Blender Tuts

 I may have posted these before. Learning Blender is the equivalent of "I have to start going to the gym"

Video based Mocap

Unreal for Feature

Auto Riggers

Just ran across M Gear and CG Monastary as free autoriggers for maya that seemed to have a decent amount of people actually using them.

Ghibli Trees in Blender

Alex Henderson

Just ran across this guy  Sheridan Grad, 1 man animation band.


Breathing Space - Animated Short Film from Alexander Henderson on Vimeo.


His twitter is full of tons of matte background painting, which look great with the flat shaded animation.

He storyboards pretty tightly. Uses zbrush and mudbox for modeling, feel like he's able to recycle his models some to jump off to a new one. For rigging he uses Rapid Rig to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and has other auto rigger scripts that he hasn't named. (wonder what he does for faces), and then corrective blendshapes for big changes. VFX are a large part preset's he bought for aftereffects. All of those skills are a career in their own, it's impressive how well he does them all, he has commissions on his site for doing quick animate portraits and it seems fairly cheap to be making a new character all the time.

Pretty inspiring what's possible.

He's currently running a kickstarter for a short

Blender

Another thing that I came across was how awesome blender is getting these days. They've got really amazing looking CG stuff, but their 2D is and cell shaded stuff is great too.





and I went searching for it because it was so cool, but this 2D looking scene made in Blender.

By Janina Gerards
(@luamono on twitter)

 

@antonioya_blend on twitter automated the process https://twitter.com/antonioya_blend/status/1244294087806783488
(so I think it's part of Blender by default now)






and the classic Blender one by Dedouze

Dedouze tutorial


and part 2 of Dedouze


blender cartoon renderer


flat in photoshop, shade and light in AE



and of course the patron saint of blender PepeLand has a series

1 person film stuff and the power of After Effects

Ok, so I caught that Spice Frontier short and was super into it, I like the flat shade look with 2d vfx. Partly because it feels more 2D so there's more wiggle room to having more stylized characters. Watching a making of Steamroll Studios made it over 2 years, and the main creator wrote basically a novel that he developed into a short. (with plans to go series or feature)

I also bumped into Denver Jackson's Cloudrise pictures again.  Specifically this comment he made:

A year ago, I started animation on this feature. I am now approx an hour and a half through animation! Another 30 minutes to go!

Super exciting. The idea that 1 person can make a whole world  and complete story in a conceivable amount of time. Although I have seen timelapse of Denver working at his cintique and not moving for an entire day, so I think he is putting in deadly amounts of hours.

But, he also turned out a whole feature worth of work already.




He said he painted over 200 backgrounds for it. And then just hand animated the whole damn thing.
A lot of his backgrounds I think he quick mocked up in 3d and then painted over, so as to speed up working out the perspective.

He mentioned that currently he is working with CG characters that he then stopmo puppets in quill/occulus for speed, then reexports back to render.

But a big factor in 1 person productions seems to be how much power is in after effects. Make a shot feel full and vibrant. Lighting tricks and depth of field and atmosphere for depth. Running through some of these it occurs to me that that is what makes a scene feel real, the depth and the sense of environment, weather effects (mist and clouds and rain and wind) and light effects, which makes it feel cinematic because it's easier to suspend disbelief.

And Toniko has a amp up vid about making a film in a week, then you can just blaze through it because you know it can't ever be perfect so you're not slowed down trying to make it perfect.


flat in photoshop, shade and light in AE


basic putting together assets in AE


and adding some volumetric and depth of field to AE


building a long parrallax BG in AE


another putting together a scene in AE


overpainting photos to make BG


rain fx



artist drawing BG starting from ref


lasso color line art


rim light AE


just rough to clean 2D anim


lighting effects in AE

Sony Animation Approach - Allesandro Camporota

using Unity as Renderer

Peter Monga: Morgan lives in a rocket house

http://www.sondershortfilm.com/

MR Carton

Corrective Blendshapes

right click on skin, go down to inputs, middle mouse to drag new blendshape after skin deformer

Point Pusher

Daniel WIlliams pretty intersting

New Class Webinar Preview from pointpusher on Vimeo.

he talks about the idea that the 9 old men were concept artists and character designers, they did it all. Current animator's are just puppet pushers, which is hard, but the old guys used to do more, were bigger artists. Why not, why not go back to doing everything?

Kevin Jackson CGtrick

ran across a walk thru by Kevin Jackson. Interesting he's using the top character control as his main mover, so that if the character does a flip or runs he doesn't have to move all IK handles and hips.

Makes me think of the CG-Fu tricks I learned from Michael Makarewicz at AnimationCollaborative. Essentially it's taking full advantage of the way the computer works. (one of Mike's tricks was on the Kevin bird from UP copying the translation of the branch to the feet, as a way to nail the feet to the branch without using constraints.)(unfortunately I feel like I've tried to work with the computer but it doesn't want to work with me (ie character sets.))  Anyway, seems like it's useful to know some CG-fu to be able to block fast.





*found on Kenny Roy

Glen Keane Interview in French

english transcript here


Rencontre avec Glen Keane by cloneweb


Would you consider going back to directing?

GK: Possibly… but I developed this idea mostly to create a character.
For me, I really think of the heart of the character… Ariel or Beast… and afterwards I start to develop a story. So I’m a different kind of director perhaps.
I started developing Rapunzel so I could animate her.
If there’s another character that interests me, maybe – and no one else is going to direct the film

Many directors used to be animators. They had to stop animating when they took the role of director. John Lasseter, for example.

GK: That’s not me.

But for me, the best moment of the creative process is the moment where I draw at my table, with the light… That is the magic moment for me. Not necessarily the moment the film is projected on the big screen.
I feel like a line is like a kind of seismograph… of emotions.

when you animate with the computer it’s always trying to seduce the animator into accepting something other than what they envisioned, to accept something less

So I encouraged the animators on Tangled to have something really personal to say. This is important. If we don’t have something that comes from inside the soul, we’ll be tempted to accept something much easier.

If you reduced Pixar to a phrase it would be: « Wouldn’t it be cool if? »
Like if a kid was looking at their toy: What if the toy could talk? All their films are like this.
If you reduced the Disney films it would be: « Once upon a time… »
There is big difference. « Once upon a time » it’s make believe. It’s the atmosphere we breathe in the two studios

Zbrush Tutorials

so there used to be easy zbrush how to tutorials. But then they got moved and are hard to fine. Digitutors has a nice easy set, up now.

AnimSchool

I missed the webcast with Gabor last year. Went trawling through the animschool blog, decent stuff in there.

here's their youtube page. And their earlier page when they were 3DAppeal, which is interesting to watch and see how he adds appeal to models.



don't jump right to ref, double check your set so you know what you're dealing with "is there space to move like I'm planning? How much movement will I have to do (how many steps)?"

then appeal test - test what poses work and what poses don't for appeal for your characters (Sid the Sloth doesn't look good from a lot of views)
familiarize self with controls and rig what's possible, what can you break. For a lot of animations does quick appeal tests for the expected golden poses of the shot (a walking talking shot, figure out what poses are gonna look good for walking, and gesturing) 2 hours about (all these poses are gonna get tossed so don't spend too much time) essentially it's thumbnailing with computer so you know what is possible (as opposed to cheating with a pencil) training and teaching yourself

at bluesky very conscious of their sub frames which will affect motion blur


earlier reviews of vids here and here


*part 2 added

William Groebe from Tippett on Animals

good animation - know your principles

good acting - fits the plate it's on

good action - so it feels real. so a cat walks across a talbe like a cat, a dog walks like a dog

good attention to detail - all the little intricacies and details in the real world (cat's scrunching nose) how toes spread when landing (of a cat) good polished animation


power of reference
find it and shoot it (yourself if you can't get an animal to do it)

he's pro w/ 14 years but if he just knocked out a dog walk and compared it to life it would be missing something. Like drawing a self portrait from memory, instead of from a mirror. Be humble, accept that you need reference. (slow mo often very helpful, smaller animals are often too fast to see)

shoot ref of cat walking and sitting, but also of yourself to get acting beats and timing you wanted

make it happen, don't let a rig hold you back from recreating what a real animal could do

head, neck and tail on world orient (so hips bouncing doesn't wig tail out, chest turns, head still acts where you want it)

just because you have controls doesn't mean you have to use them

he animates foot/palm into place first, then corrects wrist/heel

breathing trick: grab all spine scale them all a tiny bit (expand relax chest), then offset depth first then width, then offset the different spine ctrls from each other, then sometimes animate shoulders reacting to the chest

Kyle Balda - Layered Walk

I just finished taking a course at Animation Collaborative. One thing a lot of the Pixar animators talked about is working in a layered approach. What was really interesting was them talking about being A LOT faster using a layered approach. Well I have to give try on it, and along comes this Kyle Balda tut, perfect.





*found by spungella

BladeRunner Making of

Blade Runner Convention Reel 1982 from Future Noir on Vimeo.

* wow that got yanked quick, glad I jotted down some notes

a society where life had become very difficult, the urban environment had become a trap for the people. So started with very clean design concept then successively layered on top an accumulation of details and repairs and extra pieces of equipment that weren't the original equipment idea, and achieved this fixit it because it has to run which is the whole visual flavor which is the essence of the film, so it isn't a shiny futuristic society it's a society where the supply lines have broken down. the street level became like the sewers the underside of the city being trapped on the street was not only just unromantic but a thoroughly nasty way to spend your life because the street is just a service access to the upper city, Decent people didn't live below 40 floors above the street so you get an accumulation of detail of vent pipes generators and left over kind of society that your forced to live with because you can't afford to go up. It takes a trend from the current larger urban centers and accelerates it and charicatures it makes it more brutal and more glamorous at each end of the scale.

*found on animation

How To Cheat at Maya

Eric Luhta, who I went to AM with for a while, wrote How to Cheat in Maya (which has a lot of the approaches you learn in AM in it) and now has re released it with new stuff and a guest author Kenny Roy (who I learned a TON from).


They have couple of videos on their site, and any time you see Kenny Roy in a video it's worth paying attention!

vid on 2ndary animation (he touches on his frequent spiel of 2ndary animation = subtext which is a useful idea) but this idea of using animation layers to allow you to build up your animation and make changes easily is one I was vaguely aware of but haven't had a chance to explore. But here he is making it seem like a very useful approach allowing for late changes without headaches. Example here was having a tapping finger on a new layer, so can key it in and out easily to play with the thought shown through 2ndary acting happening.

vid on buffer curve: saw this from him elsewhere but it's a great cheat to re write it down, basically if you use buffer curves it's like having a save as alternate version of animation just by using the swap buffer curve button