The Blender Foundation just released its latest short, "Glass Half".
I wrote and directed it, (this is actually my debut as a director) and it was produced at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam.
The production was very quick, just a little over 7 weeks, so it was quick and intense. So far the response has been really good!
Here's a simple addon I just wrote for Blender. It automatically generates a panel in the Properties shelf for toggling visibility for the layers of a rig. Previously this required a custom python script for each character, but by using this addon you can have a panel simply by adding some extra properties to your rig.
Firstly, download and install it from here: http://www.pasteall.org/41442
(copy and paste it into a new text file, save it as "autoRigLayers.py", then install and enable it in Blender via the user prefs)
Now all you have to do is prepare your rig...
Make a property called "autoRigLayers" and set its value to "1"
Make a property called "layer.1" and set its value to the appropriate layer name.
Repeat step 2 for all the rig layers that you want to appear on the panel
Optionally you can set the number of columns in the panel. This is done by adding property called "layer.cols" and setting its value to a whole number.
Hope this is useful to you. Let me know in the comments below if you find any major bugs.
At the end of last year I got together with Pablo Vazquez and Francesco Siddi to make a short movie. The idea was to do something simple and quick. Pablo and I came up with a story involving 2 of his characters, Koro and Pichin. who are based on animals from Pablo's home territory of Patagonia. We also wanted to finish the whole thing in about 2 weeks.
I ended up doing the principal animation on all but 2 of the shots (that's about a minute's worth of animation in 2 weeks). Unfortunately the rendering side of things took longer than expected, largely due to some technical hitches we encountered, but in the end we finished it and I'm actually quite happy with it!
We also got the very talented Jan Morgenstern to make us a Carl Stalling / Warner Bros type soundtrack, and as soon we added it the whole thing came alive.
Check it out:
We're hoping to do some more shorts in this style in the future. They sure are fun to work on, and I think we can get a style that you don't often see in other shorts being released these days.
Alright, it's been a while (yikes! almost a year) since I last updated, but that's because I've been very busy.
In 2012 I worked on a game (Eat Sheep), a tv series (Jokie), 3 short films ("Tube", "Diamant", and "Caminandes" all soon to be released) as well as teaching a one week course at the Blender Institute, producing a new training DVD and developing a new character rig for the Blender community. It's those last two projects that I will cover in this post.
Following on from the success of the "Blender Animation Fundamentals" training series, I was asked by CG Cookie to produce another series. For this one I wanted to go into more advanced topics like lip sync, acting and how to set up a multi camera, multi character dialogue shot.
For this, I need a new rig. So I enlisted the help of concept artist David Revoy, rigger Nathan Vegdahl and CG Cookie's own Jonathan Williamson to help with the modelling. Together we worked for months to develop a flexible character rig for people to use when studying animation. You can see some of the results in the pic above. All these characters are the same rig.
The training series "The Blender Animation Toolkit" was released in November and so far has been very well recieved. Nathan also contributed some tutorials for it, so it's well rounded and shows many different approaches and techniques to animating characters in Blender.
This was some of the hardest work I've ever done...
Trying to do something in under an hour I would normally do in a couple of days, while trying to describe what I'm doing in an understandable way. A real challenge!
Still, I think it turned out alright, I'm really excited about the possibility of getting people into the crazy world of animation!
Earlier this year I was lucky enough to work on 2 games projects for "A Split Second", the games project produced by Submarine Channel for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The games were designed by contemporary Dutch artists Han Hoogerbrugge and Marcel van Eeden. Each have their own very personal styles and it was quite a challenge to try to reproduce them in a realtime 3d environment. I modelled, rigged and animated all the characters in Blender, and exported them to the Unity3d game engine, where the very talented Jorrit de Vries integrated them into the games.
This is an animation test I did as part of my final class at Animation Mentor. I used the "Biff" rig by Denny Lindberg. My mentor for this was Sean Sexton. All up I spent about a week on this and was quite happy with the result. Oh yeah, the beer rig is, of course, the classic one from Jeremy Davidson.
Here is basically all of the shots I worked on for the Blender Foundation's open movie "Sintel". It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my career as a pixel monkey...
For the record, I wish I could further polish every one of those shots. Like I said, it was a BIG learning experience.
This is a little animation exercise I did in Blender for my course at animation mentor. I used Nathan Vegdahl's excellent biped rig.
The exercise was to have a character walk in the wind. Instead of doing the cliche of having the character walking into a headwind, I had him jogging with the wind coming from the side.
I was happy with this one and decided to add some lighting...
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Okay, here's my go at a blog...
First up, here's an animation I finished about a year ago.
It was basically a learning exercise I used to get up to speed with Blender (the 3d program, not the appliance). While it got a good response from people (2008 Suzanne award nominee and judges' choice finalist for iiNet's Get Animated competition), there are many problems with the animation.
As a result of spending so much time on it, and still seeing so many problems, I decided to hit the books and went and enrolled in Animation Mentor.
I'll post progress here as I, um, progress...
While I don't consider myself a "professional" musician, I've been playing in bands for years, most recently in a band called "Oscar". Sometimes it was an attempt to become professional, but most of the time it was to have fun and try to make music that nobody had heard before.
This was our last "album". It was recorded over the course of about five years in various studios (both home and professional) and completed in 2007.
As part of our one show "Don't Stop 'till ya Flop" world tour, Oscar played an "Overblown Concept Gig" at bar 303 (in Melbourne, Australia) on Saturday the 22nd of November 2003. Fortunately someone was foolhardy enough to record the proceedings and this seventeen track album was the result.
This actually a compilation of Oscar's early music, with music from some of its previous incarnations - "Jester" and the "Sensory Motor Project"
