Reading Day Help in Digital Arts Lab
I will plan to be around the Digital Arts Lab from about 2 to 5:30 p.m. today (Thursday) for last-minute questions and help.
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Final Project
- Your animated shots for the final production.
- Your departmental and other contributions to the final production.
- The final production being completed on time.
- Your shots and other work presented via your portfolio website for the final meeting.
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Tuesday Meeting
There will be no class lecture on Tuesday, November 19. Please do take the time to meet in the regular classroom or DA lab to discuss and work toward the following:- If pre-lighting and layout stages have been completed to prepare .mb files for each shot to be animated (with rendering settings ready), discuss and distribute these.
- If the above has not yet been completed, work to complete it today so that shot files may be distributed Thursday during the regular class meeting.
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Rigging Discussion
Thursday we’ll begin covering some of the basic tools for rigging:- hierarchy
- joints and skinning
- IK chains
- controllers
- constraints
- connections, expressions, set-driven keys
- attributes
- blend-shapes
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Model Schedule for Final Project Productions
Models, props, sets, textures, and pre-lighting need to be completed by Thursday, November 14. -
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Other Free Rigs
In addition to The Goon and Groggy, you are welcome on your projects if you like (no technical support guaranteed) to use another freely available rig.Here are three places to find some freely available character rigs: 11-Second Club, Creative Crash, and Lester Bank’s blog post. If you’d like to use one of these, look around and choose one that you will have fun using and also wouldn’t mind seeing a lot.
[But do test it before committing to animating a shot with it!] Or seeing on your reel — which by the way, if the license accords non-commercial use, you are welcome to use these for your reel. (You should, of course, credit the source for the model and rig — but there is usually a breakdown on your portfolio/reel submission where this is done for every shot in your reel). There are a lot of fun ones, and some of them (such as the Andy Rig) are configurable for different looks. -
Walk Cycles
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 quickly, and please do not share outside of the class. I’m going to take the link down soon.