Long Time No Post!

So I've graduated now.

It's been a while actually, but I managed to leave my BA Computer Animation course with a brilliant 2:1! I'm so pleased!

For the past two weeks I've spent working for free in Blue Zoo Animation as a rigger, mainly rigging environments and a few side characters. It's been GREAT! Unfortunately I can't show you what I've been doing until it's all aired (which will be about February/March next year!) but I've learnt so much this past week and a half/2 weeks. :)

Few things to list;
Lattices
Condition nodes (in more depth)
Blend shapes
Motion paths

I could go on, but I'll leave it there.

Anyway, I just wanted to show you a few things which have been emailed around the intranet there.

A guy who had been working for a French company posted a French series which has an epic amount of action, movement, story, character and extremes. The colours are beautiful and full of life, the characters are well made, brilliantly animated and well thought out and I'm immediately drawn to them all.

Show; Kaeloo
Audio; French (this vid has English dubbing which doesn't do any justice to the lipsync.)



It's so awesome! I can't wait to see it (not really giving a damn if I'll understand it)

Then there was a guy off Rigging Dojo who've put up an amazing CGI squash and stretch Roadrunner reel. It's just amazing, I feel like it's almost paying a large homage to a very awesome cartoon, they've served this show well!

Josh Carey - Rigging Supervisor Looney Tunes VES Submission

It's tres amaze! Definitely worth the watch. You'll want to work on it for sure.

Stemming off the Looney Toons, a Swedish company was linked up in the conversation. They have a clay-like feel to their textures, making the characters unbelievably fun to work with. Squash and stretch everything, trying to give off a stop-motion style with an almost 2D base but still retaining the CGI qualities/elements.

They've done a few Cartoon Network adverts which are freaking amazing! But take a look at the rig itself. I think as a challenge I want to build a mini character from scratch (simple but a very cartoon-y rig) that everyone can use and I can experiment on.



OMNOM! Amazing what you can do, aye?

And for now, I shall leave you with the uploaded vimeo videos they have done for Cartoon Network. Simply amazing!

ERASMUS - InformAnimation IP + Graduation

So for the past 2.5 weeks I've been away in Sardinia, Italy on an intensive programme with ERASMUS. For the two and half weeks we had to create a piece of animation which also gave off information about the company and (if required) what they wanted us to promote them.

My brief was finalised on the Cancer research group, IntOGen, who take cancerous genes and put them into a huge database, accessible to anyone who comes across their site. The course had 5 memebers from 4 universities around Europe, Glamorgan, Madrid, Athens and Sardinia. Also there were 3 journalists all from Madrid as well.

It was an awesome experience, even though we didn't get to see much of the lovely weather, it was still worth the go.

Here's the final video we presented for the last day:



This was made by 4 students, including myself - one from Spain, Greece and Sardinia.

They were a pleasure to work with and I got a long with them all very well. As I was more CG based I had the opportunity to learn a new program, Illustrator, which was pretty simple to use but now I can add it to my list of known software.

Also, on other news, I graduated today, having received a 2:1 for my BA Computer Animation degree. The graduation was an experience, quite stressful but eventually got there in the end to completing it.

So goodbye education! And hello reality. :)

BA completed, Glammies over, Job hunt; begin!

Hello everyone!

Well, just to clarify, 3rd year, I'd say, is pretty much over.  It was quite sad today, shaking goodbye these familiar faces I've gotten to know over the last few years of my education lifestyle and also receiving a rough outline of my final grade.

Although, for my final major project I managed to score myself a lovely 2:1, which I'm truly pleased about.  It's such a relief to get a good mark and I'm hoping when I get my results in the post for my BA Computer Animation degree, I'll be getting a pleasing grade.  But I don't want to excite myself just yet.

Glammies was awesome.  Congratulations to all the first years for putting on a great show, the lecturers for organising such an awesome Glammies and after party, the nominees and Glammies winners, the highly commended names (yey I congratulate myself, ha) and to the DJ for his karaoke.  ;)

It was such a good day, and meet the grads (although, at first it was nerve racking) was a great experience.  It was nice to be remembered by a Dinamo employer last year about rigging, so that made me over the moon.  Dished out the business cards and had a good night.

I know I'm going to miss a lot of the faces on this course and naturally without them I wouldn't be where I am today and I hope when others get to my position in life, they get the same feeling.


But anyway, enough of my waffling!  Here's an updated version of my show reel.



Just need to sort out my CV (tidy it up a fair bit!) and I'm good to go. :)  Enjoy!

Woop!

So just an update on what's happening...

It's Glammies Friday!
Business cards arrived TODAY!
I managed to get a weeks worth of work experience as someone approached my website and contacted me to rig a character for them.  Apparently I'm going to get IMDB credited as it's a "Hollywood Feature Film".

So that's pretty cool.  Got given the mesh yesterday and it has to be completed by Sunday, fully rigged, facial rig, cloth and hair (although I'm not so sure on the two latter...) and skinning.  Ridiculous.  Also, I have no idea how to do hair!  And as my girlfriend is down tomorrow, thursday and friday are pretty un-available.  Ah well.  I can always e-mail the guy and say what the score is.

So far I've:

• Full skeleton
• FK/IK on the right arm
• IK on the right leg
• Spine controls

Need to do (rig-wise):

• FK/IK on the left arm
• IK on the left leg
• Neck and head controls
• Facial control

I'm hoping to get the arms and legs (maybe the neck and head) done tonight and facial controls on saturday, as well as the hair and cloth.  Fun times ahead!  Apparently the "Hollywood Feature Film" is called "Pizza Man". 

S'gunna be lols.

Business Cards: ORDERED! :D

They're not brilliant... and not plastic either (which is a shame) but hopefully when I get more money coming in I can sort them out a bit nicer.

Here's the front:

And the back:

So I ordered 250 glossy finishes for thursday/friday morning!  Should be here for thursday I'm hoping, which would be cool.

Anywho, I've decided to apply for the MA Animation degree.  I feel like I  learnt a lot during this final year but feel I have room to learn more skills, like scripting!  So I'm pretty keen on the idea.  That's if I don't get a job... :P  I'm meeting Gerald about it next monday, so I'll update on that on the day to let you know! :D

Evaluation!

After the three years of learning through the University of Glamorgan, this final year really proved to me what I wanted to do for my future. I have enjoyed following the animations strand for the few years and finally settling on rigging I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning this new technique to help better myself.


I have learnt a lot these past few months on rigging, researching and carrying out different ways to play out the techniques on making the animator’s workflow easier on them. Collaborating on other projects (which was my main focus) really helped me understand my role and work load as a rigger and also gave me a huge taste of what industry will be like which I’ve loved understanding from this course.

Thanks to the course, the people I’ve met and the new techniques I’ve learnt I feel I have become a better person and can’t wait to go into the real world to increase the levels of entertainment for others.

So all in all, I've enjoyed my experience on this course as I've learnt so much in all the different modules, including this final major project, which i've experienced a small fraction of what industry has in store for me.

Wowzaaah!

I honestly can't believe its the end of university.

Where have all these years of education disappeared to?  It's ludacris, but finished.  Although, in a way, I've been offered to do the MA course, or at least encouraged to go for it.  I'm tempted to go for it, but I'm not sure what the future will hold for me.  Personally, I'd much prefer to wait for a job to come along and offer me the £££'s but education does come first.

But I have great news!  This is the first time ever that I have a show reel.  I've never been so excited/nervous in all my life.  Although it's still a WIP, but generally for the guest speaker tomorrow.  I'll hopefully be able to include some rendered footage from the Alien VFX film and put that in my show reel also.

Update 2

Here's the final DaniSaur overview link:



I like how it looks and the rendering didn't take as long with the resolution settings on the screen and the input into Premiere.  I'm pleased with how this is going!  I'm hoping to sort out the rest of the files tomorrow whilst finishing up the Tinman rig tonight.

Until then. :)

Update DaniSaur as promised.

Here you go, after that long winded post before I've finally worked out the camera capture software and had a little go at exporting files with it.



It's not the compressed version, but I'm planing on (for future reference) putting the captured data into Premiere and rendering out the movies there.  I think it'll work out a lot better.  Only thing I'm hating is the downgrading resolution of my monitor to 800x600.  I feel so 90s!

Updates

Hello everyone!

I've got good news and bad news.  The bad news is I don't have any videos uploaded to show you my progress so far.  So I'm afraid it's going to be a long winded post of me chatting away about work.

The good news is I've almost completed my DaniSaur rig!  I'm so chuffed!  I have had this going on for almost a year (modelling it last year - thanks to Aled Matthews for that and the texturing) and finally my little personal project is coming alive!  Firstly I'll say what's left to do;

• Skinning the facial joints to the mesh
• Check all the skinning
• Create a video showing all the controls and how the mesh deforms (which is what you'll be seeing up tomorrow :D)

Phew!  Not that much really.  Haha, and the textures are on it and it's all looking great.  Finally, I'll be spending most of my time tomorrow completing the Tinman rig, although, I'm quite sceptical about it and don't really want to deal with it any more...  Oh well, pushing through it really.  I've done a lot of the rigging already, I think it's a few tweaks on the arms, including stretchy joints on the left arm for the grappling hook and the head/neck controls, but the legs are done and the main body.  It's just the case of un-attaching the mesh pieces and skinning them to the bones again.  Sorry, just can't be bothered with it really, but I think it'll look cool in the end.

Anyway, enough with work, deadline is Friday so I'm quite confident I'll be able to get it all done and handed in before my miniature presentation on my blog, website and final image.  Then after that's done, off I'll go to buy L.A.Noire!

Until the next update, guys and gals.

Ciao!

Design a Character - Expressions

So a little break from uni work as I gave in my final business module work.  I joined a group on dA called "Design-A-Character" or DAC and what they do is have challenges every week to help design new characters, for yourself, your work or just leisure.

This week's challenge was about designing a character and giving it 4 or more expressions.  I jumped into this idea and this was my initial sketch up:

This is Tak.  He's a weird alien creature who's skin changes colour with different emotions, like a chameleon.  I gave him an oversized snout and a bit of a long neck.  I really wanted to push the faces of the character so I really tried to stretch the features about.

Then I moved onto the line art.  I used the pen tool in Photoshop (scanned in at 300dpi).  Took a few hours but it was worth it. :)

Added in the colour.  I don't know why, but yellow was the first one to come into my head.  At first I wasn't thinking of making Tak into a chameleon-like creature so originally he was going to be all one colour.

I decided to have a go with the black and yellow theme initially.  I kind of like this idea and may consider using this as a future modelling/rigging/animating project for myself after university is complete.  Just need to do some turnarounds of the little bugger! :D

Then onto the final submitted image!  You can see the colours I used to demonstrate the following;

Yellow - Neutral

Red - Anger

Grey - Shocked

Orange - Happy

Blue - Sad

Kinda cliché I know, but I liked the theme ideas.  Anyway I'm pretty happy with the results!  Now I'm done for my break and it's back to working on my personal projects. :)

Ciao!

DaniSaur and Website.

So I've finally finished the Alien VFX Collab.  YES!  So now I can focus on my personal projects which are;

DaniSaur
Tinamous

Also, I've had the time to re-do my website (for the 3rd time now) and it's looking a lot better than it did before. I'm not 100% pleased with it, but it's a working progress for me. :)  Here's the link:

Danie Parness - CG Rigger

Anyway, onto what I've done for DaniSaur.  It's on my website but I'll post the embed of it here.  Since this video I've done more work to the rig, like adding a stretchy spine, and I'm working on making stretchy arms, legs and tail.

Final Image... How Different It Is to my Initial Idea! :|

I'm too tired to write a lot right now.

I've almost finished the business work due in for tomorrow.  Just need to scan a few final image development pictures and I'm done. :)  WHOOP!

Anyway, final image is in my header...  but I'll post it up without the text.

It's really simple, I know, but the work I do is quite limited.  I make a skeleton, I make it move with controllers, I skin.  Pretty simple procedure.

Okay, the other version I have (with the font) is a lovely .png version with transparency, which allows me to post ontop of any background.  Will probably use it in my website.

Until then!

Final Image WIP

Well I know I'm supposed to be doing my rigging, but I needed a stress relief from it.  It's really tiring at times, especially now with such a high poly model and muscle deformers and skin modifiers... etc. >_<

Anyway, enough moaning from me, here's a WIP for my final image for business.  It's really hard to create an image and have that image represent who you are but I'm giving it a go I suppose. :)

Here's the WIP;

I think it's summing me up a little.  I'm really liking the process of it and I think it's working for my favour.  I'm not sure whether or not to keep at it or add to it.  Sometimes more is less and less is more.  Not sure.  Your thoughts?

Ciao.

Muscle Jiggle, Tweaked!

I think this is a lot better.  I changed the direction of the "jiggle" to go along the Y-Axis (following the joint's axis) to make the muscle a bit more solid, as muscles aren't generally as wobbly as the previous WIP.  Also got the skeleton/muscle vid so you can see the magic happen. :P



Enjoyious!

Muscle in the Tank.

Wow, it's taken me all day to get this far with the one muscle on the Tank and I'll tell you, it's a nightmare!

Thankfully there's not too many scenes the Tank is in so there's not much of a hurry for this finale alien.  Not to mention someone hasn't quite finished texturing. ;)  Anyway, I've basically spent all day trying to clean up the muscle jiggle in the right bicep.  A FREAKING PAIN!  Mainly because turning the mesh into a Muscle System slows the rig down stupidly.  I mean it's ridiculous!  Animators, you'll have to use the wireframe or even hid the mesh to actual animate the damn thing.

Anyway, here's my progress so far with him.



It's not really the first WIP.  This was WIP7 test 11 on my saved files.  What a joke.  Ah well, please give me any feedback on it.

Until then! :)

Business Card Idea 2

It's simple.

But I like it.  I was thinking, as an idea brought from my lecturer, to have it printed on laminate instead of card.

Thought it's be different and well cool.  Anyway, here's the WIP2:

Obviously the website isn't legit yet, I do want to buy the domain name though.  

Until then.

New look again.

Thought I'd make the blog look more like the website so I changed it about and added my new logo and logo image.

I think I'm going to work on the logo a bit more, to incorporate into my business cards.

Website Wip2.

So I'd thought I'd look at other work I'm supposed to be doing (besides rigging) and I thought I'd have a look at my website.

So here's the preview..

http://www.wix.com/daniegp88/danieparness

Naturally it's no where near finished, but I'm getting there slowly.  Just need to upload a lot more videos and sort out the layouts, etc.

In comparison to my initial site, I prefer this one a lot more as it's more simple, clean and effective (as my rigging should be portrayed).

Aside from that I'm now working on the Tank.  Last alien to go!  Can't wait to get it up and running nicely.  Hopefully (after a 10-5 shift in work) by the end of tomorrow I'll have the skeleton drawn out, back legs fully rigged and the stump arm.  Shouldn't take too long now, as I'm pro at IK set-ups (no thanks to the small alien!).  Then I can focus my time on the FK/IK arm, spine and facial controls.  Woop!

Until then.

Small Alien... Complete! Until Further Notice.

Well, it didn't take me as long to do this one as the Medium Alien, but it's finally done.



Here's the deformation test.  Thankfully the skinning was relatively easy, due to the stick-like limbs and general thin physic.  Enjoyed it a lot and I've also learnt a lot by doing it.  This is truly my first proper rig using nodes, finger and toes switches, FK/IK switches and generally rigging an entire animate-able character! (I hope :P)

So now, even though I'm behind, I'm taking the rest of the evening off, settling down with some chinese and 6 feet under.

Ciao!

Where's the Bloomin' Elbow Control!?

So the animators were having issues with this silly auto-rig setup in maya.  I managed to locate how to toggle on/off the IK/FK as well as find where the stupidly placed IKelbow control was!


FK/IK Switch in arms and elbow swiv for IK from Danie G.P. on Vimeo.

Here's a quick screen grab for those who are still unsure (and haven't checked the facebook group page).

So quick analysis of progress.
The smaller alien's rig is almost complete.  Sorting out FK/IK on the arms was a nightmare at first, but after the pass 11 tries of attempting it, I FINALLY got it!  I then had an issue to solve on one of the arms, when I moved the shoulder control, the right armIK would stay in place (woo!) but the left armIK would wonder about like a tool.  GRR!

I thought I'd have to sort it all out from the beginning again, but I calmed myself, looked around the Outliner and tried to locate the issue.  I eventually found it!  I had OrientConstraint the L_armIK joints to the L_arm instead of ParentConstraint.  I was so relieved to see it working properly.  As stressful as rigging is, like maths, once you've solved the problem you feel like you've acheived something great.  Which I had!  It meant I didn't have to create an FK/IK switch again! :P  Lucky me.

So I've put IK on the legs (even though he jumps about it's only for a few seconds on screen) and the limbs are completed.  I just need to create hand, foot and head controls, tweak up the mesh bind and it's good to go.  Thankfully I've spent a lot of time learning how to set up character rigs really nicely, so the Tank should NOT take the same amount of time to sort out.

I'm glad how progress is going.  Unfortunately one of my projects (from RUST) has been pulled as I didn't have the time to sort out a Max rig for Tinman in time.  Too much on my plate, I guess!  But they have allowed me to use the model how I wish, so I'm going to be rigging Tinman (modelled and textured by Amanda Bendandi) in Maya instead of Max, so I can get to grips with stretchy bones in Maya.  I'd like to focus most of my rigging in Maya as it's more friendly to me.  I still know parts in Max but I'd prefer the layout and such of Maya.  So I will be doing a full character rig of the Tinman, with a stretchy-bone grappling hook.  Should be fun!  The feet will probably be my biggest challenge, but my focus of next week (starting Wednesday) is to had the all the aliens completed and begin work on the Tinman.

The following week (final week of Easter break) I want to have had the Tinman completed by either the Monday or Tuesday, allowing me to work on DaniSaur again.  From scratch!  Oh I've missed my little DaniSaur!  In the process of this workflow, I will also be working on my final image and website.  The website is live (I tthink, ha) but still need tweaking.  I'm currently using Wix.com for web designing but currently I'm not liking the look of it.  I will do more research into web pages.

Until then! (Sorry for a boring blog, there aren't any pictures here today...)

First Dip into MEL. Well... Not quite.

So I was looking into creating a nice arm twist that would work nicely with the smaller alien.  After trying it out first time I managed to get great results.  Finally!  An EASY thing to set up in rigging! Next to eye constraints. :P

Anywho, thought I'd share the code I put into the expression editor in Maya.

First I had to work out the rotation of when the wrist moves, how much the first part of the forearm would move; for now it was as follows;

L_forearm1.rotateY = L_Wrist.rotateY *0.75 ;

So to break it down it's just a bit of simple math.  The way Maya's expression editor works is like so

object.attribute

Therefore my little formula sounds more like this;

object.attribute equals to object.attribute multiplied by value

Sounding a little less complicated?  Well, basically I've found out that my equation is basically saying that the L_forearm1 object will rotate along the Y axis when the L_Wrist object rotates along the Y axis as well, at a multiple of 0.75, or a division of 3/4s but naturally it's easier to multiply a decimal than divide a fraction.

Testing this expression on, when I rotated my L_Wrist to 90 degrees, the L_forearm1 had a Y rotation of 67.5 degrees, showing the rotation has indeed been multiplied by the decimal (90 / 0.75 = 67.5)

Continuing with this succession, I then selected the L_forearm1 as the main object thus allowing the rotation Y to have some control over the next L_forearm2 bone.

L_forearm2.rotateY = L_forearm.rotateY *0.4 ; 

Instead of halving the 0.75 of the L_forearm1, I decided to drop down a unit to 0.4 as the rotation in the middle of the forearm is a little less than half.  Finally, I placed the following expression on the L_forearm3 joint for the finishing touch of the forearm.

L_forearm3.rotateY = L_forearm2.rotateY *0.2 ;

Thus completing the expressions for the wrist.  I can now move this onto the upper arms, thighs and shins.  I can't believe how simple this is!  Yey me! :D

 

 

Medium Alien, Completed! (Until someone comes up to me to tell me an issue...)

So the Alien (in my perspective) is done!  Finally.  Took longer than anticipated due to armour issues (which still occur, but the animators will sort out whilst animating) and to diving into my first attempt of facial rigging.

I'll admit, I do enjoy the facial rigging!  From that lecture Monday, here're a few pointers;

1. Don't skimp out on the upper part of the face.
2. Animators need the extremes.
3. All the emotion comes from the upper face.
4. Don't limit the controls.
5. The more controls, the more control!  Animators love a lot of control; fine control.
6. Narrow/Widening of the lips.
7. Maya muscle in the face?  Hell no!  Will make the rig sluggish to animate with.
8. 64 joints average for a decent facial rig.  This includes the head and neck; 2 joints for the head/neck and 62 for the face.  The more you have the more control.

So it's a little vague, but you get the idea.  Conclusion:  More controllers = more controller = happy animators. :D

And for the final medium alien movie!

Enjoy animators.  Hope it's easy for you to work with.

Alien update, Facial stuff not completed!

Just uploading the latest update while my beau's sleeping. :)



I'll have to do a close up shot of the face once I've finished rigging it up!  Also, I'll post up some notes I took from this Rigging Webinar I attended earlier. :)

Until then.

WIP4 MEd Alien, almost complete...!

Left to do (for tomorrow):

1. skinning face
2. work out how to make a face control curves panel
3. skin left hand
4. final tweaks

I've kind of enjoyed doing this alien, even though it's been an extra to my workflow but not really an issue.  Hopefully I can sort this all out by tomorrow and have it ready for the animators to get on with.

Then it's onto the smaller alien!  Finally back into setting up the skeleton. :)

I has tumblr. :)

Here it is!

http://dgprigger.tumblr.com/

I tried twitter, just didn't get it, and now i'm giving tumblr a go.  Seems pretty nice.

Edit:

Also, as promised, I'd get a deform test up of the medium alien.  I ended up not bothering with the muscle spline and just created two extra bones for the shoulder pads.  Rigging armour is hard!  The finale cycle of this vid has the full body of armour visible.  You can see the issue I'm facing when the top of the body rotates forward, the armour is so rigid it just follows it through making it look like the armour is coming off.

Now, I've given the directors the maya folder to see what they think they should do and I basically gave them two options:

1. Keep the armour rigid but then the animation is limited
2. Make the armour flexible like for the smaller alien, so that it's almost like a tight, thermal wear.

I'm hoping they go for 2 and also drop the shoulder pads. :P  Or just have them invisible so re-skinning doesn't need to occur.

Anyway, video is here!

Aliens, they're everywhere!

So I've returned to rigging the aliens for the VFX short I'm a part of, and I'm trying to get the alien sorted for tomorrow (but I really can't see that happening...).  Currently I've been trying to work out how to rig armour pads, ones specifically on the shoulders.

If you watch this clip, around 45 seconds you'll get what I mean!



And the guys says "it was a simple rig setup"  HOW SIMPLE?!  Anyway, I've been on my TechArtist forums and I've been given too forms of advice.  My question was as follows:

Hey everyone, it's my first post so I'd like to say hello to you all out there. :)

Bit of info.; I'm quite a novice TD, in my final year of studying CG animation so this last few months I've focused all my work into character rigging. I haven't done any scripting before so if this answer is regarding scripting please excuse my n00bi-ness and explain it to me? haha, thank you!

Anyway... onto the assistance!

I'm rigging an alien for a VFX film my fellow peirs are working on. The alien has huge armor shoulder pads (like a knights) and I was wondering how I'd skin it? I want to show the illusion of, almost like a secondary motion witht he armor, so as you move the arm up (in fk or ik) the armor will eventually follow the movement.

How would I go about doing this? If you require any jpegs I can provide them.

Thanks in advance. :)

First piece of advice was;

Take a look at using dynamics such as springs to give the characters "shoulderpad bones" secondary motion. Playing with dynamics requires a lot of tweaking, especially to prevent interpenetration. Be ready to noodle.

Here's a video of spring dynamics. Google will reveal a bunch of other stuff.

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-us...s-maya-196548/

 Which was really interesting, using dynamics wasn't something I'd covered so it was really interesting to learn, and it's pretty cool!  Unfortunately it wasn't helping me with what I wanted.  So I went back to the forums and posted the (top of blog entry) video so they'd understand more of what I meant.

Here was the second piece of advice;

Look at the muscle spline rig node.. used it on some shoulder pads and worked great as a way to auto keep them out of the way and add shake... one end child of shoulder other child of clav. Adjust and skin shoulder pad to joint rig.

Taken from one of the founders of Rigging Do-Jo!  Neat.  So who'd have thought muscles may work in the situation?  I'm still developing the idea so I'll post something up later to show you a successful workflow!  Seems to be working great so far, just need to add bones to it as well.

Until then.
Ciao! 

Maya Scripts!

Well, I've been following the Gnome tutorial on rigging.  It's basically a step-by-step work flow for creating a character rig which, at the moment is really nice to follow!  Finally some great grounding material.

In the tutorial it focuses on a (apparently well known script maker!) script package known as Comet Scripts !!  Check it out animators and fellow riggers, it's working fine for Maya 2011 currently and it's definitely worth it, c'mon, it is free. :)

Lioness Update

Here's another update on the lioness.  Skinning is virtually done, I'm just waiting on Mike to see if he wants teeth in her mouth.  I've had a few issues with including the tongue and teeth in the skinning process which I've been struggling to amend.  Although, depending on Mike wants, I'm in no hurry to having the teeth in the mouth at all.

Anyway, here's the latest update with the texture on.  NB: I didn't make the texture!



Now onto the next project.  Finally I can start skinning in the Alien VFX project.  Until then!

Edit:
Thought I'd include the skeleton as well- seeing as I can render it! :D



Woop.

Lioness WIP2

Just thought I'd show everyone my process on the Lioness rig.  I basically had to re-rig and re-skin this beast again last night.  So I spent the majority of the night re-creating;
- SplineIK spine and it's controllers
- Neck/Head joints and controllers
- Front and back leg foot rolls (to stop them sliding all over the place!)
- SplineIK in the tail and controllers

Soooo basically everything!  Ha.  Finally, today I've spent most of it skinning.  I've managed to get up to and further than where I left off the last WIP so I'm very pleased with my progress and feel it'll be enhancing my rigging speed. :)  It's still not complete mind, I have the head/neck, few tweaks on the back legs, tail and jaw to to and it's all set to animate.  Then I get to move on to the Alien VFX work.  Aled's finally finished his model so I can set that up to the rig.

And without further a-do, I give you the second WIP of the Lioness!



It's only a deform test so it's meant to look weird on the back legs. ;)
Ciao!

Progress...

So I've been struck with Tonsillitis.  It's well fun.  Slash not at all.

Ah well, we move on.  So I've been working on the Lioness again and it's slightly driving me insane with the high poly count, which makes me dred working on this VFX film with Aled and Joe, yey for high poly characters... -_-;

So here's a quick deform test I've done;


It's fast but whatever.  I need to do more work on it, moving about some of the joints and adjusting the weird foot role.

Anywho, whilst having lunch I tend to look for inspirational work and I fell across this ingenius film:

The Saga Of Biorn from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

Some Inspiration.

Just WOW!



Almost died inside.  SO GOOD!

Along with this Griffin rig and setup:


Sick as!
Enjoy.

Dissertation Work Getting in my Way!

So for the past week I've been stuck writing my dissertation.  

What fun it has been!

My topic was finding out and analysis James Cameron's directing style and also stating it's pros and cons.  It was rather interesting if I must say and ended up buying a few books on him and the making of Avatar.  Tres Awesome beans!

So, I've been relaxing for the past 24 hours now and I fear I have little to show for my tutorial tomorrow.  So I traced this little dinosaur.  :)

And I also made a little logo for my forum user name on oc3d.net:

:D  Woo.

This man is my hero.

So he brought me the splineIK tutorial, now he's come back with a short and sweet clavicle tut.



His voice is so annoying to listen to but definitely a great helper.  Woo!

GORM - Deform Test? I think so.

So I'm working for a company under the name of Lone Pigeon Design on their game (in developement) called Rust.

There are three robots I'm rigging for the game and here's the first mini-bot I've rigged up:


G.O.R.M. Deform Test 01 from Danie G.P. on Vimeo.


And a still?

Toodles!

Business Work.

Hello!  It's been a pretty hectic week for me, first off with our pre-production deadline monday, followed by two excessive nights out drinking, a day hangover and finally closing the week off with out first business module course work hand in.

This consists of out C.V.s, cover letters and business cards.  so far I've done the C.V. and business card.  The cover letter wouldn't be so interesting but I'm thinking of writing to either Pixar, Dreamworks Animation and/or Blue-Zoo studios in London.  So here's the C.V. and business card! WOO.

Here's the C.V. closed up, basically the both bottom and top parts of the sheet fold upwards/downwards to show the inside: 

...and my name and C.V. are here! :D

This will be the (now) front of my business card, with my DaniSaur silhouette in the background of my initals.

...And the back of my card, showing all my simple important details! :)

Now onto the cover letter...!

Business Card: Back

Here's a few WIPs of my business card back.  I know it looks boring... but I wanted it to look clean and smart!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On other news, that hand image is actually my attempt on setting up an FK/IK switch!  It's really difficult but hopefully once I get it I can upload a little tutorial for you all.  Until then, it's sleep time for me!

Stretchy IK in Maya

Cello!

Haven't posted in a while, but I can assure you work (paid work) and work (pre-production work) couldn't get any more... work-ier!  Christmas and New Years have been a blast, but now it's back to reality.

I'll have to post what I've been working on later on today (as I'm in work paid work currently!) so I thought I'd do a bit of research into stretchy IK setups!  Also known as "Stretchy Bones".  This useful video (well it visually looks useful [there's no speakers on this computer!!]) seems easy enough to follow.



It's cool in Maya, because whenever you create something, or generally do anything in Maya it documents it in the Mel script, so I can easily generate a script regarding... just about anything!  Easy as that!  Cool huh?  Will have to upload a few videos to show you what I mean.

Until then, it's been 2D work, like turnarounds and Alien bones setups. :)

EDIT:
Just found a "Seamless IK FK rig" video.  I'm in awe.  I'd want my rigs to look this good!



Enjoy.

EDIT #2:

Haven't got time to watch it all so I'll post it here to watch later.  I'm going to give this a go tonight I reckon! :)