Some Old Midway stuff...

Here's some old work from Midway. I'm assuming they don't care as Mortal Kombat has shipped and the other project is canceled. Most of my fam wasn't really sure did what I did at work all day - this is a good taste of it. If anyone at Midway does care, lemme know and I'll yank em.

• Canceled project - This is a facial animation test from a canceled Midway project. They wanted a couple of quick dialogue tests, so I did em. The animation isn't the best, I didn't get to spend a lot of time on them. Just putting the rig through it's paces. I also did the facial rigging and weighting.
• Mortal Kombat Facial Rig - This is a range of motion video from the prototype facial rig for Mortal Kombat vs. DC. I created the poses for the rig to drive and did the facial weighting pass. It's a joint based rig whose architecture was set in place by my coworker and friend Scott Englert. Subsequent rigging work on characters was done by Tony Lewellen and his team.

Site updates...

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. I sure did though my belly is full of chex mix and chocolate covered pecans... Oh, and I'm a big fan of what may or may not be a trend. I got a couple of Blue Ray DVDs for presents but don't have a Blue Ray player yet. However, they both came with digital copies downloadable via iTunes with an unlock code. I'm wondering if this is the standard or just an anomaly shared by the Dark Knight and a little robot that could named Wall-E. Hoping it's a trend:) Projects pages updated:

• Garden City
• Mortal Kombat vs. DC
• Ballers: Chosen One
• The Wheelman

Progress on Garden City is coming along just dandy.

Been a while...

It's been way too long since I've made a concerted effort to draw more and actually followed through on it. Plan on changing that. This is a 20 minute photoshop pastel of our cat. Man, I need to practice. There's only so much time in life and lately I don't feel like I've been the best steward of mine. That's something else I plan on changing. That'll be my present to myself. Also, this is absolutely amazing...

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.

Lessons....

Finally wrapped my first sequence on Garden City. Don't know when I'll be able to show it but it was a lot of fun to do. Also the first bit of full body animation I've done in some time so it took a bit to get back into the swing of things. When I went to start my next shot on Garden City only to find the updated set made my layout pass of Henry dance his way into the shower. Understandably, gonna have to fix that. However, while I was waiting for the updated set, I stumbled across some great info and inspirational work via the ole' Google Reader:

• Visual Comedy 101 - Carlos Baena had some edutainment gold on his blog in the form of a series of vids staring the ever humorous "Bean" on what constitutes visual comedy. Check it out here.
• More Gobelins awesome-ness - Here's my visual fav and the making off is embedded below. All of them can be seen here.
• From the Maker of "Simon's Cat" - More hillarity...

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:)

The Chestnut Tree...

I've been wanting to see this film for a while having heard about it a year ago or so. It's no wonder it's gotten so much acclaim. Take a look at a delightful little film:

"Get over here!"

No I had nothing to do with this screenshot. Yes, I'd like to be Batman.

Scorpion kept using his signature move to keep me in the brutal crucible that was the Mortal Kombat production pipeline. Weeks of very long hours and plenty of weekends work makes for crispy cogs in the game-making machine. However, it is done (at least my portion) and though I learned lots of good lessons during production I can't really talk about them yet, so.... Thankfully, I'm off on a little comp time and I plan on enjoying it and pursuing normalcy again. That begins with:

• Fitness - It's amazing how fast this remarkable thing we call the human body can go from being in shape to "yea-I-know-we-ran-4-miles-no-sweat-two-months-ago-but-I-don't-wanna-do-that-anymore". It gets worse the older you get. Yay. However, like the apostle Paul declared I shall "beat my body and make it my own" once more.
• Back to the basics - The joy of just animating faces has run it's course and I need some more exercise for those animation muscles. I'm working on my first shot for Bokser's Garden City (all done with layout!)
• Politics - This election cycle and the insipid stupidity of this whole two-faced financial crisis blame game has burned me out. The press for the most part has not been doing it's job and I'd rather animate or read a book than try to do their jobs for them. The debate last night was just painful. I've cleared out my Google reader of political readings - Animation, friends, tech and some theology is good enough for now.
• Christmas Card - I gotta get started on it. Asap. :)

Oh a very, VERY cool little tool that Bokser came across is a service called Dropbox. We're using it to keep assets up to date on Garden City and I'm using it to send files between my PC and mac easy peasy. Watch the little video. It's free and very cool.

Okta-Awesome!

This is a fantastic short. AND. They have a great making of vid here. Check out the rest of the site for some more great artwork. I'm continually impressed by the work coming out of the Gobelin's school.

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.

Squirrely has a Tail and Other Things...

My buddy Dave (who has a new website by the way) introduced me to a fellow worker of his who has had some great traditional and cg animation experience. He gave me some good suggestions for tweaking "Squirrely's" design. The most important being the transformation of the slightly-inflated-balloon-beaver-tail to something more of squirrelish semblance. Crazy thing is the guy went to a high school in the same town and same district I did - just a few years earlier. It's a small world sometimes... Some neato stuff hit the net this week:

• Pixar's "Up" Character designs - Couple of characters are up. The attention to detail on the scouts gear is specially great. Even from the little bits I've seen about the film, it has great story potential.
• Great little read on Facial Animation - Check it out. Written by Shawn Kelly from Animation Mentor. Being that facial animation is pretty much the vast majority of what I do at work, I particularly found it insightful. Facial animation is gravy, not the meat of a good performance.
• Princess and the Frog trailer - As excited as I am about Keane's maiden voyage into CG via Rapunzel, it's about time Disney got back to traditional animation. Can't wait to see more.
• Very creative little flash game - This is a fun little diversion from a talented flash animator named Nacho Rodriguez. I ran across another of his surreal shorts this week as well.

Squirrel Skins for All!

Well, for one squirrel at least....


I got Mr. Squirrely's texture done and started needlessly playing with some mental ray subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion. I gave fur an attempt but it just takes too long and I don't wanna mess with it. So there.

Little more progress on the little Squirrel that could...

Pretty much all that's left is giving him a tongue and figuring how I'm gonna do a bushy tail. I'd prefer not to go the fur route...we'll see....

Chip off the old block...of polys...

Started blocking out Squirrely a couple of days ago and put some more time into him tonight in ole' Silo. That's not his real name, but it works for now. My modeling skills needed some exercise anyway while I wait on some crits from Bokser for my latest blocking on a shot.

I'm sleepy and it's midnight. That is all.

Something neat from an old teacher...

Larry Lauria was my first traditional animation teacher at SCAD and grounded me in the basics. He's just releasing a new set of classes partnering with Digicel Flipbook (which still finds a place on my desktop). It looks like the basis of the Introduction to Animation I had with him back in the day and it was a great class then. Check it out if it floats your boat (not too pricey either).

Squirrels...

....I like them. :)

Flash drawing with substance...

Dan Paladin (what a sweet name, eh?) is an amazing illustrator and animator for that matter and I can't wait for Castle Crasher's to release. In the meantime here's some great workflow vid from him. Comic-Con 2008 Flag Design from The Behemoth on Vimeo.

Scripts, Podcasts and MacGuffins!

Been working some on Bokser's film and enjoying that. I can't wait to get past blocking and into animating after the assets are finaled. In the meantime, I think it's time to get some back to the basics exercises going.

• Updated jbExportQss - Got some insight from a poster on Cgtalk and adds some new abilities and squashed some bugs. Still available here. After this one, I think I'm done mel scripting for a while...my brain hurts.
• Andrew Stanton Podcast - A nice long interview with the director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo.
• Big MacGuffins - I had never heard this term but this was a great introduction to it and an insightful pose. My meager education in storytelling continues.
• Another Episode of Simon's Cat - I love these.
• Some amazing concepts - Check out the work of Harald Siepermann.

jbExportQSS

Quick selection sets are something I use a lot. And I got tired of setting the same ones up repeatedly for work and home projects. There's lots of scripts out there to make working with selection sets easier but I couldn't find one that exported them to use in other scenes, so I rolled up my sleeves...

Download here

TITLE: jbExportQSS
VERSION: 1.5
AUTHOR:Josh Burton
www.joshburton.com

DESCRIPTION:
Script to aid in the redundancy of setting up quick selection sets all the time
for the same assets but in different files. Exports a mel script that will set up
the identical quick selection set in another scene.

Exporting:
1) Select a quick selection sets in the outliner to be exported
2) Run script - it will export a mel file to recreate the sets

Importing:
1) Run the mel in your new file you want to set up the quick selection sets in
2) It will ask you want to add a prefix. If you're using a referenced asset
put in the prefix. If not, leave it blank:)

Features:
1) Checks for referencing data and removes it in the exported selection set
2) Can do multiple selection sets at once
3) Will account for prefixes on import if desired
4) Reports if set members aren't found in imported sets

Thanks:
To David Bokser for answering my many questions and Scott Englert for my picking apart some of his scripts

History
v1.5 - July 14, 2008 - Added the ability to export multiple sets at once into a single mel file, making importing easier. Also,
little quick selection window doesnt' pop up any more due to a flag on the "sets" command I hadn't known about. Several bug fixes
as well
v1.0 - July 3, 2008 - Initial realease

Bolt Trailer!

Not sure what to think yet, but it's looking promising. Some of the animation looks great and I dig the little hamster (giving me some inspiration for a character I've been thinking about). Part of my still prefers the old character design (aka American Dog) by Chris Sanders, but it looks like the story has gone through several re-evolutions since then... New link, embed link was removed. Thanks Ale!