Ostrich Momma

Cintiq jitter problem - solved!

I recently bought a new computer, and was dismayed to find that my Cintiq 12WX developed the "jitter bug" when connected to the new system. This is an incredibly annoying problem that's quite widespread -- just Google "Cintiq jitter" and you'll find numerous accounts of wobbly lines, and claims from dissatisfied customers that Wacom believes that the issue is unavoidable.

Here are some samples of the problem from my own computer using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009:



No, the shakiness is not from my hand!

The problem, as it turns out, has to do with the Windows Vista/7 Tablet PC Input Service. I stumbled across this nugget in the SPB 2010 Readme file:

There are Vista performance issues due to a conflict between SketchBook Pro and Vista’s Input Services. These services automatically start up whenever a tablet driver is installed and interacts with the tablet for hand writing recognition and more. The services affect performance, the mapping of stylus buttons, and more. For ideal performance when using SketchBook, Input Services should be disabled.

I turned off this service, and voila! Nice, clean lines:



Here are Autodesk's instructions for turning off the Tablet PC Input Service:

1. Go to the Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools.


2. Double-click the Services shortcut to open the Services window, which lists all the services available through Vista.


3. Scroll down the list and right-click Tablet PC Input Service.


4. Select Stop from the menu provided. Input Services is now disabled and your Wacom driver takes over.

I hope that Wacom and Microsoft can work together to solve this problem. It doesn't bode well that I'm seeing it on Windows 7 RC (build 7100). I will do what I can to spread the word, starting with this blog post.


EDIT: I originally said that you could get around this problem by permanently disabling the Tablet PC Input Service, but that does not seem to be the case. I've discovered that I need to enable/disable it every time I boot my computer. I'm using the retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate now, and this is still an issue.

Sketchbook Pro doodles

Just noodlin' around with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009. (Special thanks to Creaturebox for the free copy of sbp2009 they gave me at Comic-Con last year!)

Stone Arch (DS)

I've been practicing the Glenn Vilppu Spherical Forms lesson, and for some reason my drawings keep turning into cobblestones and castles.

Snowman (DS)

Yep, I've joined the Nintendo DS Colors! crowd. A very handy, fun way to doodle.

Follow this link to see how I drew my snow man.

Where's Glago's Guest?

I saw a really cool new Disney animated short at Siggraph this year, called Glago's Guest. That's right, Disney is back in the business of animated shorts, yay! And from the looks of it, in a big way. GG was fantastic, and I couldn't wait to share it with my family. Word was, it would be screening in front of Bolt.

So I took the kids last weekend to see Bolt, and was disappointed to find that Glago was nowhere to be seen! Why Disney, WHY?

Boards!

This is what I've been up to lately -- storyboarding a short film idea I've been kicking around in my head for ages.



I decided to do this on standard 3x5 index cards initially (they're almost exactly 16:9 aspect ratio, which is handy), but after scanning them in, I'm starting to do more in Photoshop.

I'll likely be tight-lipped about this project for a while. At least until I have the story nailed down.

Stan Winston

First Ollie Johnston, and now Stan Winston?!? 2008 is turning out to be a sad year in movie history.

My favorite Stan Winston film, by far, is Aliens. If you haven't seen it, please do so now.

Are you done?

Yes, I was being serious. Please watch Aliens, now. I don't want to spoil it for you.

Okay, so back to my point... Sure, James Cameron deserves a ton of the credit for his well-crafted story. All the characters in the film have clear, credible motivations (some of which are initially hidden), and the plot twists and turns and escalates in a very exciting way.

And a huge tip of the hat to the editors, who knew how to build suspense by showing exactly as much as they needed to, no more, no less.

That said... Those creatures seem so freakin' alive! The way they uncoil from the shadows during the "town meeting" scene is truly chilling. (Anyone who's confronted a poisonous snake will agree, Stan and his crew must have studied predatory reptiles for motion reference.) The way the alien warrior emerges behind Newt from the sewer water, tail first like a giant scorpion. The threatening tilt of the queen's head, and the flailing of her limbs as Ripley torches the hive.

Those creatures were so convincingly real on so many levels. How this was all achieved with puppets and rubber suits is utterly beyond comprehension.

Stan Winston, you will be missed.

J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box

A healthy dose of inspiration for hobbyist filmmakers such as myself:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/205

The Animator's Survival Kit Animated

I just found out that Richard Williams' amazing book, The Animator's Survival Kit, is going to be released as a 16-DVD box set! This is book is truly one that all animators should read, if not own. If you haven't already, track it down at your local library or bookstore.

My one gripe with the upcoming DVD set is the price -- £596 (around $1200 USD) if you pre-order before November 17th, and £745 (about $1500 USD) thereafter. Why on earth did they price it so far outside the budget of students and hobbyists? As much of a fan I am of the book, I think I'll pass for now. Maybe my local library will buy a copy.

Short Shelf Life

I think I'm cursed. Every time I draw something that I think is halfway decent, I end up hating it a few days later. Maybe that's just part of being an artist. Anyway, here are a couple more sketches that are already beginning to make me cringe.

One Page per Day

I've been trying to maintain a pace of one page per day in my sketchbook lately, in order to improve my drawing skills. (It's much harder than it sounds!) I started a new book on February 9th, and so far I've filled 20 pages -- so I'm just about on track. Below are a couple of my most recent doodles. I'd love to hear your feedback, good or bad, so fire away!

Jacob Glezer

I had a friend in high school named Jacob Glezer. Maybe you knew him too, or someone like him. He was one of those ridiculously smart types but also very down to earth and easy to get along with. Just an all around great guy. I regret not staying in touch with him after I graduated.

I just learned today that Jacob passed away last year after a long bout with leukemia and brain cancer. [UPDATE: A kind commenter wrote to tell me it was actually melanoma, which spread to his other organs.] I'm still in complete shock, trying to digest this news.

If you knew Jacob and would like to share some memories, please leave a note.

Animating a Cut-Out Hole

For my 11 Second Club Entry last November, I decided to build simple character models whose mouths and eyelids were simple cut-outs on NURBS surfaces.

Right off the bat, you're probably asking yourself, why on earth would you want to create such a character rig? Why not use blend shapes or bones to deform a proper edgeloop model?

My answer, in a word, is simplification. The 11 Second Club organizers strongly recommend that you use of of the freely available, pre-built rigs, so that you can spend the majority of your time focusing on animation -- and rightly so! But I had a fun story concept that demanded specific character models, and I knew that the only way I'd be able to complete this project on time, with only nights and weekends at my disposal, was to simplify.

So here's a basic tutorial for those who want to try this at home...

Let's start by setting up the basic model and cut-out.

1. Create a NURBS cylinder
2. Make the cylinder live (Modify > Make Live)
3. Use the CV Curve Tool (making sure that it's set to cubic, for a smooth opening) to draw a curve on the surface of the cylinder, taking care to place the curve on the side opposite the seam.
4. Close the curve (Edit Curves > Open/Close Curves)
5. Make the cylinder not live (Modify > Make Not Live)
6. Open the Trim Tool settings (Edit NURBS > Trim Tool [ ]). Under Standard Options, check Keep original. Then, using the Trim Tool, select a point on the back of the cylinder. Important: make sure the point you select is as far away from your cut-out shape as possible! (More on this later.) Press Enter to confirm.



Congratulations! You now have a hole in your cylinder!

So, um... now what?

Well, there's not much point in all this unless we can animate the shape of that hole. Before we can do this, we need to set up a few layers.

1. Create a new layer called "Controls", and add the curve to it.
2. Create a new layer called "Proxy", and add the original cylinder to it. Set its display type to Template.
3. Create a new layer called "Render", and add the trimmed cylinder to it. Set its type to Reference.

You can now easily select the curve and move its control points around, and the trimmed surface will update accordingly.

When binding this rig to a skeleton, be sure to bind only the original cylinder -- not the trimmed surface. This way, the control curve will move and deform along with the trimmed surface, so your controls will always be on the surface of the character model.

To make the inside of your character's head a different color than the outside, you can assign a double-sided shader. For more information, see the "Create double-sided shaded surfaces" tutorial in the Maya help.

So that's the basic technique! I hasten to add that this method is not flawless...


First of all, if you're not careful about the point you select when trimming your surface (see step 6 above), then your cut-out may overlap that point when you're animating; if this happens, the trim operation will invert, making your hole opaque and the rest of the surface invisible. There is probably a way to modify the trim coordinates after the fact, but so far I haven't been able to figure out how.

Secondly, I found that mental ray does not always render the trimmed surface correctly. For example, my character's eyelids, which use this same technique, occasionally became stuck half-closed in the middle of a batch render. Strangely, rendering those same frames individually resulted in the correct pose. I suspect mental ray is doing some sneaky caching under the hood. This problem really derailed my progress, and I never did find a solution other than to use Maya Software to render my final animation. If anyone out there has any insight, I'd love to hear it!

That said, this technique does result in a rig that's pretty simple and intuitive to use.

Here's a final render of my pencil character. his mouth, eyelids, and eyebrows are all animated using the technique I've described.



If anyone has any comments, questions, or suggestions, fire away!

11 Second Club results for November

Well, I didn't win the 11 Second Club November competition -- not by a long shot! In fact, I was exactly in the middle of the pack, ranked 47 out of 95 entries. But that's really beside the point! The main reason I entered was to get some practice animating a scene, and to get some useful feedback. Check, and check!

Congrats to Kevin Franczuk, who had the winning entry for the month, which earned him an incredibly detailed critique from none other than Jason Schleifer! (I must confess, I felt a twinge of jealousy when I saw that Jason was providing this month's critique. I read his blog all the time.)

My favorite one ended up in second place, so I guess I did a pretty good job rating the other entries!

At any rate, here's my movie. Let me know what you think!

11 Second Club

So I decided to join the 11 Second Club this month! For those who have never heard of the 11 Second Club, it's a really cool web site that hosts a monthly character animation competition. Anyone can enter, and contestants are all given the same audio clip to animate to. It's an insanely complex challenge for an animation noob such as myself, but I decided what better way to learn than to jump in feet first! (This will be my first time entering, by the way.)

Here's the transcript for November:

Voice One: "I was adorable once... and now, look at me! I'm this short, fat, insecure, middle-aged thing!"

Voice Two: "I made you short?"

Voice One: "Aaaaah!!"

My wife and I bounced some ideas back and forth, and quickly came up with the idea of having voice one be a short, stubby pencil, and voice two be a pencil sharpener.

Now, everyone strongly recommends using one of the various free character rigs, especially if you're a beginner. But I say, where's the fun in that? After about a week or so of experimentation, I had a pretty slick method for animating a hole cutout on a NURBS surface. This is the technique I used for the characters' mouths and eyelids, rather than trying to model and rig a complex edgeloop model. You can get a huge variety of mouth shapes this way, just by pulling eight CVs around.

Plus, I created a cool little Mel script to auto-generate a shelf button to store a mouth pose, complete with an auto-rendered icon to show the resulting pose. This made it really easy to set my mouth keys for lip sync, and vary them to convey emotion. Here's a screen shot of some of my shelf icons:



Given that I didn't even start until the 11th, the past few weeks have been pretty nutty. I'm somehow surviving on three to four hours' sleep each night, for many days in a row, while simultaneously holding down a day job, raising two young kids, and supervising a home renovation project.

My maybe-final version is rendering while I write this. Wish me luck!

New Blog Home

I finally moved my blog over to my own domain and host -- yay! I wish there was a way to mirror it on frameadvance.blogspot.com. Maybe there is, who knows. I also wish there was a way to use the Blogger Layouts customization for blogs that are hosted on non-Blog*Spot servers. And I wish I could invent a way to never have to sleep, so I could reclaim those hours for all my hobbies. Naw, scratch that last one. Sleep can be nice sometimes. Zzz...

Cube Jump Tutorial

Another animation tutorial... For this one, the assignment was to animate a cube jumping from one platform to another, showing anticipation and squash/stretch. My cube is a SubD model, and I created clusters out of the top, middle, and bottom verts so I could easily scale and rotate them together.

I'd say my biggest challenge was getting the bounces to look fluid, while at the same time keeping the bottom of the box from sliding. I probably could have used IK for this, but instead I keyed the bottom cluster's position every frame to match the lateral translation. Bleh, so tedious. Note to self: learn more about rigging!

If I take another pass at this, I'll add some twist about the cube's spine, and polish the squash/stretch during the final jump. But for now, I'm tired of bouncing cubes.

Bouncing Ball Tutorial

Much like Hello World is the classic introductory lesson for programmers, the bouncing ball tutorial is the standard exercise for animators.

Inspired by my trip to Pixar, I decided to dive back into animation as a hobby -- and what better place to start? A friend of mine at work told me about the version he was assigned in art school: not one, but three balls, each with unique size, mass, and elasticity. Here's my humble attempt.

Let me know what you think!

Getting the Hang of Blogger

Okay, I've managed to tweak the look of my new Blogger blog to somewhat match the look of my web site, and I also copied a few of my old posts over to this new blog. I discovered by accident that you can add new color and font variables to the template, which makes it easier to keep the CSS consistent. And as an added bonus, the new variables you add also show up in the "Template / Fonts and Colors" list. Pretty snazzy! If only they'd add more controls besides just color and fonts! (I'd love to add variables for layout dimensions.) Anyway, there's an article here that tells how to do this sort of thing, but I didn't discover it until I was done. Sometimes it's just more fun to figure these things out yourself!

Hello World!

I've decided to give Blogger a try. I really wanted to FTP my files to my ISP so they can live in harmony with my existing web page (www.FrameAdvance.com), but I couldn't get that to work. *sigh* So my first blog entry is about blogging -- lame! I'll try to write about more interesting stuff in the future.

The posts before this one were copied over from my old blog on FrameAdvance.com.

Pixar Trip!

Last week, my wife and I went on an amazing road trip to Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA, for an advance screening of their latest film, Ratatouille. For me, this was the adventure of a lifetime! I've been a huge Pixar fan ever since Mike Bailey, my Scientific Visualization professor showed me and my fellow students Tin Toy and Knick Knack back in 1995 (before Toy Story was even released).

The Ratatouille screening was a benefit event for the EmeryEd Fund to raise money for Emeryville's public schools. I heard about this event on the Upcoming Pixar blog, and my wonderful wife (who supports all my dreams no matter how crazy they are) snapped up tickets shortly before they sold out.

The event organizers respectfully requested that we attendees refrain from talking about the movie before it comes out, so I won't give any specifics other than the following:

• Ratatouille is among the best of Pixar's films, IMO. If you're at all entertained by the numerous trailers and featurettes they've released for the film, you'll love it. Amazing character animation, heartwarming story, and stunning visuals. Seriously, go see it.


• The film was preceded by two unexpected treats:
  1. A teaser for their next film, WALL•E -- voice over by Andrew Stanton describing the genesis of the story, accompanied by still photos of Pixar's core creative team; followed by a quick peek at the title character crushing garbage into neat little cubes, then looking longingly at the stars.
  2. The animated short Lifted, a funny, charming story by director (and multiple-Oscar winning sound designer) Gary Rydstrom.

I will also say that the Pixar site is freakin' incredible. After verifying our credentials with "Pixar Security" at the gate, we drove over the Cars logo painted on the main drive, and parked in the official employee lot. We strolled along the lovely tree-lined path to the main entrance, signed in at the guest table (our badges read, "A stranger from the outside!" under our names), and entered the enormous foyer. The stairs and pathways to the production areas were blocked with signs declaring "Closed Set," so we weren't able to wander far.

The screening room, located opposite the entrance to the building, provided hands-down the most impressive AV experience I've ever had. The picture was absolutely flawless, no doubt digitally projected. (I never did see the "cigarette burns" indicating the end of a film reel, or any other artifacts that might indicate that it was a film projection.) The audio was crystal-clear, with booming sub woofers that literally shook the floor. When the lights went down, the ceiling of the auditorium briefly became a star-filled sky, complete with shooting stars and chirping crickets.

I really wish I could have taken some pictures of the studio, but we were strictly forbidden from bringing any electronic equipment on site -- even cell phones. In fact, a security team searched each guest with a metal detector wand before entering the screening room. But the next day, we did manage to snap a quick picture in front of the main gate:

If you ever have the opportunity to visit Pixar Animation Studios yourself, a word of advice: bring cash! They do have a gift shop in the lobby, where they sell various T-shirts and souvenirs, but they only accept cash and checks. Carolee and I were lucky enough to have enough dough between us to buy a couple of shirts, two Golden Books for our kids, a Luxo Jr. ball key chain, and a handful of Pixar-branded pencils for the gang back at the office.

I'm sure I've come across like a gushing fanboy, but I don't care! This was truly an amazing experience that I'll never forget.

A Brush with Oscar

If we are to be judged by the company we keep, then I am extremely flattered that Yoink'd! had a passing acquaintance with Shane Acker's 9 at the 2005 CCI:IFF, where 9 took the CCI:IFF award for Best Animated Short -- and now it's up for an Oscar in the category of Short Film (Animated)! I was amazed just to have my film screened by a major film festival, but for one of my fellow entries to be nominated for an Oscar? I'm speechless!

For the record, I had no illusions that I would take home the CCI:IFF award for Best Animated Short last July. (Heck, I was competing against the likes of Bill Plympton!) But the fact that the award-winning film is now up for an Oscar makes me feel oddly flattered, in a peripheral sort of way.

Congratulations, Shane!

Yoink'd at Comic-Con 2005

Yoink'd! had a great reception at the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival! Ben and I talked to an audience of about 50 people after the film screened, and were asked some great questions during the Q&A. Thanks to all who attended!

We also showed the film to the folks at the STIKFAS booth, and they loved it! So much so, that they made it a featured news item on their web site! Thanks to all my new friends at STIKFAS for their
encouragement and support!