Mery Rig - One Week animation Project Pt 5

Well, the week has finished and although it is no where near finished I am happy with the progress I managed to squeeze in there from grabbing time here and there through the week. There wasn't a competition or a deadline but I wanted to set myself a challenge.
The eyes, lipsync...well everything needs more polish but it was a good practice exercise.

I've so much just playing around with this animation and i'm itching to start another.

Mery Rig - One Week Animation Project Pt 4

Hello hello, so my weekend was spent planning and getting ready for my big move to Australia so the animation had to wait for the week. (Don't worry, I bought a new sketch book for the 4 months of travel...yes i'm thinking of the essentials).

Yesterday I turned on the splines and started working on separate body parts. On this rig (as if I don't praise it enough...it's free too...go get it from here) you can make only certain elements viable which means its a great way of getting those curves smooth in the spline.
I am struggling with the dance, I altered it to try and find a bit more variation and comedy so it's a few stages behind the rest of it. Once again, the face is not even slightly done. apart from vague poses left over from the blocking stage. So ignore those horrible face...if you can.
I hope you like it and please forward on any critiques. I'd love to hear your opinions.

Mery Rig - One Week Animation Project Pt 3

Another day and another pass on the animation. Not much has changed since I only had a little time today but the dance is a little more settled.

Mery Rig - One Week Animation Project Pt 1 (block)

A week ago my laptop broke. I had been waiting for it to happen for a while but it doesn't mean I wasn't heart broken when the I.T guy said the dreaded words 'it's the mother board'. Poor little laptop.
So I had to bite the bullet and get a new one. Apart from having a new arch nemesis in the shape of windows 8 , it has been great. I am editing my showreel and ready to put everything in order but I couldn't have a new super fast laptop and not try some animation. So here is a little trial acting piece I'm working on. As i've mentioned many times before...I LOVE ACTING SHOTS. So I tracked down a fantastic rig called Mery (here) which is probably the best rig i've ever animated with.
Here is a little block that i've done so far. I'm only a day or two into it so i've got a lot left to do. Also please ignore the face since after I finished the key poses I decided to leave it for later. Now it looks a bit insane.
I love blocking (as i've banged on about on here before) but i'm just about to add some more anticipations and settles before I go into spline.

If you have any feedback...it is always welcome :)

How to tell you're an old animator

There are certain events that make you sit back and realise that you have changed, things that make you aware that there has been a significant passage of time. At the moment I am creating my showreel and cv for job hunting in Australia. I can't tell you how excited I am to apply to work in Australia. The whole reason to come to Korea was to save enough money to animate in countries such as Australia and Canada so this is a big step but it's easy to still think of yourself as a graduate when in fact my CV tells a very different story. Here are just a few things that have dawned on me lately to make me realise that I am no longer a 'fresh out of the box' animator and maybe those 7 years I've been animating in the industry make me an actual animator now.

CV's

Creating your CV when you leave uni is a experiment of words. How can I make the part time job I had in the toy shop at 15 sound like it's relevant to a studio environment? But as soon as you have some jobs on that CV it actually becomes more like a game of Tetris. What to leave off? What should I leave in ? How can I make that really ,really cool thing I did jump off the page? This week I faced a new problem that made me step back and take a breath...'I think I may be old!?' I had to get rid of my A-levels from my CV. Squashing a life time into two pages can prove hard but at 28 I've finally reached the stage where A-levels are such a distant memory that they no longer seem relevant on my CV. That's some scary stuff. I realise in the big scheme of things this is just silly but it's nice/weird as hell to be at an age where something so momentous from my past has well....been sent to the bench.

Rigs

I paid for a rig, yes I know! As a student animator living on cup-a-soups and 'chicken' cola , the idea of paying for a rig was insane. I could use the free ones to my hearts content why would anyone ever buy a rig? Then at some point I crossed that line where I realised how 1. insanely hard rigging is and how I should give them all my money 2. How much time it takes to make a good rig. I still use the incredible Malcom rig and I even still use the morphus (old habits die hard) but when I saw the Body Mechanics set of rigs by Joe Daniels (here) I had thrown money at them before I had my first coffee. Was it worth it? YES. I love them. You definitely get what you pay for and I can now animate things I've always wanted to try such as lady walks and baby walks. It may be age (or laziness) but I've crossed the line where I'm an animator through and through so spending money to be one doesn't seem strange, after all I've been spending every penny I've made on animation books for so long that moving house means I need to hire the world's stoniest man to move my boxes, at least rigs fit on a hard drive.

Remakes

This isn't an important point but the other day I caught some kids in my class reminiscing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...it took me far to long to realise they were reminiscing about the new modern version. I've become so old that I've started reminiscing about reminiscing.
And there you have it...in conclusion I'm old, and there is nothing wrong with that. Bring on the next stage of animation because something tells me it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Laptop

My laptop broke....ten minutes later I was online looking at how to buy a new fancy one. This isn't so much me since I think all animators would buy a laptop no matter what age but my lovely boyfriend heard my laptop had broken and he went as white as I felt. 'How will you animate?' was the first question that passed his lips. He gets it....so this either means a. I'm annoyingly obsessed 2. He doesn't question I'm an animator. I think there is definitely a tendency in our industry to idolise everyone with experience and I still do, in fact everything I've ever learnt from animation has been a lesson taught to me buy another animator or actor but it's strange to see that the people around you don't doubt that you are an animator too. I feel I've come a long way from my first animation job where i'd go to the toilet just to dance because I was so excited....nahh that's a lie. I'll still be doing that on my first day in every animation job.

Learning to model (attempt 2)

Well last attempt was more than a learning curve and more of a steep fall but it is done and dusted. I definitley won't be using it to animate but its sparked the creative fire in me and i'm still gonna keep on trying.
So the next part of the project will be Doodlezilla before returning to King Konglish once again. Fingers crossed i've learnt enough to make an animatable model this time :)

Learning to Model: Day 9 FINISHED

Day 9

I created my blend shapes but then hit a brick wall. 2011 Maya has a bug that doesn’t allow you to go into the input > input all settings. On the mesh so I haven’t been able to change the topology. When you make blends they need to be below the skin cluster otherwise you will have your model jumping back to the bind pose every time you push a slider.

I found a way around this by deleting all of my layers, resaving my file and opening it. It worked a charm. I also entered the blend shapes by choosing the advanced settings when setting up the blends and changed the option to ‘front of chain’ which should set it under the skin cluster. This all sounds very complicated and should be very simple but the bug in 2011 made it awkward. The answer is probably getting a newer Maya (Santa?)

So now his is rigged, skinned, textured and have expressions.

Basically he is finished. How has the end result ended up? Well as you can see it’s not perfect but it’s functional.I won't be using this as anything else but a learning tool as there is no way this guy will be in my short (sorry fella) but he was a good start.

I have learnt so much over the last 9 days and I am really happy to have gotten back into this. I’m going to build the next character in my short and then probably revisit King Konglish and do it again.

I realise my babblings probably not very insightful for anyone building a rig but I have written it to keep my sanity and to remember the little problems I ran into for when I try again.

King Konglish v.1

Welcome King Konglish…even if you are just the practice model                    

Learning to Model: Day 8

Obviously this is in the middle of skinning..look at those horrible arms

Day 8

I have finished my skinning, hazzah! Once again I can see all of the mistakes I made with the rigging more clearly but surprisingly there aren’t as many as I expected. Its just great to see him move. Only one more stage and I can get him animated.

The blend shapes is the next thing to conquer but I’m at a loss at how to separate the mesh from the bones to make them. I fear I forgot to separate them at an earlier stage but I need to do a little more research. Its frustrating as I just want to get to it but since he will be a character in a short that teaches kids English I fear blend shapes will be very important.

Time to research!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Learning to Model: Day 5 - Skinning

Day 5

Skinning

Today I finished off the rig. I followed a fantastic tutorial here** and at the end felt confident enough to even go a little further and add my own additions to the rig (such as eyebrow bones and ear bones.) This is something I just wouldn’t have done at uni so I already feel more confident in the process. Obviously a project like this is a kind of ‘time will tell’ situation as its only once you start animating and skinning that you see all those faults come to life.

This of course leads us to skinning. Skinning goes hand in hand with rigging for me so when I let out a groan at the idea of rigging I am in fact imagining all of those tiny verts just waiting to be weighted. I also have to apologise as I am writing this as if the people reading this will know what these processes are. In case you aren’t familiar, skinning is the process of adding the model to the bones. This is the process that tells the computer how it is meant to move. In theory it sounds fun, you get a paint brush and you paint on the weights you want using a nice colour graded system but realistically there are thousands of verts all reacting off every bone and it’s a fiddly pain. The advantage of this type of work (in my opinion anyway) is that its one of the rare jobs in Maya that you can bung on a podcast or some music and just listen away while you work.

This is normally the part of the process where all the little mistakes you’ve made along the way start to show. I am prepared for a long graft but I am already excited to see how he’s moving. He is currently block weighted which means I grab each section and give all the verts a value of 1 for the main bone that controls them in the component editor. Now that’s finished I’ll be able to go into the intricate process of painting a middle ground onto other verts. The tricky part of skinning, like animation is that no one notices when its right but every person sees when its wrong. If you were to move your wrist up and down its amazing how much skin moves, it’s this tricky balancing act that makes skinning so hard but ultimately so satisfying. Unfortunately I will have to leave it at the block stage today as my travel blog (so that I don’t bug you lovely people with my Korean and Asian travels at www.doodlezilla.blogspot.com) has a header that I am not happy with and its in need of changing. Did I mention how much I love desk warming?                        

Learning to Model: Day 4

Day 4

Rigging

After texturing yesterday I hit myself as I had forgotten my facial edge loops. I went back and added all the necessary items to give my Ape his smiling features. Then I gritted my teeth and got ready to begin my least favourite stage. Rigging.

Rigging is something you either love or despise with a fiery passion. I remember being faced with a board in university that had so much writing on it to teach us IK that I couldn’t see the white in the background anymore. It was daunting.

When I first started rigging I couldn’t see any artistic talent in it what so ever. It was maths and a process of following a weird recipe to get my character moving but as I have worked with different riggers and seen their skills I completely take back my old opinions. Rigging is a beautiful thing when done right. The facial rigs that you see online these days blow me away and I dream of animating them. It does feel, when you’re learning to rig, that you are fighting against the computer at every stage but once you pass the initial terror it is very satisfying.

Obviously this is a refresher course for me and probably the most important one. I have rigged in the past at different companies but the sheer dread that enters my chest when my boss would even mention me and rigging in the same sentence showed I needed more practice. Its something I plan on practicing a lot this year.

 As the day has gone on I’ve really started to enjoy rigging my character. It might be because I put rigging on a terrifying pedestal, scared to attempt it after the nightmares of uni but it was so much easier than I remember.

There is always a feeling of copying when I rig. I watch a tutorial and copy every word but I feel like a cheat so a lot of the time I try to work it out myself when it goes wrong. When it comes to rigging you can’t copy enough! (As long as you give 100% credit) It’s a little similar to learning to draw, copy until you make it.

The rig currently has ik legs, ik arms and hands. I am yet to attempt the spine and test it all but so far it’s been enjoyable. A little like playing on a frozen lake*. You know it’s frozen (because old men fish on it every day) but there’s still a tiny part of you looking at the shore, even when you are having fun. Fingers crossed it all goes to plan.

*Last weekend I was on a frozen lake in the middle of a forest, this analogy might be because of that, but who knows the mysteries of the human m

Learning to Model : Day 3

Day 3

Texturing.

So today is my favourite part of modelling, the painting. Putting colour to a character always seems to make them jump off the page. I had forgotten every part of uv-ing, or so I thought until I started watching the tutorial and it all came flooding back. My uv-ing was horribly messy and the perfectionist in me is realising more and more as this process happens that I will definitely be redoing King Konglish because the learning curve has been so steep. I want to get all the mistakes out of the way so I can do it properly.

My concept for this character and the short is really simplistic, Pocoyo like colours so I only needed to block colour him in but it was still really fun to get back into painting and uv-ing.

Learning to Model : Day 2

Day 2

Well I started off on the wrong foot , being a fool I followed a tutorial that was just to build a still model and not an animateable one. So none of the limbs were connected. I made them all separate before realising the error of my ways. This means I’ve had to start again and also learn to merge verts again. It is probably a little more annoying retraining than starting from scratch because you know and remember tools but have no idea where they are located. It’s a bit of trial and error at the moment but i'm getting there slowly. The more I practise the more I learn so even if I do end up re creating this fellow about 5 times it will all be worth it.

Learning to Model all over again

The secret to an animators success (unless you are a university prodigy) is to get yourself noticed but with the same rigs doing to rounds on the circuit the best way to get noticed is to build your own unique characters and ideally create a short that will entertain people

That’s what I’ve set out to do.

I have lots of ideas, too many sometimes, but I’ve always needed to rely on someone else to build them before I can animate them so I’ve decided to take the initiative and create my own characters.

Now I am definitely not a modeller. I spent a week creating characters in university and I took to it like a ton of bricks to water. Since then I have managed to feel pretty at home in Maya so I’m excited to give it another shot.

The modelling part I’ve always enjoyed. I like forming characters the same way I love playing with plasticise but the rigging and skinning have been my downfalls, but I am determined to learn.

Today is day one of modelling. I have a few tutorials that are awakening my memory at every step and its exciting to see the character I’ve imagined animating actually start to appear. I suppose the key to modelling is the same as animating. Know where you are going.

I’ve known some extremely skilled animators who can sit with a cube and add vertex’s until their model resembles something beautiful but for us newbies , I need to know my character inside and out before I start or I can stray. The best tip I can give for new modellers is grab a lump of play-doh or clay and make the shape you want in the computer. Having a 3d model in your hand really will help you to see where it is you need to get to. Drawing a turnaround is hard but stitching those drawings together can be extremely hard.

King Konglish is starting to take shape.

Time to build a Showreel.

 Its that time again when the familiar animation cogs start turning and the future starts to rear its beguiling head. It’s time to make a new showreel.

 For the last year I have spent my spare time fiddling with different animations just for fun with no pressure but as 2015 grows closer and I am ready to set out into the Australian animation market I want a brand spanking new showreel to take with me.

Showreels are a mysterious object. They have endless rules but also no rules at all. In preparation for my preparation (yes I definitely am an animator) I listened to countless podcasts and read endless articles on ‘showreel tips’.

There are reoccurring rules we all know:

1. Don’t make it too long
2. Show your best stuff first
3. Aim it at the job you want to get

But I feel like we all listen to these podcasts trying to find that one mysterious ingredient we can all add to our reels to make it stand out from the crowd. The honest answer is, the only way you can stand out is to work your comically kitsch socks off.

So I have put together a rough years plan for getting back in the old showreel saddle.

I should also mention that my showreel method is based mainly on the way I was taught at uni. I had a fantastic bunch of tutors and the layout has always felt right but there are many ways to set out yours.

A Showreels Beginnings

Stage 1 content

(Stage 1 is what I would call mechanical animation. Runs, walks, jumps and animal movement are all counted in this category)                                                                                               Finish by early April

Stage 2 content

(Stage 2 is a shift in emotion. This is animation that shows a clear separation of two different emotions. A lot of this stuff will come from past work that I’ve done but I’d love to get a few new ones in there two. Think pantomime for this stage )                                                                                Finish by early July

Stage 3 content

(This is my favourite stage by far. This is dialogue and interaction. I love animating emotion and dialogue pieces so I will try to do a few new pieces in this stage because in a dream scenario this is the work I’d love to be doing                                                                                                     Finish by early September

Stage 4

(Work done in previous jobs and under strict deadlines)

                                                                                                                            Finished.

Personal shorts and other skills

(This is a new area for my reel but I’ve spent the time out of the animation field to learn new skills so I can create my own shorts. Modelling, rigging, skinning and animation ideas will be demonstrated on the reel)

                                                                                                                    Finish by early October

Edit

The edit of the reel will take time because it really is one of the most important parts of a reel. I really enjoy this stage of the process but if you are new to editing there are lots of helpful tutorials on line that can help you.                   

                                                                                                                  Finish by early November

CV,Website, CD’s and breakdowns

Self promotional materials need to be ready to support the reel. When you are applying for jobs you will be expected to share all of these things so I need to have them as polished as the reel or there wasn’t much point spending a year working on it J

                                                                                                                   Finish by early December

Apply!!!

I will be moving to Australia early April 2015 so this will give me a very large chunk of time to apply for all sorts of jobs. In a perfect dream scenario I’d love to do cartoonie animation but sinking my teeth into some realistic animal’s animation would also be a great way to spend a few months. Unfortunately my VISA for Australia only allows me to work for 6 months in one job so I may be the only animator ever to not complain about short free lance contracts.

Anyway that is my plan. I will be aiming to keep an online diary of events. I am currently doing lots of design work for people here in Korea which I will share with you soon. Other than that I’ll be keeping you up to date with my reel diary , pulling my hair out and drinking more coffee than Korea can hold (And that’s a lot of coffee…I’ve never seen so many coffee shops in my life).

Happy Feb everyone x