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.

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...

cgmWeekly is back!

Hope everyone is doing well. Finished up a gig and back on cgMonks workin on tools. They're in open beta now so hop over and download em if you like:)

In other news...

• Prometheus - beautiful film with a couple of plot holes. Saw it in IMAX 3d and enjoyed the experience a lot.
• Legend of Korra - Anyone else geek out at this weeks episode? How cool it is to see Aang again. Man, I love that show.
• Guild Wars 2 Beta - So good....get it out now ArenaNet!

Have a good one, internets! Gotta make dinner:)

Hope everyone had a nice Easter...

First things first, I have the internets at maximum warp again! Well, not maximum, but quite sufficient.

The commercial I worked on last month at Psyop finally aired and someone who worked on it posted it so I reckon it's okay to link it.

My main shots were -

• s17 - fore and mid ground Octo guys, their Squid bubbles, and the arms.
• s23 - quick shot of the fox at the Octobot controls
• s24 - foreground fox, octobot and bubble sac, and the near-midground action of the bubble sac being hit by the turtles and eaten by the sub

I'll post the playblasts when I get the project page up as there's a bit more there. I had a blast on the project and really enjoyed the team and look forward to working with them again in the future.

Had some lemons of life lately which I'm workin on making into something sweeter...maybe lemonheads...I like those. The most recent of which was discovering Poison Oak in some other vines I was clearing off of some trees. Never had it before. Don't want it again. Don't want you to have it either. Avoid this at all cost....

However, I do have a sympathetic, supportive and beautiful wife who makes the bad days not so bad.

That and the prospect of a gator hunt on a neighbor's pond sounds like a life experience that suburbia just can't offer that the rural one can:)

Also, Bokser wants to finish Garden City this decade so I best get back to that...

Update on my shot and this week...

This is the first solid pass on the shot and I sent it off to Bokser to get some more eyes on it. That's the hardest part about not working in a studio - not being able to spin around in your chair and say "Hey, how can I make this better?" or more likely "How much does this blow?" This week will prolly mainly be swinging back and picking up fixes on about 4 shots I have out. I'm trying to wrap things up to send out some reels at the end of April. Gonna be doing a lip sync in the next couple of weeks to round things out. This spring has wreaked havoc with my health. I cannot seem to shake this cough/headcold. Anyone else having a harder than normal time? /off to look for some advil...

For my friends...

Almost all of my friends at Midway today were let go. I'm still shell shocked about it. They are all talented animators and artists and would be asset at any studio. Any one hiring folks should look em up on Linked in or the link if I have it here:

• Scott Englert
• Mike Peterson
• Randy Stranton
• Roger Berrones
• Nick Carter
• James Gentile
• Justin Muir
• Tony Lewellen
• Matt Taylor
• Phil Kourie
• Chris Torres

This is the list as I know it so far, if I find out more were let go, I'll add em. My thoughts are with you guys.

On an Animbatical...

Last Thursday was my last day at Midway Games. I had a great run there over the past 3 and a half years and have made many what I expect to be lifelong friends. Looking back, I consider myself fortunate to have worked on so many shipped titles - Ballers 2, Stranglehold, Blacksite, Ballers 3, Blitz, and most recently Wheelman and MKvsDC which will be shipping before too long. I also was able to work on some other projects in a protoype/helping role. My time at the company was mainly spent working on pushing the facial animation pipeline with my friend Scott Englert and overseeing production in that facet of those projects and doing some motion capture cleanup, vehicle rigging/animation, dynamics and even some cloth in the down times. It was a difficult decision to leave as the company treated me very well and I had been able to work remotely for the past 8 months or so from Houston. However, my passion for animation lies in full body keyframe work rather than just focusing on the face and my opportunities to do that were limited. It was time for a break. A chance to seek out opportunities that would afford the exercising of those passions. What might you ask is an "Animbatical"? Well, I think I made it up to be honest but the intention was a sabatical of sorts for an animator. Over the next several months, I'm going to be working on "Garden City" - a film being directed by a very good friend David Bokser. We've been plugging along on it for a while now and it's time to get 'er done. I'm also going to be doing some animation exercises, working on some short film ideas and hopefully finishing Squirrely and Olaf and looking for some freelance or short term on site work if opportunities come along. If you hear of anything, lemme know:)

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.

"1.#QO" - the value of DOOM!

Working in games and getting things to play nice in a game engine can be "fun." By fun I mean hey-kid's-let's-play-rake-the-leaves-on-a-windy-day kinda fun. This week's mind bender had to do with a crash every time I tried to do a pretty basic function of bringing in animation. What's especially endearing is not having error messages to have any idea what happened. So you start trying things. Fast forward multiple hours later and it turns out my Maya sim mentioned several previous posts past had sent an object into a quantum singularity known with translation and rotation values of "1.#QO." Now, I can't really fault Unreal for not knowing what to do with that. I didn't have a clue what to make of it either. Frankly I'm impressed Maya can still chug along will no mention of an apparent black hole in a scene. A couple of curves deleted later and things went swimmingly. Weird. Note - A quick google search informed me that this is the default value Visual C++ uses when a division by zero occurs.

Happy New Year!

It's a new year and I accomplished about 2 of my resolutions from last year. Let's see, what did I do this year? Hmm...

• Got engaged to my amazing fiance
  
• Taught a semester of college
  
• Finished working on 3 games at work (Stranglehold, Blacksite, and the next Ballers)
• Learned to write some mel scripts
  
• Grew my beard back
• Read a copious amount of books
• Visited Yosemite
• Moved to Austin
  

I guess that's not too shabby. I've got some resolutions for this year, but I'm not writing them on my blog so I can't see them a year from now glaring at me having not accomplished them.

What else is going on...

• Glumpers - Amazing sound, beautiful animation. Just watch it.
  
  
• Project No Name. Still chugging along on my buddy Dave's film. I'm really excited to be working on full body stuff again. I've blocked a couple of scenes and am looking forward to digging in. I think it's gonna be a great piece.
  
• Share the Potion! - Check out an Animated short/commercial by my buddy Cory.
• Dynamics - I hate thee. I've been working on some dynamics at work and it's about to eat my lunch. I hear Maya's rigid bodies aren't well suited for what I'm making them do, but I don't have any other options at present. A work flow of move this, run 5 minute simulation, move that, 5 minute simulation isn't the most efficient. I'm sure there's better ways of working, but I did find this heartening read that let me know even the big budget movie guys have the same frustrations.

Stranglehold Demo is up on XBox Live!

(Dislaimer - VERY violent video, lots of blood and stuff, if you're squimish...move along) So, the Stranglehold demo released last night on XBOX live. IGN did a quick write up on it and the comments I've been seeing for the most part show people enjoying it. If you're into shooting stuff up, give it a look. I hadn't really seen the multiplayer in a very long time. Prolly a year ago. It's actually looking pretty fun.

New things, new days...

• New(ish) job - Monday was my first day in Midway Austin. Things are going well and most importantly, my one way commute has gone from 38 miles to a fraction of that - 3.8miles. My small part toward driving less and stopping the world from blowing up because of mankind (see Al Gore's film for more information on that).
• Apartment living - Finding an apartment in a new place can be an absolute nightmare especially if you've never been to a town and have a day and a half in which to find one. I used a service called apartmentsnow.com which cost me nothing and I was very happy with. However, my new landlords are not starting off with a very good record. First of all, when I was looking here and they showed me the model, it looked great - nice new appliances, great color and great layout. What I didn't know and I discovered my first night here was that there is a rail line running directly behind the complex (far from the rental office or model I saw). My apartment just so happens to be about the closest in the whole complex to said railroad. Imagine my delight when trying to sleep. I reckon I'll get used to it. Sure will help me find a new place with my 6 month lease is up. Secondly, I got in a week ago Monday, dropped off the stuff from my car and went to the grocery store and got some milk and some Frosted Mini Wheats. My stuff wasn't to come until this past Saturday so on Tuesday I headed to Houston to hang out with my girlfriend. When I got back on Saturday and was waiting for the movers, I noticed some ants on the counter. I made a note of it and went down the rental office to request them have someone come out. I only thought it was a few ants and didn't think much of it. Further investigation found that the ants had quite a little conga line going. Right to my Frosted Mini Wheats. Flustered, I started calling the rental office as obviously the apartment had not been treated before I moved in. Wow. I have to hand it to them - they know how to give bad service. The first time I called and said that it needed to be dealt with that day as I couldn't unpack or buy any food till that ant problem was fixed. They said there was nothing at all they could do as the pest people only came on Friday. I explained that they could call their manager and said I expected to be called back with an answer in the next couple of hours. Nothing. I tried calling and I heard the line pick up, background chatter and noise, and then be hung up on. Confused, I tried again, same reaction (with new background noise). Now I've never really had any company I'm paying for service do that, so I was three parts surprised and one part irritated. Finally the phone went to an answering service which I left a message with them and was called back a little later. The girl said the same thing. My response was that either they were going to send someone out or I was going to buy the stuff to do it myself. Guess who won that one, eh? A trip to Lowes later, my ants are gone. I will say this - I didn't know they had it, but if you Google an apartment complex, you can see comments from tenants. If only I had known. Ah well, builds character, right?
• Josh the Car Body Banger! - In other news, I fixed my bumper. When I was in Houston last week, I grabbed a rubber mallet from my girlfriend's tool box and banged that puppy right out. Doesn't look too shabby, either. Well, actually, that's exactly what it looks like....:)

Oh the places you go...

Wow, it's been a busy, well, month or so.

• Moving to Austin - the biggest current news is I'm moving to Austin. I transferred with my company down to our Austin Studio and am very excited about it. It's a lot closer to family and my significant other so, it's good all around. I finished up my work on Stranglehold and am hopping on a couple of other projects at work so that should keep me busy. Hopefully I'll have a bit of time to do some personal work as well:)
  
  Last week I was in town finding a place to live and found a new favorite restaurant - Rudy's. I'll be visiting there often. If you go and they ask if you've been there before, tell them, "No, I haven't." It's well worth it.
  
  Trust me.
  
  Disclaimer - if they don't do something special, maybe it was something they only do every now and then...:)
  
  
• Arkansas - Three weeks ago I was in Arkansas for my girlfriend's family reunion of sorts. We had a lot of fun hiking, meeting/hanging with her family and checking out the sweet cave art. The name "bob" painted on the rock surface wasn't nearly as impressive as the Native American's work. I also learned that I suck (and I mean SUCK) at the card game "Mafia." It involves being sneaky and lying with a straight face if you're the Mafia so you can "kill" people between rounds and not get killed off by the townsfolk. The one time I was something other that a meager townsfolk and got opportunity to try my hand as a something else it didn't last too long. After the FIRST round, my girlfriend looks me in the face and somehow "sees" something amiss. She says, "You're the mafia, aren't you?" I muster my best lying face and tell her of course I'm not. Her response was to promptly get the rest of the townsfolk to agree to my early demise. The nerve...
  
  She was right of course, but still....:)
  
  
  Waited for a bit on this one:)
  
  

• Fairytale land (also known as Yosemite) - last week I was in Yosemite for a family vacation and it was amazing. Pictures do better than words.
  
  
  One of the falls from Glacier Point
  
  
  
  Half Dome at Sunset from Glacier Point
  
  Yosemite Valley
  
  Me and a tree nowhere near as big as the biggest we saw
  
  
• Torrential Downpours - Yesterday, I got back from my week of vacation, apartment hunting and what not. An hour after I got to work a small portion of Lake Michigan, which had miraculously enough been lifted in the air over Chicago, decided to fall. I heard there was a sight to see in the other building and so ran between buildings through 4 inches of water and was amazed by this view:
  
  
  Midway Geyser
  
  
• Not very nice people - I got out to my car this morning and discovered that in my absence, someone had decided to so lovingly hit my car with their own - crumpling my rear right bumper. The apartment complex doesn't keep records well enough to know who might have a white car that could have done it and the police won't do anything for non injury related accidents taking place in private parking lots, so....guess I'll be heading to the junkyard to find me a new bumper since it's not worth it to pay the deductible. You'd think someone would leave a note....you'd think that...
  

Gonna have some moving time next week, hope to get some doodling and reading done:)

Icontastic!

A sampling from the year...

So one of my favorite little tasks at work is making icons for the mel scripts we use and create. Scottie is the brains behind our little mel factory here (check his site, he has some goodies up there) and I..well...I make the picturesque little buttons. But I'm learning. I did complete my first major mel script last week that makes captures a thumbnail of a character's face, adds custom text in to label it and render it off to an input location which then became a very small part of Scott's current opus mel project which is gonna be very sweet when finished. One of my goals for the year was learning more mel and I'm slowly chipping away at it. Next on the list is UI Mel creation which my compatriot tells me is "lots of fun." Giddyap.