First pass on 030_030_050

Finished up a first pass on this yesterday and got back some notes today. The giggle isn't working for Dave, so I'm reworking it. Got some gig's in in the works though I don't know when I'll be able to talk about em. Garden City updates are definitely gonna slow down a bit for awhile. Hope everyone had a great fourth! (those in the USA at least...though I reckon I hope you had a good fourth regardless of if you spent it on cookouts and fireworks or not)

New Shot, Updated Head and Austin for a day

• Garden City - Started a new shot this week and coming along on the blocking. Also, Bokser started a new fan page for the film on Facebook, so join away if you like
• Head Project - Coming along just fine. The base model is about done and I ran it through The Face Machine a couple of days ago to see what it looked like moving around. Pretty swell:)

• Austin for a Day - So word of advice - if you move make sure you tell Amazon. In a rush to make an order before heading out of town a few weeks ago, I neglected to check that and I now have a shipment of books waiting for me at my old apartment. Ah well. The main reason I'm heading there to to hang with my cousin before he heads off to school in England, have coffee with an animator pal and visit with some potential animation conspirators.
• New Gigs - Got a couple of gigs in the que so the aforementioned projects may be shifting to the side burner for a bit. However, looking forward to some new projects to gnaw on. It'll be a bit before I can talk about them. I will say that I would have be up a creek without The Setup Machine the other day. It's a great tool for the tool box.

Sally is Twirling Again...

Spent most of the week polishing on some shots for Gardern City and working on the "head project". Here's the latest shot: Have a great weekend all.

Arkansas Mountain Sketches

Some sketches from our annual trek to my wife's family reunion in Arkansas. Had a great time, experienced my first small Tornado after having lived in Oklahoma for 17 years and seen none and did a little sketching. Note to self - you suck at drawing trees. Practice.

Garden City and a Face...

• Garden City - Been waiting on some notes from Cory before continuing the 2d gig so polishing on some Garden City shots to get them past Bokser. Here's the latest on one of em.

  Speaking of, Bokser has a public Garden City production blog now!

• Face Thingy - thumbnailing up and planning for a new project that would make good use of my staring-at-faces-for-three-some-odd-years-at-midway experience. I've been playing with some other peoples rigs. The Norman Rig, Andy Rig, and Blake Rig (you can google em) in particular. Great stuff! However not super easy for folks to customize the characters further. The idea is to create a customizeable face and rig to go along with it. Initially it'll be just to throw on a character that's already setup except for a good face rig but eventually I'd like to make it more comprehensive. I'm still trying to think of a name for it if anyone has any ideas. I started a sculpt/model for the initial head. Still pretty early on but it's somethin to show, eh?!

In awe....

So rarely do you come across something so unlike anything you've seen. I have no idea what's going on but I like it. A lot. Don't know where he's been hiding, but glad he came out to play. Came across some other neat stuff lately but that's it for now. Back to deadly combat with my allergies.

Yes, I have been working...

...And man, 2d camera moves and moving characters through space is hard (especially when you haven't ever really done it or worked in a 2d production pipeline). This is where I'm at on a promo piece I'm doing with some buddies at Portland Studios. Initially I just started working in flash but I realized there was no way I was capable of doing that by hand. So, I animated the layout on a large format, and then moved my camera around it in flash. I'll clean things up as I tie down the details in the next flash pass. If anyone knows a better workflow, I'm all ears. :) We're still looking on final look but for the most part Cory wants to keep things rough.

Couple of great films I came across...

Both from students out of Cal Arts. Need to get me some of that water...

...on, and flash is hard....

Thanks to everyone who's sent emails on Squirrely. Glad you like him:)

Space Girl...

Watch out for Ruxpin.

This is my first entry into the Drawergeeks drawing club. Perhaps a little uninspired, but it works! I'm gonna try to be more proactive on drawing more.

Jack and Inar...

Who's Jack and who is Inar? Well, Jack is the boy above and you'll have to wait to see Inar down the road. I started working on my collaborative project with Cory this week. First thing was to play with seeing if I can draw in his style. This was the first attempt I felt hit it. We'll see if Cory agrees. Working through the animatic now and hopefully we'll have something to show before too long. I have a tinge of worry that this project is beyond my traditional animation muscles but that's what stetching is for, no? Oh, for an animation desk... Progress might be a little slow next week as my beautiful better half is off and wants to do stuff other than animate:) After this project it's back to Garden City unless another freelance or work opportunity sweeps me away.

Squirrely Bounces into the Wild!

Version 1.0 is out! Catch him while you can:)

Squirrely is a free rig for noncommercial use only. I wanted a "ball like" character with a tail to play with for animation tests and Squirrely came into being.

Features:

• Body Rigged with The Setup Machine 2
  • Stetchy IK Spine
  • FK/IK Switchable Arms and Legs
  • Limb mirroring
  • Auto/Manual Stretch limbs
  • Character Sets Set up for proper keying
  • Tail/Ear Controls
  • Finger/Toe FK/IK
  • LowRes Proxy Geometryy mode for faster playback
  • Character scaleable via master control
  • Hideable tail via "COG"
  • Face Camera
• Facial rig
• Limited yet functional facial rig
• FK/IK Eye Rig - set up via my good friend Scott Englert's Tutorial
• Eyelid Tracking/Blinking Control - setup via John Doublestein's Tutorial

Recommendations:

• EyeBlend Control transitions between Joystick/look at control for the eyes
• Use the character sets - one of my nit picks with the setup machine is that the FK/IK swich attributes are located on the COG control. As such, having limited keying sets via selection sets or quickselection sets is a hassle. The characters sets make sure you key all the appropriate attributes
• FK/IK Arms and Leg switching accessed via the TSM controls
• Mirroring accessed via TSM Controls

Requests:

• I'm not great at shading/texturing. If anyone wants to come up with some slicker stuff you want incorporated, lemme know.
• Tag animations you do with him as "Squirrely" on YouTube, Vimeo or the like. I'd like to see em.
• Have fun:)

Demo Reel - Spring 2009

Well, it's about time. I've finally updated my reel. It's mostly comprised of Garden City work along with the lip sync and Squirrely animations I did over the last couple of weeks. I am currently seeking temporary/contractual onsite or remote work as an animator in film, game or commercial work and am also open to full time employment opportunities in the Austin/Houston, TX areas. A higher res version of my reel can be found at the "Reel" link up top. Resume is up to date as well. Next week, I'm working on a project with Cory. Can't wait! Also, Squirrely is in prerelease. If you wanna test/play with him, gimme a shout via comment.

Squirrely in HD!

Just press the HD button on the full screen mode. This was as far as I needed to get for some anim on the demo reel, I'll swing back and get him over to the acorn when I have the time. Demo reel incoming shortly:)

Squirrely (almost) first pass...

Good progress today. I'll spend a good bit of tomorrow putting some elbow grease to it and then send it to render to get the old reel ready. He's a fun little character. Looking forward to seeing what other folks do with him after I release him:)

Blocking done...

On to linear on Monday. Have a great weekend all:)

Squirrely Obstacle Course Continued...

Been working on 3dizing the Squirrely test. Overall, pretty happy with the rig and plan on releasing version 1.0 after I'm done with the demo reel. He was designed as a 'ball type' character for tests and is serving that purpose well:) Still on stepped keys, hoping to get through the segment's "3dizing" by tomorrow so I can shift to linear early next week. We'll see how it goes. The wife and I are heading out to bowl here in a few so I'm out. I wish I could bowl as well in real life as I do on the Wii. Ah well...

Lip Sync Pause

It's close to done. Gonna give it a few days to settle and then swing back before throwing the reel together. All comments welcome. On to Squirrely!

Lip sync progress

Another day on the scene. Well, partial day. Making good progress though it's still in the "funky" phase when things don't quite look right. In the spirit of showing process if anyone cares to see. :)

Lip sync update and GREAT books...

First off, here's an update on where I was on my lip sync earlier this afternoon. It's coming along alright. I've been working on an in progress cut of my reel and am pretty happy with how that's looking. Need to do a bunch of stuff to finish it but what else is new. Plan on sending reels out in a couple of weeks. Going to be looking for short term onsite work, remote/freelance work so we'll see how that pans out. After the reel goes out I'm gonna work on a 2d project with a buddy at Portland Studios while I wait for responses. Two fantastic books came out recently and I highly recommend them both. I got one of them a couple of weeks ago and the first volume came in last week. They're amazing and worth their weight in gold to anyone not at a studio with drawing classes or in college anymore for that matter. Buy them now.

Blake Rig and Script Jobs...

note - NOT my rig creation

Came across a new rig on Highend 3d and it's a pretty good looking rig. So I decided to use it for the lip sync piece I'm fixing to start on. It makes use of script jobs which don't seem to like referencing as the creator notes in the docs on the site. So I did some noodling and figured out how to make it work. If the character is referenced (all nodes prefix option) to "Ch1:", this is how to make the rig work.

1. Fix the Expression
   • Go to the expression editor
   • Select the "CH1:blake_FKIKSpaceSwitch_scriptNode"
   • Input "CH1:" in the spot provided
2. Fix the script jobs
   • For each character, you'll need to run this is in the script editor: scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "LArmFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "RArmFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "LLegFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch.FK_IK_Match" "RLegFKIK"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch.parent" "LArmSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch.parent" "RArmSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch.parent" "LLegSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch.parent" "RLegSpace"; scriptJob -ac "CH1:blake_tie_ikFK_switch.parent" "TieSpace";
3. Notepad is your friend for additional characters - see Find and Replace
4. Ran into an issue with referencing that the rig maker was kinda enough to help out with. You'll need to create a new script set to fuction on (Open/Close) and set the name spaces: proc multipleChars() { // prefix for character1 string $character1= "CH1:"; // prefix for character2 string $character2 = "CH2:"; // prefix for character3 string $character3 = "CH3:"; // prefix for character4 string $character4 = "CH4:"; string $a[] = `ls -sl`; if (($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character1+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character1+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character2+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character2+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character3+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character3+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } else if (($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_L_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_R_arm_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_L_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_R_leg_ikFK_switch")) || ($a[0] == ($character4+"blake_tie_ikFK_switch"))) { scriptNode -executeBefore ($character4+"blake_FKIK_SpaceSwitch_scriptNode"); } } scriptJob -killWithScene -e "SelectionChanged" "multipleChars";

That outa do it. Thanks Jason for the great rig and the help trouble shooting the referencing issue!