Malcolm - Free Maya Rig

This rig is great - and it's free :)

CLICK HERE TO GET IT!

Celebrating Steve Jobs

AM Animals & Creatures - Some aftertoughts

It's been truly amazing to be back at AM for the 6 month Animals & Creature course, but as I've mentioned in previous posts, it's been exhausting because I've worked full time on "The Penguins of Madagascar" at the same time. I would actually not recommend doing this course while working - the course is fantastic, but it's just too intense and time consuming when having a full time job. That's just my experience and opinion though :)

I was very fortunate to get two awesome mentors. Keith Sintay and Kevin Koch are both really really good teachers (and super duper nice guys) and I learned tons from them. I guess all the mentors at AM are great, so it really doesn't matter who you get, but I feel very lucky to have had them as my mentors for this course.

The course is built in the same way as the core animation program, where each concept/lecture build on top of each other. They had some super cool lectures that really goes in depth into animal behavior and locomotion. I would say though, that this course isn't that much about animation (at least not from a technical point of view) as it is about intent, thought process, how and why animals move the way the do etc.

The rigs are really good as well and they kept updating and improving them as we went through the course.

My conclusion is that this course is worth every cent and more - it is truly amazing - but it's very intense and time consuming.

To keep practicing, I've started to do some quick cycles with the AM A&C rigs.

Animals & Creatures - Session 212

So this is it! I've completed the very first official Animation Mentor Animals & Creatures class.

Right now I got a bunch of mixed feelings about it. It's been awesome, but I'm exhausted. Working full time and doing this course has been quite intense and sometimes I've felt like it's been too hard. I've learned tons though and I'm confident it has been totally worth it and that it will pay off.

Here's my final of the Dragon Attack shot:


Here's a progression reel from layout to final of the Dragon Attack shot:

Watch higher resolution here

And here's a compilation of the assignments I've done during the course:

Animals & Creatures - Session 211

I continued to polish and went over a bunch of smaller stuff that most likely nobody will ever notice, but hopefully the sum of it will give the shot a more polished feel.

It's kinda sad, but this is the last week we actually have to turn something in. We do get a critique this week, which I'm gonna spend next week to address for sure, but there's no grade or assignment due for week 12.

I also put some lights in and rendered the shot just for the heck of it. It integrates the characters into the shot a little bit more than just a playblast, which I think is kinda cool.

Here's this weeks pass on the Dragon Attack shot:

Animals & Creatures - Session 210

Got to do a toe/leg-pass, a wing cleanup pass, tracked arcs on both characters and kept tweaking and adjusting the shot through the week.

Here's this weeks pass on my assignment:

Animals & Creatures - Session 209

Kept refining and cleaning stuff up this week, especially under the hood, and in general just proceeded refining the shot.

The exhaustion is starting to set in, but almost there :)

Here's the second refining pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 208

I spent most of the weeks cleaning things up - cleaning up the curves and the poses from the blocking pass.

I also worked a little bit on the dragon flying in and landing, as well as the pulling of the dragon. 3 weeks to go and a looooot of work left. :)

Here's my first clean-up/refining pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 207

It's been quite a stressful week trying to flesh out my shot and add more breakdowns to both characters. I think I got the main stuff in there now to show the idea and the intent, but it still has to be pushed and exaggerated - lets see if I can get to that next week.

This second class is a bit more demanding than the first class and a lot more hours are required - still fun though and I'm learning tons. 5 weeks to go!

Here's my blocking pass of the Lion vs Dragon shot:

Animals & Creatures - Session 206

Rough blocking of our 2 character interaction shot this week.

My layout from last week wasn't quite working staging and composition wise. So I found another plate of the same setting where I could get the characters to fill the frame a little bit more.

The problem with the new plate was that it was panning slowly across and didn't fit the action I had planned out very well - the camera was leading the action instead of the action leading the camera. When somebody in our Q&A pointed out that it looked like a security camera in middle of the forest, I figured I gotta do something about that haha - thanks by the way to whoever pointed that out :)

Then I remembered something that Glen Macintosh had mentioned in one of the previous lectures - in one of the Jurassic Park movies, he had deleted frames from the plate in order to get more intensity into an action that felt too slow.

The original plate I used was about 30 sec long and the camera eventually came to a stop. I went ahead and started to delete keys from the matchmove camera in Maya to speed up the pan to make it fit the action I had planned out.

Once that was working, I went back and deleted the exact same images from the plate and renumbered all of them to match the new keys on the matchmove camera. It took foooooorever. Ah well...pain is temporary - film is forever. And I think it works better now, so I guess it was worth it.

In a production I would probably not be able to do that, but I'm pretty sure the plate would have been shot to fit the action better in the first place - at least it's my way of justifying it :)

Here's my "old" new layout:


Here's the new layout after the camera change:


Here's the first rough blocking pass of my assignment:

Animals & Creatures - Session 205

Countless hours has gone by this week searching for reference for the next assignment. I had a few ideas that I explored. I went ahead and researched and edited reference for three different ideas, but eventually I decided on an idea that I think is doable within the time we have.

The next assignment has to have character interaction, so my shot is going to have a lion type-ish cat attacking a dragon that lands to search for food at some kind of picnic forest clearing.

My goal for this one is to be able to get to the polish stage and really dive into the details that hopefully can make it a nice reel-piece. Let's see how it goes :)

Here's my planning for the assignment:

And here's a super rough layout pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 204

One month already into the second class of Animals & Creatures. Class two so far feels harder in terms of concepts to learn, but at the same AM has changed a few things since last term, such as avoiding planning and polishing in the same week, which makes it better in terms of time management.

The lectures are really really good, packed with tons of information and/or walk-thrus by VFX industry veterans. We also have weekly Over the Shoulder Q&A's with Nicole Herr where she goes through hard concepts or grabs one of our assignments and talk us through what she would have done to improve it. Pretty amazing!

Next week we're starting our last assignment, which is a 7-week character interaction/fight assignment. That's gonna be cool!

Here's this weeks pass of the Church Landing Dragon assignment:

Ira Glass on Storytelling

Animals & Creatures - Session 203

Flying creatures are hard :)

It's been a bit of a tough week with lots of frustration and the feeling of that I have no idea what so ever of what I'm doing. Getting the dragon to feel right in flight with a gazillion controls to potentially touch and with very little experience animating flying creatures or bag of tricks to fall back on (regarding flights) - has been a real struggle.

Taking a step back and looking at this rationally - this is actually really really cool. Being this far out of my comfort zone is something I know is super necessary in order to learn and grow as an animator, but I find it very hard to force myself this far out of it if I don't have to.

A sentence by Glen Keane (from Clay Kaytis Animation Podcast) has been a helpful reminder through the week: "When you run up against a problem - you always think it's because you're not good enough - but it's not that, it's just that you've hit the limit of your knowledge and you gotta go out and observe and find and discover something more - those are the best times when you feel like you stink and you can't get it any better and you're stuck - now the world is open and you're ready to learn something new. You gotta take advantage of that!"

One week left on this sucker - not sure how far I'm gonna get on this one, but I'm gonna do my best - and if nothing else, I'm confident that I'm learning a lot and getting a lot of mistakes out of the way.

Here's my blocking pass of the Church Landing Dragon:

Animals & Creatures - Session 202

This week we're starting working with live action background plates. For our next assignment we have a bunch of different plates to choose from, already matchmoved by Animation Mentor - which is supercool!

I was considering going back to the cat rig for the next assignment, which is a 3 week assignment - basically designed to get us introduced to working with background plates and matchmoves - but decided to stick to the dragon rig to learn as much as possible about flying creatures while I have access to an experienced mentor :) - I can always go back and do another cat test later.

Here's my planning for the next assignment:

Here's a rough layout pass with the selected background plate. Based on feedback, I already know I'm gonna have to change this a little bit, but this is the essential idea:


And here's the revision of the flight cycle from last week:

Animals & Creatures - Session 201

After a VERY good and much needed break :), I'm ready and superexcited about diving into the second term of the Animals & Creatures Masterclass.

Again I've gotten a fantastic mentor, Keith Sintay, with over 17 years of experience, in both traditional and CG animation - and some really cool classmates that I already know I'm gonna learn tons from. This is gonna be pure awesomeness!

No relaxed first week this term. They're throwing us straight into a vanilla flight cycle with the new dragon rig. Even though it's a crazy cool rig - opening it for the first time with tons of controls and hardly ever animated anything flying at all - it's kind of scary.

I spent most of the week trying to wrap my head around the rig and figure out what controls that I'm most comfortable using etc. Also started to study tons of birds to get an idea of how this works.

Again, I have this really exciting/scary feeling of moving into a territory that's somewhat familiar in terms of animation, but totally new in terms of flying creatures and animal/bird behavior. It's a really really cool "I'm gonna learn a lot here"-feeling!

Here's the planning I did for this weeks assignment:

And here is the blocking pass of the vanilla flight cycle:

Animals & Creatures - Session 112

All good things has to come to an end and coming to the end of Animals & Creatures Class 1 is sad. Being a part of the first official term of the Animals & Creature Masterclass feels truly special.

I don't think I could have gotten off to a better start with amazing classmates that have seriously inspired me through their work and a really awesome mentor, Kevin Koch, that went totally into the material and really explained in-depth in weekly e-critiques that often lasted 20-30 minutes.

I've learned so much this term, but what I think I've learned the most is the importance of reference - when to use it, what to use from it and what not to use. This not only applies to VFX and creature animation, but I hope I will have huge benefits from what I've learned in all the animation I will do from now on.

This week, I've gone back and addressed Kevins final notes on my assignments. In the Ogre shot I know I should have pushed it a lot more, but the way I've set up the shot, caused the rig to distort too much. It would be cool to start it over knowing what I know now about the rig - and maybe I will one day, but for now I'm just gonna take what I've learned with me into future shots and hopefully manage to get something cool out of it.

There's a week break before Class 2 starts and maaaaaaan do I look forward to that! It's fun, its awesome and it's supercool, but crazy exhausting :). After a week of recharging, I'm really looking forward to get into flights, working with live action background plates and fights/interaction between two characters. It's gonna be amazing.

Here's all my assignments from Animals & Creatures Class 1:

Animals & Creatures - Session 111

We had a really cool lecture with Tippet animator Will Groebe this week where he went through a shot all the way from planning to final. I always find it interesting to watch how others approach a shot and see other peoples workflow - super-inspiring.

I just kept pounding away on my shot this week and tried to get it to a more polished level. Kevins notes are as always really great and I'm learning a lot from his e-crits.

Next week is the last one for this term and this suppose to be the last assignment. I'm still gonna keep working on this shot next week though :)

Here's the second polish pass on my Ogre shot:

Animals & Creatures - Session 110

Week 10 already - getting close to the end of class 1.

This week I tried to get some energy into the shot, as well as work some more on details such as the toes and fingers etc.

I also did some re-timing here and there and tried to push the spacing a little bit further in an attempt to get a little bit more texture and variation into it.

Still quite a bit work left to do and one more week to go.

Here's the first polishing pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 109

I've decided to move forward and do the second term of the Animal and Creature Class as well. Even though it is exhausting doing AM while working full time, it's so much fun and so much new supercool stuff to learn, that it's more rewarding than it costs (in terms of energy). Besides, it's only 3 more months -  It's doable.

I did a refining/blocking + pass on my Ogre test this week. I changed the beginning a little bit based on Kevins feedback and a couple of other things. I also did a clean up pass. It still lacks "omph", but hopefully I'll get some more energy into it next week.

We also had to do a page of drawings this week as part of the assignment. Even though it's takes some time from the animation assignment, I kind of wish we had to do it every week. It's so much fun to draw and I'm not doing it enough  - obviously :)

Here's my assignment this week (refining/blocking +):