Planning my poses

Just planning some of my key poses for this little animation I'm putting together. My plans have changed a little bit over the past few days and I'm trying to organize my thoughts.

Butterfly screenshots

Posed the butterfly in some paint effects grass and branches in maya. Still trying to figure out the MEL script. Digging through the outliner, mostly, trying to make syntax jive. What a pain... may give up on it and do it the old fashioned way.

Butterfly rig

Wanted a flying animal rig and finally broke down and made myself one. Decided on a butterfly over a bird mainly because of billows in the wings and advanced rig things that I'm not prepared to try yet. Modeled a lot of the mesh myself, but got some help on the legs and body tweaks from modeler Heather Berry. The texture I threw on there just for the visual. There is nothing special about it.
The rig is a modified advanced skeleton file. I used the quadruped setup and then added the extra legs, the antennae, the wings (there are four) and joints for the proboscis. The legs are separate pieces, as are the wings. Plan to use this in an animation soon. Looking to check out a MEL script I've found for wing flutter- hope it works out.

The Future of American Animation

Tooling around at the CTN Animation Expo in Burbank this weekend really inspired me to look again at the way I draw, how I get ideas- everything about the conference was very well put together. Except how small the venue was. There was a lot of interest and it was very crowded. Artists from everywhere- insane. There were a couple of studio unions around the same time, which brought Don Bluth and Gary Goldman into town.
If you don't know who these people are and you are in animation, then shame on you. Criticize, if you feel like it, a few of their projects. The fact is, they learned from brilliant talent in animation, and they themselves are considered in my business to be living legends.
I stood around watching his tutorials and finally got to introduce myself. He's a living caricature- broad forehead and skinny little nose. I mentioned maybe that I adored The Secret of NIMH as a child, and we used to play NIMH all the time. We were the rats and we would hide in the "rose bush." He laughed. He asked if I was working, so I told him. He asked the question:

Do you think there is a future for 2D animation in America?

God, I hope so. But lets face it. American animation is in a crisis. What happened, I don't know. I think what happened mostly is that we all lost the connection with the characters we work with. We (animators) are not emotionally involved with them as we should be. Lately, it seems people remember the writing more than the art. The animation on a certain network seems to be incidental. It relies on clever writing and the animation is more of a visual guide for the audience- so hurry up and get it done. How sad. We threw away decades of discovery. There are a few older guys left, and they are desperately preaching the same things. Maybe it's time to listen: No more s***y animation.
So I got a critique on my 3d animation from a 2d legend, he looked over my life drawings, and I got some good insight on how I should think about my drawing and my acting, and some new inspirations for my new projects. Exciting weekend- glad I got to attend.

Demo Reel

Not everything is redundant. There is some new material.

Playing with rigs

Who knows. Maybe sheep do walk on their hands...

I changed a few things about these monsters before I started my scenes. Some eye control issues and strange scalers I couldn't figure out. What I learned, I think, from working with these rigs daily for the last several months is that you have to work with what you got and it is what it is. If you know enough about the rig and know what the limits are, you can get some pretty flexible action from the worst skeletal setup. Of course, it better have principles. The only way to really know what kind of action you're going to be able to get out of a rig is to make it do things you may never have to do in an actual scene. Then when you sit to plan, you know ahead of time what you're up against.

Good animation I think makes up for a bad rig. Really doesn't go the other way around. Bad animation makes the best art bad. That's the hard part about 3d. Got to love that kind of challenge if you're an animator.

Two More weeks of Vilppu

Just to recap...

The top drawings are two minute poses completed on the first day of Vilppu's 2009 Life Drawing Class at The Animation Guild Office in Hollywood. People who have drawn with me know I like fast gestures (fifteen seconds and less). Sometimes I lack the patience to sit through the longer poses. The bottom drawings are the fourth class. The center drawing is a ten minute pose and the marker drawings are half hour. The ten minute pose and the two minute drawings aren't all that different- just a tad more built up. The goal is to have the initial gesture completed very loosely, very quickly- in about 10-15 seconds. Then you build using your shapes. You just keep building it like anything else. Then time runs out.

Drawing With Vilppu

Got up on Saturday morning and went to the guild office on Hollywood Way to draw with Glenn Vilppu. Hollywood from a distance sounds glamorous, and you mention Burbank on the street and immediately people connect with some mythical place, maybe liking it to Toon Town (Who Framed Roger Rabbit). It's very "brown" in Burbank. The place is rather dusty. It's a landscape combination of warehouses and older buildings set against the foothills. It was cool though, because when I got out of the car at the guild office, I looked down the street and could see the water tower at the classic entrance to the old Warner Bros cartoon studio. And since is was Saturday morning, there wasn't a lot of traffic. The new guild office actually has parking.
The class met and ten in a small drawing room in the back of the building. Vilppu met us at the door and welcomed up in. For the first hour or so, he talked about the method he wanted to teach us, mentioned how his drawing had changed since his trips abroad, and we did some warm up drawings. He draws in pen, and emptied his shirt pockets to showcase his pen collection. Some of the drawings he did for everyone he did on a tablet computer. After he talked for a while, he went around the room and looked at the way people were drawing as the model went through 2-3 minute poses. It was a new experience. I kept quiet and just watched. I guess the experience of getting to learn with the man who I've studied and emulated for the past few years made me a little nervous. I almost tripped over my horse when he hit the side of my arm and asked if he could sit down and show me something. The class time went by very quickly. He's easy to listen to, very well read, and he's very down to earth. Awesome. I can't wait for the next class.

I've been animating my life away. I've done a little of my own animation, but not enough to post yet. Some of the other stuff is protected right now and can't be released. Sorry. I would love to show you some of the animation I'm doing for ZOO FX, but you'll have to wait a little while. I have some drawings... may post those later.