Happy February

First up, here's a teaser for a film my friend Hugo is working on :

In other news, there some scary stuff going on right now with my pals in the vfx and film industries, been thinking about you all. The world is changing and it may well be harder for us to find a living doing this.

In some happier news, the new 9 old men flip book collection is awesome and Morpheus 2 progress is coming along great.

Also, the film my buddies Matt and Bokser have been making for the past several years is almost done and will be on the the festival circuit soon. Had the pleasure of doing layout and animating a chunk of it a few years back. So very exciting.

CG Monks Tag Anim WIP

Been playng around with a tag animation for CG Monks. We're probably gonna do the fx in maya and do 2d characters for the tag. Gonna try go get it done this week. Hope everyone is well!

Epic Mickey Work...

Well, it's finally up. At least a good chunk of it...

I had the pleasure of working on this project last fall and a chunk of this spring. Last fall I animated a segment (all of which is in this vid). The majority of my work on the project was rigging character faces, rigging other stuff and swapping in and out mesh updates on rigs. I wrote a good chunk of my blendshape transfer stuff during the project to make the workload manageable.

Specifically I animated from 3:58 - 4:36 except for the lightning storm exterior, doc at the window and Mickey in the tv at the end so the Gus working and Ortensia observing stuff. Gus was a lot of fun.

Crummy thing is I did another pollish pass on a bunch of my shots but they apparently didn't make it in the render pipe...the joys of production:)

Dang, it's been since last fall that I've animated full body stuff. Python has me in a death grip...

Morphy! By a noodle....

Morphy Tip of the Month: If you get some funky creasing in the face with a customization option don't hesitate to select the offending section and try a 'smooth skin weights' option or just manually paint in some smoothness around there. 

First off a big congrats to Pairatch Lerthajornwong for their winning entry to 11 second club. Check it here!

First the classical....

Then a little more hip

Morphy struttin it

Little drinky drink

And some more from 11 second club

• Everyone has a crazy uncle....
• Need a little help with the candy
• Man bites dog shark
• Maybe not all of america(apologies if you don't live in America, Lee) has talent 
• Get that fly!
• Love me some full body chess workouts
• So, so many more. NICE WORK ALL

Updated Reel - Sizzlin Houston Summer Edition!

Update of the ole' demo reel. Some new work from the last year and a test of ole' Morpheus posted a couple of weeks ago. 

What else has been happening....

• Next month I'm gonna be doing a demo at the Austin Autodesk group and am lookin forward to seeing some friends there. I'm just plannin on doing a general customization demo but if anyone that'll be there would like something more specific post here and I'll see what I can do.
• I also did a little interview for Simply Maya should you be inclined to check it out here
• Created a best of Morpheus channel on vimeo  - http://vimeo.com/channels/226100
• Work has been trucking along on bbThingamarig or bbRigger (whatever we end up calling it). Here's an update of what I've been working on
• Curve tools - python based saving of compound and simple curves and creation and various other 
• The rigging process - 
• easy class based template creation is in place (one sided so far) with multiple arms, heads, whatever. Template has orientation and control helper objects which work well
• Saving of template settings into the rig itself for easy re-creation.
• Joint creation and orientation (from orientation helpers as well as the general orientation options from the settings.conf)
• AutoNaming
• Intelligent naming via type detection and tagging that happens in the rigging process accounting for children type names (i.e. groups deriving names from child and constraints getting their root from their objects as well).
• Iterative processing in place
• Absolutely unique name generation
• Able to process whole hierarchy at once
• Lots of other stuff:)

Morphy Tip of the Month: I'm gonna be lazy and say watch David's videos below:)

Kicking off with a tutorial/demo from a internet friend of mine. David's class are the ones working on  the Morphy Wardrobe project. Nice demo Dave! Also, there's a part 2....

Fantastic bit of animation by matthewpres. Forwarded to me by Pierre. Thanks!

Great one I stumbled across on vimeo...

Some great Morpheus examples in the 11 sec club this month. An especially good one even got number 2. Congrats!

• Creative (and questionable) medical practice
• Day at the science fair
• Even Grimm has a shoulder 'angel'
• Talking in a mirror
• You tell em Chief
• And many more...

Gatekey render, and stuff!

Waiting on a stubborn NDA to lapse to be able to show my updated reel. In the meantime, here's a rendered version of that Gatekey test I did a few weeks back to test out Morphy and add some lip sync to the reel.

This here is a Morphy version of a friend of mine who's been on me to make him one for a long time.

What else is shaking....

• Started a vimeo channel for best of Morpheus stuff I see on there - http://www.vimeo.com/channels/226100
• Kung Fu Panda 2 was fantastic, Cars 2 hit a nail on the road somewhere to completion.
• Netflix is my new friend. My wife and I have been enjoying the BBC "what if he lived today" Sherlock miniseries with the British The Offices' Jim character playing a solid Dr. Watson.
• Just wrapped a facial animation gig for the company a good friend of mine works at. Animating on the joints FTW!
• One of my closest pals was here for a visit a couple weeks back and we brainstormed projects to take us at least till the end of civilization in 2012. I sure hope we finish before then so other folks can enjoy the stuff for a little while. Some pretty cool stuff, we can't wait to start connecting the cg community to it.
• Been busy:
• Drawing robots for another of those projects
• Back into my nemesis Web designing for another
• Digging back into Python for the rigger.
• Started squashing some Morpheus bugs.
• Just too much to do...
• Team Fortress 2 has had a lot of updates since I stopped playing last summer which I've been digging through. The Castle keep map with melee weapons only is a ball.

Best of Morphy for July

Semih sent me an image from a couple characters from his film. This is certainly one of the "fishier" uses of Morpheus I've seen. If you can't tell, the fish's face is a modified Morphy head. Really nice work.

Nice one I came across in the 11 sec club wip forum.

Playful little piece with a little girl.

A ton of great pieces from 11 second club this month. Here's a few...

• Couple of guys with spike wrist bracelets 
• Couple of guys in a room
• Portrait guys
• Some great pirate customizations
• Interesting take on Jesus with some very strong posing
• Don't think this is Sparta

Best of Morpheus (and one of Squirrely too) - June 2011

Morphy Tip of the Month: Adding some of your own customization to Morphy via clothes adds a lot to your pieces and will help set your shots apart from others as Morpheus starts populating other people's demo reels. It's always nice when it takes me a second to figure out if the shot I'm seeing is Morphy or not. :)

Finally got a bit of time to catch up on some stuff and the Best Of post was one on the check list. A big one I wanted to point out was the great work that some buddies of a buddy of mine have been workin on. Dennis inadvertently tested out something I'd planned on doing whenever I found some time - namely to use the Morphy head to help genearte a good first pass on shapes on a new head. Thanks Dennis for the R&D. Check it out here. Can't wait to see how the project shapes up!

Here's a sample image from the post.

Nice bit of animation from Leon. Lookin forward to seeing how his 11 second club piece shapes up this month:)

Great one I came across on the 11 second club wip forums. Thank you for using the shoulders well:)

A really nice WIP piece from Katy:

A few from last months 11 second club:

• A dancer's attempted dancing courtship
• Not the best of magicians
• Couple of guys
• And a really good one with ole' Squirrely

Project NoName Revealed!

Project NoName (more widely known as Nintendo's E3 2011 3DS Animation Thing) went live at the Nintendo keynote on Tuesday. This is what we've been burning the midnight oil on for a while now. It was awesome seeing it live on the internet and Bokser was in the audience so we all lived vicariously through him. 

I'd like to throw out thank you's to all the people involved but I don't know whom I can talk about yet so I'll just say, "Thank you [you know who you are], for letting us be a part of this and for all your support."

The story of the how this project came about will have to wait for another day along with a clean render to put up whenever I get the clearance but I'm gonna say what I may. The clean version doesn't have that dark panel on the bottom either (it was added after it was too late for us to do anything about it...ah well).

The Pitch:Nintendo wanted a series of segments to first show off some upcoming 3DS titles and two as a bit of a show piece utilizing projection mapping. 

The Limitations:

• Established well known IP's - As such, how characters move and what they can do is fairly well established and must be adhered to. Also, characters from one game could not be on the screen as other characters at the same time so clear delineation between segments was a must.
• Flexibility - The segments were required to be created piecemeal so that the order of them could be changed right up till the show.
• Projection mapping - For those of you not familiar with projection mapping, there are certain "rules" if you will which need to be obeyed for the effect to work to it's best. The main one is that you have to "color in the lines" which on a building is a fairly large are but when you have lots of panels like in this case, require creative thinking to work around. So for example, no character or main content piece can cross a panel's edge that is closer to the audience. You can come from behind a panel but you cannot start at a front one and jump down to a lower one over the edge. It's a bit confusing until you start playing with it - but it is what it is. The reason you don't do it is that it causes major distortion in the image. We did break the rule a little on the effects but they're so fast that you don't really see it. 
• Assets - First off, Nintendo's support was great on this front and for the most part we took skinned characters and assets and added our own rigs. We only had so much bandwidth to make stuff from scratch so we had to use that time judiciously. Because of that many of the sets and concepts evolved based on what they were able to provide.

The quick facts:

• Production time - 6 weeks
• Preproduction - 3 weeks 
• Resolution - 3335 x 1080
• Animation - 5 segments ~ 18 seconds apiece 
• Characters rigged - 12 
• Props rigged - 17 
• Sets - 5 
• Pots of coffee drank - a lot 

Visuals Team (alphabetical!) - The audio and some other work was handled by some of the great people at the company I've been working with but don't know if I can mention them yet. However, I will name our visuals team and give each and everyone of them a hardy thank you for their great work. Without further ado,  Team Project NoName :

• Matt Berenty - Modeling, Texturing 
• David Bokser - Co - director, TD Lead, Schedule Master, Rigging
• Josh Burton - Project Lead, Co - director, Art/Anim Lead, Animation (Kid Icarus), Rigging
• Chad Howitt - Compositing 
• Richard Hudson  - Animation (Mariokart) 
• Yehonatan Shai Koenig - Lighting 
• Matthew Ornstein - Animation (Luigi's Mansion 2, Mario) 
• Christine Phelan - Animation (Starfox) 

What did I do?

• Co directed and acted as project lead and liaison with ...the people I can't talk about yet
• Acted as art director/animation lead 
• Segment Concepts and boards
• Set Designs 
• All set modeling blocking (Berenty cleaned it up along with my nasty booleans) 
• Layout and Animation - Kid Icarus segment only 
• Character Rigging/TD
• Kid Icarus 
• Pit
• Eye
• Gun/sword
• Bullet particles 
• Set rigging 
• Mariokart
• Particles - smoke, sparks 
• Road modeling, texturing (cave to loop only)
• The poka dot mountains in the back
•  Set Rigging
• Starfox
• Fox
• Arwing
• Set Rigging
• Mario
• Particles - implemented the prep work Bokser did 

Relief!

We wrapped up the project that has consumed the last 2 months of my life and delivered to the client. If you happen to be at E3 next week you may catch it.  This was an amazing project and one I plan on writing at length about as soon as I can.

For now, I'm catching up on a myriad of emails and relaxing for a few days. Today I get to hang some blinds for my wife and make some bird houses with neighbors. Nice change of pace.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen this film yet you really should. I love everything about it.

Project M (for March!)...

Greetings internets! Wrapped up my gig on Friday and so glad to be done. Feelin a bit crispy. It was however a great experience working with a new concept - building projection. For those of you that haven't seen it, it entails projecting to a surface (often a building) whereby you do creative things with the surface to make it appear 3d for the audience. It was my what I expect to be the first of many with the TVP (a company based right here in Houston).

Looking forward to being able to show some of it. Here's some quick tidbits of my portion.

• 5 weeks of production
• Created template based rigging system for rigging the assets with body following, fin dynamics and auto swim functionality
• Modeled and rigged 4 creatures and rigged one more
• ~ 110 seconds of animation with aquatic creatures
• New python scripts written:
• createCurveFromJoints - self explanatory
• createJointChainsFromLoftSurface - makes joint chains from a nurbs surface
• attachJointChainToSurface - attaches joint chains to nurbs surfaces
• makeChainsDynamic - makes input joint chains dynamic, connected to the same system and names everything intelligently
• createDistanceNodeBetweenPosInfoNodes - creates measure nodes between position info nodes for measuring stuff on surfaces (like joint lengths!)
• getClosestUV - finds the closest UV on a surface to an input object
• getClosestCV - finds the closest CV on a curve to an input object
• getClosestObjToCV - find the closest object from a list to an input CV
• bbFish.finRigger, bbFish.rigSpine. bbFish.fixPoleVectorsCauseJoshIsAMoron (this was a good one:)

Spring means student films! So much talent out there...here's some great ones.

• Rain Town...wow...
  
  
• Thursday
  
  
• From Sheridan
  
  
• And a sweet lookin maya plugin to top it off...
  
  

Where on earth have you been, Morphy?!

He's comin - I assure you. And sooner than you might think (if you were thinking next week that is). Life has gotten busy the last few weeks but that doesn't mean there's not more Morphy fixes and updates than I can remember. Here's a tease of some of them....

• Hand blendshapes for for flexibility
• New hand sdk stuff to make hands more meaty!
• Hideable parts on the rig (i.e. no legs, left leg only, whatever). Also - hideable parts retain morphing.
• LOTS of polish and pushing of shapes
• Nose tip mover
• Ear controls
• Partridge in a pear tree (if you were good this year)

My beta testers are looking at things now to make sure I didn't blow anything up. So keep an eye out:)

In the meantime, here's the best of what I could find on the internet using Morphy:

And a lot of fun entries from 11 second club's contest last month. Keep pushin him peeps! Here's a few:

• Yoga guys
• Rubber ducky, you're the one!
• Skullduggery....
• One thing Morphy could actually be wearing...:)
• Santa and elf
• Pit of doom!
• Painting, painting on the wall...
• mmmmm....doughnuts....

Keep your peepers peeled!

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:)

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

The return of GLaDOS and a couple of great shorts!

Finished up a short gig a bit ago and gonna hop back on Morphy after lunch but wanted share a few gems.

• The return of GLaDOS - Portal was one of my favorite game experiences of the last decade and this new sneak peak is looking awesome. I didn't watch the last half cause I didn't want to spoil the puzzles for myself so be forwarned. However I for one can't wait to have a hilariously sadistic robot attempt to kill me again. For science.
  
  
  
• Couple of great shorts. Hat tip to lineboil for these. The first from the great animation school Ringling where some talented students have made a great little short with snappy timing and great shot composition and color use.
  
  
  Followed by a charming liveaction/animated short story. I love the "animated kid telling a story" genre.
  
  

Geo Customization Pass Dos...

Spent another day finaling up Morphy's face. Threw some of the range of motion poses on him to make sure things were working on that front....

• Worked on keeping hair line intact during deformation
• More weighting work
• So, for the most part, the facial customization geo works fine when the face is deformed. However, when you're workin with it and get a look you like, you may want to freeze the deformed hair and reskin it to have more control over the firmness of portions of it.
• Added chin deformation control
• Setup customization toggles. If I get any good submissions geometry wise I'll add em but for now I'm done making new ones.
• Friends and contributers can expect probably the last facial beta rig in their mailboxes later this evening.
• Tomorrow, I plan on working to final up the body morphs and start splitting those up and setting up their respective morph based deformation controls.

Ran across some really neat stuff recently on the internets:

• There's been a neat Disney motion blur vid making the rounds and this is an interesting take I'd not seen before. (hat tip to Spungella)
  
  
• Some great Glen Keane art
• Another great post by Cameron Fielding on the imperfection or reality in terms of motion
• I found this film absolutely mesmerizing. I think it has something to do with the seasons, but whatever...visually stunning. Please watch it full screen.

Where's Morphy?!

I know. I know. He's been a bit shy this week. Actually I've been doing not very glamorous work on him as well as taking care of lots of errands - vet for the pup and a pony and all kinds of other stuff. The life of an animator/farmer sometimes requires a split focus.

Rest assured he's coming along and I've been getting great feedback from some friends. I can actually say the head is just about ready for primetime and his body has been being reworked a lot. After taking another look at The Setup Machine, I decided even though it made setup a lot easier it didn't have quite all the features I wanted. For example, I really wanted "pinable" elbow and knee control as well as easy space switching. So I went back on the look out and decided to use Doublestein's setup once again (we're using it on Garden City and I like his work...so why not). I'm modifying a few things but for the most part it's gonna be his awesome rigging tools doing the heavy lifting here.

The body rig is 90% done and I finished up my own hand rig last night (Doublesteins is fine...just wanted a few other controls and like to not have all the fingers on one control as the only option).

In the meantime, there's been plenty of awesomeness on the internets:

• The Engineer updated finally landed for TF2 so I've been getting my sentry on with friends some
• Limbo released for Xbox Live. It is a beautiful game that deserves your $10 or so or whatever it costs. Absolutely love the feel and moody settings.
• Someone else released a nice new rig here and I found his test animation pretty darn tight.
• And some sweet film stuff...
  

In laws just got here for a visit, gotta jet! Have a good weekend all:)

Happy Monday!

Had a good weekend here in south Texas - my wife made a couple of homemade breads I got to sample, mowing the lawn on Saturday, finally saw Toy Story 3 (beautiful film - darker than I expected), and went for a nice horse back ride last evening with some friends.

What's on the plate for the week? Gonna try get Morphy's face rig completely done. We'll see if it happens.

To start the week off, some great stuff from around the internets....

• Beautiful film by Anthony Holden from BYU...
  
  
• Free sculpting app plugged by Keith Lango.
• You can Kling-on to this gag! (via Lineboil)
  
  
• Some pretty remarkable stop motion work. Plug author has much more insightful comments then I could provide. Check his post on cartoon brew.