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Blender Journals Stuff I made

There goes May 2018

Summary: I made an animation tools plug-in for Blender 2.8 and I’m still working through body mechanics and lip sync animation courses for now.

Hello from May 2018. This month, Blender Animation Studio packed up and moved to the new HQ in Amsterdam North and to my south Margaret River tragically became famous for something other than surfing. The Hawai’ian volcano Kilauea started tearing up its neighbours and there was some royal wedding that people made a fuss about. And oh that torrent of never-ending GDPR emails, many from companies we look forward to never hearing a peep out of again..

Personally I spent most of the month battling one illness or another as the cold started settling in here.

There was a little pear animation I made. It uses shape keys and the Laplacian Deform modifier. Here’s the .blend file if you want a closer look. It was made for Blender 2.79a but it’s munty in the current 2.8 preview.

Speaking of Blender 2.8, I set up a Windows build environment this month when Blender’s nightly builds stopped during their office move. If you’ve ever wanted to try out unbuilt branches (like greasepencil-object) or code changes as they get committed, this is not super difficult to do and absolutely worth it!

I even did a little coding myself. Now that armature-driven animation is possible in Blender 2.8 again, I wrote a little add-on to put back the old 2.7-series keyframing tools on the toolbar exactly how they were before.

And of course there’s the fun of loading up old files in the 2.8 preview to see how well they work. Here’s an abandoned animation test from A moment in the sun rendered in 2.8’s Eevee renderer (currently a work-in-progress). None of the materials have been tweaked to work in Eevee – it’s doing a pretty good job reproducing the Cycles materials, I reckon!

 

I kept going with the Animation Body Mechanics course. I submitted this polished jump for exercise 2. (Character rig is from CG Cookie.)

 

It only had to be a simple jump across a gap, but I got fancy – that’s how this four seconds of animation is the end result of nearly 26 hours of blocking, splining and polishing over an entire month.

I’ve been encouraged to stick closer to the assigned work in future without creating momentum-crippling challenges for myself. I think this is sound advice. 🙂

For something a little easier, I started the Demystifying Lip Sync Animation course too. My linguistics training helps me get good mouth shapes at speed. Here’s my submission for exercise 2 of the course. (Character and sound from CG Cookie.)

 

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great June. 🙂

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Journals

Did a test animation of Pointy pissbolting today. Then it got all 1990s and cyberdelic.

Suffice it to say, the end film will not look like this.

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Journals

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.)

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Journals

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 – but there’s a text box to show you what’s up to an extent.

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

In this video you can see:

  • skinning/binding the rig to a mesh (lots of skinning)
  • driven shape corrections
  • testing rigging and skinning/binding using simple animation
  • how to rig a hacky set of “cup” eyelids
  • skinning/binding a rig to curves using hooks and bone parenting
  • building a (crappy) FK/IK switched arm rig
  • skinning a hand and fingers

Blender 2.71 test version in the hizzouse. Release candidate should be out later this week. 🙂

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Spent some more time building Pointy today. Timelapse video to follow.