Code Guardian

http://www.stage6.com/user/Streetcan/video/1648470/Code-Guardian

thought this was pretty cool, video on Stage06

SITE FOR SORE EYES

http://www.henningko.net/media/0807_HenningKOshowreel_web.mov


im speechless. ENJOY!

I call upon All Knights for a Meeting

hello.
summer's gone away and we're all just about ready for our final year at Sheridan. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm excited and at the same time curious to see how thing whole year will turn out.

I know there are a few of us doing a 3d production this year and I call upon those Knights for a meeting to pass on idears, questions and concerns, and discuss how we will be approaching this year as individuals.

i really think it would be a good idea to exchange ideas amongst ourselves and to catch up and share how our summer's have been.

cheers
-farrukh.khan-

Samurai

Pixar Online Library

Pixar Online Library

some interesting stuff here i guess as well,
with not a lot of time to spare though i looked through a couple of pdf files and found a lot of mathematical equations in them.

never the less

More Animation Shorts

just click the image to view the animation short

The Tale of How.

Potapych. The Bear That Loved Vodka

The Grandfather of Soul

Siggraph 2007 Surf's Up Course Notes

PDF File
129 pages

i just had a skim through look, seems like a lot of good info to be found here.

A Gentlemen's Duel

I thought this was pretty impressive, a short by Blur Studio.

Animation Question

okay i've got a question and maybe somebody out there knows the answer.

does anybody know how to copy the animation keys from one file and apply that animation into a newer file that you are working on?
or perhaps not even a whole animation but you want to use a single pose that you have already made some time long ago and want to use it again.

any ideas?

VFX Programs

Post all your VFX programs and thoughts on the subject so we can all be FIRE GODS!

RealFlow is a good, fairly intuitive program for Fluid Effects. We used it a little bit this year, we ran into trouble with the render farm. It is only 100 bucks to buy and there are a lot of free tutorials on their site.

RealFlow website

-C

Glen Keane Lecture

Cook has this on his blog, it is a great chance to get into the mind of Keane as he animates a scene. Check it out at: Cooked Art - Glen Keane

Free Texture Web-site

I just came across it, I haven't looked into very much. If you guys have a look through it let me know what you think.

http://www.cgtextures.com/

Cheers,
C.

MORE MORE

http://www.martink.no/shortfilms/forever_young.html

Animation Treasures

Animation-Treasures
heres a sweet blog with layout images from classic works of animation. so now there is layout, composition and colour schemes that we can think (and worry) about. so let us better our understanding by analyzing the masters.

Another Great Short

please belive. The character acting is great in this. even though its creature.

Monsters Inc Ending

Another favorite scene from Monsters Inc.

Academy Award Winner Best Animated Short Film 1997

Geri's Game!

Animation - Character Performances

I am starting to look/find examples of scenes of good animated performances to get me pumped for the year. While I am enjoying creature animating (It is a ton of fun) it lacks a lot of the subtleties it take to get an interesting performance out of a character.

Here is a Student Showcase Reel 2007 from Animation Mentor.

KOOZA!

hey guys, Cirque Du Soleil is coming to Toronto, August 9th to September 23. even though this has nothing to do with animation directly it is still art. the sets, the costumes, the music, the performance all unified to make a night to remember. it is definitely outside the box of things that can get you inspired but oh my does it capture you like a film when you are expiriencing the show in the theatre. (for whom ever has seen Cirque on tv, seeing it Live is a completely different experience, tv does no justice to the feeling and the overall mood achieved by seeing the show first hand.

i was completely blown away when i had the chance to experience cirque du soleil's show Saltimbanco in Paris, France. after the show it made me take out my sketchbook and draw! it was a true inspiration!

so whom ever has the chance and the ability, go see it!

$$$

This is a branch off Andre's previous post.

Can everyone find out how much people in their studios are getting paid? I know this information is usually kept under wraps but try to find out, I am very interested in the reaslitic range in salaries we can expect when we finnish school and the salary to aspire to.

So An Animator And A Rigger/Modeler/Render Walk Into A Bar...

..and the animator says

"hey did you see my final scene today for that project. WOO. Man it was looking sweet. I dont know what you "3D/Rigger" guys complain about. I mean...Your jobs easy. you just rig it the way I want and I spend all the time animating the damn thing. Then all the rendere does is sit there and push buttons. HAHA! We rock. Man my scene was killer!"

rigger says

"Hey did you see my pay check today.WOOOOOOOO. Had more digits than you could ever animate. "

A low blow but Im sure at least someone besides me has heard a convo kinda like this in the studio. The pro star animator taking the rigger/modeler/renders job for granted.

You guys are all great cuz i wish I could do half the things you guys do. But seriously. In the studios you guys are at what do they want to see from someone (a grad/junior animator) to get a job. And also how much do they get paid. Im traditioanlly doing my film (in flash for 2D and flash jobs) but I am spending my time at Red Rover learning 3D for 3D jobs.

Scripts, Shelves, Mel, Shortcuts ect...

This one is for anyone currently working at a 3D animation studio this summer.

I'm sure your various companies are using custom scripts, shelves etc.. in Maya (if you are using Maya). I think this could be very beneficial to us all if we could (if possible/allowed) grab those things and bring them back and share them with everyone; it can only benefit the production pipeline for our film.

What are your thoughts on this?

Light Thoughts

Ooo, okay, so.. We had a guest speaker at BioWare the other day who works as a lighter for Blue Sky. It was a fairly basic talk unfortunately, he spoke about 3 point lighting and the types of lights he uses. One of the good take aways was that they don't use global illumination, they use ambient occlusion, he mentioned that very few studios do use GI.

I did tests with GI and of course I found that it was extremely slow. I have not tested out ambient occlusion yet but I have heard it is much faster and comparable quality. Does anyone know anything about the subject?

hilarious

Story Focus

hello mates,
now i'm not here to say something that you guys already dont know but I've been getting questions about how many characters i have and whatnot. So here's what i've done and as a INSPIRED student of FILM MAKING (as we all are) my technique has worked for me and if you give it a try, who knows, it might work for you too.
At the beginning stages of my story for 4th year film, i was so excited to do a "perfect" film with 3-4 characters and with 3 background/layouts, including a human arm/hand, cause of the way the story was written. I did a reality check...7 months...theres NO WAY i will be able to achieve it to the standards i want this film to be. so i did revisions on the story and got rid of 2 characters and then i thought the story is PERFECT. I then went to my source of inspiration (reasons why i'm here doing animation) and went back to my script and learned that there are better ways to approach some of the things i had typed up so i edited more and more. So during two weeks of going back and forth with the storyline and inspiration, I've come to the script where i'm happy. i've been asking myself as to HOW to tell something in a affective way without changing the story and its worked so...
to answer some question that i've been asked, I have ONE character, one location, and i'm personally aiming for 45-60 seconds of animation and hoping to finish around March/April...
I'm currently taking time off from 4th year film over the weekends to catch up on some movies and games =)
thats important too.
cheers guys, hope it helped
-farrukh.khan-

4th year Blog, my friends =)

hey guys. i'm loving this blog, good stuff...

i'm sorry i've been busy with just work as i'm sure you All are. so i've been working with an idea that i'd come out with some time ago in early stages of 3rd year and i stuck with it cause i thought it would be a cool story to do.

i know i know...we all should be open to other ideas, true but having said that, i made a promise to stick to it so i can hopefully finish something. also i wanted to see if i can work on ONE thing for a long period of time =) anyway nuff said. i've gotten the blog up for my 4th year. http://dalastsupper.blogspot.com/

these are some concepts that i wanted to share with you guys/ everyone more to come. hopefully soon =)

comments and positive criticism is always welcome

cheers

-farrukh.khan-

Houdini9 Beta release!

Yo! Just a heads up on this: Side Effects Software has just released a beta for Houdini9 and it's free for everyone to download and use... well, it's only the apprentice edition but it's still great. You may have heard that it's perhaps the best 3D software available but impossible to use, but with this new release, things will change and that steep learning curve has becomes a lot easier to climb. Anyway, check it out if you guys are interested! (download here)

Sigg Jones

Oldie but a goodie!!! I particularly like the shot composition and graphic design in this.

Making of Le Building

I know this video is a few years old, though I thought it could inspire. It's an overview of how they approached modeling, rigging, texturing, compositing and animation.

Fallen Art

Another great favorite short.

The Big Story

Hey guys..this is definitely a short that's inspired me for next year. It's some of the best stop motion I've ever seen! I've been watching alot of awesome film too..the Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, Double Indemnity, Vertigo...and a few others. Im pretty sure this particular piece won an academy award about 10 years ago also.

The incredibles - Unreleased Trailer

We should post a bunch of shorts that we can find that inspire. Here is an amazing trailer/short. We've all seen it, but one more time can't do anything but help.

Jason Deamer - ‘Ratatouille.’

Check out this interview on CGTalk with Designer Jason Deamer who created
characters for ‘Ratatouille.’

Interview here!

Blogs, Blogs, Blogging

for those of you guys who might not be aware of this take note, im just trying to pass the word along. anyways a few sites to note that i think need to be added to the side list for our reference.
since Cliff is our all masterful lord and king who controls this quest (aka blog) maybe he'll add them to a list on the side.

first of all the Spline Doctors blog should be brought to our attention, as Pixar animators post some interesting and mind opening posts, and a great plus is that they relate it to 3d.

and speaking of splines theres a tutorial on Spline Hygene at the Victor Navone blog.

thats all i got for now.

~RATATOUILLE~

I'm just going to have to assume that everyone here has seen this movie....cause if you didnt help support it opening weekend...shame shame on you! Ha ha. Well someone was going to have to write somthing about it eventually so I guess im going to be the one to do that.
First off...this movie was FANTASTIC (for any of you guys who haven't seen it yet). The story was really strong..maybe not as well structured as say "the Incredibles" but my interest never dwindled once throughout the plot. The character animation was beautiful...some say the best since Pinnochio (at least thats what I've been hearing). Now i dont know if i'd personally go as far to make such a claim, because you'd have to disregard alot of other amazing performances we've seen, buuutttt it was sooo rich in character animation (like a SCHMORGUS BOARD!!) on might have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. The organic quality they got into the characters faces was a STEP UP. The Incredibles was well incredible but this was ULTRA INCREDIBLE. I can think of one sequence..Emile in the refridgerator trying to grasp the grapes with his lips. Man it was just gorgeous...totally bridged the 2-D 3-D gap..if there was one after the incredibles. The shadeing and lighting was RETARDED, and the traditional credit sequence was brilliant with a capitol B for BAD ASS!!
Anyways what the hell did you guys think??

~hoggan~ (ohhh yah happy CANUCK DAY!)

Rigging, Part 2

Deformation is the tricky more objective part of rigging. It comes down to good joint placement and good skinning(placement of weights) You can practically solve any problem with that. common area, like you said are wrists and shoulders. They can be easily solved with a "twist" bone solution, where you have multiple bone in line, say for the forearm. Then you weight the mesh to those bones and have them share the rotation of the wrist controller. What I used this year is a modified version of the muscles system from The Art of Rigging. That worked well for solving the wrist problem or the shoulders.

Watch out if you choose to use that method from the book though, the muscle will tend to flip on you. I figured out it was how the Bulge locater is orient constrained to the two end locator's. It does an liner interpolation between, which once the rotation reaching around 180 degrees it tends to flip(CHAOS). It is an easy fix though, instead of linear interpolation, using quaternion space works well. Quaternion ("quarter onion" as coined by Doug) is a different calculation that helps maintain volume. So the fix is to change the orientation constraint interpolation from "No Flip"(which is VERY miss leading) to "Closest" or "Farthest".

That whole method of deforming the skin with Muscles that you have created using lofted Nurbs curves uses them as influence objects. If you are not familiar with influence objects I would suggest trying them out as some tests first. They do not give you total precise control and they are definitely heavy and slow. They are useful on your final render rig, I would leave them off your animation rig.

Actually guys, I am interested in hearing what you guys took away from Dougs class. Doug really helped me out this year, but I was working on a different schedule that his class.

RIGGING MADE EASY..a must know!!

Hey guys I just thought I'd post this to inspire you. We can all achieve greatness just like this talented man..all we have to do is paste our films into the computer. Its as easy at that. (This is gunna be a lot easier than i thought it was!!)
~hoggan~

BBC Motion Gallery, yeah!

Hey guys,

Here is a great source for video reference : BBC Motion Gallery
I have been animating a lot of creatures this summer and it has been a great resource.

Rigging, Part 1

Okay, I am finding it difficult to decide how to start the first post on rigging. So I am just going for it. I am pretty sure you guys know that I always stress the importance of good rigging(yeah, yeah). While it is true that you can get a performance out of anything(a box, a rock, Keanu) but with a more complex character, a good rig makes a world of difference when it comes time to animate.


The Art of Rigging - http://www.cgtoolkit.com/book1.htm

This is definitely a good book to get, while it is not perfect, it covers all the basics and then some. It goes through everything step by step, then gives you the MEL script at the end(if you are interested in learning MEL scripting)

Stop Staring - by Jason Osipa

THE facial rigging book. The Art of Rigging covers alot of this ground but Stop Staring seems to be THE go to book for facial rigging.


Sort of continuing from the topic of Focusing, a rig should be focused or specific to the task that it is needed for. You can save yourself a lot of trouble say for example : Your character never talks, you can cut out on alot of facial setup, or if the character is sitting at a table the entire time, there is no scene in doing a full rig on the lower half(or at all).

The two characters for our film this year I tried to give enough facial setup to get any sort of range of emotion, but they were pretty limited in their mouth shape control. Also, when I was creating the muscles, I tried to only place them in areas where they were definitely needed. I am planning on improving dramatically on the facial setup this year. As for the muscles, even though I got them working by the end of the year, I didn't feel like it was very successful, so I am looking into other methods. One of those might include Pose Space Deformers (PSD) as opposed to the influence object based method I used this year. I think there is enough on that subject for an new post.

P.S. Try and Label your posts so we can keep track.

hello autoTangent!

hey fellow knights hahaha
this blog is awesome and it has finally enabled me to shift my focus on the troubles and the fights ahead. so i think this is awesome.

anyways
one helpful thing i can already relate to you guys is this wonderful tool autoTangent - "Animation utility for nicely smoothing tangents but without overshoot"
it definitely saves a lot of time, so you save the tangent adjustment games for the touch ups stage in the end.

you can find this tool with others that i don't know about here...

ANIMATION/DESIGN FOCUS...HEY! WHERES THE E-2-Da-B-MAN?

Very nice insight cliff. I love this blog for a mojor reason and thats its about animation and film. Even though mine is 2D doesnt mean I cant "pick from the bones" and take things into consideration.

Example. Hoggans one room idea. Brilliant. Its like Robert Mckee said in his story lecture. The smaller the world the more knowledge and the more you can do within it. Very smart Dave.

How does this encorporate in to my world. Well keepin it simple is the underlying. So i keep props, and characters to a minimum and only show what is needed.This is a montra everyone should wake up and chant when warming up to crank out story ideas, characters, props, even light and shadow and texutre..blah blah blah.

Design with purpose.

Two great shorts( i know theres 100's out there) that show this and more.

and

BALLOON: Joseph Kim

and

KAELOU

I think KAELOU

will start another topic such as animation but what I want to bring up is animation style. This is where you as an artist can take classical principles and do more with it if you choose. I gave this to Farrukh cause of the frog in it. Im sure Daves influence would traditional(Marcos Ball / Balloon) but these 3 shorts show range within the realm of animation... I believe.

Just something to think about. I mean, animation isnt just trying push to the "WOW" benchmark but also entertainment. Its whats its been used for for decades.

So have a look and think about how you want your film to look as a whole.

I can go on forever ..and who cant its such an open topic but Id like if others could give their input as well into design, design principles and animation(pushing story/possibilities and caricature of life)

Short film Focus

This post can hopefully continue the topic of focus for our shorts. I definitely think it wise to know your skillset and decide what you want to focus on for a short film. That is one of the major lessons I learned this year. Even with a team of 8 people it was nearly impossible for us to cover all the areas that we wanted to. For example, my focus for the film was to try and create convincing characters. We also tried to do water(splash fx, water interaction, etc), cloth simulation, complex character prop interaction, advanced lighting and rendering, etc(on top of trying to create and interesting story with good animation). It was too much to learn and implement at the same time. If we had chosen one or two of those we would have pulled it off much more successfully.

One example that I often cite is how Pixar has done their movies. Of course they are genius' but they are smart about the choices they have made. If you look at the progression of movies it goes like this:
Toy Story - They nailed non-human characters that emoted really well.
Bugs Life - Again focused on non-human characters, but start to become more fleshy(humanistic)
Monsters Inc. - Major development of fur/hair using particles. The characters become more human in their expressions. You will notice that that move did not have overly complex environments.
Finding Nemo - WATER (of course, right?), but even more so they focused on lighting, rendering beautiful environments.

Only once they had tackled those obstacles and had a team with that experience I think they could have handled what came next...

The Incredibles - A masterpiece that had (imop) the first successful humans, Cloth galore, amazing environments, the list goes on and on..

So my point being, if they can't do it all at once... how can we be expected to? :D

QUESTION TO YOUR QUESTION AND MORE...

Hey guys I live the way this Chain-Q&A thing works rather than responding in comments. Umm. First off.

SCRIPTS DO HELP AND NATALIE DIDI SOMETHING RIGHT.YYYEEEEAAAHHH!

2nd

My question goes to production schedule for 3D film as well I thought about it at firs, Im not doin my film in 3D, but Im curious anyway so if a production schedule (8 months roughly) could get posted it up Id love that because as Farrukh says we all got different films in mind I think something like a 3D classically story can have one. Further more I think Dave is also asking what are the pitfalls and what routes too avoid.

3rd

Ive been putting together an animation journal while at red rover and will continue to put feedback and lessons learned through my mistakes . Nothin technical but more so animation wise. once Photoshop is up and running again I'll start editing my work to show what I mean if I say anything misunderstood. Im no animation genius Id just like to share what I know so that way anyone doing animation can be more efficient, not so much by doin...but NOT doing.

misterbarnwell.blogspot.com

Right now its just been animation test given to me by guys there and so far I can do 3-4 secs (pending on difficulty and the amount of knowledge I know about the action) in half a day (not including stretching and squashing and little cleaned up graph editor). This however is by the laid back environment we do have at the studio mind you and also the knowledge I picked up animating in 3D. If you havent started making that graph editior your friend yougot problems. I managed to tally that into a bit of production (one chracter animation with finalized boards) and I'll admit Ive been wrong so heres my two sense in Dave Hoggans qustion....

ANIMATION SCHEDULE........

start animating (rough blocking in) by DECEMBER. This will be your final leica, dont lose sight of doing a rough leica on paper(photoshop) first. If you either wanna cruise through animation production and spare tim eto make it good then you should (as animator) Also remeber..

A: what industry (job) are you trying to pimp your film towards is it more animation, or rigging.

Solid animation will go towards your rigging which is why you should start animating(rough block-in) by DECEMBER.

B: If you want it to be pretty then focus on strealining you film so it can be finished on time for industry day. remeber the load of problems rendering a film can have. Id suggest animation test on the side to demonstrate you characters flexablity and performance range. and then short change your animation a bit in you film or save finessing for money shots.

hey guys

hey hoggan, and other nerds lol
kddin guys haha
good to hear from you mate. I know what you mean when you're talking about organizing yourself into a good schedule. HAHA i've been talking to cliff about it and hopefully we all can come up with a time line for ALL of us. We can basically be doing our OWN films and SOMEWHAT follow a common schedule, BUT again that can be tricky. We're not doing the same stories, characters are different,...etc. One thing i've been lucky with is that, i've stuck to ONE idea and I've written about 5-6 drafts, carefully cutting down on the script. BTW scripts help =)

To give you an update on where I stand with the 4th year, hopefully this weekend, i can come into work and scan everything and load it up on a 4th year blog. I will be sure to post my link as soon as i'm finished.
cheers
-farrukh.khan-

FILM QUESTIONS.

Hey guys!! hope your summers are going kick ass. I figured I'd shoot up this post. I've started film production on my film for this coming school term already doing some design work and some story boarding. I haven't quite reached the modeling stage yet (and i know i should be already in the midsts of this) buuut ive been trying to create a solid production scheduel. Since you guys have already completed your first CG film I know where some some answers can be found. My main question..the area im concerned about the most..has to do with rendering. I want a decent render something that gives my film a real professional looking quality. If i were looking into a high quality render what would I use...and how long should I project that this would take? I know of Mental Ray..and Ray Tracing..well I know the names haha...and Sub-Surface Scattering..and Global Illumination ( i guess the last two or more of a lighting issue) Is this stuff feasible for someone of my skill level..given a good amount of time? Im sure you guys have much insight sooo fill my brain!!
Cheers

Gnomonology Launch

The guys behind The Gnomon Workshop have launched a new tutorial website GNOMONOLOGY. There you can purchase and download the tutorials right off the site. I think this is a great idea on their part. They run on average of 5-6$ for a 30-40 min tutorial. Basically each video deals with one topic, so if you have a weakness or an issue you can fix it for 5 bucks.

On that note I have been collecting tutorials over the last year or so and it is my hope to get them organized so we can pool our information together. I recently attended an XSI softimage presentation and received great "Digital Tutors" DVD on the program. I will post again on that topic and the potential in using XSI to complement Maya.

Cheers.
Cliff

ADAPT 2007 Conference

The 2007 ADAPT(advanced digital art production techniques) Conference is in Montreal this coming September 24-28th which will be perfect timing for a research trip for our films.

I have not been to this conference but am very interested in going this year. Check out the website at this address www.adaptmontreal.com The cost is about 400 for the weekend for students if booked before Aug 24th. If anyone is interested please let me know and hopefully we can get a group going.

Cheers,
Cliff

f1 to f1 do you copy...

hey cliff, i was going about my daily routine of searching por....NEWSPAPERS? lol and i came across this script, but for some reason i'm not able to get it working. check it out
highend3d.com
its called controlMaker
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/character/3877.html
//This is a rigging tool for creating zeroed out controls on joints(or objects) that you
// have selected

-farrukh.khan-

Welcome!

Welcome everyone and anyone. I have set up this blog to help share information about animation, more specifically 3D animation. I will be posting as often as possible about topics that I am interested in and any other relevant information I come across on the
"internet". So please feel free to do the same! Add links to your favorite websites, tutorials, nudie pictures, blogs, etc. Also post up problems or issues you are having and need help with. This blog will compose mostly of Sheridan Animation students, but anyone who is interested in joining, please send me an email.

I hope everyone is enjoying their summers!
Cheers,
Cliff B. Mitchell