FrameAdvance

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]