Diving into rigging part 2

Here is a movie with my curent eye setup for my new character. I wanted to create a separate set of eyes that I can attach to the head rig with locators. This way I will have a flexible setup so I can move the eyes around freely.

All the attributes for shaping the eyelids and pupil dialation are in the eye controllers and can be adjusted in the channelbox.

The reshaping of the whole eye is done with separate controllers that drive a lattice. I have three controllers per eye that can rotate, translate and scale so I can have a lot of fun with the eye shapes. I will also add brows to the rig. These can be modified with a separate controller.

Diving into rigging

After hearing a lot of people talking about creating a fresh reel with your own characters I decided to dive in the world of rigging too. I had some mixed feelings about this because it's hard enough to become a good animator and your really need to spend a lot of hours to improve. (Thinking about the 5.000 hours Shawn Kelly was writing about in his blog before).

But on the other hand, it think it's a good thing for an animator to understand that rigging thing some more too and to be able to communicate well with the technical departments. At the moment I am working my way trough the Jason Schleifer rigging tutorial. And I am surprised how clear he explains everything in a way an non tech guy like me can understand all this. I already knew he's a great teacher at Animation Mentor but never expected that these DVD's were so clear and thoroughly documented. Really great stuff.

At first I wanted to try to rig with auto-riggers, and that could work great too, but than I would not expand my knowledge on this subject. So that's why I decided to take this rocky road and fill my brain with new stuff and have fun along the way.

Here is the character I designed. Did some facial tests in Maya too. It's still a work in progress.

Based my new knowledge I am going to finish the model try to create a rig from scratch for this dude. Just wish me good luck the next few weeks. I think I am going to need it:-)

Frames from the first movie

First rendered frames after some compositing. Thinking changing the window colors of the cars and maybe the colors of the shirt of the girl to make here stand out some more.

HTM Tram model

Working on the model of the tram now. I trying to find a balance to keep the shape stylized but also recognizable as the HTM tram that runs in Den Hague.

Bike

I also modeled and rigged a bike last week. I even added a wheely controller :-). A big thanks to Henk Kok who helped me write an expression to be able to counter rotate the pedals to keep m horizontal when a character is riding the bike.

Rigging

Working on a new project where I also have to design, model and rig the characters.

I am using The Setup Machine for rigging the body and that works pretty nice. I only still have to fix some weight painting. But overall I am pretty happy with this tool. This week I will do the facial rigging with the Face Machine and I am very curious how that will work and how heavy the rig will become.

Rendertest 2

So today it was time to do some more testrenders and dressing up the character with some hair and clothes. There are still some tweaks to be made. I am not so happy about the eyes. They have a weird glow around the iris. I also need to tweak the animation just a little so I guess be the end of the week I will give my computer no sleep to do the renders for me at night.

Rendertest

Working on my first 3D character showreel at the moment and trying to figure out all these render settings like Ambient Occlusion, Final Gather, Global Illuminatio and also trying to understand Subsurface scattering. Lots' of technical stuff to cover and it almost drove me crazy that I was not able to render out some decent pictures.

This weekend I finally made some progress and was able to create some renders that are a good starting point. In the above picture your can compare a playblast with a rendered version. Just a little more tweaking and I can render out my first short this week for my reel. Of course it's not necessary to render out your shots but a nice render will just add that extra appeal to your reel. Now only some hair and some clothes :-)

Cocktail penciltest final for now.

This is the latest version of the cocktail penciltest that I did this week. It was a fun project to do and I learned tons of stuff about timing, texture and contrast. It's amazing how little changes in timing can affect the total look and feel of the animation.
I will revisit this animation later again when I have some fresh eyes again to polish the animation some more. Just let me know what you think of it.

Cocktail blocking

Made some changes to the end of the animation. I tried to add an extra cartoonfactor and pushed it some more at the end. After he takes a zip he totally freaks out. This exaggerated cartoony stuff is kinda new to me, so let me know if it reads well.


First rough blocking animation in Flipbook.

Cocktail animation planning.

First rough planning for the cocktail animation. It's time to try to use all the animation principles I learned at Animation Mentor, in a 2D animation instead of 3D. I also wanna try to experiment with a broad cartoony style animation with lots of texture in the animation. My previous assignments last year where very subtle. So this will be a nice change to get a grasp of the cartoony thingy.

First Flipbooktest

This is my first Flipbookexperiment I did today with the Jason Ryan approach to solve an animation in 2D first before diving into Maya. This is just a quick test on one's and two's and I have no intention of building this one in Maya but I am pretty happy with the speed of this workflow. This rough animation was done in Flipbook within two hours without any videoreference. Just trying to come up with a performance. 

With a template like this in Maya, the blocking stage will hopefully be faster because the poses and the timing are mostly solved in those first two hours. Also when working this way it feels much easier to let go of poses and experiment more and come up with different acting ideas. For sure there are a lot of things wrong with this first pass, like the body needs more follow trough after he releases the ball, arm is too overlappy etc..etc.. But I think this is a good guide for rebuilding the animation in CG and refine it there. 

Normally I would create a lot of thumbnails but I could not tell from those scribbles on paper if the performance really would work. Only after I created the blocking in Maya I could see if my ideas for the shot were working. And when it did not work I had to rebuild certain parts to make it work and ended up losing a lot of valuable time. Also an extra advantage of this method is that you can train yourself much faster to solve animation problems. Within a short amount of time you can practice doing a lot of shots, experiment like crazy and train your mind and eye.

This test makes me wanna do a lot more of these. Very curious btw if directors will accept these kinda blocking test in the near future. So you already got an approval in a very early stage for your performance before you even blocked out the shot in Maya. Comments and ideas are very welcome.

Acting, eyes and expressions

After visiting Kevin Koch's blog about blinking where he showed a video with a part of an old acting class of Michal Cain explaining about blinking, I was eager to see the rest of that class too. 

This class is full of acting tips that are also extremely helpful for animators to create genuine animation. It made me realize even more what you can do with subtle movements and expressions in the face and how hard it is to create that real genuine expressions so that the audience will forget that they are watching an actor in a movie. It's the same thing an animator is striving for. Making the audience believe that they are watching a real living being with real genuine emotions. So hard to do, but so rewarding.

While watching that Michal Cain class there where moments when he acted out a scene where I forgot I was watching him and was totally into the scene because of his genuine performance. It made me realize that i wanna learn a whole lot more about this acting stuff.

Enjoy the class. There are 6 separate parts on Youtube. Just let me know if you have found some more of these on the web.

Jason Ryan approach

Jason Ryan, a supervising animator at Dreamworks opened his site with tutorials earlier this year. I had already seen some lectures of him at Animation Mentor and I liked the approach he uses for his shots. He works with Flipbook
an application where you can quickly sketch and test your animation. Recently I drew a lot of thumbnails for my animations to test out different poses but once in Maya it took me a long time to get my animation and the timing right.

With this method your can draw the animation with little stick figures really quick, test your animation and timing on the fly and solve your animation in no time and because it works so fast you have more time to experiment with some poses.

Once the animation is done in Flipbook, you can export the animation and use it as a template in your workspace. This way you have a great guide for your animation. The timing is already solved in Flipbook and now you can spend the time to really finesse those golden poses. I bought two tutorials last week and had a lot of fun doing some tests. I will post them soon.

Check out Jason Ryan's site .