Animation with a moustache

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

Tagged: tutorial

Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial 2

Character design / Drawings / Education / Painting

 by 

Bobby Chiu new free painting tutorial

Bobby Chiu is a very good artist, a very good businessman and still a very generous guy.

I hadn’t followed him for a year or two and while looking for Photoshop painting tutorials for a friend I found that “new” video he posted well … last year.

Unlike his old painting videos, in that 190 minutes long tutorial (9 parts video) he explains his whole painting process from the original scanned sketch to fully rendered. This is probably similar to the paid videos you can get when attending his online art school Schoolism.com.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dib6oA3in0[/youtube]

Since this is a free video, I am also posting my notes, feel free to add comments to these.

Water creature fishing

1. Bring the scanned sketch onto a layer in multiply mode, Bobby work at 33% of the final res
2. Open a second window not the navigator in a corner at about 12% to get an overview
3. Create a backgrond layer in dark grey
4. Add a new layer inbetween sketch and background and work on the tonal values of the character, we establish the base tone.
5. We create a new layer for the cast shadows
6. We create a new layer for the Colors in Color mode

Part 4 Lets bring the lights in:
1. We have been roughing out until now but it is time to zoom in, to add more detail in normal mode
2. Upmost layer in Normal mode we add the light so the sketch disappears

Part 7 Adding a secondary rim light

Part 8 Make an overal Levels change to make the painting much lighter. I would actually do the exact opposite so the dark area would have more details rather than creating flat dark areas… strange workflow

Ah and while I was getting ready to post this….. I just received a notification that Bobby Chiu posted an other AWESOME video interview with Pixar story artist Alex Woo. Alex was Tom Gately’s substitute teacher at AnimC last week and the class had a really fun time with him. Alex is a gesture drawing teacher in San Francisco and his class is usually sold out month in advance, he also holds a very popular class at Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism

As a side note, using the 75qs0 promo code when registering on the Schoolism website, you should get a nice discount and it will also help to fund my Philz coffee addiction 😉

Related posts:
Dice Tsutsumi interview
Bobby Chiu interview

Low polygon modeling 6

Education / Modeling

 by 

Low polygon modeling

Low polygon modelling, opposed to “high frequency modeling” (the stuff done in Zbrush or Mudbox), is the basics of modelling. Any software can handle that type of work nowadays, from the free Blender to the extremely expensive Maya, 3dsmax or XSI packages.

There are two approaches to low polygon modeling:

1. A top-down approach where you start directly with a square plane whose edges you extrude following the final edge loops.

2. A bottom-up approach where you start modeling from a cube that you gradually subdivide by adding edges or extruding faces.

Both techniques are so simple that they only require a subdivide toggling hotkey (3 in Maya) and a handful of tools which I featured in my ‘Low Polygon modeling tools’ post.

The Edge extrusion method was extensively demonstrated by Kolby Jukes back in the days he used XSI as his primary modeling software. All his videos are offline as he only does Mudbox “High frequency sculpting” nowadays but the Edge extrusion technique is the technique I featured in my latest modeling timelaps video based on Brave’s Lord Macintosh character so have a look at this:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25620952[/vimeo]

If you are not familiar with modeling, what I did here was to put the original concept art on a plane in the background then create a second smaller plane whose edges I extruded following an edge flow mental picture I had. The edge flow being the minimum amount of flowing edges necessary to describe the muscles, skeletal structure or deformation of the surface. Whaooo that was complicated! Well instead of just projecting a grid of edges on the surface of the head, I am creating a minimal amount of edge loops and rings that follow the creases facial expressions will produce. Makes sense?

Bay Raitt was probably the first one to fully demonstrate the Cube approach in that ground breaking 1999 “One afternoon with Bay Raitt” Mirai timelapse video.

This is the one I used in my Rickshaw modeling timelapse video:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6857488[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6825067[/vimeo]

I think the video is self explanatory, if not, post a comment and I will add more explanation in my post

Related posts:
Pixar “Brave” concept art and teaser
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of animation
Posts in the Modeling category

Francesco Giroldini, lighting tutorials 9

Education

 by 

Francesco Giroldini, lighting tutorials

I wanted to write a well thought post about Francesco Giroldini but my priority is animation and not journalism so a quick post should do it for now.

For the past few years students from Ringling have been producing some really nice shortfilms. Few weeks ago I did a fair amount of research to know the school a bit better and two things struck me. The first one being that Renderman is the default software they use to render their shortfilm and the second one that most shortfilms are a two, but more often, a ONE man job. Character design (based on a caricature of themselves, what a good idea!), modelling, rigging (using The Setup Machine), animating, rendering and even compositing! By the way, there is a mention of a software called Tsunami in their credits, anyone knows what this is?

Justin Sklar gave a pretty good breakdown for his shortfilm Helga on AnimatedBuzz
“All of the preproduction work was done over the course of about 8 weeks. Modeling, rigging, layout, and the vast majority of the animation were all done in about 4 months and then I spent another 4 months on lighting, final textures, and compositing.”

The good thing about this is that you can claim all the work yours. Most french schools have teams of 5 and upward people and looking at their showreels it is near impossible to know who did what.

Right, back to the topic, Francesco Giroldini!

Francesco is an Italian Ringling graduate who co-directed the gorgeous “The Monk and the Monkey” 2010 shortfilm. If you missed it, check it out here. It was so well received that an internship at Pixar and a Dreamworks lighting TD job followed.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14441514[/vimeo]

So Francesco is not only an amazing lighter but he is also a really nice guy and he posted loads of tutorials on his blog. I would highly recommend you to check them out as they are directly aimed at people wanting to make their own shortfilm. They deal with dynamic simulation, cloth, hair and he obviously made several tutorials on lighting that are far more interesting than those crappy DVDs explaining every single buttons but don’t tell you how to make the magic happen! Here, Francesco shares his thought process on how he creates light sets and cheat things so they look more … magical.

Watching his tutorial made me realize that more than one light should often be used to create the effect of a rim light for example. Saying this, a Pixar lighting TD told us few weeks ago that they always have a different light set just for the eyes. Light linking and light breaking are your friends!

I hope I tempted you into browsing his blog so here are several posts you should start with.

Ah, I have few Lifehacking tips for you when watching video tutorials:
– always take notes and write down the timecode so you can refer to them at a later time without having to watch the whole thing again, I write all my notes in Microsoft OneNote, OneNote is a great software to centralize and synchronize notes automatically. I keep my source files on my USB stick and they automatically update my desktop and laptop as soon as I plug the USB key.
– KMPlayer, Quicktime and probably other video players allow you to speed up the playback of videos, I often watch videos between 110% and 120% speed depending on how dense the information is.

Lighing video tutorial
New Lighting Tutorial Stewie
Renderman for Maya lighting and compositing video tutorial
Eye shading and rigging video tutorial

He has plenty more on Mental Ray and Renderman so make sure you bookmark his website and thank him for sharing his knowledge.

Francesco Giroldini

And while we are at praising Ringling, here are some interesting Ringling short films:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25541923[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/4493509[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14219605[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23616948[/vimeo]

Ringling Vimeo Channel
http://www.vimeo.com/channels/ringling2011

Related posts:
Abautorig-part-i-pyro-tutorial
KMPlayer, best player ever!
Microsoft OneNote 2007

abAutorig part I Pyro tutorial 16

Animation / Education

 by 

abAutorig part I Pyro tutorial

If some of you are still struggling to use Supercrumbly’s awesome abAutorig auto-rigging script, or have no clue on how to rig/skin, here is something for you!

The video is real time and has now, me, commenting on the different steps involved. If you double click on the video this will sent you to Vimeo where you can save the Quicktime file in HD!

Let me know what you think!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14722424[/vimeo]






Related post:
abAutorig Part II and III, Pyro tutorial

abAutorig overview, how to create a rig in 5 minutes 15

Animation / Character design / Education

 by 

abAutorig overview, how to create a rig in 5 minutes

[update] if you found that video through Google and missed the Pyro abAutorig tutorial make sure you check the following series of posts for a full tutorial with audio explanations and skinning tips. Original post after the link]

abAutorig Pyro tutorial Part I

The following video is a quick 5 minutes intro to the excellent abAutorig mel script.

Double Click on the Vimeo logo to get the full screen video in full HD res.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/10220416[/vimeo]

Related post:
abAutorig Pyro tutorial
Autorig tutorial preparation work part 04
Autorig tutorial prep work 03
Autorig tutorial prep work 02
Autorig tutorial prep work 01
Low polygon modeling tools

Jamie in “3d World” issue 126 1

Friends

 by 

Jamie in “3d World” issue 126

3dworld magazine

3dworld magazine

Following the release of his new book “Realistic Architectural visualization with 3ds max and mental ray”, my friend Jamie Cardoso was asked to write an article about Mental Ray for the january edition of “3d world” (issue 126).

I didn’t get a chance to read it yet but knowing Jamie, this is probably a very thorough article demonstrating the abilities of Mental Ray when used in Visualization.

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=3d_world_126_now_on

Related post:
Mental Ray for visualisation second edition