Animation with a moustache

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

Tagged: workflow

“This is what you need”, blocking 2

Animation / Education

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“This is what you need”, blocking

Here is the blocking for my “This is what you need” shot. I also shot some new video reference footage for Anakin as the previous video wasn’t very strong or interesting.

I am incorporating Blender more and more to my workflow as it has some amazing tools really suited to the Animation pipeline. Here I am able to write some notes on the video reference to single out some elements of interest. Other people like Jeff Gabor would edit their video reference in Premiere but I find it simpler and cheaper to use the Grease Pencil keys in Blender’s Dope Sheet editor.

New video reference, no sound (yep I am a cartoon but you knew that already):

Blocking:

The box at the beginning is a placeholder for the boxed Darth Vader outfit. I might add 12 frames at the very beginning it just so the first cut doesn’t come so early. I ran out of time and didn’t manage to fully flesh out Anakin or even the facial poses but with the help of the video reference, I think we know exactly what I am aiming for.

Related posts:
“This is what you need”, planning
“This is what you need’, gathering references
Blender
Jeff Gabor webcast recording online

Brave concept art and teaser 11

Animation / Character design / Modeling

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Brave concept art and teaser

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYg0VgPy6Uk[/youtube]

Pixar just released a teaser for next years feature Brave (previously titled The Bear and the Bow) along with some character designs.

Those designs have definitely a Pixar feel to them as they immediately remind us of The Incredibles or Up. Some commentators compared Lord Macintosh to Muntz and the Wise Woman to a Carl Fredericksen in drag 🙂

My favourite are actually Lord Macintosh and the Wise Woman as they are much more graphic than the other character. As a matter of fact I have decided to model those two in order to better understand the Pixar style and improve my modeling skills.

Updated version after the release of the movie

I modelled Lord Macintosh in Maya starting from a plane and using the edge extrusion technique in order to quickly create some edge loops then refined the base shape by cutting faces, merging and moving vertices around. Nothing too fancy. I have some experience with that type of modelling but I think I will try the Zbrush approach for the Wise Woman. My friend Richie just showed me the work of Tom Parker, an incredible Zbrush modeler that can knock out a piece in less than two hours.

Here is the timelapse, I only recorded the first few hours as the final “vertex cleaning/edge rerouting” pass is too tedious to watch. I hope you will find this interesting, the video is a sequence of automated screenshots hence the choppiness.

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

via http://www.cartoonbrew.com/pixar/brave-characters.html

Related posts:
Lord Macintosh update
Modeling blog category

Maya, mel scripts for animation 6

Animation / Education

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Maya, mel scripts for animation

[update] I don’t use the GI joe script anymore and now go with Mental ray GI preset. I no more use Lluis Llobera Reset Channels script anymore, I just zero things out in the Maya channel editor.

I created a set of icons for the mel scripts I use the most. Click on the picture to download them all and also a nifty Xsheet script someone created for me.

maya_icons.jpg

Gi_Joe lighting script for cheap Global Illumination

Michael Comet’s autotangent download the whole cometScripts.zip pack and only extract autoTangent.mel He also has some cool parenting scripts but that’s an other story. [update] I currently use a hotkey for that one since the only value I use is the magic 4.2

Luis Llobera Make button and Reset channels. LLMakeButton IS A MUST!!!!!!

Pose2shelf

Zoomerate great to zoom and pan into your camera view without moving your shot camera. Perfect when animating fingers or eyelids in the camera view.

Tween Machine by Justin Barrett. An other must have script!!! It allows you to create linear breakdowns while in step mode and favour the previous or next pose. I just upgraded to version 2. The new interface takes a bit more screen space but you now have the option to use buttons or a slider, great for people suffering from RSI.

An other script I use all the time is Aaron Koressel ackSliceCurves. I use it so much that instead of a button I just use “Shift + b” as a hotkey, b being the “set key” hotkey for me. This script is great if your default tangents are set to step.

ackSliceCurves

Xsheet is a little mel script someone on CG talk created for me. The script tells you on the viewport how far you are from the previous keypose. Great to learn about timing.

Related post:
Animation hotkeys