AnimC posted and that people might not be aware of:
Related posts:
I don’t think I ever posted that old video where Supervising Animator Scott Clark, takes us behind the scenes and quickly features Pixar’s animation software, Presto, and Sulley’s dance shot from Monsters University.
I love the little aparté on Motion Capture and I can only agree:
“It isn’t realism that we are trying to get in animation, I would just be a Mocap artist (otherwise), I wouldn’t be an animator.”
Related posts:
I was lucky to have Albert Lozano as character design teacher while attending Animation Collaborative in 2011 but my drawing abilities didn’t allow me to make the most of that great opportunity.
Albert rarely appears on social medias so it was great to find this little video insight into Albert’s thought process when designing characters, starting from simple shapes based on the personality of the characters.
Related posts:
Few month ago I was joining Dwarf animation in sunny Montpellier to work on the Monsters Inc TV series and today, Disney finally announced “Monsters at work, the TV series based on the Monsters inc universe.
The project is looking stunning and obviously I can’t say more than what was made public so if you are eager to know more about it, head off to the Pixar Pod where T.J. and Julie did a brilliant detective work! 😉
https://www.pixarpost.com/2019/06/monsters-at-work-logo.html
If you have liked my old Toy Story lip sync article, you will love this little video where I am studying the lip sync of a shot from Pixar’s forthcoming movie “Onward”.
Ideally, you want to download the video and play it frame by frame with a media player like KMPlayer, Keyframe MP or RV for the lucky ones.
It is also possible to play the videos frame by frame in Youtube and Vimeo after pausing the video. Use Shift + Left or Right arrow in Vimeo, coma (,) or dot (.) in Youtube.
Related post:
This article is the third of a three part series
Pixar animation software part 1
Pixar animation software part 2
I have just found a very old Pixar presentation where Pete Docter demonstrates an antique version of Pixar’s animation software Menv (Presto) running on Silicon Graphics.
The concept hasn’t changed much but the software allows much more finessing nowadays.
Have a look and compare to the latest iteration of the software featured in Part I and Part II below.
Related posts:
Pixar animation software Part I
Pixar animation software Part II
Many red moons ago, Disney partnered with Double Negative to bring to the screen Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel “John Carter of Mars” and more specifically the character animation of the Tharks under the helm of Pixar brain trustee/ “Finding Nemo’s” director Andrew Stanton.
Here are few behind the scenes videos and a great animation process walkthrough by Patrick Giusiano followed by a series of related articles.
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/a-world-away-john-carter/
https://digitalmediaworld.tv/in-depth/467-john-carter-and-the-creatures-of-mars
