"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
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!!
Back to the madness.
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.
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!
Well i guess i really should post this up on my blog by now. This is the completed version of my short movie Shower Power. I must thank the guys for all the wonderful responses ive had so far and i was even lucky enough to be feature on Bobby Becks blog. Its usually pretty tough squeezing these projects into our personal life but i found if you pick something that truely gets the animation jazz playing in your own mind – its a little easier to see it through to the end. Enjoy!!
The second piece of good news, i'll be starting over at Double Negative this September. These guys are one of London's biggest VFX studios having done work on Hell Boy2, Dark Knight, Harry Potter... and more. Starting with 30 people and grew to 500 employees its definitely going to be a change from the small teams im used to in games, but i nervously and eagerly await the challenge! That's does mean i have to say goodbye to my buddies at Rare, who i'll miss dearly. Rare gave me my first shot as a professional animator for which i'll always be thankful for, i really do wish them all the best in their future endeavours. Goodbye my friends, but im sure we will meet again.
Its been a while... partly because no one really reads my gibberish, which is probably down to my lack of posts – its a circle of madness. None-the less, here is my latest showreel....as Wall-E would say "ta-dar!"
Next on the list is my graduation short, and if im honest – i have never been nervous about doing an animation until now. Its got to be good or thats 6months of work wasted.
