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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Today's sermon is about...

Hey everyone,
So in animation mentor we are starting walk cycles this week, and I just finished writing an email to my class with a couple of tips that might make their lives a tad easier. First one is a mel script called "Auto Tangent". The second was my thoughts on the ever classic reverse foot lock setup, friend or foe? Anyway I thought the ideas expressed here might be of interest to others, so I went ahead and just copied and pasted the email, enjoy!

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So I was just watching this weeks lecture, and I know this week is supposed to just the block out, but I thought I would give some pointers on a tool and some work flow that will make your lives a lot easier.

Auto Tangent: This is one of those scripts that were given to mortals by the gods. Really, it's a terrific script for roughing out animation (especially walk/run cycles) by saving you time and allowing you to make iterations quickly. This script really gives you the best of both worlds when you change your tangents out of Stepped. In the lecture, Bobby talks about how he goes from stepped to flat. This is good because it's going to prevent any unintentional overshoot from your keys poses. However this is also bad because it creates a weird ease in/out on your breakdowns, which you then have to go in and manually fix. On Ballie it's not so bad, he has like three or controls. However take a character with a few dozen and you can waste a lot of time doing this. If instead you go straight into spline, your breakdowns will be nice but now you will have all manner of overshoot going on. Your feet will be sliding through the ground and all sorts of craziness, which leaves you once again manually fixing your tangents (taking up precious time).

Auto tangent to the rescue! Run this script on a curve and it's "smart" enough two see two keys of the same value, and make the tangents flat like you would typically want. If it sees two keys of different values, it will attempt make a nice gently slope of your curve, WITHOUT over shooting. So you are getting the best of both flat and spline with one click of a button! Now you will still need to go in and make the ultimate decision on the curves, but this tool gets you so much closer to your goal than turning your keys from stepped to exclusively spline or flat. The script can be found here:

http://www.comet-cartoons.com/melscript.php

Reverse foot lock... friend or foe?
Ok, so hear me out on this. The reverse foot lock rigging set up (which is basically allows you to have the foot roll attribute) is a crutch and bad, nay evil. This was taught to me by my former lead who was animating 3d walk cycles (good walk cycles at that) before they even had ik! And once they had ik they didn't have any fancy schmancy foot roll control (spoiled kids!). But seriously, the reverse foot lock is bad because you end up animating two sets of curves that are fighting each other, and affecting the IK solver:
The main "foot control" translates/rotates, and the "foot roll" attribute.

Whenever I use the foot roll control, I am able to block out a walk cycle a bit quicker, but I end spending a lot of time cleaning up strange arcs and popping caused by it.

Instead, consider not using the ball roll and use just the toe flip control, and rotate and translate the main foot control into the position you want. Then just eyeball planting the foot on the ground (us a locater as visual reference if you need to). This takes a little more time blocking out, and you end up with a few more keys in the end, but it makes your arcs from the feet lifting up and planting on the ground so much nicer and, and gets rid of a lot of strange knee popping, that you will probably spend more time cleaning up at the back end than the time you saved in the front end.

I know what you are thinking, "this is madness! I will have no more your blasphemy!” I too had these thoughts, but now I am converted, won't you join me?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Persepolis

So I saw Persepolis last night, for those of you who don't know, Persepolis is a animated film about the Iranian Revolution through the perspective of a young girl. It is also up against Surfs Up and Ratatouille for the Oscar nomination, and frankly I hope it kicks both their butts. This is hands down one of the best animated films, nay just flat out best films I have seen this year. While I do think very highly of Surfs Up (and I enjoyed Ratatouille), Persepolis is a complete departure from US animated film formula. It's art is nothing short of breathtaking in its simplicity, and the animation is charming and expressive. Most importantly it tells a good story, and a new one at that. Surfs Up gets credit for attempting a to make a animated documentary, but at its heart it still was the classic "follow your dreams" theme that so often is rammed down our throats in animated features.

You would think that a movie about the fundamentalist oppression of a entire nation would be a damn heavy film, and it is, but they managed to include just enough humor and humanity in just the right moments to ensure that you still walk out of the theater with a smile on your face and your wrists intact. If you are an animator, you should be required to see this film. If you care about this moment in history, see this film. If you just want to see a great movie, see this film!

Friday, February 08, 2008

TFU on Aint It Cool News.com

Wow, the press machine for my game is really starting to pick up! The print version of the Vanity Fare article on TFU just hit the streets, and it's creating a lot of buzz. Let me state again how huge it is that they did a story on us. Vanity Fare has never before done a story on a video game, and their readership isn't usually considered part of the gaming demographic. But TFU has managed to tickle Vanity Fare in a way that no other title has been able to. Suck on that Halo.

As a result of this we've also been picked up by AintItCoolNews.com, which for those of you who don't know is one to the biggest movie and entertainment news, rumors, and reviews websites on the internet. The link to the story is here:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/35542

On a side note we also recently got our first of hopefully many Penny Arcade comics about us. Penny Arcade is a very smart online comic published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday usually parodying the video game and entertainment industry. It's part of my daily reading, and you're not a REAL video game until Penny Arcade has made fun of you. Just a little background info, in our game when you force grip an enemy, if two or more are standing near each other they will grab hands and try to "stay alive", so the comic is ripping on this feature.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Shameless plug for ME!

So I have a totally shameless plug for myself, but I just discovered my first professional work just made it on the interwebs! Actually its two very brief clips of first pass animation I did like four months ago, but damn it this is the first time any of my work has made it in a video, so I thought I would share.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/video/2008/starwars_video200803

Both of my shots are of this giant monster made of chunks of junk. The first one is of his junk bits forming up, and the second is the very last shot of the video of him roaring and shooting a bunch of shrapnel out. Anyway it's crappy little snipets, definitely not the cool stuff I have gotten to work on, but I am still giddy!

Also the very fact that our The Force Unleashed is in Vanity Fair is HUGE! Vanity Fair has never ever done a big story like this for a video game before. This is just the tip of the marketing iceberg that LucasFilm is going to unleash (no pun intended). Stay tuned to be brainwashed into buying my game.

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