Moonbot Film Teaser!

This is the film I had the pleasure of working on back in August. Can't wait to see the final film. Check out the new project website here :)

Best of luck on the festival circuit, guys!

Thank you Disney...

Tangled was the best animated film I've seen in a long time. Easily up to par with the greats. Beautifully crafted and geektastically Keane'esqe. Loved it.

So last week I fulfilled my civic duty of eating way more than I should to celebrate Thanksgiving. The rotation fell on my wife's family and I had a good time. Went hunting with my brother-in-law - saw some does, shot nothing, and let my feet freeze for far longer than I ought. I have to say the northern Louisiana woods are beautiful - pines, white oaks and cardinals dropping by to say "good morning" on the edge of my treestand.

I've decided to curtail some of the Morphy fixes for the time being as some of the stuff it just gonna take too long to fix when I'd prefer to just do it right from scratch. So, I'm gonna make all of the non rig breaking fixes to Morphy and a couple of improvements and release full release v1.0. Then use him as my template character for rerigging using the tools Bokser and I are fixin to write (where I'll make the spine fix, scaling foot fix and some other stuff).

What else...again working a freelance gig as well so updates will be slow. Oh, and if anyone will be at the Austin 3d user's group on Friday, I'm plannin on being there so feel free to say hello:)

Hand update (all the better to grab yams with....)

Come here, my pretty...

So been taking a hard look at hands and came to the realization that Morphy's last release hands just weren't as good as I wanted them to be. Hands are such an imporant part of the expressiveness of a character. So, I've been doing some research and experimenting and think they're much better now. Did you know that finger segment lengths tend to follow set proportions? This was a good read on that.

Here's the changes on the hands:

• Added blendshape customization (still gotta figure out what controls to put em on - prolly the ui)
• Added bunch of fixer joints that are sdk driven to help maintain "hand meatiness"
• Moved a bunch of joints
• New sdk poses all around 
• Mesh changes as well

Oh, starting another gig any day now so things will slow down again. Apologies, but paying work comes first.

Other neat stuff from the internets!

• Really interesting read on where we look when we're accessing certain parts of our brain. Useful for facial:)
• Beautiful film.
  
  

Happy turkey day all!

Morphy 1.0 Plan of Attack...(it's a trap!)

So, got back this last weekend from a great gig with Sony in San Diego. Made a lot of new friends, ate great food, and saw the zoo! Coming back I'm gonna be putting a bigger focus on  rigging for the next little while as I think it'll offer more remote work opportunities.

So the first thing I wanna do is get the full Morphy 1.0 out the door. It's been so fun seeing what folks have been coming up with and a big thanks to the guys at 11 second club for putting Morpheus on the resources page. Took the last few days to relax and get caught up on errands but I've also been getting input from my closed Morphy testers on my list of stuff to fix and or add on the rig.

Here's a preview of what I'll be hoping to get done before a full 1.0 release. Wherever possible, I will make fixes in such a way that won't mess with any animation that's been done on the release candidate rigs.

• Face - anyone (who's done some lip sync animation) having any trouble hitting anything? I wanna get back and test the brows especially when I can. Any input you can provide would be helpful.
• Spine - Not thrilled with the fk funtion on the spine may want to revisit. Also want better hip isolation. Anyone else take issue?
• Hands - 
• Thumb weighting needs a lot of love especially in the webbing
• Think the pinky side of the hand needs some more meat.
• Add more range of motion on the thumb
• Add - overall face squash and stretch control
• Add - nose tip mover
• Add - ear control? had a request for an ear animation control but not sure how I'd wanna do that. Anyone have any ear controls they like in a rig?
• Fix - normals on the body and some hair are screwy. I know I fixed it but must have reverted to a previous version somewhere
• Utility FIX - got a great tip from Tobias on a way to group quick select sets so I don't have to leave em out of the scene. Should help people's confusion when trying to do mods
• Neck - wanna try to get less curve built in by default to make it behave a little more as expected
• Fuctionality add - wanna add the ability to toggle of visibility on body regions. Had a couple of teachers request this
• Add - easier to access joint squash/stretch settings
• Add - scaleable feet
• Add - settings saver script

After Morpheus is done, gonna start digging into Python. Woot!

Quick Morphy Tip (Selecting the mesh)...

Gotten a few emails on this and wanted to leave a quick tip on how to enable mesh selection on an unreferenced Morphy.

To turn on selectability, run this mel.

//turn on selectability
    //body
    setAttr "all_anim|Geo_grp.overrideEnabled" 0;
    //face
    setAttr "FacialRig_grp|Geo_grp.overrideEnabled" 0

To turn it back off, here's the alternative...

//turn off selectability
    //body
    setAttr "all_anim|Geo_grp.overrideEnabled" 1;
    //face
    setAttr "FacialRig_grp|Geo_grp.overrideEnabled" 1;

 Go, go Booleans!

Also, Semper Fi Devil Dogs. 235 years and still truckin. Any other fellow former Marine animators out there? I'm guessin it's a small club:)

Morphy Internet Roundup #1!

NOTE - please tag your animations on Vimeo, youTube or whatever site with "Morphy", "Morphy Rig" or "Morpheus Rig" so I can find em. I wanna see em;)

First off, things are going well on the gig and we'll be wrapping up this week so I'll be saying goodbye to some new friends (and old ones) and get to see my wife again. Can't wait. I'll also be getting back to Morphy to tie up some loose ends as well as digging into Python for another side project with Bokser (you should really go check out his site right now, it's nostalgically awesome).

Been starting to get some tests back from some folks and some friends at my current gig pointed me to some 11 second club entries as well. It's so exciting to see what everyone is starting to do with the rig. Please continue to send bugs/issues as I'll be back on trying to finish Morphy up next week.

Here's a great one from a polish animator


And here's another:


11 Second club entries from last month using Morphy. Nice mods peeps! I love it when I have to look at it a bit to tell if it's Morpheus:) I've heard from a couple of you but if you ran into issues or bugs please lemme know. In no particular order...

• Time travel guy
• Undertaker
• Mad Doctor
• Chair is too short guy
• Chess game
• Doctor with second guy
• Jekyl/Hyde
• Fortune teller
• Tied up guy
• Grainy guy
• Drinkin guy