Week of character performance posing / keyframing workshops

Sometime the things you try in teaching turn out to be way more fun for everyone than you had hoped. I have just had a great week of character performance / posing / keyframing workshops with the 25fps@staffs students.

Started off with using the Mathilda rig from Leon Li-Aun Sooi and Xiong Lin for a twenty-five expression challenge based on the well loved on-line exercise...

Just a small selection of the exercise results

...and followed this with a recreation of classic paintings using a multitude of posed rigs.

Very rewarding to see how everyone fully engaged with the tasks and the strength of the resulting work. Plus they really enjoyed it. Cant ask for more than that. Well done everyone!

Poses from classic fine art

New 2D Maya rigged character and ready for animating.

Animation test scene ready.

Got a nice scene ready to go with the Bruce Lee-esque generic character and one robot (hidden). 

This will involve the two characters interacting on a reactive surface made up of nearly 100 octagonal pillars that move vertically when something lands on them (or they will when I animate them).

Why? Been watching too much Max Cooper / Nick Cobby... 

Max Cooper, Tom Hodge & Nick Coddy - Remnants

Just dropping in...

Important Animation note number whatever !?!... Curves curves curves (in animation)

Nearly all animation is based on curves, natural movement normally (nearly always) rejects a straight line in favour of a curve; see example from Big Hero Six below.

Wasabi, meticulous tool keeping, Gogo...and many beautiful curves...

(ps: Comedy is played front or side on, not 3/4)

New low poly human model ready for rigging with HumanIK.

This is a simple low-poly Maya model for level 4 Animation students to experiment animating with in September, then model themselves.

Modelling is pretty much done. Time to rig with HumanIK.

Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

In a moment of madness I dusted down the old Diesel Robots mechanical hands and gave them to the Mark II robot; Massive Holographic hands with Thirty Eight working pistons!!!

I never got them rigged before so it is great to have them done at last.

Big Damn Hands baby!!!

[Yes, I know its ironic that a robot with no actual working joints has half visible magic hands that have tons of working pistons that they do not need (because they are holographic hands).]

But hey, that's just artistic license!!! And it looks great. Mind you, the five 1/2 hour render time for one frame is a bit steep. The laptops fan sounded like it was going to take off. I may have to try our chunky PC's in the green-screen room for this one.

Rigged Pistons galore!

Mery Poses in Maya 2016

Here are some quick tests have been doing with the free Maya rig; Mery, available here:

http://www.meryproject.com/

Mery is a collaboration project designed to give animators a really good quality free rig to experiment with. I think the design is a cross between characters from Disney's Frozen and Monsters vs Aliens.

 A great rig, this is very flexible but capable of great subtly and emotion as well as comedy and drama (check out the demo reels on the site and on Vimeo)! The facial controls are detailed without being overwhelming.

Do check it out, it's the most enjoyable rig I have by far right now. 

The Mery team are:

• Modeling, Look Development, Dynamic hair, Lighting & Compositing :   Jose Manuel García
• Character Design : Alejandro Delgado Rubianes
• Character Setup & Tools Development : Antonio Méndez Lora
• Thanks to: Ignacio de la Cruz, Alejandro Delgado Rubianes and Jose Luis Silva

[If you do have a go and find yourself wondering where the facial controls are, that have their own camera listed in the Orthographic panel views list.]

The creators even have a better version of Mery with dynamic hair and improved textures. If you create animation that they think is really good they will render it for you using the polished rig!! How cool is that?

 

  

GUI's for the Robots

GUI's (Generic User Interface; in this case basic NURBS curve handles) for Robot rigs. 

The facial expression comes from roll bars above the eyes and at the chin. Bit like Chappie, but I thought of it first, honestly. 

Do love the work of concept artists http://christianpearce.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/chappie-concept-art-part-1.html and Aaron Beck http://skul4aface.blogspot.co.uk though! Their work always looks like Boston Dynamics robots in ten years time!!

I can admit to Portal 2 and generally everything Valve being a big influence though.