Very good insights on making of a transformer animation! You can try out similar techniques to make your very own Transformer 🙂
Animation Tips
Key Points on Animation!
Useful points and key notes/quotes to keep in mind and follow during animation…
1. Rhythm, Timing, Beat & Spacing ~ Pattern, Texturing, Timing!
2. Learning drawing is vital!
3. Anticipation ~ Every movement in animation should have! Anticipate force being applied…
4. Arc ~ Every single thing in body should have!
5. No overshoot, No energy ~ exaggerate first and then pull it back until it’s fit with animation (Don’t be afraid of exaggerating too much)
6. Focus on PRINCIPLES ~ Staging, Posing, Anticipation!
7. KISS ~ KEEP IT SIMPLE Stupid!
8. Contact Frame ~ Right before and after the energy applies, foot touches the ground, legs stretch. Look out for contact key poses!
9. Video Reference ~ Cool motion, we could get the acting that people can’t think of consciously. Push things more, search what makes animation unique!
10. Graph Editor ~ Be careful about the gaps between keys. Smooth out until the keys are faded out. Ease-in and Ease-out!
11. At least 3 frames are required to let audience see what it going on the screen!
12. Heavy ball takes a lot more frames to stop. Root is the heaviest part of the body!
13. Every frame should be able to tell a story. Posing is very important!
14. Polish TILT, RHYTHM, TWIST!
P.S. Notes assembled from a Romit studying at PIXAR 🙂
Facial Animation Basics
A step by step tips on creating fast and quality facial animation by DJ Nicke! These tips and techniques are really good resource for not just animators but also riggers to create quality, interactive animation friendly facial rigs that delivers what the animators are looking for! More tips on animation…
Squash and Stretch (Part 1)
Useful post on Squash and Stretch by Mark Kennedy.
“One of the first concepts you hear about when you’re studying animation is “squash and stretch”, which is the idea that living forms (and certain types of inanimate objects) have a certain amount of flexibility and that they change shape as they move around under their own power, react to external forces or change expression.”
Troll Hunter VFX
Some video demos of “Troll Hunter VFX” work that I really liked and wanted to share. Outstanding job done to bring out the hyper-realism for the character!
Frame by Frame
The Animator Prepares: Unique Workflow to Make It Magical
Stumbled upon an interview post at youanimator.com about animation preparation and workflow by Peter Nagy. Good read and the workflow presentation video is a good reference for every animator.
Acting Tutorials Highlight
Here is a really cool, very useful tutorial for any CG animator out there from Kyle Balda’s 3D Animation Masterclass: Dialog Acting Tutorial. The tutorial appeared in the June 2009 issue of 3D World Magazine. This ten minute clip covers highlights from the 20 hours of video capture in 3DWorld to show one possible workflow of approaching 3D Character Animation with multiple characters. Too Good!
“Lost Animation when loading Referenced Rigs” by Mark Jackson
Here is a really good read for anyone animating in Maya. Mark Jackson has descrived a good work through for solving this annoying problem when animating via file referencing!
“This is Particularly relevant to referenced Rigs which have characterSets.
So this has come up a few times on the forums and I’ve also had emails asking how to fix it so thought I’d drop some info up here. The issue is that at some point the referenceEdits that connect Animation Data to a referenced rig can get broken or corrupted. This means you can be animating away all day, saving incrementals as you go, completely unaware that when you load this scene in, all animation will be lost..or so it would seem.
see this post recently:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=990314
The issue is usually the referenceEdits themselves. What sometimes happens is that the ‘connectAttr’ block in the referenceEdits gets blanked. We have no idea why, neither does Autodesk, it’s completely random. Its also more common on files that came from 2010 and have been loaded in 2011. It also was an issue with rigs that had characterSets on the early release of 2011 IF you were using AnimLayers. (pre hotfix2)
So what to look for?
If you open up the Reference Editor then go to file>referenceEdits. In there you should get a list of all the edits performed since that file was initially referenced in. It’s basically a macro that the file load uses to reconstruct the file. So, take a look in the list, see if you still have a large ‘connectAttr’ block. These should be the connections from the characterSet (placeholder list) to the anim curves themselves. If these edits get corrupted then as I said, you can spend all day saving incremental saves which are all broken but you wouldn’t have been aware of them until you reloaded the scenes and the reference list got re-passed.
Now there are some good things to help you. Firstly the fact that the connections aren’t there doesn’t mean that there’s no link from the anim curves to the reference. What happens is that the curves will be left connected to the references RN reference node. If you graph the referenceNode in the hypershade you should still see the connected anim data. It’s what happens when you unload a reference, the anim data is cast back to the referenceNode for safe keeping.
So, graph the data, see if it’s there, look at the referenceEdit list, see if it is correct or not. If you have no ‘ConnectAttrs’ then its the same issues we have.
Fixing it is a different issue. Basically we need to write a little tool which spins through the characterSet plugs, then the animCurves left connected to the RN node, does a nameMatch, then reconnects the data. The following dropped into a Python script Tab should do it, just select the characterSet you want reconnected!”
- import pymel.core as pm
- import maya.cmds as cmds
- cSet,type=pm.ls(sl=True,st=True)
- refNode=cSet.referenceFile().refNode
- if not type==‘character’:
- raise StandardError(‘You must select a CharacterSet to reconnect’)
- if not refNode:
- raise StandardError(‘Given characterSet is not from a referenced file’)
- animCurves=refNode.listConnections(type=‘animCurve’,s=True)
- cSetPlugs=pm.aliasAttr(cSet,q=True)
- for plug in cSetPlugs[::2]:
- for anim in animCurves:
- if anim.split(‘:’)[-1].endswith(plug):
- print ‘%s >> %s’ % (anim,plug)
- pm.connectAttr(‘%s.output’ % anim,‘%s.%s’ % (cSet,plug),force=True)
RIGOLOGY ~ Letter from THE PUPPETEER ;)
What exactly do you need to be a good rigger or more lead a bunch of fellow artists!? Is it really age that determines a person becoming a lead? Experience may be!? What it really takes to be a sucessful rigger? What are the basics and the fundamentals? ~ Some of the countless thoughts being processed by our brain! So what else …
Well, my point is if you keep learning and updating your skills with passion and patience, you are going to be a good rigger. Once you have mastered the art you may as well start leading a bunch of artist! To lead a team is another challenge, you need to have strong communication skill and the motivation and will power to complete an assigned task. Of course you will have to keep the team happy and motivated. To be a lead or a superior, it doesn’t matter with age; it depends on your overall skill and talent. The real point is that you are never going to master a subject! Learning never ends. Problems leads to solutions and solutions leads to more problems. Never ending cycle ain’t it? Richard William once said he just learned how to hold a pencil. Now then, what have we learnt yet?
The core fundamentals for rigging is not just the tool and software; it is the Art. Always study reference materials for characters in motion, creature anatomy, study animated cartoons or characters, study the facial expression and acting of actors in movie and such. All these things add up and you can visualize how the joints are placed for the skeletal anatomy, how to setup an animator friendly rig; flexibility of the controllers and so on. One more crucial factor to be a successful rigger is to learn and respect the critiques and comments that the animators and directors throw at you. That’s a how you update your skill! We all are aware of the fact, how important INTERNET has been in our daily life and career. Make sure to go through those wonderful forums, blogs, websites, tweets and interesting videos that creative and passionate people like us share with the community 🙂
Here is a little quote that makes a really good sense “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal” 😀
That’s pretty much it, keep the spirit and enthusiasm alive 🙂