Featurette video showcasing some of the workflow pipeline from WETA for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” movie. WETA has really broken through the mo-cap technology by shooting capturing motion outside of a studio. Awesome job as always!
Animation
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.
HippyDrome’s Videos :)
Useful and inspirational video focusing on for articulation or rigging by HippyDrome. Good One 🙂
Modelling for Articulation!
Intro to Articulating the Face!
Articulating on 3 Curves!
Twist Joint Setup Overview :)
I have seen people and previously me myself using twist joint setup (usually while rigging forearm twist) using the good old rotational weighted constraints or direct rotational connection with offset values to give even twisting. It works great for straight aligned joint rotated or twisted in just single direction for example rotate X, but once you start rotating in all direction which we all tend to, some thing weird happens, something not so good that is known as flipping. This flipping behavior is the result of GIMBAL LOCK! Well then, that is a major issue.
Basically, the flipping can be avoided if we stay out of rotational constraints or connections. I am going to show two methods on how this can be achieved.
1st Method (Aim Constraint with Up Vector) : The first method deals with setting up a joint twist using the power of aim constraint. The twisting of each joint is controlled by World Up Objects, which are basically locators re-positioned on top of each joint. Once the locators are moved, the joint twist evenly without any flipping. Check out the images below for detail!
2nd Method (Spline IK with Up Vector) : The second method is pretty straight forward. Create a regular spline IK on a given joint chain. From the advance twist option, make sure that World Up Type is object Up (Start/End). Just like the aim constraint, the up locators are used to setup the advance twist for the entire joint chain. Again, check out the images below for detail!
Therefore, both of the method shown above can be applied for creating a non – flipping GIMBAL LOCK friendly twist setup which can be applied for regular forearm twist or whatever. Spline IK Advance Twist doesn’t seem to work very well with mirrored joint, in such case just re-root the mirrored joint chain so that the end joint becomes the parent (Maya Bug). I hope this post could be useful to you, let me know if you have any concerns. Cheers 🙂
P.S. here is another cool alternative for no flipping twist by Cedric Bazillou. He used a custom Quaternion based Aim Constraint node to achieve the result. More info can be gathered from his blog!
Yet another cool post by Keil Figgins “Forearm Twist: An Animation Solution“. Good read!
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)
Defective Detective
Really funny hilarious animated short by Avner Geller and Stevie Lewis! I loved the final shot just before the credit, sure is a defective detective. The short is debuting exclusively on cartoon brew’s 2nd student animation festival.
To find out more about the production of this short, visit this page 🙂
My Bathroom
My Bathroom, a short animated humor by Keith Lango! I really liked how he captured such subtle acting in those puppets.
Received a Honorable Certificate :D
OK! So today 7/7/2011 was the day for Inauguration function at Black Box Animation & VFX Academy. The really good thing is I first stepped my foot into the world of CG Animation, beginning with traditional animation from Transcube Animation which happens to be founded by the same person, Mr. Suyogya Man Tuladhar. I worked with him for the past 6 years and today he honored me with a special Certificate in Achievements in the field of Character Rigging & Animation! The certificate was handed down to me by Mr. Kiran Bhakta Joshi who is a former Walt Disney Animation Studios veteran. He worked at Disney as a VFX Supervisor for over 17 years and return back to Nepal to start his own animation studio, Incessant Rain Animation Studio. I worked with him for the the past 4 years as a Lead Senior Rigger and CG Supervisor. I am really thankful to Mr. Suyogya Man Tuladhar, Mr. Kiran Bhakta Joshi and the entire Black Box team; I wish them the very best and great success! I will be conducting part time character rigging workshops and will be a part of the special board adviser for the academy. It’s a great honor for me 😀
Blik
The simplicity of this animated short really stands out! I am imagining the range of facial expressions on the characters. Awesome work and bravo to the team!