Walt Disney's Multi Plane Camera

The Core Skills of VFX

"The Core Skills of VFX Handbook has one simple but ambitious aim: to improve the new entrant skills available for the UK's VFX industry.

The handbook is relevant to both students and tutors; it is designed to assist universities and colleges to raise the standard of VFX courses available and therefore the new talent available in the UK.

The handbook has been prodcuced following a sustained dialogue between Skillset, the industry and educators. It is a clear presentation of the VFX industry's voice on new entrant skills, setting out what skills the industry needs to remain world beating."

Core Skills VFX Handbook

Animation Gig #1: Review and Reflection

I've been meaning to write this post for a very long time. But changing jobs, moving city, moving house (twice), seeing family, friends and general bus-i-ness it's been a little delayed. But, here it goes...

My first animation gig at The Charactershop wrapped up at the beginning of March 2011 and I moved straight onto my second gig straight after it and i'm still there. I got very lucky, both The Charactershop and Ragdoll are fantastic places to work.

The Charactershop was the first time I got to work on pure character animation. In the scene were two characters; Rory and Ned, both rigged from 3ds Max's Biped system - not much of a joy to animate but gave me lots of questions to ask about animation. I tried to make a note of all the comments and feedback I was given and now I hope to be able to embellish on them here a little bit.

In the following clip I did the animation, adjusted Rory's whiskers with morph targets, rendering, compositing and editing. The title cards before and after were added in by The Charactershop.



Review:
- The first problem I see in the animation is the result of the process I underwent... I should've blocked (stepped) each line of dialogue before splining and then refining the animation. Instead, I blocked (splined) chunks of 250f/2.5 seconds dialogue and then refined the splining in one pass.

- I didn't know what twinning was until half way through - it was one of the feedback I got - and although it doesn't happen very often now, there are many other acting choices I could've made that would've avoided twinning. Twinning is where the character does a symmetrical poses/action e.g. shrugs shoulders and raises both hands at the same time.

- I did make a conscious effort to keep strong poses and good silhouette, but what I forgot to do a lot of the time was check my poses in different viewports. I only started to do that half way through and realised that the characters were way out of line from each other. Animating to one static camera wouldn't make it much of a problem as you can see, but it's bad practice and could've got some stronger poses if I had checked the animation in other viewports.

- There were a few moments where the characters feel uber robotic. The cause of which came from not knowing how to create anticipation and moving holds.


- This was the first time I got a storyboard to follow. I wasn't sure how much of it I should follow so I tried to keep as close as I could to what I saw, but there were many instances where I had nothing to follow and this was a great test to see how well I knew the characters and if I could keep their action choices 'in character'.

- A great lesson I learnt was that happy accidents can occur when you start from scratch - try to avoid polishing turd!

- An important lesson I learnt only through doing this - as I had already heard it from a Digital Tutors guy - was to leave the facial animation right until the very end. It's important that the body can tell the story and 'speak' the dialogue before any facial animation and lip sync has begun. I knew this in principle, but now in practice!

- Hitting walls is often I find myself doing... not literally... but in my animation! This is where a characters movement suddenly stops, as if it has hit a wall, or is still in the blocking (stepped) phase. At the same time, I can see my animation floating a lot here. I have to say though, on this occasion, this was more something that was a result of the rig and the program I was using. If 3ds Max gave easier control I probably would've done it less.

- Hitting the accents was often in the feedback I got. What had to do more was find the accents in the dialogue and hit those fluctuations by emphasising parts of the animation.

- Watch your arcs! Heard that one before, right? But that was something I wasn't doing enough here. A lot of the movements were very linear and lifeless. I only had enough time to go back and work on the arc of the head turns.

- Blink. The blink timing I used was something like this: |..||...| (| = Open . = Close) Everyone prefers different blinks but this way seemed to work well.

- When a character needs to interact with an object, or another character, it's good practice to link them to an IK Dummy (3ds Max) or Locator (Maya) with a parent constraint. This gives you loads of flexibility and it's what I did when Rory pulls Ned back at the start and when Ned pats Rory on the shoulder.

So that just about wraps up all the notes I had for this. If you would like to bring up any other points that I haven't included please leave a comment or contact me directly.

Here are some pictures I took while I was living in Birmingham and work at The Charactershop.

Common Blocking Tangents

Via Spline Doctors

"After looking at about 50 people, it seems that stepped mode for blocking is the preferred approach. The following graphics show Industry to blocking style and years in the biz to blocking style. Take a look at the graphs. Some interesting results. It seems like I am in the minority… I have used spline transition blocking for my 14 years at pixar. It was one of the only ways to work when I started and it all changed when the incredibles go going. I do see the strength of Step mode and I do use it in Pre Production. Linear for me does not make sense and Layering is good for certain types of shots in my honest opinion (mostly action shots). All in all what counts is clarity. Everyone has a different way to work. What I have seen not work is too much complexity in the beginning. Keeping is rough and simple seems to be good. Some animators really work for strong poses in the very beginning stages and I see the benefit to this. Thanks to everyone for participating and please keep adding feedback. Next I am going to Poll animators around the office."

Pilsner Urquell - 'Book of Legends'

More info here.

One Man

Olliver's Adventures - "The Singing Pickle"

I don't think we ever got Oliver's Adventures in the U.K, but this show looks really good.



Directed and via Ron Doucet

The Nod

Better In Black & White?

A really cool project by flavorwirejason. It's made me think about animation in black & white. It's not necessary, but could be good to see.

James Baxter - How To Draw Spirit

James Baxter gives us a walkthrough of horse anatomy and drawing...





Here's a really cool gallop cycle of his too...

Neighbours (1952)

"It's not important what goes on each frame of film; it's the spaces between the frames that are important."

- Norman McLaren Director/Animator of Neighbours.

Industrial Light & Magic: Creating The Impossible

Walks and Runs from Robin Hood

In Character: Actors Acting

On this Vanity Fair page, they have a huge collection of pictures from Howard Schatz's book In Character: Actors Acting. Also a good slideshow here on the photographers website.

Here are a few clips of how it works and more about the actors involved...