I’ve not been in the mood to do any work.

Or much else.

However, Sufjan Steven’s second batch of Christmas songs have been lifting the tone.

Here is a tumblr page soon to be full of shit and sketches http://ringroadsupermarkets.tumblr.com/

I’m really feeling the lack of anything with a narrative. Just focusing on getting a visual style to work was not the greatest idea i’ve ever had. Perhaps I should be making something with a bit more actual animation and story to it. Watch this space – regular updates to occur.

Oh and the squid doesn’t quite have the ‘ooompf’ it needed.

Wait…I’m supposed to be selling myself here!

Hopefully this isn’t just a gimmick aimed at getting attention from the people fed up with ‘copy & paste’ 3d animation features – the story needs to hold up too and make it seem relevant to even try this combination.

Anyway, let’s hope this is only the start.

Link for some angry/let down comments already; http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/me-and-my-shadow-poster.html#comments

Yeah, yeah, 12 seconds long. I think i’ll work a little bit more on this short after I finish this MA course (2 weeks). It’s looking quite nice, yes there are a few problems with it, things that if I were to work in this style again I would know and implement from the outset, i.e. hands and feet being a part of the attached limb rather than just follow it. Be more careful with the face! The eyes/mouth/hair don’t move and shift perfectly with the face, but I like them all as separate objects… a compromise perhaps?

Hmm I don’t know, but it’s an interesting mix of 2d and 3d and certainly looks handmade.

I don’t mean to sound so sour about this, but every image I have seen just looks like somebody has added a grainy diffuse filter in post production to a ‘normal’ 3d render. I really hope that the technique they’re using does justify the hype. I think 3d animation would really benefit from the charm of hand made marks, rather than being ‘plasticy’ and sterile as it so often is – that’s why I’ve been trying to do just that.

Like I said, I don’t want to sound bitter, I hope it is brilliant, I hope it validates everything I am working towards! It just seems odd getting so excited about animation when you can only see stills.

Taking of which, here is a still from the animation I am doing…

A link to some cool Paperman stuff: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/a-little-more-about-disneys-paperman.html

So i’m back to doing this again and everything was running quite smoothly, which means something confusing will happen soon.

The arms (and other blend shapes) are really tricky. Due to them being completely flat they can only move in certain motions without becoming invisible. Distorting and twisting the drawings to use them as blend shapes is an interesting technique though, it allows the looped texture of an object to be animated with and controlled in 3d software. It also gives you the option to mix up 2d and 3d animation quite nicely.

I am finding the right arm to be especially difficult as it will need to move more than the rest and has the most complicated paths. Linking body parts together in the hierarchy is proving to be annoying too because moving a limb via blend shapes does not change it’s position in the world space, just it’s appearance – so a hand or foot won’t follow the bent arm or leg.

Ncloth is pretty tricky!

Right, I think that trying to learn how to generate clothes with ncloth is not the sort of thing that you can learn in about two weeks. There are just far too many statistics – collisions, resistance, object properties and all of the nucleus stuff (gravity, wind etc), I just can’t figure all of this out in such a small amount of time. I managed to get something though! It’s just not quite as I imagined. It’s almost exactly the same as if I had just skinned the jumper as part of the body. It is likely that I didn’t use the correct pipeline for making something like this, not doing things in the right order or testing with a model with a high polygon count. (I found a decent tutorial towards the end…)

Every time I got a cloth ‘consistency’ that I liked the jumper would pull/stick/fly apart and lose it’s shape or fly through part of the body. This resulted in the jumper being too sturdy and not flowing like a knitted jumper should, but at least it didn’t explode anymore.

I used a mixture of techniques; hanging the cloth around the body by fixing groups of vertices, using proxy objects in limbs to collide and force the cloth to follow it and finally using the whole character’s body as a collider object. It’s all pretty slow work and horribly frustrating when experimenting with variables that you don’t quite know the exact function of. Guessing by it’s name is not always the wisest thing to do 3d software.

Anyway, the jumper (dynamic objects etc) was never the main focus of this experiment – the pencil lines were. The computer generated clothes were just there to contrast with the hand drawn lines and textures. Besides, I can’t quite seem to get the right ‘normal map’ to give the impression of the soft wool, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s not perfect – at least I know a shit tonne more about this stuff and about exporting/importing between Maya and Max.

It works!

All I have to do now is finish my work.

Rather stupidly i didn’t put any fingers in the biped skeleton (I thought they would mess up the strict naming system for optitrack/motion-builder). They can’t be added afterwards either, without messing up in one of a hundred ways.

There aren’t enough outlines around the character, they don’t vary enough as the same few are repeated on both arms and legs. I think it would be worth while having each outline designed specifically for each body part, it should make it appear more as if it has been drawn around – but still just planes linked to the movement of the bones. I think the scribbles in his eyes look a little too big in this too.

Motion capture is alright though isn’t it.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/glen-keane-talks-about-his-post-disney-plans.html

“I want to animate something where my original drawing stays on the screen.” – Sketched pencil lines, being able to see the thought of the animator behind each movement, that same scribbled nature that I want. Cleaned up Cel stuff lacks it just as 3d does, although it is considerably more difficult to achieve the same effect with 3d software.

Speaking of 3d – I feel as though I am getting close to what I want. I just need to plan out the movement of each body part and have sequences of lines unique for that part only, rather than repeating the same looping scribbles on different limbs/parts of limbs.

Not so long until Paperman…