Saturday, September 10, 2011

Character!

I can’t not do a post on these. These short movies contain character on a level that most Hollywood movies struggle with today – even with all the fancy CG, score music, celebrities, without a sense of true character and heart even the biggest action scene means absolutely nothing. - just click the images below.

"Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle. They're more intrigued by human relations. If you're making a film about the trappings of the period, and you're forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you're in trouble."

Ridley Scott





Thursday, August 4, 2011

Jeremy Love

Here is another one of our concept artists I feel lucky enough to work with, Jeremy Love. Whose work , im sure you will agree, is incredible. Very inspiring stuff!! - just click the image below.





Friday, March 25, 2011

James P Brouwer

This guys work is kickass, highly recommend popping over to his blog to see his goodies.... great poses and designs. Now all i need to do is get as good as him... hmmm (gonna take a while!)


Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Pencil Test Blog - the goodness!!!




This right here is an incredible blog dedicated to animation pencil tests!! Its a real treat getting to see the raw drawings of some of the most celebrated animation in history - its like looking into the mind of the animator. Enjoy!!


Saturday, October 2, 2010

That Rigging Malarky

Yup its true, I have a weird taste for rigging – while im not particularly advanced I enjoy building virtual machines which come to be the characters we animate. I’m insanely against bloated and slow rigs and believe that a good rig should be expressive, relatively fast in realtime, and simple to animate.

Here is a little test video of my latest facial rig, this is by no means anything fancy. There are no expressions, no fancy node set-ups… this is simply the combination of joints and blendshapes connected through set-driven-keys. The real challenge has been trying to make the deformation as appealing as possible when posing. More testing needed, body rig to come…

I’d also like to thank Andy Thomas, Josh Burton and Dan Harris for their advice and encouragement along the way – thank you guys!!

click me




Back to the madness.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Gobelin Animation

Damn, I love these guys – what they produce is just outstanding. The simplicity in character design, yet it has such beautiful movement. A lesson to us all - keeping it simple at every layer of development, and bringing these layers together helps to reach a true sense of depth and dimension.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6ZmMjMdrqs


Superb Rig by Josh Burton

If you’re like me, don’t have much of a life, strange looking and find yourself back on maya animating evenings and weekends – but unable to find a decent free rig, so you try making your own, only to break down in a fit of frustration – crying and screaming and then you accidently run over your neighbour’s cat because your too distressed at the thought of reskinning for the billionth time because maya’s tools are poo?!?! Well look no more… this is an incredible free rig! Especially great if you’re learning animation and need a decent rig to cut your teeth on (or like to learn rigging and enjoy looking what’s under the hood). Plus check out the site for other hidden gems such as Josh’s development on the rig, how he has approached and solved problems and various useful scripts.

If you do happen to use this to some degree, and able to spare a few pennies then please drop a small donation via the link, the time invested in a rig of this quality is enormous. Thank you Mr Josh!

http://journal.joshburton.com/