FrameAdvance

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 3×5 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!