A reminder that this will be Wednesday.  Here’s a link to a review guide.

Welcome to a fun and challenging semester!  During this course we’ll be following a production pipeline similar to that used in the industry at computer-animation and visual-effects studios. Software required is installed in the Digital Arts Lab, and you are encouraged to work there for a variety of reasons. You can also get most software, though, for use at home (and even for free). Primary tools that we will use will include Maya 2016, possibly Mudbox, RenderMan Non-Commercial, and Shotgun Production Management software. You can obtain Maya, Mudbox, and other tools here.  RenderMan is available here.  You will not need to download Shotgun, as we have our own web address associated with our licenses (da.shotgunstudio.com), but you can read more about the software here.

Here is an in-progress version of the Job character for rigging.

We’ll be talking about some face-animation and lip-sync concepts today — audio files should be .wav or .aiff (and still may not load if encoded in a standard that Maya does not recognize).

• Here are slides for today’s discussion.
• Here are some files we may use for example.
• Here’s one website that has a collection of movie quotes in .wav format.

We’ll discuss production setup with Shotgun a bit today as well as workflow for animating a shot, then work through a walk-cycle example.

   

Here’s a very basic example of a walk-cycle, a fundamental animation exercise. Read chapter 5 in Character Animation Fundamentals as well as refer to The Animator’s Survival Kit or other texts for good references. Here are some excerpts.  Grab these, and do not share outside of the class. (I’m going to take the link down soon).

Things are getting setup for both productions on Shotgun.  In the meantime, you can login and check-out the sample Big Buck Bunny project.

Here’s the list of positions so far.

 

Sony Pictures Animation and Imageworks through IPAX have offered up one of their feature-film rigs for your fun (and possible contest entries).  This is good timing for this class, as you can use it in any of your upcoming homework or projects! Also, here’s a link to a video where animator Chad Stewart steps through the Zombie rig.

As mentioned in the email, there will be no class meeting today.  We should have a regular class meeting on Wednesday. For today, please watch these two videos that offer some good information about animating a lift movement in Maya, also using constraints to help the character’s hands move relative to a prop (rather than a prop relative to a hand).

• Lifting a Heavy Weight Part 1
• Lifting a Heavy Weight Part 2

Make sure that you have completed all homework and web exercises up to this point before class on Wednesday and bring any questions about animation work in Maya so far.  Also, production crew — bring list of assets, any updates to concept art, and any updates to storyboards and animatics.  We’ll plan to setup things in Shotgun on Wednesday for the productions. For bonus credit, after watching the videos above, complete another lift movement using parent constraints for prop movement using a rig other than the Goon or Groggy.  (It could be another rig included from the book downloads, or a free Maya rig from creativecrash.com).