My animation notes

AnimSchool : Character eye blink video

2012-01-12T17:22:00.001Z

Interesting video from Blue Sky Animator, Garrett Shikuma, demonstrating, how to add appeal to an eye blink.

Tangled ever after clip

2012-01-06T13:42:00.000Z

Here is the first clip from Tangled Ever After animation short with Rapunzel, Flynn Rider, Maximus and Pascal featuring the wedding of Rapunzel and Flynn. Reminds me how great the movie was.

Ianimate videos

2011-11-28T21:10:00.001Z

This 15 minutes video showcases some really nice animation made at the Ianimate online school.

iAnimate.net 2011 show reel from iAnimate on Vimeo.

One more that I've found, is a really compilation of students shots who've all animated their characters to the same music.

Gets You Back To You

2011-10-18T20:24:00.002+01:00

Beautiful animation made for the recent Twinings tea advert

Shot study

2011-09-17T10:40:00.002+01:00

A very interesting shot study by Blue Sky animator Nick Bruno
http://theloztboyz.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-i-study-animation.html

Posing characters for animation

2011-09-13T22:20:00.004+01:00

Awesome post from the Animation Resource Centre blog which goes into great details about getting good poses in animation
http://sbit-animation-centrala.blogspot.com/2008/08/posing-characters-for-animation_21.html

Rio comparison reel

2011-09-13T21:52:00.003+01:00

Here is another comparison reel by Blue Sky animator Jeff Gabor for some of the shots he did on Rio.
Really inspiring stuff.
http://vimeo.com/27379093
password: education

AnimationScout

2011-09-10T10:57:00.003+01:00

Hey everyone,

Have a look at these great videos from animator Ugur Yetiskin.
He's made little videos covering a lot of great tips on facial animation that I've found super useful to remember.
So far he's made 5 videos where he talks about Blinks, the head direction, the eyelids, the eyes direction and the mouth corners. Enjoy!

Frame by frame

2011-08-21T09:20:00.001+01:00

Frame by frame and sequential images from various animated films for study and appreciation.
http://framexframe.tumblr.com/

I'm a monster

2011-08-16T22:31:00.004+01:00

Very nice 2d animation

Hey

2011-08-16T22:29:00.000+01:00

A few months have passed so quickly, and nothing new in here :(

Not that nothing has been happening, but I've been a little lazy. I'll try to stay focused this time and do my best to keep the blog alive

Lines of action and silhouette

2011-04-15T15:24:00.004+01:00

Hey everybody,
check out this link which talks about lines of action and silhouettes, with lots of drawings and illustrations !
http://floobynooby.blogspot.com/2011/01/lines-of-action-mickeys-christmas-carol.html

Body language, acting and subtext

2011-04-13T17:49:00.008+01:00

Hey everyone,
In my research in getting good performance in animation I discovered a couple of super useful links :
- The first one is a 3 part tutorial by awesome animator Samy Fecih, and talks about good posing and body language

- The other link, from another great animator, Brendan Body, talks about acting and subtext. It's a 2 part tutorial that I've also found really instructive. You can have a look at the PART 1 and the PART 2

If like me you're in search of animation knowledge then these notes will not disappoint you :)

Inspiring demoreels

2011-04-10T13:27:00.003+01:00

I've discovered a really interesting website called Reelbarrow. It contains a lot of amazing demoreels from professional animators that would certainly inspire a lot of people

Rango

2011-04-10T13:20:00.001+01:00

It's a bit late to post this comment, but a couple of weeks ago I went to see Rango, and I really went to the cinema that day to see if it was as good as most of the people were saying, because I really wasn't convinced by the trailers.

But man, I was blown away by this movie. So beautiful in every aspect, and very different compared to every other animated feature that I've seen. It's cinematography gave me the impression that there was a real cameraman who was filming everything. Well done to everybody involved in this !

New demoreel

2011-03-10T16:23:00.005Z

The last few weeks have been a bit hectic, trying to push my work a bit more. Here is my updated demo reel, with a selection of shots that I've made while studying at Animation mentor. Hope you enjoy.

Less is more

2011-03-10T16:04:00.001Z

In the last few weeks I started to realise something that was quite new to me in animation. I noticed that in many cases doing the simplest thing usually works best than trying overcomplicated choices.

A good friend and animator recently told me that many young animators want to prove to themselves and everybody else what they're able to do, which most of the time results in overcomplicated acting choices. Sometimes having the animated character nearly still on screen with a strong pose is more powerful than having him do some crazy movements.

A few months back I learned the importance of a good performance to get a sincere animation. After that I also realised that the best acting in animation usually works with a strong but also simple performance.
There is no need to put crazy overlaps, follow through, arcs or anything else unless there is a purpose for it. An over animated character makes the look insincere, and this is where the planning stage becomes a very important step to me.
When in the beginning I know exactly what emotions I want to portray, I've found it extremely helpful to write everything down on a piece of paper and then come back to these notes later to see if the targeted emotions are still there. And again, when I see that I went a bit beside my intended goal , I receive comments from others that the action feels overdone. Hope this makes a bit of sense.

Animation Mentor is finished!!!!

2010-12-18T14:27:00.005Z

Hey,
to who ever has been reading this blog in the past few months, I have to apologise for not putting any updates.
I was doing my last Animation Mentor class, and by far this has been the hardest.
It's all finished now, I'm really excited for the things to come but extremely sad as well because of the AM community that I'm already missing. It has become like a family.
I'm not here to talk about sad things anyway :), the last class has been awesome and my mentor, James Chiang, had a very unique way of teaching that really helped push myself RRRREEEally hard.

Class 5 Progress reel

2010-10-04T22:11:00.000+01:00

Here is my most updated reel, with most of the work I've done so far at AM except the very first tests of the first class. Those are probably the shots I'll be polishing in the last term to have my final animation demo reel ready.
Thank you for whoever's watching this :)

AM progress reel class5 from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

2 Characters acting shot

2010-10-04T22:04:00.001+01:00

Here is the 2 characters acting shot that I did in class 5. Soooo much things that I've learned with this challenging exercise, most of the things have been mentioned in my earlier post. Any comments are always very welcome.
Thanks for watching.

AM 2 Characters shot from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Facial study

2010-10-04T21:52:00.003+01:00

Here are a few tests that were done in the previous term. The aim of those exercises wasn't just to copy some random images but to get the essence or emotion of those images and try to have a 3d rig express the same thing.

Class 5 summary + Tips on animation

2010-10-04T20:42:00.003+01:00

I think that my 5th class at Animation Mentor was the hardest of the programme.
I kept learning from the first day of the class and I realised even more how being an animator can be difficult.
To keep it a bit short, here is a small list of the things that I think I really learned during that term:

* The hands : they're super important and can give a lot of character to a piece of work. I think that I made a good choice trying to animate a woman character because it helped me see more details in they're hands. For those of you who may be reading these notes, next time you watch people, pay close attention to their hands, you may be surprised at how much detail they can give.
One of the best advices about animating woman's hands was to avoid to keep them wide open. As soon as you do they tend to lose their feminity. They work a lot better with closed shapes.

* The face : during my time at AM I started to become comfortable with body mechanics, but something that was still a big challenge for me was the face. Altough I think that I've learned a lot from my 1 character shot , when I looked back at it I couldn't help noticing this character that really feels lifeless whatever it was trying to do. Then I realised what was actually missing. The face is really complex and requires a lot of craft to have it look like one single piece instead of different parts moving at different times. A lip sync that's slightly off, eyes that are not expressing the mood of the character, eyebrows that are moving independently of everything else and the illusion is gone.
A few things that I've learned here :
     - Try to get some clean arcs in the corner of the lips when the character is talking
     - You can get a lot of fluidity into the lip sync by moving the entire mouth up and down when necessary
     - When the mouth goes up, thing about moving the cheeks and maybe squashing the eyes a little bit too
   - Don't forget to shape your eyes to your eyebrows. This one really adds a lot to the character
     - Think about offsetting the eyebrows and eyelids movements. For most of the time the eyebrows start the movement then are followed by the eyelids one of two frames later.

That's it I think , there is a lot more but these points were really important to me as I wasn't considering them before. Thanks for reading :)

End of the 5th class

2010-09-22T16:43:00.000+01:00

This blog has been inactive for some time, the reason being that the work at AM has been extremely intense. I can breath a bit now that the 5th class is finished, and will try to resume what has happened in the past few weeks, not right now but on my next post :)

Class 504 - One person dialogue final

2010-07-21T12:48:00.000+01:00

Finaly!!! I was really staring to feel sick with listening to the same sound over and over and over and over..... for the last few weeks. I'm happy to say that it's finished :)

This was submitted to my mentor last week, and today I had my critique

There are even more things that need to be improved :(

My hand shapes are working nicely but could still look more feminine.

There are also a few weight shifts that could be refined and well as some of the facial shapes that are not strong enough.

I will probably have a extra refined version for my final reel.

Any thoughts are always welcome

Going to heaven Finalized from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 503

2010-07-19T13:53:00.002+01:00

Here is a revision of my shot with most of the suggestions applied to it.
The lipsync is a bit better but still needs a lot of work.
The eyebrows don't really feel connected with the rest of the face.
I'm still being told that the gesture for "honest " feels late. This will be corrected in my next and final version of the shot.

Going to heaven - Lipsync refined from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Lipsync blocking

2010-07-10T08:02:00.001+01:00

The serious stuff has finally started :)
Last week we were busy with the facial animation blocking of our shot.
I tried to have all of the basic shapes working, but haven't really started to animate the eyebrows.
Here are the main things that I still need to change :
- My hands still feel masculine. The character rig has big hands, so I was suggested to avoid to show them in a completely open position
- My hips could be moving a bit more, especially when she says
- The breathing at the beginning doesn't look natural at all. What I did was just scalling up the upper part of the spine, which isn't really what's happening when somebody is breathing.
- My mouth shapes are a bit exagerated, especially with the "o" sound. Toning them down by not rolling the lips so much will probably help.
- I think that changing my last pose so that it doesn't look like the first pose in the shot will work better too.

Those are the main things that I'll be refining for my next version.

Going to heaven - Lipsync Blocking from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 5 started

2010-07-05T07:47:00.000+01:00

Last week I started my 5th class at Animation Mentor. This term we ll continue with our previous shot and add the facial animation to it, and we ll have to animated a two characters dialogue.
My mentor for this term is Michelle Meeke r, and she is seriously awesome. I really hope that I ll be able to push my boundaries even more for the weeks to come.

Small update

2010-06-25T16:23:00.000+01:00

I've worked a bit more on my last shot, and here are the main things that I've updated
- I've refined the fingers a bit more to make them feel more alive
- Reworked the timing in some parts, especially where she says "....because you're honest ?... ". I had many comments about the gesture happening a bit late, so I had to review that.
- The hips part have also been refined to feel more natural.
- The most difficult has been to have the left arm a bit more 'present' in the shot but without distracting the main acting. Hope this works better.

I'm sure that there's still a lot that can be done but I'll keep it as it is until I start working on the face.

Going to heaven - Extra polish, no facial from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

End of Class 4

2010-06-18T16:25:00.005+01:00

Woooow.
This is becoming very alarming!!! Where is all the time going? A few posts earlier I had just started my 4th class and now it's finished. This class has been the hardest so far.
What I learned before was like a small warm up session compared to the acting class. All of the animation principles have become a lot harder as well.
Depending on the mood of the character for example, the arcs, overlaps, settles and everything else have to be used in a certain way. Too much of a gesture or not enough of it makes the animation feel unnatural. That is where most of the great animators advice are to look at the world around you and observe all the time.
I've posted below the final submission of my acting shot, without the facial animation.
Right now I'll be relaxing a bit and in one week from now we'll start our next class where we'll be continuing with the present shot and add the facial animation to it.

Going to heaven - Polished from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Still a few things to fix here and there. Not particularly happy the the "... because you're HONEST ? " hand gesture. I'll probably post another update before I start the facial on this one.

First AM dialogue shot

2010-05-21T16:51:00.005+01:00

Well, after the pantomime shot, we started our first dialogue shot. That's what I've been waiting since I started the course, and one of the main reasons me taking the course.
This time we're animating a fully rigged character with facial controls, although the facial animation will be done in the next class.

I've already experimented with some dialogue animation before with the 11second club monthly competition, but that was way before starting AM and I really needed to learn the basics at that time. Right now I don't even know if I'm ready, but I'll need to dive in to get the answer :)

For this assignment we're free to animate on any sound as long as it doesn't contain any profanity and isn't from another animated movie. My final choice went for a clip from the movie American Gangster, with Denzel Washington.

Below can be seen my blocking as well as my blocking plus version of the shot. For the blocking plus I decided to go into splines a bit early to be able to clearly see the subtleties of the animation. I also made the arms invisible to focus on the mechanics a bit more , particularly in the spine area.

Going to heaven - Blocking from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Going to heaven - Blocking plus from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Pantomime shot

2010-05-18T20:11:00.003+01:00

(I've updated this post and added one more version of my shot at the end )

In the past few weeks at AM we were busy animating a pantomime shot, which is an acting shot without any dialogue or sound.
I've really learned lots of things again, but I also realised that there's still so much left to become an awesome animator.

You can have a look at my previous shot below. I've posted the different stages of the animation process until my final submission. There are still a few things to refine like the hands which I think are a little stiff, but that will probably be done in a couple of weeks.

Hiding Stewie Blocking 01 from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie Blocking 02 from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie Blocking Plus from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie Refining from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie Refining 2 from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Some thoughts on acting in animation

2010-05-01T04:10:00.002+01:00

Long time no news :(
I haven't forgotten about this blog but the work at AM has recently kept me really busy.

Anyhow, a few weeks ago I started my fourth class there, which concentrates mainly on acting. Our first assignement was supposed to be a pantomime shot where the character is having a clear change in emotion, like for eg. having him happy in the beginning, and sad at the end.

The term started really well, I was trying to develop an idea that wasn't too overused. I wanted to animate a happy boy playing with his toy and then getting very panicky when he accidentally breaks something because of his clumsiness.

To summarize a little bit what happened in the last few weeks, I'd say that I see animation in a completely different way. I've realized that what we did in the first 3 classes was only focusing on body mechanics , and that acting brought a whole new level to what animation really is.

When I looked at my favorite animated films like those from Pixar and Dreamworks I always wondered what was the thing that was giving to these films so much appeal compared to my work. I clearly saw that whatever the quality of my shots there seemed to be a clear difference between my work and those animated movies. Then a few weeks ago I think that I had found the answer or at least some part of it. Acting!!
What is acting? Acting is defined as the performance of a part or role in a drama. Good acting can make a simple performance shine.
For us animators I think that our acting choices can clearly make the difference between a good and an excellent animation.

I've reviewed what I did in my previous classes and could clearly see that I have many animation test where the character feels lifeless, where the body mechanics are okay but the acting is nearly absent. That was only half of the wok done. The other half is about good acting choices. If the audience can read the character feelings, what's he's about to do before he has actually done it then I believe that the acting is on a good start.

Finally, I think that great animators have to be great artists and technicians at the same time. Technicians because that's what body mechanics really are , they consist of the techniques to use to get good movement. And artists because there are millions of possibilities to do one single thing, some are better than others, but I don't know if that can be taught or if it's just a matter of personal taste.

AM Class 3 Progress Reel

2010-04-02T12:01:00.003+01:00

Here is my new progress reel, which includes updated versions of my work done in the 3rd term at AM.
Hope you'll enjoy :)

AM Progress Reel Class 3 from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Posing your characters

2010-04-02T11:56:00.004+01:00

During my third term at AM there's really been a lot that I've learned.
One of the things that I can see with new eyes is posing. Posing a character is really important and can make or break your animation. Even if everything is nicely moving, if the poses aren't strong then something will definitely be missing.

By strong poses I mean readable silhouettes and clear lines of action. The character's personality has to be seen in as many poses as possible, if not all. If a character is running because he is scared, you have to pose your character postures so that they clearly show what's happening on that moment.

I remember the work I did for my Hiding Stewie shot. I had lots of comments telling me that the animation was flowing nicely but I could see that something was missing especially in the first 100 frames , and clear and strong poses was one of those missing ingredients.

I hope that my notes make some sense, and to illustrate that , below you can watch my old work compared to the updated version, with clearer poses, and I think that this works better now.

AM class3 Hiding Stewie( old version ) from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie ( Updated version ) from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

AM Class 4

2010-04-02T10:31:00.002+01:00

Hey everybody,
Sorry for no being able to post anything for the last few days.
The Animation Mentor course is doing great, and I finished my 3rd term there. This week we went straight to the 4th term. It's time for acting now, so things are going to get very interesting.
The other news is that I have the honour to be mentored by T.Dan Hofstedt , an amazing animator who's animated on many big projects including Disney's Alladin.

Soccer kick Final

2010-03-22T09:24:00.003Z

Soccer kick Final version from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Soccer kick refined

2010-03-18T19:14:00.003Z

Soccer kick refining from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

This is my refined shot of the soccer kick. I reworked my arcs and changed a few more things. Unfortunately the final shot seems to have en even texture in the timing. We still have one extra week doing this shot and I'll really focus on trying to change that.

Soccer kick blocking and blocking plus

2010-03-10T09:09:00.001Z

Soccer kick - Blocking from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Soccer kick - Blocking plus from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Soccer kick planning

2010-03-03T13:32:00.002Z

Here is the planning of my next animation. My main idea was having a character sitting in a bench and being hit by a soccer ball, then having the character kicking on the ball because of his anger.

Soccer kick - video reference from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 307 : High bar accident - Final polish

2010-02-28T08:27:00.001Z

I finally finished this exercise last week. I've really tried to push it from what I had the previous week and thanks to the many feedback that I received a lot of things are looking better now. I wish I had an extra few days to refine it a bit more, especially at the very end where the body crashes on the floor. I'll probably do it on my free time.

High Bar accident - Final from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 305 and 306: blocking and blocking plus

2010-02-17T16:56:00.000Z

Here is the blocking and blocking plus version of my high bar exercise animation.
This assignment had me learn a lot of new things that I'll be explaining in my next post.

High Bar accident - blocking from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

High Bar accident - blocking plus from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Maya tip : launching an external application from inside Maya

2010-02-16T23:24:00.000Z

It is possible to launch an external application right from the Maya shelf. That could be useful when using an external tool like Photoshop, Mudbox or even Screen marker that I've talked about in here.
The way to do it is quite simple. Right in Maya, create a shelf button with the following code:
system("start C:/folder_location/sofware.exe" );

folder_location will be replaced by the complete folder adress where the software is located
sotware.exe will be the name of the software you're targeting.

Class 304: Polishing of my first animation and planning for the high bar accident

2010-02-04T06:07:00.003Z

AM class3 Hiding Stewie from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Here is the polished version of my recent animation. It's been one of the hardest thing I animated so far, doesn't look perfect but it helped me learn a lot. My next animation exercise will be animation a character having an accident during a gymnastic exercise.
Below are the video reference and rough thumbnail planning I'll be using for my next animation assignement.

high bar exercise from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie blocking plus

2010-01-26T13:45:00.000Z

Last week has been spent refining the my first blocking. I decided to move from stepped to splined keys and started adding breakdowns. A bit too much I think because in some areas I ended animated on 1s already. A big mess in the graph editor again.
During that stage I also decided to reblock the second part of the animation ( the pull until the end ). I had some early feedbacks saying that my poses weren't strong enough so sadly, I had no other choice than to redo it.
I was also lucky this week to get an early feedback from my mentor. Awesome notes again. So much had been suggested to change, changes mainly focused on the timing of the shot. I was told that there are certain areas that are too smooth. That's a great thing to know about my work, and I'll be struggling against this weakness.

Hiding Stewie - Blocking plus pass from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 302: Animation Blocking

2010-01-18T16:14:00.000Z

Blocking 1st pass from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

animation blocking 2nd pass from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Class 301 : Planning

2010-01-16T08:21:00.002Z

This first animation will be part of a 3 shot animation, where my character ( Agent Stewie ) is trying to hide from an unknown danger. Here is the planning of the shot.

AM 301 video reference from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

AM Progress Reel Class 2

2010-01-09T15:57:00.002Z

Happy new year to everybody!
It's been a while that I haven't posted anything. My days were kept busy trying to finalise my AM progress reel.
I've reworked most of my shots trying to apply everything that I've learned so far.
During this week I also started my third term at AM. I had the pleasure to see my new mentor, Josh Book
(another awesome mentor), as well as my new classmates. It's all looking full of fun for the days to come.

Animation Mentor Class 2 Reel from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Tips for refining your animation

2009-12-27T12:44:00.006Z

During this long journey of continuous animation learning I've learned, along with my friend Nick , a few tips that can be really helpful especially in the last stage of your animation, when you can't see what's good and what's not, when your eyes are simply tired of seeing the same thing all over again. The best way to refresh your eyes is to step away from your work and come back later. The longer you'll stay away, and the more things you'll notice that could be improved. I'm sure that many of you have already heard that. But sometimes it's just not possible to stay away for long enough to have a clearer view of your work. Here are a few methods I use that I think are really good.

1. Have a look at your silhouettes
In Maya, simply hide any light and background that you have ( you can put them in a layer and hide them ) and press at the button 7 or in the panel view options go to Lighting - Use all Lights.
You'll be able to see your character all in black against the background. I assure you, you'll also see a lot of mistakes that may have been difficult to spot otherwise.

2. Horizontally flip your animation
If the first tip isn't enough, here is another one. Playblast your animation, open it with Quicktime,and go to Window-Show movie properties; a window will appear, where you'll select Video track, and finally select Visual Settings in the tab below. If you look carefully you'll see a flip rotate button , that can basically flip or rotate your video sequence. Again. when you flip your animation horizontally, you'll suddenly see your animation with fresher eyes, as if it was a completely different piece of work.

3. Change your animation Frame rate

Ok, maybe you already knew the first 2, but there is a third super useful tip. Right inside Maya, you can change your animation frame rate, make it for example a lot faster or slower. This will help you see mistakes more easily, especially with pops, or if your in-betweens aren't working as expected.
You can change that by going to Window - Settings/preferences - Preferences, and in the new window, in the Time slider category , you can change the playback speed. I usually switch from Real time( 24fps ) to half ( 12 fps ). This makes the animation play 2 times slower.

If you want you can even mix those tips together, like having your animation in silhouette mode, flipped and in a higher framerate :)
Hope that these will help somebody :)

ScreenMarker

2009-12-25T08:18:00.005Z

Happy Chrismas to whoever is reading this. :)
I know , it's Chrismas, and I should be staying away of my computer lol. I will do it, but before that I wanted to post another of my recent findings.
For those animators who draw directly on their screen to work on things like their spacing, timing.or for any other reason, the alternative would be to use a software called Annotate Pro , that basically lets you add notes on top of your desktop using your graphic tablet and pen, saving you the hassle of messing with your computer hardware. The only problem is that it's not free ):
The good news is that there is another software that does nearly the same thing as Annotate Pro, but this time for free. It's called ScreenMarker

Update ( 01.05.2011 ) :
ScreenMarker has been quite useful to me, but I found it a bit limited in functionality.
There is an even better tool that I use now, and it's called Sketch It!

Greedy Boy

2009-12-23T05:18:00.004Z

Hey everyone.

here is another gem that I found, it's called greedy boy, by animator Kim Young Ha. A very energetic and inspiring piece.

Inspiration

2009-12-21T08:13:00.008Z

Today I came across this beautiful piece of animation, by Pixar animator Rodrigo Blass. The theme is a bit dark but very inspiring.

Animation tools

2009-12-17T15:37:00.011Z

Hey everybody.
For the past few weeks animating I've discovered a few tools that can save some time when doing some repetitive tasks during your animations. I use them all the time now and find them extremely useful:

-cMotionTrail : a very powerful arc tracker tool for Maya. With this Mel script you're able to track your animation arcs and see the spacing of a moving object.

-Ghostman : another awesome tool! it lets you create copies of your poses and acts like an onion tool for those used with 2d animation. You can easily see your next and previous key and adjust your poses accordingly

-AutoTangent : this is a script by Michael Comet that I can't work without. For those that usually spend hours in the hypergraph trying to correct those overlapping curves and tangents going in the wrong directions, here is the solution! Simply select your curves and on a press of a button, they're all looking good again!

-TweenMachine : this tool will help you easily create your in-betweens poses.

-Maya hotkeys

To end this post I wanted to share a couple of hotkeys I know that can save a considerable amount of time when animating:
* , and . hotkeys that are used to move to the next and previous keyframe
* alt+, and alt+. , for previous and next frame
* have a look at those timing hotkeys from animator TJ Phan. Great time savers again, and very useful when moving large amounts of keyframes at the same time

That's it for now, but I'd be really happy to hear about other tools that could be used when animating.

Class 211

2009-12-15T18:58:00.008Z

Pffffewww.....
Last week's was spent refining my dance animation.
There was just too much to do, and the end result still isn't perfect.
What did I learn from this exercise ? I think that I'm starting to understand a bit more how to use all of these animation principles at the same time. And the main problem I encountered was how to effectively use drags and overlaps. Below is the final version of the dance.
I received a few more suggestions on how to improve my shot, especially in areas where the arcs aren't working very well.
On a side note, we're finishing our second class at Animation Mentor and it's really being amazing.
I'll be posting my new progress reel very soon.

Dance blocking plus and refining

2009-12-06T16:13:00.004Z

The last 2 weeks have been extra hard. After having studied the dance I'm animating I realised how hard it was going to be to animate. I've noted that for a dance to be well animated I had to make sure that the different body parts were not changing directions at the same time. For that I found myself putting a big amount of keyframes and ended the blocking plus stage with nearly everything on 3s and 2s. Even that wasn't enough when I moved my curves into splines. The refined version isn't finished but right now I have a very big mess with my keys. I tried really hard to keep everything organised but I think that the last stages is really difficult to keep clean.
Still looking for a solid workflow.....

New blogger template

2009-12-02T19:26:00.002Z

I was a bit bored this afternoon and decided to change my blog's template.
I've discovered that there are a few sites with some great templates available.
Mine was taken from http://www.bloggerstyles.com.

Class 208 : Dance blocking pass

2009-11-20T11:53:00.000Z

Here it is, my first dance blocking pass! Man, it's hard! Still lots to do, but to get there I had to bend, twist, turn and do so many strange things to the poor rig :)
Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have something descent for my future showreel.

Parkour final

2009-11-18T11:38:00.001Z

Here is my final refined version of the parkour animation. I've really learned a lot with this one, especially that things can always be pushed a lot further even if everything seems to be working well. I can't say that what I have now is perfect, I can already see things to change, but there is a big difference from what I had in the beginning. With a lot of help from my peers and my mentor I was able to change many things, speed up some parts here and there, remove a few frames and mostly rework a lot of the timing issues that I had.

There was a lot of frustration trying to effectively use the provided rig, especially in the spine area. We could animate either in FK or IK mode, and FK was my chosen option. The problem was that I had to counter animate those spine controls most of the time for them to look right. I also struggled a lot to get some good overlap into the spine. I guess that I'll be used to it with more practice.

For my next animation, the dance move, I've already started some posing tests. We're animating a character with arms this time!!! A lot of fun coming but lots of hard time too.
I wanted to try the IK spine but my first experiments with it convinced me to stay with FK.
There's a lot of work on the way, I hope that I'll get through it all :)

Class 207 Planning

2009-11-17T20:00:00.001Z

Class 207 Video reference

2009-11-12T14:35:00.000Z

Everything is going great with my work. I'm spending this week polishing my parkour animation as well as thinking about my next piece. My first work was more subtle and the second one had more broad movements, so for this one I'll challenge myself with something more difficult. I'll be animating a 10 seconds dance move. Below is my reference, edited from various sources. The dance is from the song "My love" by Justin Timberlake.

Class 206: Blocking plus

2009-11-09T17:26:00.000Z

In this week I moved my animation out of the stepped mode and started working on splines.
It's always a very challenging step because that transition almost always gives a floaty feel to the animation. So there was a lot of refining, more breakdowns, and keyframes all over the place.
There were also a few areas where I decided to completely redo the animation because it just wasn't working. Here is what I've done so far.

Class 205: second animation blocking

2009-11-02T13:19:00.000Z

Hey everybody. So this week was busy with the blocking of my second animation.
I'm animating a character running and climbing up onto a pillar and then doing a back flip.
You'll notice that the blocking is a bit different from what I originally planned, that's because in the middle of my blocking I thought that there was missing something, it just looked boring. So at the end I decided to increase the height of the pillar to have a more dynamic animation.

Class 204: Planning for my next animation

2009-10-30T03:50:00.000Z

Hey everybody! Thanks a lot to anybody who's spending some time to read my gibberish lol.
Anyhow, this is week 5 already, and for this week we're starting our second animation planning. So for this one I wanted to animate something more dynamic than my previous work. I'm going for a small parkour sequence. Here are my reference video as well as some drawings that I've done for the planning process.

Class 204 : 180 degree turn final

2009-10-27T03:01:00.000Z

We finaly handed in our first assignement this week. 4 weeks of work for less than 10 seconds of animation! I can really see the difference with what I used to do before.
Compared to a few months back, this time everything was thoroughly planned from the beginning.
Here is the final version, and I hope that you ll enjoy.
For now I'm only playblasting my animation but at the end of the term I'm planning to render my old animations and post a beautiful video full of colors.

Animation blocking and spline versions.

2009-10-21T17:54:00.000+01:00

The first video is at the blocking stage of the animation. An animation is said to be in blocking when it only contains the main keys of the story. There's no need to add too much details, as long as you can clearly understand what's happening in your scene.
I think that I really started to understand the importance of a good blocking. Without it it's really hard to end with a good animation.

The second video is the spline version with a lot more keys added to the animation. At this stage I added more details like overlaps, ease ins/outs, solid arcs, and more breakdown keys. I think that I did a bit too much and already tried to get to the final look at this stage. The consequences were that I had too many keys all over the time frame and I couldn't recognize my main keys anymore.

I guess that managing all that mess will better with time.

Class 201 Animation planning

2009-10-21T05:06:00.001+01:00

Before moving showing you my animation I thought that it would be a good idea to show the few drawings I did for the planning process. My drawings aren't great but I think that I can manage to express my ideas with very basic drawings.

Term 2 at Animation Mentor

2009-10-09T02:10:00.001+01:00

We had nearly 2 weeks off at AM and I enjoyed to stay away from the computer. Last week the second term at AM started and I discovered my new mentor for the term. It's Drew Adams, currently animator at Dreamworks.
The first week started and we had our first assignment already. For this term the assignments apparently look a lot harder than those from the previous class and they're differently structured. We'll only do 3 different animations for the whole term, each animation extending into 4 weeks.
We had a pick list of different possible animations to chose from. I decided to animate a character jumping and doing a 180 degree in the air and settling.
The first week was only dedicated for the animation planning. I've been doing a lot of drawing and shooting video reference for my work. Here is the final video reference that I'll use for the animation.

Interesting blogs

2009-09-23T10:51:00.001+01:00

While looking for inspiration today I found an interesting blog which has links to many Pixar's and Dreamworks' artists websites. If you love drawing and animation as I do you'll probably enjoy the following :Pixar's artists blogs and Dreamwork's artists blogs

Class1 Progress Reel

2009-09-22T18:09:00.000+01:00

The video posted below resumes the progress of my work at animation mentor. Hope that you'll enjoy.

1st term finished

2009-09-17T22:52:00.000+01:00

How has the program been so far you may ask?
Frankly, I was expecting it to be great, and the fact is that it has really been. It's not that I'm a fan, but this experience has been really mind blowing.

Before Animation Mentor, I was animating in a disorganised manner. Although I'm no professional animator yet, but I see things in a new way. All of those animation principles are getting a lot clearer. Timing, spacing, arcs, overlapping action and other have really become the foundation of every animation. Now when I look at some of my older works I say " gosh! how didn't I see it earlier ? How could I do such a mistake? ... How this and that?...."

There's still a long way to go, I'll work really hard and hopefully one day I'll be able to stand close to some professional animators. For now I'm compiling my class reel that I'll be posting very soon and then will be staying away from my computer and relax a little bit before starting the following class.

Class 110 and 111

2009-09-16T22:25:00.001+01:00

The last 2 weeks for this term have been about animating a walk with personality.
After looking at different references I decided to go for a sort of heavy and exhausted walk.
I've really learned a lot (yes I know, this sentence won't stop coming back lol) during this week and for this animation we had to put into practice everything we learned so far.

Exhausted pause

2009-09-13T10:31:00.001+01:00

Class 108 & 109

2009-09-04T02:11:00.000+01:00

Those two past weeks have been pretty intense. The main assignment was to animate the simplest possible walk for 48 frames. Yes, just that. I tought that was very easy but again there were many surprises waiting for me when I started doing it.
It's been very interesting because it helped me open my animator's eyes a bit more in being able to see subtle details. The simple walk or vanilla walk is supposed to be the kind of walk we see everyday on the streets. No exaggeration, no too much ups and downs, no personality, just a boring walk. I've had many difficulties and after so many hours in front of my computer I couldn't judge what I was doing any more. At the end I had something that I was quite happy to show and I personally thought that it looked great. Wrong!!! My mentor showed me that I still have a load more to learn. I hope that one day I'll be able to read these notes again and laugh about my past mistakes. The video below shows what I had after I submitted my weekly assignment and then reviewed it after receiving my mentor's critique.

Strenght pose

2009-08-29T11:05:00.000+01:00

Class 107

2009-08-17T17:55:00.000+01:00

This week we've had to use a new character and make it behave like a squirrel, and for that we have to concentrate even more on overlapping actions, timing and arcs.
The pendulum assignment wasn't my greatest piece of work but fortunately this one seems a bit easier so I'll try to catch up!

Week 6 Pendulum Revision

2009-08-12T14:47:00.000+01:00

I have to admit that everything is getting harder and harder. Loads of work every week and a full time job are a real challenge to overcome. But.... I will get there!
I've had the video critique from my mentor for this assignment, and the overall message for me was that it was overcomplicated, especially for the second half of the animation. So for this week's advice I'll have to remember to keep things simple.

Class 106 pendulum first pass animation

2009-08-05T20:52:00.000+01:00

This week was about understanding overlaping action and the assignement was to animate a pendulum moving around and apply the overlaping on the pendulum joints.

Devastated Stu

2009-08-04T23:23:00.000+01:00

Class 105 Final

2009-08-03T18:00:00.000+01:00

With this one I really had the opportunity to experiment with spacing. I discovered that one of the key elements to have in a good animation is the diversity in the timing and spacing.
Having an animated object moving to fast or too slow from the beginning to the end will probably make it feel boring. Having some texture in the spacing subconsciously adds a lot of appeal to an animation.
To illustrate all that crazy talk you can have a look at my animation where the ball starts with a slow jump, then accelerates in the roller coaster, decelerates on air and accelerates again when it gets hit by the rotating bar. I can't pretend that this is a perfect animation but I think that it looks much more appealing than the previous video where the ball has a more even spacing.

Class 105 blocking

2009-07-31T16:56:00.000+01:00

Here is my obstacle course animation. Still loads to do but not enough time. We were introduced to squash and stretch, and the assignment was to have a ball going through an obstacle course and correctly apply squash and stretch on the ball.

Class 104 final

2009-07-28T21:17:00.000+01:00

That's the final version of the assignment

Class 104

2009-07-23T09:44:00.000+01:00

Here is my try on this week's assignment and the main principles learned this week were timing and spacing. With those 2 principles correctly applied you can give an impression of weight to an animated object.

Excited Stu

2009-07-20T11:25:00.000+01:00

Here's Stu. He's supposed to be very excited. Do you think he is?

Class 103

2009-07-20T11:20:00.000+01:00

This third week seemed easy at the beginning but I quickly realised how overconfident I was.
We had to animate a simple basket ball bouncing and coming into rest. What I thought was going to take me a few hours to do ended up keeping me busy for a few days!

Class 102

2009-07-20T11:13:00.000+01:00

My second week assignment consisted of going outside and drawing people around me doing different things, and then choosing the best sketch and represent it in 3d with the provided character. Here is what I came up with.

Animation Mentor

2009-07-16T21:08:00.000+01:00

Having finished university, I really wanted to push my animation skills before getting into the job market. I really think that there is still a lot to learn in order for me to become a good animator .

So 3 weeks ago I officially started the Animation Mentor program. This has really been fantastic so far.

On the first week I missed my live lecture but there wasn't anything particular . I was presented to my mentor for this term. It's Ruth Daly , a professional animator working in the industry for many years already. She's very nice and really knows what she's talking about.

During the second week we were introduced to the traditional animation principles.
I thought that this first class was going to be easy but I was wrong. We just started and there's loads of work to do. The assignment for that week was to go outside and draw people around us and then select the best sketch and represent it in 3d.

This third week is about planning animation. My main assignment is to animate a bouncing soccer ball or basket ball. I'll try to have this blog updated with my work as much as possible; in the meantime, stay tuned.

Dinosaur animation

2009-07-16T20:00:00.001+01:00

Hello to anybody reading this.
I've been pretty busy for the last couple of weeks. I recently finished my animation course at uni and hopefully will be graduating in a few months. A lot has happened since. Very sorry for those who were following this blog, I ll try to catch up. Here is a small short that I did with a friend for my vfx module. I did the dinausor animation and the vfx effect at the end.

Due to a lack of time I couldn't really refine the dinausor animation. It looks a bit like stop motion animation. I started refining it, so hopefully in a few weeks I'll be able to post the final revised version. Here is what I've done so far.

3d Tracking test

2009-04-05T14:59:00.001+01:00

Here is a 3d tracking test done in Boujou and rendered in Maya.

dino walkcycle

2009-04-05T14:51:00.000+01:00

Here is the walking dinosaur that is going to be used in my vfx module. Don't look at the model itself, it isn't finished yet. I have done a walkcycle that was presented to my fellow classmates; I hope they liked it.

Advanced character animation Assignement 3

2009-01-30T10:58:00.000Z

Here is my try for the 11 second club January competition, tell me what you think.

11sec club wip 2

2009-01-20T12:36:00.000Z

Sooo much work to do for uni these last days. I've managed to work a little bit more for the 11second club competition. Here's my second WIP, I've nearly finished the animation for the first character. The second one still needs a great amount of polishing, so just ignore him.

11 second club January Wip

2009-01-12T00:00:00.000Z

Here is my work in progress for this january's 11second club competition.

Ernest's Adventure

2009-01-11T22:58:00.000Z

Well, here' s the short animation I've done , featuring Ernest the lion and Moom, a nice character from Ramtin Ahmadi than you can download here

Completed lion model

2009-01-11T22:22:00.000Z

Lately I've been working on my lion animation. I will upload it on my next post, but for now here's the final lion modeled and textured.

Lion cycle test

2008-12-12T15:18:00.000Z

This is a quick walk cycle test of my lion character. It is a very rough animation, just to make sure that the rig is working fine.

Experimental animation demo

2008-12-05T01:00:00.000Z

I'm also working on another project, a sort of experimental animation this time. It's called Machine, and basically the story is about a machine that is being created by humans for good purposes. Everything goes fine until when we realize that this creation is not going to bring happiness at all.
Have a look and tell me what you think. It is still a work in progress though.

Lion model

2008-12-05T00:26:00.000Z

Right now I'm finishing a new 3d character for my advanced animation course. The model is a lion called Ernest. He may be a lion but he acts like a human being. More pictures and a walk cycle test are coming next.

I'm back this time

2008-11-24T09:54:00.001Z

Really long time and nothing posted. Well , I'm on my last year at uni, doing sooo many things at the same time. I will try to post as many past and present works very soon.

3d Tracking test

2008-04-01T16:49:00.001+01:00

For my mixed media animation module I tried to experiment with 3d tracking. That was the first time for me to do it. I used the software called Boujou for the tracking, and the animation was done in Maya. Another moment of fun. This project was a sort of test animation for another work I will talk about very soon.

11second club March final entry

2008-04-01T13:55:00.000+01:00

And here's my march submission. Although I started just 10 days before the end, I managed to finish it and really learned a lot of new things. I really see why those animation principles are so important. It was great fun to do it and I hope that my future entries will benefit from this precious little knowledge.

More animation

2008-04-01T13:44:00.000+01:00

The last days have been filled with work from everywhere. I have a couple of animations I did and a few concept designs that I will post very soon.