Introducing a new character, initially called.. Boy Rig! Vanilla flavored. And then I thought he could be a Huckleberry, cuz he only has one pair of pants and his shirt is somewhere out to dry in the sun..
He's inspired by Pixar's latest opus. I got busy after seeing their first Luca teaser, which I think is the perfect 1 minute little story btw.. I wish I could make one that good, it's not easy to make some sense of a story, characters, and setting, in just 1 minute of film. So I wanted to do some facial animation, but I was unhappy with the free [and not-free] off-the-shelf rigs out there. I wanted a clean face rig, with perfect clean splines, no wobbly imperfections.. as much as possible. It's crazy hard to keep all shapes clean tho, and I've definitely not reached perfection yet. :D My face rig is also not as flexible as others, it's somewhat limited. And this is my rigging philosophy basically. The idea is to easily achieve certain shapes, at the expense of detailed, localized control [which could muddy up things]. It's supposed to be used for clean, pixarish shapes, Luca-style, not for realistic FACS-based animation, and not for Everything You Could Possibly Dream Of. So for example, pretty much all face rigs I ever used have one way to open to mouth. I have multiple ways to achieve different Aaah ans Ooos. And the animator is supposed to get a bit artsy at times, with teeth positioning, maybe ears tweaking for best angles, but especially with mouth shapes. The eyes are supersimple, only basic blinking is allowed, no shaping of the eyelids. For above-mentioned style reasons. I'm thinking of offering this as a Free Rig, but it needs a few more tweaks. : ] For now, just a quick face animation test. Audio file extracted from this little gem called Stand by Me [1986]. And a quick preview of the face UI. It's a lot of fun to use! :D
Responsible for all keyframe animation in this reel.
You can find bits of mocap in the Lord of Change shots [the big Vulture thing] and the gigantic Mammoth's human victim. I also modeled and rigged the frightened Tortuga. All rigs, free or proprietary, are credited in the video. Music: John Williams - 1941 OST.
..and the Slide thing.
Animation reference: a cat. Found on a random YouTube video. Yeah, I looked for all sorts of cats and dogs and other small animals for inspiration and/or reference. The most interesting stuff I found was this cat, struggling to climb a slide, and eventually running away from it. I changed it a bit here and there, but the performance is somewhat similar. And adapted a bit to Max, who is.. not a cat.
Max is a fun free rig from characterrigs.com. Today is Animation Thinking Day. I would like to share some of my thoughts on animation. [not my drawing] I thought of writing a few animation tips with a personal touch. I'm not going to mention the usual suspects, like Anticipations, Overlaps, Lines of Action, Squashes, Stretches, and so on. My focus is on realism/naturalism, but some of these ideas are general enough. Without any further storytelling, here we go! Tips: 1. Think 3D. Pose 3D. Animate 3D. Even in 2D. Love your Round Curves and Wobbles and Figure 8s. Don't let things go linearly forward on a 2D plane. Move your creature in 3D space, turn it around and twist things and go crazy! Rotate your camera a lot around your main poses, and think of what else could be more dimensional. 2. Consider Dynamic Range. Don't make everything big. Don't make everything subtle. Consider range and contrast carefully. Big is only big when contrasted with small. And vice versa. Real Life movement is often on the slow side, subtle, and infinitely detailed.. but still has contrast, and can sometimes, not very often, feel really big! 3. Change Stuff. Retime, Readjust, and Repose. Edit bravely, courageously.. not subtly. Dare to actually change things. Be disrespectful to your animations, don't get married to one or two ideas. If something doesn't work, try something else, don't massage details forever if the animation is not working. Writing is rewriting. Animating is.. uhm.. reanimating? 4. Try Other Ways. Of animating. No, seriously, I know there aren't many. But if you usually work Pose to Pose, try animating the Spine first, and hide the limbs. If you usually Inbetween a lot, try going straight to Splines, from basic blocking. If you don't limit your timeline enough, try that, work on smaller bits of animation at a time. If you rely too much on video reference, try free-styling. If you do too much realistic animation, try zany cartoons. If you have never drawn animation, try posing in 2D. So on. Reshuffle your bag of animation tricks and learn new ones. 5. Add Juice. Add detail where it needs to be. Don't skip detail, don't make things faster cuz you don't know what to do between poses. Study references, get inspired. Favor slower timing and add detail. 6. Push for Accuracy. Instead of pushing your animation to be more exaggerate, try to push it to be more accurate. Add natural detail, charm, and life to your animations, by being a more accurate translator. Reality and Animation are two languages, and our job is to be good translators. It's both Science and Dark Art. Sometimes accurate Science is more important. Sometimes Art. In both cases, understanding the Science helps the Art. 7. Stay real. Look at live action reference. Study nature. Anything can work as inspiration or even reference for animation, but I think there is nothing more surprising, more insightful, and more charming.. than the real world. Of course, we have to consider Style tho, so if you happen to be working on zany Cow & Chicken animations, then just ignore most of this and.. go zany! [also not my drawing!]
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3 tennis shots done for fun on AM's free rig. And edited to kind of look like there are 2 Stewarts playing tennis..
Demo reel update. I finally managed to render my shots.. presentably. I'm not a fan of fancy renderings in animation demo reels, or anything that can hide animation quality.. like camera movement, especially camera shakes, depth of field, motion blur, you name it.. even textures. Textures can make shapes read better, but dense, busy textures, can do quite the opposite. I like to see animation as raw and as clear as possible. So.. that's what I'm trying to do here. The quality rendering, as opposed to Maya viewport, I think helped a lot tho'. Ground contacts and shapes read better, and the overall image is cleaner, clearer.. : > Now I don't even know why I was such a big fan of rendering Maya viewports anymore. But the clarity that comes in a final render is something that worries me a bit.. when working in the Maya viewport I don't get to see the shapes and especially contacts between things as clearly as in a final render. So I'm playblasting, looks OK.. I hit render.. oops. I thought I was done with that animation.. now back to polish. Fix this and that, hit playblast, looks OKish.. I hit render.. oops! Back to fixing annoying, smallish things, again and again and again.. I've also re-timed my 30 FPS gamey shots, tweaked some details.. and now I finally have one 24 FPS reel instead of two reels. Amen. I'm still tinkering.. I want to add a Kayla shot or something. |
About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
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