First Fume FX test

So in an attempt to motivate myself I have started mucking around with fume fx. I have been interested in it for a long time.

I'm really keen on how to do fire and smoke in fume so I can render out some kickass textures to be used in UDK.

anyway I booted it up today and had my first go at making something in fume fx

It's really amazing how easy it is to make something look good :). Still could use some work on smoke colour etc though.

Also I recently bought the book elemental magic which is all about creating 2d special effects. It has a lot of concepts that still translate over to 3d and the thing i love the most is throughout the book they deconstruct each effect they do and show how everything works when compared to nature.

I'd reccomend it to any fx artist

http://www.amazon.ca/Elemental-Magic-Special-Effects-Animation/dp/0240811631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314535214&sr=8-1

Photoshop Smoke

So I've been doing some mucking around this weekend trying to improve my Photoshop skills by making some smoke in Photoshop using a combination of various filters.

The results turned out a bit meh but still a step in right direction.Think ill stick to using photo reference stuff in future.

Im really trying to get myself motivated to be more proactive and study more.

Blue wierd smoke

 More realistic smoke

VFX stuff

So its been a while since i've made an update. Things have been pretty busy over the last month with starting a new job as junior fx artist.

Recently I been doing a lot of research on vfx and am working on improving my skills in photoshop,after effects and 3d s max when it comes to visual effects.

I have found a few websites such as

www.videocopilot.net has lots of awesome after effect tutorials

http://www.allanmckay.com/allanmckay/

Really love the fume fx stuff and would love to learn more about it.

Either way i've got a week off work before things get really busy, so im looking at using this week to hopefully work on some personal projects.
So keep an eye on the blog for more frequent updates

New FX Job

Hey Everyone, I know I havent posted in a while the last week and a half has been pretty full on. I have been doing a lot of overtime at work in QA getting age of conan ready for the free to play patch :).

Also I recently applied for and got a position as a Junior Fx artist for Funcom games studio :)
This is such an amazing opportunity and I cant even begin to say how excited I am about it. The more I've gotten into fx the more im loving it. It lets me animate and bring particles to life however in a more technical fashion.

I start in another week and I cant wait

To check out some of my fx work I've done so far check out www.brendonvince.com

A week to Recharge :)

Just thought I'd do an update to let everyone know that I haven't died or anything :P.I'm just taking a week to relax a bit and get some reading in on all the books I have bought. I am really digging the drawn to life series :)

walking into the night!

So I spent a few hrs this evenning working on a walk. Im still no where near happy with it. The wrist and a bunch of other things arent moving naturally its been a good training exercise but to get a truely good walk im thinking of starting again and keeping my rotations cleaner because I've made a bit of a mess using different rotation types

Busy Week :(

Unfortunately havent been able to post much this week :(.
done over 25 hrs overtime at work this week so havent had a lot of spare time unfortunately. However I still have managed to get a fair bit of study done. I've continued listening to the animation podcast while at work when I get the chance and am really enjoying that It's amazing what little bits of information you can pick up with all those interviews from the great animation pioneers.

I've also been reading through animators survival kit, working on my walk a little and thinking a lot about what to animate for this months 11 second club.
The clip this month is aweosme however with 2 characters reckon its gunna be really challenging. I will have to start thumbnailing it over the next week and hopefully start with blocking it next wekeend. I dont know how terrible its going to turn out but either way its a learning excercise.

Bouncing Ball Tweak and some Bouncing ball sites

First of all want to say YAY this blog has been up for 1 month :)

Had to do OT again tonight so didnt get a lot done. I been thinking a lot latelly about my bouncing ball animations and it really has been shitting me that I couldnt get them look better. especially when I know that most things are based off them.

Sooo After looking up every type of reference I could find I came accross a lot of really awesome websites
http://blog.fjasmin.net/search/label/Bouncing%20Balls
http://www.angryanimator.com/word/2010/11/26/animation-tutorial-1-bouncing-ball/
http://www.animationphysics.com/
http://www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2010-timing-and-spacing-in-animation-explained.html


I have also decided to really ramp up my reading of all my animation books I own I got stuck into animators survival kit last night. It's really pretty sad that I used this book through uni and had it for years and never took the time to fully read though it. But that will shortly change

Still deciding which one I like better. I'm thinking first one

Putting things in Perspective and slowing things down.

Today was a pretty amazing day. Not in terms of what I did today which was doing Overtime work for 4 hrs on a sunday. No but in terms of my development and mindset, Ill explain.

So after spending the week or so working on walks and eventually moving up to full body walks. I was having a lot of technical issues with Gimbal lock.
Which after some very helpful advice on the 11 second club forums I was linked some awesome videos

I never really understood how this worked before. After watching this I feel I really have a greater understanding of why it occurs instead of just going AHHHH why is this crazyness happening.

The Rotation Problem from The Guerrilla CG Project on Vimeo.

Euler Rotations Explained from The Guerrilla CG Project on Vimeo.

The second link goes to a 3 part animation tutorial on how to animate a walk that starts with how to resolve the gimbal lock issue. Also the way he explains walks is amazing. I love how he said that him as a senior animator it takes him a couple of days to animate a walk cycle. Juniors take about a week and students can take month or two. It really does put it in perspective. There is so much  to consider when animating a walk.
http://sbit-animation-centrala.blogspot … anima.html

However the amazing part is that the guy who did that tutorial above about walks is a guy who I used to work with at Krome Studios in Brisbane Australia, it really is a small world.
He also happens to have one of the best animation resource sites I have found and I reccomened everyone checking it out.
http://arcresourcepage.blogspot.com/
Also check out
http://spungella.blogspot.com/

After spending an afternoon of reading articles on things from walks to animation in general it really helped put things into perspective and help me get my head in the right place. I do feel I have been rushing through things a bit and do have a tendency to jump straight into things without planning things as well or thinking about whats behind them.

I will link below just a few articles that I found really inspirational reading this afternoon/evenning

I found this article really great as I think its really easy to get in habit of thinking as study only as actually animating and reading up tutorials and articles. After reading this I realized I really need to start watching more movies.
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2008/07/importance-of-watching-lot-of-movies.html

If you only read 3 articles these should be it. I found this to be really inspirational and really help put things in perspective. I am going to strive to take all of these things to heart and especially try to plan all my animations with what the splinedoctors article said.
http://splinedoctors.blogspot.com/2008/01/anticipation-arcs-and-overlap-oh-my.html
http://academyanimation.blogspot.com/2008/01/time-and-effort.html
http://academyanimation.blogspot.com/2008/01/sounds-simple-doesnt-it.html


I found this article great and I'd highly reccomend it to anyone who is thinking of animating things for a showreel or even just working out what they should animate next. These articles go through how to approach animation in terms of if they are an exercise or a demoreel piece.
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-should-i-animate_24.html
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-should-i-animate-pt2-exercises.html
http://splinedoctors.com/2008/05/revisiting-what-makes-a-good-reel/

If you are looking for more
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2008/06/best-of-spungella.html

Either way I am feeling really pumped and ready to absorb as much information as I can :)

More walk Goodness

So its been a busy few days. I have mainly been focusing on trying to absorb as much information as I can on walk cycles.

I started my first full body walk today since like forever. Think its turning out pretty well except for the arms :(. I am having a lot of trouble getting the arms to look natural. I can get the key poses down easy its just the crazy rotations that max loves putting in between that are causing me trouble. Sometimes I wish I was a 2d animator then i wouldnt need to worry about it.

Also watched Alladin tonight for first time in years and forgot how awesome it was. Very inspirational stuff

Anyway I feel I've learnt a lot about walks and reckon after another week or 2 on them ill be able to do a few fairly decent walk cycles :)

Anyway here is my Rough pass on walk so far. still needs a lot of work and the arms are completely screwed but.

Also I did manage to polish up my 2 other walks with little warrior rig

Double Bounce Walk
Still feels a bit erratic

Double bounce!

I decided to spice things up a bit tonight and wanted to try something a bit more fun and cartoony so I made a double bounce cartoony walk on 12's I also took a different approach than my last walk and animated this one walking forward instead of on the spot. OMG its so much easier doing it this way because once you have worked out spacing you can easilly test it on the spot afterwards.

Either way here is my walk so far. It still seems a bit snappy and the foot isnt rotating the way I want it at the moment. also the foot seems to hang a bit or move unnaturally when comng down.

Also think this animation would look 100x better if attached to a body and arms :P

But either way I have to say this was probably the most fun thing ive animated since I got back into animation. It was so great to actually see some character in the animation instead of boring physics objects like balls :P

Onto Walks :D

So its been over 3 weeks since I started getting back into animation and during that time I have probably spent 150-170 hrs animating/reading up on animation, watching webinars etc. Its been a blast.
I decided to take it slow and as a result have only really been animating balls and things.

I started today with my first walk in a long time. (Think I did a walk back in 2006 at some point :P)

Started simple just using The little warrior rig a copy of which can be found below
http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/downloads/character-rigs/c/little-warrior-rig

It's just a couple of legs and it did have some hair but it was behaving wierdly so i deleted it.

Anyway I started by doing a simple on the spot vanilla no character walk.
Spent a couple of hrs on this, Most of which was spent trying to get it to move forward after having set up cycle without it sliding ( always had problems with that)

I'll head to the 11 second club forums and attmept to find an easy soloution.

Anyway here is my first walk cycle :P (Dam it feels good to be animating something that isnt a ball :P)

Buhhh Also just realised I was aniamting at 25fps not 24 so my timing is a little off :(

Lotsa Balls

Re-linking this for a post on 11 second club forums as cant get looping animations working over there

Very Interesting articles about learning by Bobby Beck

I was just checking out Bobby beck's (Previously animator at pixar) and current ceo of Animation mentor) blog and among other inspirational things he posted 2 really interesting articles on learning

http://www.bobbyboom.blogspot.com/

the first one is
Stages of learning and growth
Which is all about the 4 different stages of learning
1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence

I found it really fascinating because I'm pretty sure I'm in the conscious incompetence stage. or as he refers to it the "Suck" phase. I know my stuff isnt top notch and needs improvement.
He goes on to say how this can be one of the hardest phases to get out of and posted another article entitled
Reduce the "suck factor" - Step 2

Id really recommend checking it out very inspirational stuff. I couldn't work out how to link it directly so just go to his blog and scroll down his page.

Updated ball with tail

Here is an updated version of my Bouncing ball with tail. I have spent wayy more time on this animation than I had have first anticipated (a week now) I have gotten some good Feedback from JKR on both 11 second club forums and my blog. I was up till 4am working on this last night and spent some time today working on getting the final jump a bit more believable and making the platform actually feel the weight of the ball more. I also tweaked a few of the arcs in graph editor and did a bit more work on the tail.

I think the animation is improving but there is still something about the timing on the bounces and the whole animation that feels off.

The tail is also only kinda working it really needs to move a lot more naturally I reckon I can get it right I just need to spend a lot more time on it.

I also wanna add rotation to the ball as it jumps up and lands however thats not as simple as it sounds seeing as doing that will screw with all my squash and stretch and all my tail movements :(

I've been looking at a lot of blogs and showreels and stuff recently and although it is inspiring it is also a little depressing. I've got so far to go to be good. The biggest thing that's getting to me at moment is that I still feel im not above where i was when i graduated at end of 2005. Granted it's hard to tell with bouncing balls. I am really looking forward to next month's 11 second club clip because I wanna totally give it my all and think it will be a really good judge of where my skill level is at in animation.

Productive Long Weekend ahead.

Woot its finally weekend and its double exciting because its a 3 day weekend because of a public holiday which means even more animation fun to be had. I have been really trying to get more into the animation community especially on the 11 second club website. I posted up my bouncing ball with tail animation and am already getting some amazing critique (Thanks JKR :) )
Really made me think of a few things like the physics of the things I am animating and remaining consistent.

Either way I am hoping to get in around 30-40 hrs of animation/animation related study this long weekend which should be great.

My main focus's will be polishing up my bouncing ball with tail animation and I'd like to move onto doing some emotional static poses with a faceless character as I have read in a number of books and lectures that posing is as important if not more important than timing. Plus think it will be a good break from animating bouncing balls.
As much as I know its necessary after 3 weeks of doing bouncing balls I'm starting to get a bit over it. I think after this fox ball animation is done I might do a pendulem and maybe one final scene with 2-3 balls of different types hitting each other or falling in an obstacle course then move onto cycles and see how I go. I've been reading a lot about posing and acting especially after finishing acting for animators books so im itching to use all this knowledge to make great scenes. I cant wait for next month's 11 second club I hope its a great clip because I really wanna give it my all and think it will be a really good gauge of where my skill level is at.

I'm also continuing to think about improving my drawing skills. I have simplified drawing and planning for animation on the way and am probably going to pick up the drawing from the right side of the brain and maybe cartoon animation books to get some drawing practice in. Think it will be great thing to do when im burnt out from animation and want a break I can just sit on couch and do some drawings while still being constructive :)

Bouncing ball with tail update now with dodgy tail

I spent a couple of hrs on my bouncing ball with tail animation. tidying up a bit of timing and a few keys. Also taking on advice that JKR made.

I spent a great deal of time trying to tweak the tail. I'm still not very happy with the way that tail is moving it feels really un-natural and is not moving correctly. The tail on rig works with individual fk controllers part of me wonders whether it would be a lot easier to animate a tail using IK.

I have to admit Although I have learned a lot from animating this bouncing ball I feel that I really should have approached it in a slower way and got everything locked down timing wise in stepped mode and then got all key poses right instead of just rushing a head a bit.
I think I have to many keyframees and am finding it hard to edit timing with so many different keys on differnet things.

I am going to post this video on 11 second club tonight to get some feedback which should be good.

Late night update on bouncing ball with tail

I spent another 3-4 hrs or so on my bouncing ball with tail and after much frustration I finally am starting to get it in right direction I want it. The biggest thing i noticed is that I was rotating the whole ball to get squash and stretch positions when I can just move the squash controller in a direction (didnt know that) so that helped a lot. that and tidied up my timing a little.

I also think ive finally got how to animate tail basics down. I did a rough pass but its still pretty shitty hence ive got it hidden for now as im trying to get the ball bounce and timing right first.

Anyway here is a render of it so far. main issues im noticing are around when the ball lands on stick. he snaps too quickly onto it holds completely motionless before it falls and a lot of minor things.

Also my squash and stretch directional controller is playing up and not saving my keys or something because I keep losing my direction for the up's and down

I'll have to try a wobble or sway to stick to keep movement going or something.

Anyway Im off to bed as its 12:30 am

Pixar Master class.

Lets start by saying yesterday was one of the most exciting days ever.

It wasnt that exciting in terms of the fact that i still had to go to work and had a pretty boring day.

However after work a friend and I where sitting around at work for an hour waiting for  the IGDA Presentation that was on at 7:30 by Warren Spector about the making of Disney's Epic mickey.
It was an amazing lecture and warren not only talked about the development of the game but talked about the history of Disney. He also delved into a bit about the animations and the characters which I found particularly interesting.

But then If that wasnt exciting enough While we where waiting around for the event the start i figured hey maybe I should check to see if there are any good animation events coming up in Montreal.
When I discovered that there was going to be a pixar 2 day masterclass in Montreal focusing on storytelling, story boarding and character animation With a $500 price tag it was a bit pricey but being from Australia this is such a rare opportunity as something like this would never come over there.
Luckilly my loving and supporting wife allowed me to spend the money and  so now I'm going to  the 2 day master class  on July 29th and 30th

A link to the event for anyone interested in going or just finding out more information is below
http://www.vanarts.com/events/pixar-artists-masterclass-2011-montreal-quebec

But it gets even better I happen to be taking 3 weeks off work in July as the studio is taking a bit of a break. So it ties in perfectly as it gives me even more time to improve my work and learn more before the big event so I can hopefully get the most out of it.

I'm so pumped and excited like you wouldnt believe. only 10 weeks before the event. I worked out if I continue at my current average of 50 hrs of animation theory and animation each week while working  for the next 7 weeks and then put in 3 weeks of 100 + the 3 public holidays coming up :P I should average about 650 hrs in before then :P. Id really love to get my basic drawing skills up so i can do gesture drawings and thumbnails better because thats one of my weak points and I wanna get fully back into character animation again but to do that I think I still have another week or 2 left practicing the basics and as much as balls and things arent that exciting I'm hoping it will pay off in the end.

I also realized that I really need to get more active on some community sites. I have been lurking around on 11 second club http://www.11secondclub.com for the last few weeks so thinking of becoming a bit more active and seeing if i can get some critique and maybe some actual followers of my blog so I dont feel like im talking to myself everytime i write one :P

New animation Books Yay

Oh my god the animation books I ordered on Thursday evening arrived today (1-2 days earlier than estimated) Omg I'm so excited.

Animators Survival Kit
by richard williams
I had this book during uni and I referenced all of my animation off it. its a truly amazing book and i recommend it to all animators as one of the best animation books in terms of reference and principles that there is available.

Drawing Cutting Edge Anatomy
I got this book because i wanted a light book on drawing for anatomy, seeing as I dont care as much about realism figured id pick this book up cheap just to help me improve my drawing.

Drawn to Life - 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes
By Walt Stanchfield Volume 1 and 2
Out of all the books I got these two would have to be the ones I was most excited at weighing in at 800 pages between both volumes. I skimmed through both of them and they seem amazing cant wait to start reading them.

The final Book in my order was

Character animation crash Course
by eric goldberg
I've read a lot of really great things about this book and wanted another reference book about the principles and animation. I'm really looking forward to checking this out

The other two books that I'm still waiting to arrive are:

The illusion of Life and simplified drawing for animation. which should be here in the next couple of weeks. I really need to pick up my reading to get through some of my current ones :)

Inspirational video - Compare your life to pixar

I found this pretty inspirational video on 11 second club forums I could relate to this allot and know a bunch of people who feel a similar way

Its good to get things in perspective

Especially when you combine this with the whole it takes 10k hrs of doing anything to master it :P looks like i've got one hell of a journey ahead of me

Compare Your Life To Pixar from Josh Mirman on Vimeo.

Bouncing ball with tail update. (animation is haaaard)

And update on my jumping ball with tail animation. Honestly this animation was a lot harder than i had have first anticipated. I have spent probably about 6-7 hrs on this so far which feels like forever and there where countless times throughout that I thought I would never get the timing right.

I think its turned out ok so far. Im still most proud of the big jump onto the platform and the slide.

Now I just have fun part of animating the follow through on the tail :)

UPDATE: Instead of posting a new blog I re-uploaded this video as I did a bit more work on it I vaguely started animating the tail which is proving a very daunting task. I also added a little something to the end. :)

I also read an interesing article on animation mentor about blocking out and workflow. I found this a really good read because I think one of the biggest things thats causing me problems and slowing me down is my workflow
http://www.11secondclub.com/helpful_hints/the_fear_of_moving_past_blocking

Bouncing ball with tail WIP

So after finishing watching the webinars this afternoon all about planning I got back into some animation. Trying to take what i had learnt to heart I started by sitting down and planning my animation out with pencil and paper for an hr or so.

I'll upload some planning once i plug my scanner in :)

anyway here are a few things I worked out before I started animating

Animation: Simple ball with fox tail

Personality of ball:
Energetic,confident,Agile,Playful
-lots of big forcefull movements with self momentum.

Overview of animation:
In this animation the ball sits idle and then jumps up into air launching itself forward showing anticipation. It takes 3 jumps straight ahead to the edge of platform then does one giant jump onto a floating platform followed by a small slide as he tries to stop himself from falling off the other side.

The ball pleased with his success jumps up and down 3 times on the platform in victory however this causes the platform to fall out rapidly from underneath him leaving him hanging loony tunes style in mid air before falling down the hole at bottom of screen.

So far I have only animated up until the ball jumping on the platform. I have only animated rotation and position of ball at moment.

I started by blocking it out. It took me a lot longer than I had first anticipated to try to get the timing not looking like garbage. Biggest problem I had was judging the height and distance of the jumps.

Eventually after scrapping my work a couple of times I think im finally starting to get there. Chances are ill wake up tomorrow and notice a stack of things to change.

Cant wait to get in and start animating squash and stretch and the follow through on the tail.

I apologize in advance about how small and dodgy quality the render is. It really isnt the best shot as the ball is so small its hard to see what its doing. I might have to zoom the camera in and have it slowly move along with the balls movements.

Also a shout out to http://www.bauervision.com/downloads.html
This website has a lot of great tutorials and is where I got the free rig for ball with tail :)

Some inspirational webinars id Reccomend.

Just spent the last few hours watching a couple of animation mentor webinars and have to say im really impressed and inspired.

First one i watched was
Learn how to be an animator:
http://www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2008-learn-how-to-be-an-animator-with-bobby-beck.html


I found this very inspirational and was great to hear about peoples animation journeys and the obstacles they had to overcome to get to where they are today.


The second webinar I watched was Planning and workflow
http://www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2009-planning-and-workflow-webinar.html

I have to say this is one of the best webinars I have watched. I think my biggest problem by far in past with animation and even still recently is lack of planning, I have a horrendously bad habit of just jumping straight in and animating straight ahead without doing the proper planning.

I think alot of this stems from my lack of confidence in my drawing abilities.

However after watching these videos I have a whole new way planning my animations and the workflow in which I do them.

I have also just ordered a copy of simplified drawing for animation
http://www.anamie.com/anamie_book.html
It goes into great details about how to plan animation and show personality and force of movement using simple drawings. I'm really looking forward to this arriving :)

Some of most important things I took from these webinars

General:
- Spend time actually animating not just studying and browsing forums 75% of time (Im really guilty of this)
- when doing key poses keep to 2-3 to get idea accross per shot.
- Just because character rig has lots of controls doesnt mean you have to use them all


When planning
- Use video reference
- Thumbnail key poses (Clear silohouttes and lines of action)
- 50% of time planning 50% of time animating will make better animations
- Plan personality
-Define force driving character (this is in line with stuff im reading in book acting for animators which talks about power centres etc)
- Before animating character put him in pose that best defines his character
- Ensure you fully understand character and controls before animating.
- When planning your animation focus more on what you want to see than remembering your animation.


Things to do before actually animating
- Sketches
- Animatic
- Visual references


To improve:
- Study silohoutes
- Study tangents

Back to basics and some new animation books on the way.

So it's Saturday morning and I've had a couple of really productive weeks. Been putting in 40-50 hrs a week doing 3d and animation. Granted the silly hairy balloon was probably not the best use of my time :P. either way i'm looking forward to getting back into some animation over the next couple of days.

I also am really excited as I got my amazon book order in on thursday night so I have 5 animation books and a drawing book arriving on tuesday-wednesday next week. I'll do a separate detailed post about the books when they arrive :)

Below I have outlined some of the things i'd like to accomplish this weekend.



Aims for the weekend
1. Animate a jumping ball with fox tail (Found a cool free rig on the net)
2. Animate a pendulum
3. Watch a few more lectures,especially about workflow
4. Get some drawing practice in.
5. Maybe re-vist my balloon hitting the roof animation to get timing right or start another light animation such as a normal balloon or ping pong ball.

Anyway time to get some work done :)

First Pass Balloon hitting roof

Here is a short animation I did for the lols of my hairy balloon floating up and hitting the roof. I was going for him being asleep and getting startled and waking up. I'm not very happy with the way it turned out. The biggest mistake I made was I didnt plan it out very well and found myself moving things for the sake of moving them instead of thinking more about what the character was actually doing.

Also the biggest problem with the animation is there isnt any real weight or impact to the balloon hitting the roof.

It was a good exercise to animate something light and floaty as oppose to all the heavy balls I have been animating. it probably also doesnt help that the balloon has no eyebrows or mouth which makes it harder to show expression.

Oh Silly Balloon

Ok this balloon is very creepy lol.

I spent some time tonight getting my eyelid morphs working correctly again on this silly balloon character. I did a simple test animation.
I only did one pass on this and he doesnt leave the bottom of frame correctly but oh well still fun :P. Just takes sooooo long to render with all that fur

Another bouncing ball

Here's a ball bouncing accross the screen using its own momentum. this is more cartoony and I added some squash and stretch.
I didnt get to spend as much time as id like on this as I had 3 .5 hrs of overtime tonight :(
But think it turned out alright could use a bit more oomph though and character. as it still feels a bit robotic.

Also put a little bit of extra height in the last jump to spice it up and give the audience something unexpected but think I need to add a bit of anticipation or something in there to give it more effect.

Something very silly and fun :P

Tonight I got bored and decided to make a silly hairy balloon character :P
It was fun to muck around with the hair and fur tool. I even imported the moveable eyes and eyelid rig from one of my old knight characters. However having some scaling issues with the morph targets. When I work out how to fix that I will do a few silly animations :P

More bouncing ball action

Here is a bouncing basketball type ball bouncing in from the side.

Still seem to have more trouble with the smaller bounces and trying to animate rotation is posing some technical issues :(

I'm especially having lots of technical troubles trying to get squash and stretch to work with a rotating ball. I dont know if there is an easy way to do it because currently its a nightmare. Seeing as to get the right shapes for squash and stretch positions im using rotation and its screwing with lots of things.
Also still experimenting with scale keys dont know whether to have them on linear or Auto them.


Anyway here is the realistic version. I'm currently working on a squash and stretch version.

To go forward you have to learn from the past

I was looking through my old uni work again today from 2005 and omg some of it makes me cringe. especially my short film. soooo much floaty animation with poor posing and dodgy animation.
Granted during the last 6 months of my uni course I was doing a law unit, modelling,rigging,texturing and animating 2 game characters and then there was my short film that went for minute and a half where I did everything from modelling 2 characters setting up two facial rigs including the character rig as well as animating and sorting out dialogue.

Was a very hectic and busy 6 months where I dont think I got very much sleep and a lot of animations especially those in my short film where rushed out in a day or even a few hrs.
Looking back at it I wish I had have chosen a more simple idea that involved one character in a room trying to get something off the top shelf that he cant reach. but being a young animator I was aiming for the sky.

Anyway figured I would put up a few of my animation exercises and animations from uni. I wish I had all my early ones in 2d and even simple ones using balls and flour sacks but unfortunately have no idea where those files are or if I even have them anymore.

Here's my showreel that I had at the end of my 2 year uni course. Dont ask my why it has linkin park as the soundtrack :P


The lumberjack: This was a game character for a game that a bunch of friends where making at uni. This character was really rushed but looking back it the animations came out pretty well considering I spent less than a day animating all of these. I still think the death animation is my favorite.
Looking back the arms could have used a lot more work. but then again this whole set of animations was really only at first pass. could have used more time.

I had so much fun setting up this facial rig :)

I like to push the prammmmaloooooott

Heres a few screenshots

Late night Ball update

So its after 3am I have been working on a realistic bowling ball drop.
It's slowing getting there. There are still timing issues especially witth last couple of bounces feel a bit unnatural.

I used some awesome reference off of youtube
The only difference with this one is that it moves sideways instead of staying on the spot. I could have just made mine go sideways as well but figured that would be too easy.
I think thats why my bowling ball is feeling a little off though seeing as that reference footage has a bit of the energy being dispersed to the side.


I also worked out how to get video's playing on a plane in max (wasnt hard :P)

Once again any critique or feedback is welcome, however seeing as no one is following this blog I doubt ill get any. Hello *echoes*. Ill prob post a bunch of ball animations up on 11 second club for some feedback once i've given them all another pass.

anyway Im off to bed. Looking forward to getting in some more ball animations tomorrow will probably try some sideways bounces because they are more fun :)

A bouncing ball animation

Here's the bouncing ball animation I was working on this afternoon. Think it turned out OK. It still needs a bit of polish. especially on the squash and stretch impact frames as I was having some issues with scale in regards to rotation.

The biggest issue I had this afternoon was trying to find a working Frame counter for 3d studio max (OMG it took forever) finally found a script. It doesnt look pretty but does the job.

I also spent about 40 mins trying to work out where to upload my video's and how to embed them in this blog. I finally got everything working and the quicktime controls showing so yay.


Anyway here is my animation. any feedback is welcome. I'll hopefully get a few more ball animations done this weekend. and maybe some posing

A busy yet surprisingly productive week.

So it's been about 5 days since my last blog update. I should really try to keep this blog updated but this has been a really busy week. done overtime a couple of nights this week with Age of conan pushing new dungeons and faction revamps to live.

Also I have a new blog yay. figured I would split up the level design one and the animation one :)

Either way I have still managed to stay surprisingly constructive. I have been watching animation lectures on the basics of timing and spacing and giving characters weight. As well as workflow.
I'm feeling a lot more confident about planning out my animations now instead of just rushing into them which is what I used to do and would generally result in a giant mess.

I've also been slowly reading through Ed Hooks - Acting for animators, I've had this book for years but havent properly ever read it through. It's an amazing book and I would really recommend it to anyone who is into character animation. It has really gotten me thinking in a brand new way when it comes to what my characters are doing on screen and why they are doing it.

I'll summarize a few of the main things ive taken from the book so far.

1. ) Always remember what your character is coming from, what was your character doing before the scene what will he be doing afterwards.
2. ) There are 3 kinds of conflict, conflict with self, with situation and with other characters. Those are your obstacles.
3. ) A scene is a negotiation of conflict.
4. ) Be wary of overacting. 

I also bought a sketch book and a small notebook and have been trying to get some basic drawing done and taking notes of ideas whenever I can. My drawing is still pretty bad at the moment and I hope to slowly work on it on the side and get it up to a semi decent level where I can atleast do poses and concept out ideas.

Free Rigs for Maya and Max 
 I found a site called www.creativecrash.com that is amazing it has a treasure trove of free rigged ready to animate characters for 3d studio max and maya  (I really need to learn animation in maya some time soon )



Plans for this weekend
This weekend my plan is to continue on with my basics and focus on timing and spacing, what better to do that with than the good ol bouncing balls. 


I found this awesome free rig setup that includes a bunch of pre-rigged balls and models of different types from bowling balls to basketballs
http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/downloads/character-rigs/c/simple-ball-rig-v--2

My plan is to spend atleast 15 or so hrs this weekend getting some ball animation done. as I didnt get a lot of actual animating done during last week as was too busy reading up on theory and watching lectures :P

Acting it out, timing and spacing

Read an interesting article tonight.
http://www.11secondclub.com/helpful_hints/acting_it_out/
Addressed the importance of acting out your animations in front of a camera before starting to animate to get ideas on poses. which is something that I have tried in the past but havent really ever given enough time to. I think to much of the time we are so keen to get into the animation itself we dont spend enough time actually acting it out and coming up with interesting poses.

I also found the section on indicating very interesting. (Indicating is where when someone says they are hungry the do something like rub there tummy or when someone is talking about the sky they point to the sky) After reading this article I realised just how much indication is poorly used in animation. I myself can think of numerous times during uni where I couldn't think of what to do with a characters hands and would have them use blatant indication.

Besides that watched an interesting lecture on timing and spacing and think its going to be my main focus over the next week or 2 :)

Another interesting webinar on timing and spacing can be found here on animation mentor which is pretty awesome that I watched tonight http://www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2010-timing-and-spacing-in-animation-explained.html

Balloons!!!!!

Had a productive day today :)
After doing a few bouncing ball animations reading a bunch of animation articles I wanted to make something pretty :P

I found this awesome website that has a bunch of tutorials on it that are simply amazing.
I made a balloon which was way easier than i first thought it would be

http://www.polygonblog.com/3d-birthday-balloons-in-3ds-max
Tutorial for people interested


It's in a tiny res because i didnt have time to wait 12 hrs to render it :P
It turned out okay but could have looked better if i spent longer placing balloons correctly


I think the single balloon looks awesome. I'm definetly going to have to think of a reason to use a lot of balloons in an animation or a level at some point :P

Bouncing Balls

So I spent yesterday afternoon reading some very interesting articles on
http://www.11secondclub.com/resources/ There are so many good resources there. Am going to aim to read atleast 1 of those articles each day. I've also started reading through animation book Acting For animator's. I've owned this book for the last 3 years however have never fully read through it so am also going to be aiming at getting through a chapter of that each day. It has some really awesome concepts and idea's when it comes to animating.

In terms of actual animation I spent bit of yesterday and all of today prowling the net for various tutorials. I came across http://www.bauervision.com which has an extensive set of video tutorials and free rigs I figured I might as well start back at the basics and have been going through the good ol bouncing ball tutorials. I've been remebering a lot of stuff as well as new stuff especially about the curve editor.



I also found a number of Z brush and 3d s max modelling tutorials that i'm keen to try out at some point. so many things to do :P

Trying something new(Old)

So I've been a bit down,unmotivated and undecided on what I want to pursue this year.

As a result I haven't really done a lot Level design work or anything.

However this week after reading a few inspiring articles I'm starting to get motivated again. I'm thinking of trying my hand at getting into a lot more 3d modelling stuff and animation.
Seeing as I do have a Games animation degree its a bit of a shame to not be using any of the skills I have learnt. So my current plan is to get back into 3d and animation. I'm guessing I'm going to be really rusty seeing as I havent done any proper animating bar a few props here and there in the last 5 years.

Also the new version of 3d studio max does scare me a bit :P. But I'm sure i'll get my head around it .
I'm going to start with brushing up on basic animation principles and might even participate in the 11 second club animation for may :).
http://www.11secondclub.com

Think the key is really keeping myself active and getting involved in a few communities. from what i've seen the 11 second club community is very good and maybe might even try to be more active on cgtalk.

Here's a bit of a blast from the past my character for my short film at uni in 2005, where has the time gone