Tag: a moment in the sun

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Pointy’s rig is finished! (Ish.)

A timelapse for the modelling process and part of the rigging process for Pointy from my forthcoming cartoon “A moment in the sun”. The video is unedited, complete with questionable decisions and short pauses when I get stuck – and this time there’s some narration.

This character’s only ever meant to be seen side-on, hence the weird geometry.

In this video you can catch a glimpse of:

  • rigging curves using hooks parented to bones 0:53
  • making custom bone shapes (“rig handles”) 5:50
  • tidying up the rig by locking unneeded controls 7:48
  • the hackiest IK foot setup in the universe 11:10
  • fixing a reverse finger curl 18:05
  • setting up lattice deformation 20:31

Made in Blender 2.71 release build. (Not using any specific new features though.)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Here’s a quick rig test of Pointy from “A moment in the sun” in all his peeved glory. He’s growling at his co-star Gronky, played here by a metaball.

This past week 23 – 29 June was not particularly intensive creativity-wise. I did a bit more doodling and have decided my anatomy skills need work.

I watched a few movies once I hit the weekend – Summer Wars, Army of Darkness, The Passion of Joan of Arc – and started watching the original Australian series of the improv comedy TV show “Thank God You’re Here”. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” has some amazing faces in it and an amazing performance by the actress playing Joan of Arc.

Then at around quarter past six on Sunday night (tonight) I decided to do some more rigging on Pointy here. This short animation is just to see what else needs doing, ways in which the rig could be less crap, whether I should start again from scratch, etc.

It’s not the best rig in the universe but it seems to be mostly doing its job. I’d like to work with a larger deformer of some sort as well, maybe a mesh deform or a lattice just to get those more expressive character deformations with less titting around with bones. See how I go, then.

I’m still documenting the build using Blender’s screencast feature but I’m out of time tonight to cut something together. And speaking of Blender, Blender 2.71 has now been released with lots of new toys for the boys and girls.

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This week I started a weight loss regimen and cut sugary stuff out of my diet. Perhaps this had something to do with Masters dropping the delectable Kakao range from their chocolate milk offerings (or so I’ve been told). Some things are too good to last, apparently.

Here’s my creativity report for 16 to 22 June 2014. The biggest news this week was coming up with a design for Gronky (then doing nothing about it) and playing with a motion capture system for the Razer Hydra.

On Monday, I decided to try a thirty day art improvement challenge. On Tuesday, I got really furious at how terrible I was going (probably low blood sugar) and stopped.

Wednesday didn’t happen.

Thursday was when I started playing around with the Razer Hydra stuff, culminating in this set of notes. Friday saw even more of that and a video demo to boot, and on Saturday I played with the motion capture stuff some more and did a quick sculpt. The timelapse of Saturday’s fishmonster sculpt is included above.

Today (Sunday) after a night of weird dreams (including a sideways homage to “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”), I’ve been either drawing or writing pretty much all of today day – none of it is worth posting here though.

Project reports

A moment in the sun: Pointy’s still awaiting his final bit of rigging and Gronky’s yet to be built at all now that I’ve got a character design I like. Pre-pro-wise I’ll be tweaking the timing on the story reel then hitting animation. I’m expecting the models I take into animation to be pretty basic compared with the models I finish up with. Since I am the entire pipeline on this project I can revisit any stage I like before i hit render – so if I come up with a brilliant gag that needs a special version of the character model, I can jump back into model/TD whenever.

A man who turns into a bear: going back for another rewrite on this one. More to explore. I’m slowly cracking the whole flavour of surrealism but it’s so weird to write – a very fine line to walk.

The Quiet One is still on my mind from time to time. It’s one of these projects that wants a lot of time to percolate. Lately I’ve been pondering a moment between two characters – Ktish and another friend of his visiting a museum, where Ktish explains the significance of his “story blanket” because it’s hanging up there as an exhibit.

The shortest night of the year here has come and gone, so here’s to warmer weather and longer days… well.. longer days. We’re only a quarter of the way through winter after all.

Oh and Blender 2.71 has released its second release candidate with final release expected any day now. Go jump on it. 🙂

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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A gent calling himself PaulStormblader has posted a script to do Razer Hydra motion capture with Blender. I’m playing with it right now. I’m not sure if it’s specific to Windows or not. Possibly it is. Anyway, it’s spiffy.

Useful things to know:

  • As a Hydra owner, MotionCreator is definitely worth having installed – if only to remove previous sculpting-oriented Hydra profiles you created years ago and forgot about. 🙂
  • Read the README of the plug-in. It explains everything – how to install it properly, for instance.
  • Also watch this video.
  • Today I learnt that Blender on Windows can put its plug-ins into user space and doesn’t need to run as admin. Noice.
  • At the time of writing, the plug-in is currently limited to recording data from the Hydra into a set of push-button-there-they-are Empty objects.
  • It currently records All The Things. You may not wish for it to record All The Things but, annoyingly, it does.
  • You can copy the animation from the Empties to other objects by using constraints (copy rotation, copy location, transforms – works for bones as well as full objects) or the ever-popular drivers

Remember how I said it recorded all the things? That means if you want to do multiple passes (not just multiple takes but multiple passes to animate separate things simultaneously), you have to get clever. Fortunately, today I also learned Blender has a Bake Action feature…

To “save” a motion (from go to whoa):

  • Go to the “Animation” tab and look for the “Motion Capture” panel.
  • If you haven’t already done so, hit “Add Controller Objects” to drop the Hydra’s magic Empties into your scene.
  • Hit the “Activate Hydra” button to make Blender keep watch on the Hydra.
  • Use trigger/stick a bit to make sure the empties are responding. They should move at this point.
  • Go to your first frame and hit the “Start” button (the little thin one) on the controller you want to use. This will drop a keyframe.
  • If you plan to record motion from the trigger, you’re good – holding the start button of that controller down with your thumb is easy. Motion is captured as 0-1 Y.
  • If you want to record motion, you’ll need to hold down the bumper button AND the start button. Motion comes in as quaternions for rotation and X/Y/Z offset for position.
  • If you want to record the thumbstick movement.. well.. it’s tough to do with one hand because traditionally on the controller you’ll be using your thumb to work the thumbstick.. but you have to hold down Start too. Under the current design, it’s basically a two-handed job per controller at the moment. Would probably be less painful if the controller could treat the thumbstick button the same way it reads Start. Motion is captured in +/-1 X/Y.
  • Hit play in Blender and record your motion! (Don’t forget you need to hold down Start to set keyframes.)
  • Once you’re done, stop playback in Blender.
  • In the Motion Capture panel, hit “Off”. This will stop the Hydra from being able to input data into Blender. (If you don’t do this, you might notice flickering motion like some sort of depsgraph glitch.)
  • Create an Empty. Name it something useful, like Bubbles.
  • Go to the Constraints tab in the Properties window and select “Copy Transforms” (or just whatever you want to copy). Pick the Hydra empty with the data you want to copy.
  • Alternatively, do the same thing with drivers if you know how.
  • Hit Play at least once to ensure you’re saving the right data.
  • With the Empty selected and in the 3D View window, hit Space bar and run “Bake Action”.
  • You’ll get a modal dialogue box. Check things are OK and confirm it.
  • Wait for the bake to finish (should be more or less instant)
  • Remove the constraint (or driver). You won’t be needing it anymore, for voilá – you now have one Empty with your mocap data saved.
  • Clear animation data from the hydra_* Empties using your favourite method – in either Dope Sheet or Graph Editor, select all the animation channels on the objects and hit X to wipe the data out.

So far from my initial tests I’ve mainly discovered that I suck at puppetry – which is fine because I’ve never actually learnt how to be a puppeteer before. It’s a very cool little tool full of possibilities even at this early stage and I’m definitely going to have more of a play with it as time permits.

Also today, I came up with a great design for Gronky that should be a really easy build aside from one interesting technical challenge concerning his mouth. We’ll see how I get on. 🙂

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It’s Sunday. Here’s what I did this week.

On Monday, Tuesday and Saturday I wrote drafts of a project I’m kicking around quietly. It’s proving a real bitch to get the tone right, so It may be a non-starter.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I began making Pointy from “A moment in the sun”. (He’s a bit peeved because I haven’t worked on him since Wednesday.)

On Thursday I worked on the bear nose morph test for the quiet project and posted a timelapse of it afterwards.

On Friday and Saturday I wrote a bit of music for fun – nothing worth showing off. The timelapses would definitely go better with music and narration, and thanks to VirtualDub it’s possible to add an audio track to a silent video without having to recompress the video. Useful!

The weekend has mainly been catching up on movies. I watched Barbarella, La Dolce Vita and The Godfather, Part III. Barbarella was very late sixties cute and silly; I enjoyed the memory of La Dolce Vita more than the experience of watching it because it went on for so bloody long; and Godfather III was.. well.. Sofia Coppola can direct better than she can act, that’s for sure.

I suspect La Dolce Vita’s going to need some time to digest. I liked 8 ½ and Fellini Satyricon better, though the image of a giant Jesus statue being flown across the city by helicopter is a great way to open a film.

HEY KIDS! HERE COMES HELICOPTER JESUS!