Okta-Awesome!

This is a fantastic short. AND. They have a great making of vid here. Check out the rest of the site for some more great artwork. I'm continually impressed by the work coming out of the Gobelin's school.

Last "Squirrely" update for a bit...

Gonna wait till after I've got his face rigged for any more postings. I used The Setup Machine 2 to rig him up and it worked great. Painting weighting has gone pretty quick and it's a nice way to quickly test the posing and make modeling changes accordingly. There have been several since the rotation render. He's already a lot of fun to pose around. I'm thinkin hard about picking up The Face Machine and giving it a go, the sample rig has a lot of flexibilty though I'm not sure how it will fare with a snout. I finally got some notes from Bokser on my shot shot so I'll get started on that when I can. Work has been some long hours trying to finish up a project for shipping this fall so progress on Mr. Blue might be spotty. I'm taking name suggestions for "Squirrely" if anyone has any idears.

Squirrely has a Tail and Other Things...

My buddy Dave (who has a new website by the way) introduced me to a fellow worker of his who has had some great traditional and cg animation experience. He gave me some good suggestions for tweaking "Squirrely's" design. The most important being the transformation of the slightly-inflated-balloon-beaver-tail to something more of squirrelish semblance. Crazy thing is the guy went to a high school in the same town and same district I did - just a few years earlier. It's a small world sometimes... Some neato stuff hit the net this week:

• Pixar's "Up" Character designs - Couple of characters are up. The attention to detail on the scouts gear is specially great. Even from the little bits I've seen about the film, it has great story potential.
• Great little read on Facial Animation - Check it out. Written by Shawn Kelly from Animation Mentor. Being that facial animation is pretty much the vast majority of what I do at work, I particularly found it insightful. Facial animation is gravy, not the meat of a good performance.
• Princess and the Frog trailer - As excited as I am about Keane's maiden voyage into CG via Rapunzel, it's about time Disney got back to traditional animation. Can't wait to see more.
• Very creative little flash game - This is a fun little diversion from a talented flash animator named Nacho Rodriguez. I ran across another of his surreal shorts this week as well.