Sunday, August 31, 2008

Indy Storm Animatic

This was the animatic for the film in the previous post. Again, this was done back at school.



Cutting storyboards together with audio definitely helps with planning...though it didn't seem to help my animation at the time. :)

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Indy Storm

DISCLAIMER:
This is an old student film...purely for laughs:)


Anyone want to see some bad animation? Here's one of my first 3D films that was created during my 2 semester in computer animation, right after I learned how to create a nurbs sphere with a phong shader.



Each student was responsible for all aspects of their individual films. This included concept, storyboards, setting a production schedule with milestones, pitching it, all modelling, rigging, animation, lighting, any post-effects, audio, and editing.

This little spoof is intended as a mock advertisement. I took bits and pieces from the Jurassic Park soundtrack and spliced them together for the audio. The logo is just a series of Photoshop'd images. I grew up with Indy and Nikes, so I had a lot of fun with this piece. In the end, though, I'm pretty sure I didn't schedule enough time for animation:)

MORALS OF THE STORY:
---We all had to start somewhere.
---With a little bit of hard work, we can improve.
---We should spend less time layering endless bump maps on stalagtites and spend more time on animation.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Character GUI

For the majority of my workflow, I prefer to select controllers in the actual viewport and on the character--I find it faster that way. However, I also like having a character GUI (or picker) to supplement my selection options. Every character should have one of these. I find GUI's most useful for selection sets (i.e. All Controllers, Spine, Fingers, Mover, etc.) or whenever a controller happens to be hard to find in the viewport.
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AbxPicker, a free download from Highend3d has to be one of my favorite scripts. Thanks Adam Burke for sharing! This super versatile script allows you to create fully customizable Pickers very quickly.

HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

--Easy to make, easy to change and customize on the fly
--Able to save out and import GUI into another scene (with a new character)
--Supports referencing
--Supports multiple characters
--Supports tabs (i.e. body, hands, face, etc.)
--Clean=>only one extra node in the scene
--Useful "help" button on the GUI
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Here are some of the pickers I've made in the past using this script.



The buttons I made at the bottom are "extras", used for mapping frequently used scripts and commands (i.e. euler filter, toggling inherit/follow attributes, bringing up other scripts like tweenMachine, autoTangent, shotView, etc.)
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QUICKTIPS:

  • Change the size of the GUI in line #41 of the script to your liking--then save script. Mine's set to 300 x 550.
  • If you want more control and precision while lining up the buttons during creation, change the resolution of your moniter to the lowest setting (as long as you don't mind messing up your desktop icons)
  • Making that first GUI could take 15 mins...or an hour if you are artistically anal like me. But after you've made your first template, you could just import it into a new scene and modify it very quickly for every new character.
I know the GUI itself won't make good animation, but I'm all for workflow helpers and making technical things (like selecting and manipulating controllers) a bit less cumbersome. That way, hopefully, we could concentrate more on the actual art.