Example Animations & Projects

• The Inner Life of a Cell, (SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theater 2006).
• After You by Christopher Cordingley
• Elephant’s Dream (“open-source” short)
• Big Buck Bunny (“open-source” short)
• Yo Frankie! (“open-source” game)

Notes and Slides

• Slides from our discussion on narrative structure and a script example.
• Link to a page on script format.
• Slides from our discussion on Visual Storytelling: Crash Course in Filmmaking and Storyboarding.
• Slides for discussion of facial modeling, animation, and lip syncing.
• Slides from a presentation on face re-topology and animation.

Drawing for Animation Resources

Here are some good resources for drawing that can help your animation:

• ASIFA Animation Resources Instruction Jump Page with the $100,000 Animation School for $8 online course. (This features Preston Blair’s rare 1st edition text). To follow the course, the links may be scattered because of dated blog posts, but you should be able to follow along mostly from ASIFA’s instruction page when last I checked — the instruction page also has wonderful additional resources. To access John K’s lessons 1-10 (and more recent ones) adding on to Preston Blair’s work, you may also jump directly from here but will miss the brief instructions for the ‘course’ posted on ASIFA’s pages:
  • Lesson 1: Construction, The Head
  • Lesson 2: Squash & Stretch on Heads
  • Lesson 3: How to Check Your Copies — Proportion
  • Lesson 4: Two-Legged Characters, Full Body
  • Lesson 5: Line-of-Action, Silhouettes
  • Lesson 5 continued: Hands
  • Lesson 6: Head Construction, Advanced (this link was missing from the original blog?)
  • Lesson 7: When Generic is Good
  • Lesson 8: Proportions Affect Design — Contrast
  • Lesson 9: Model Sheets
  • Lesson 10: Copy Old Cartoons
  • John K’s Curriculum Site with More Content
  • Lesson 11: Getting Back to the Primal Needs of a Cartoonist (not on ASIFA’s page)
  • Lesson 12: Head Mechanics and Hierarchy (not on ASIFA’s page)
  • Lesson 13: Stylized Drawing (not on ASIFA’s page)
  • Lesson 14: Toot Head Construction (not on ASIFA’s page)
  • Lesson 15: Drawing with All the Animation Drawing Principles Only (not on ASIFA’s page)
• Force Drawing — some great books, videos, etc. to help your figure and character drawing from a neat instructor.
• Animation Physics — information, tutorials, and a wiki on physics of paths, balance, actions, characters for animation.
• Fantasy Art Resource Project (Basic Pose and Construction): Concisely details a good method to follow for building basic character drawings (great place to start).
• Drawing Tutorials Online with videos as well, such as this short gesture drawing tutorial.
• Character Designs: An Artist’s Resource which has tutorials, demo work, and details recent creations such as these by Hong Ly, artist for Uncharted 2 and others.
• Some free Figure Drawing eBooks.

Other Links

• SIGGRAPH — the organization for 3D artists.
• The SIGGRAPH Student Volunteer Program — you should apply!
• Animation World Network — industry news.
• AnimationMeat.com — news, learning, great resources!
• 11-Second Club — monthly animation contest.
• Animation Magazine — news & other fun.
• 3D World Magazine — great magazine for 3D news, tutorials, etc.
• CreativeCrash — lots of Maya resources.
• Learning-Maya.com — lots of great tutorials.
• Simply Maya — more practice tutorials.
• TurboSquid — a marketplace for 3D assets.
• Falling Pixel — another marketplace.
• Renderosity — another site for 3D assets.
• Article with 100 Maya Tutorials! Take a look — some are pretty useful.
• Digital Tutors — we have some of their DVDs in the library, but see here for online lessons.
• GNOMON — educational material for 3D modeling & animation.
• Harmony — a really neat procedural sketch tool I found through Armand Serrano’s page. Mr. Doob’s site is lots of fun!