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.

Morpheus Rig 2.0 Kickstarter...the game has begun!

CLICK ME!

We're live, internets! You have 30 days to make this project a go. So if you like Morpheus Rig or CG Monks and  wanna see more, now is your chance! Thank you for all your support.

Morpheus 2.0 Kickstarter Preannouncement!

First off, thank you for all the great uses so many of you have put Morpheus (and Squirrely) to. You've pushed the rig in ways I hadn't anticipated and it's so exciting to see it.

This September, CG Monks will be starting a Morpheus 2.0 Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project. We have a lot of ideas and would love to get moving on the project but we want to try and find a way to fund development of rigs like Morpheus and Squirrely, tools, assets and other projects for the community we so loving being a part of. We reached out to many of our communities and a Kickstarter campaign was one of the common themes we kept hearing. So, we're gonna give it a shot.

What we're looking for now is quality versions of some of the great animations we've seen on the internet. So, if you've created a great animation with Morpheus and want to possibly be included on a best of video to be featured as a part of our campaign, please upload a good (hd is preferred) version of it to Vimeo and send me a link to the video - (no spaces) j j b u r t o n @ c g m o n k s . c o m. In your message, please list your name and an email or webpage if and as you want them specified.

I'll post again when we have a better idea of when the kickoff date will actually be.

Morpheus Needs help...

Or rather I do in helping to plan next steps that involve ole'Morphy. If you're a fan, please take a moment to fill our a survey to assist or maniacal plan making:)

http://www.cgmonks.com/public-input-july-2012/

Thanks!

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

Independence Day! (and Morphy)

First off, happy Independence Day if you're in the U.S. and if you're not - happy Monday! Smoked a brisket yesterday and man do I love slow smoked meats....

This is a playblast version of my 'let's-try-out-Morphy' anim test. Had a lot of fun doin the segment and learned a good bit about the rig. Those interested can see progressive updates on my Vimeo channel. 

Voted on the 11 Second Club entries yesterday and there are a lot of solid Morphy entries. Best of luck to you all. However my high vote was for a Norman piece. No favoritism here:)

For some training wheels on customizing Morphy, you can download the customizations from my animation in their own respective scene files. Eventually I hope to have a more elegant customization saving solution but that day has not yet come.

Download em here

Included are:

• Fezik - Big guy
• oldGuy - Key guy
• Wes - Mr. Shoves a lot
• Inigo - the Spaniard!
• Base scene file with my lighting setup from this piece since some folks haven't the time or inclination to set up lighting. Some just wanna animate and I can appreciate that. REMEMBER - mental ray.

Some notes:

• BEFORE you try pulling one into a scene, make sure your preferences are set to cm units. Otherwise the rig will self destruct.
• The customizations reference the Morphy v1.0 rig. If you try to point to one you've modified, it probably won't work
• Import whichever rig you want WITH 'preserve references' checked.
• With that you should be off to the races

What's good for the goose...

Yeah, I know. It's about time I did a Morphy animation test. As I was looking to update the ole' reel last week the lack of a quality lip sync was striking so I'm gonna remedy that as I can find time between gigs. Decided to do a clip from one of my favorite movies though one I haven't seen done much because it is a pretty popular film. I had a monologue from another movie I wanted to do but I'd never done a full keyframe sequence with a lot of characters so thought I'd give that a go.

Rough Blocking

I've already learned quite a few things by using Morphy in an animation which is the best way to test stuff. So first off, apologies for some wonkiness in some places on the rig. Here's a few things I've learned:

• polySmooth causing major issues with simple customization - When I changed the surface of some faces and then ran a poly smooth, the shaders go all over the place. So, because I'm using mentalRay, I just have a mesh approximation setup to use my viewport smoothing and that works much much better. When I go back I may find a way to do the polySmooth that will work, but it's annoying. Apologies.
• The uiCam's pivot is nutty - I gotta dig in to what's going on but in the meant time if you select the uiCam and turn off inherit transforms, it'll behave properly
• Some of my geo has flipped normals.
• Turn off the face shaper's visibility after you're done customizing so you don't keep selecting them inadvertently
• Locking the geo selectability - While I understand my reasoning for doing it, it's a little annoying. 
• Shoulder and wrist rotation orders - Still don't think I got this right. I'm playing with different setting as I'm working through my anim and will post what I think are best choices when I'm done
• Eye orb mesh creasing against the cheek and in the brow when doing some customizatoin scaling - You can alleviate this to a large degree by selecting the mesh area verts that's getting wonky and smoothing the skin weights there
• Limb scaling switching isn't as intuitive as it could be - having to manually change the stretch settings on the fk and ik to ensure matching isn't the best workflow. I've got some ideas at how to make that process better.
• Head placement on the neck - taking the head's blue mover control and positioning the head a little more forward on the neck seems to work a lot better.
• The spine blows - My pivots stink and I apologize for it. The hips are especially offensive. This shall be fixed.
• Want to add pose mirroring
• Want to look at the body geo to get better muscle topology
• Fingers - Think I probably need to add an alternate finger setup what's more direct
• Face controls - Though I like them for the most part, I think the lip roll should be on a separate control than the lip movers. One thought I had was to just pull all of that off the face and do a faceUI similar to what I have for the bodyUI (which I'm really enjoying). 

When will I get around to updating Morphy? The minor stuff here I think I can do before too long but the big stuff will be a while. Bokser and I have a long way to go on our rigger which I'll be using to do 2.0. 

Feel free to offer thoughts on the blocking or the rig thoughts. Thanks for all the support:)

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

Morphy May be around....

Morphy Tip of the Month: Take a look at some of the lip sync choices some of the stronger pieces have used (especially the example below). Seen a lot of animations that are pretty much just open/close and wide/narrow. Remember, wide can be smiling wide or terse/angry wide or a myriad of other options. Play with showing more teeth for some characterizations as well. Some folks talk showing more lower teeth, some upper. Play with it and keep up the great work!

Awwww...baby Morphy. nice job Shawn!

It's just a flesh wound Morcy! Great work Jed.

Fantastic mod, Tim and great animation too:)

Here's a good example of nice mouth shapes for lip sync.

And from this months 11 Second Club a few selections:

• Great mods on this one. Well done.
• And another from the top 10.
• Love the expression on the last guys...
• P.I. Guy
• Pretty nice hand work
• Drunken Duo

In other news....

The gig is going along great but working some crazy hours. Ran across a wild Maya bug though. Some scenes would only playblast at 24fps regardless of settings. Spent a good couple hours banging my head against Maya before looking up the hot fixes and finding I wasn't up to date and that was a known issue. So, if you're using Maya 2011 on a project, I'd recommend getting hotfix 3:)

Can't wait to see this project up and done. The team is doing fantastic work and I plan on bragging on each and every one of them as soon as I can talk about it.

Cheers.

April Showers brings MORCy!

Morphy Tip of the Month - Seems like some folks are having trouble hitting b/m/p. Don't forget that there's a lip sealer control that rides along with the jaw. Give it a go! Also, seriously... roll those shoulders down:)

An orc from Vitor

Some great animations I stumbled across or had sent in...

from Juan Couto (thanks for tagging it so I could find it). Fantastic mod!

from Bhavin for an iAnimate assignment


Some motion capture work from Josh in Tennessee

Some of last month's 11 second club entries:

• Boring date
• Guy at a bar
• That guy has a doll...:)
• What's that in your hat, mac?
• Dino guy!

Also, just found out I'm gonna be pegged on a gig through June and I couldn't be more excited. SO COOL....better get my posting out this week!

When, where, how can I use Morpheus?

Gotten quite a few emails in the last week or so on Morpheus usage. They're mainly from students but there have been a few commercial queries as well. I tried to be clear in the docs, so I'm not sure if folks just aren't reading it or if I need to clarify. Some insight there would be helpful. (the docs are here). If it's not clear please lemme know.

So I'm gonna try to elaborate some...

• Crediting - please just credit to Josh Burton and a link to the project website (http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp) where anyone looking can find a full list of contributers. 
• If you are a student working on school projects (including competitions) or a professional working on personal work - you can pretty much do whatever the heck you like with Morphy so long as the 'would Pixar make this kind of animation' rule has been met. Short film? Go right ahead. Competition? Knock yourself out. Yes, I know that you might win some money. If you do, awesome. There is a place to make a donation should you choose but I'm not asking or requiring anything.
• If you are a school or competition wanting to point people to the rig - Awesome. Please use the link here - http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp
• If you are a professional or group of professionals working a commercial project - I've had a few queries on this and haven't come to a solution I'm comfortable with yet. I will say I am not in the least bit open to one time buy out option especially with an exclusive clause. I am open to talking about per project kind of stuff. If you'd like to chat about it, send me an email.
• If you are someone who doesn't care about permissions or creator's intent - Really doubt if what I say would matter so not gonna bother. If it ever becomes an issue I can worry bout it then.

Sorry again for the lack of posts, been workin long hours on my present gig. Should be comin up for air in early April.

March on Morphy!

Morphy Tip of the Month - Check out this tutorial from Andrea in Italy on how to more easily mod Morpheus' texture. Also,  don't forget to try scaling the hands down a bit for a more feminine look (or even using the finger tapering shapes if you're daring;)

A fun one from Stine who's studying in Denmark. Nice customization work too! Check out the other stuff on the vimeo channel as well...

Don't forget to check progress over on the Morpheus wardrobe project! Lookin pretty cool.

From last month's 11 second club:

• Morpheus And Squirrely! (done by a buddy of mine from back at Midway too)
• Minor character part. Posting cause I like the coke animation:)
• Date not going so well. (Like the punk hair:)
• Storm troopers in tights.
• Nothin gets you goin like a kick to the head...

Gonna be a crazy busy month with this gig. Don't know how much time I'll have for much else. If I don't respond to you, that would be why. I did finish a pretty cool python function for generating joint chains from lofted surfaces this evening...been coding like crazy the last couple of days as I have a lot of stuff to get rigged this week and doing it modularly will help:)

Your Monthly Morphy update!

Morphy Tip of the Day - If the selection objects in the UI aren't working, you need to run boTriggers update script:)

First off, thank you for all the encouraging and kind responses to my last post. Back to the business at hand - congrats to Edwin Schaap for winning this month's 11 second club using Morphy! Here's a few from the month:

• The winner!
• Guys and a telescope
• Rubix cubes!
• Jedi number one 
• Morphy gilmore
• Couple of guys are the arcade
• Big head old guys
• Thieves
• Wish they'd finished..:)

Couple of things in general to those of you using Morphy. His shoulders in the t pose are high cause the arms are outstretched. In general, if you bring them down for a regular pose it's going to look better. There are exceptions of course but try bringin em down and see what you think. 

What else is up? Well, progress is moving along on bbThingamarig and my python is becoming passable. Got the template maker working pretty well as well as the main architecture for the arm rig. I had initially been thinkin about just the roll joint setup like AFR and Doublstein's rig use but I'm leaning more towards a ribbon setup so I've been experimenting with that. I think the new spine in particular will be much much improved.

What about cool stuff from the nets?!

• My good friend Scott Englert is working on some very cool stuff for maya. Check it out!
• If you ever wanted to try Project Messiah, now is the time cause this temp pricing is nuts.
• Also, this weather lately has been nuts -  65 one day and chipping ice off the water bowls outside the next

Announcing the Morpheus Wardrobe Project

From one of the folks there

Check it out here!

It's my pleasure to announce the baton has been taken up by the good folks at Ex'pression College to head a Morphy Wardrobe Project. It will be a free to use library that their students will be working on as well as inviting participation from anyone who wants to participate. It's so exciting to see folks excited about Morpheus and wanting to take it further. We'll be establishing protocols for props and clothes to make sure everything works great. Check it out!

In the meantime, work continues on the tools to make the rig even better with 2.0.

And some more great examples of his use from the 11 second club last month:

• Couple of kids
• Balloon popper!
• Octopus head
• Balloon clown in space
• Annoyed chef
• Christmas at sea
• Channel changer
• Office banter
• Girl with a wrench

Have a very Morphy Christmas!

See what you can come up with:)

There comes a time when you just have to "stick a fork in it" and this is it. Some of the stuff I wanted to do I'm gonna hold of till 2.0. But for now Morpheus 1.0 is done and released. Now. 

Get it on the Morpheus project page as usual:)

Additions in this release pack:

• The file I used to render the above teaser so you can get some ideas on how to push the customization stuff. Can't wait to see how you push it even more.
• Latest head rig as always for those tinkerers out there
• All necessary quick selects sets are in scene in a group so you don't have to worry about bringing them in when "tinkering"
• Both release candidates in case you have animations referencing them
• New finger/hand poses and new joints for more "meaty" poses.
• Hand blendshapes
• Accessible via the hand objects in the Morph-o-matic ui mode
• Ear animation controls
• Nose tip mover
• COG prop space object and switching
• Parts proxy mesh which enables you to turn off arms and legs and stuff - sorry it's a bit of a hack till I can completely modulize the rig
• Accessible via the all_anim
• Polished and pushed face poses (brows, eye squeeze)
• TONS of fixes that I don't remember them all...:)

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Rotation order fixes were made on the hand ik controls. It will gimp any ik hand keys you have so if you're in the middle of an animation and don't wanna deal with it. Use the last release rig.

What's next?

I'm gonna chill till new years and put together a plan of attack to try to gin up some remote rigging work and pushing my skillset in that area as well. Python shall be tamed in 2011!

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!