Stock Rig Part 3

The Stock Rig I've been working on in my free time is "complete!" I got the motivation I needed this past weekend, and finished a full face/full body rig in much less time than I ever have before.

It required 30 blendshapes for the face and has IK/FK switching on all the limbs. Pretty basic stuff really...

I want to continually update this rig with more features as I go. I already know I'm going to add in a great deal of Squash and Stretch controls that I didn't get the chance to do just yet. If anyone has any suggestions for cool features they'd like to see, let me know.



I've also done some animation tests to see how it holds up. I want to keep doing short lip-sync/acting exercises like this regularly to help improve my animation skills.



And feel free to guess where the audio clip comes from.

-Evan

Spark of Inspiration

I've had a couple ideas in my head from watching various nature documentaries over the last couple months, and realized that concepts from some of them were similar enough to put together into a single story. This idea I have in mind continues the strategy of dramatizing a messed-up real world situation from nature, similar to what I did with First Step.

I would like to develop this idea into an animated short, hopefully when I have some better resources available, so it can be polished. Anyway, here's a concept sketch from it to keep you wondering. Some of you will probably see where this is going:

Inspiration:

Concept Sketch:

I have some great ideas in mind for this, and am excited to mold them into something great.

-Evan B.

3D Modeling Project of the Day

So today I decided to play with something different. With the big snow that's been hitting the east coast, I decided if and when I move to California, I may never get the chance to do a fun snow sculpture for a very long time. So with that in mind, I took a shovel, an ice cream scoop, and two and a half hours and built this in my yard. Some of the photos have been manipulated a bit so I could show off the details on the sculpt. Click the images for a high-res view. Enjoy!

Stock Rig Part 2

It's been a while since I posted anything, but that doesn't mean I haven't been up to anything. Most of my time recently has been spent travelling (for the Holidays), sending out job applications, and undergoing some independent study to help improve my understanding of higher-level mathematics, as well as programming (related to the job search).

Last post I mentioned the stock rig I've started to push my cartoony character rigging skills, as well as to have a custom rig to do acting exercises with. Overall, it's been incredibly nice to work on a cartoon again, as I'm still sort of recovering from the Thoracosaurus. Below you can see the full model of the stock rig. I decided to give him polygonal hair, to match an early sketch I did before I started building the guy. The hair is on a separate layer though, so different hairstyles can be swapped in and out as desired. This character doesn't have a name yet, so feel free to make suggestions if you wish.



I also have about an entire book and a half of sketches I still need to post, but the logistics of where my computer is compared to my scanner has been preventing me from doing it. Lots of cool things to come when I finally get them posted, though...everything from creatures and cartoon characters, to candid sketches of people as well as animals. Hopefully one of these days I can bring myself to post them.

Stock Rig

In the midst of waiting to hear back from my advisor regarding my thesis document, and while searching for employment, I've decided to stay busy.  I don't want to get rusty, and want to keep pushing my abilities. Lately I've really been in the mood to do some animation acting work. I was tempted to pull out one of the many stock rigs floating around the internet, but was reluctant to do so. I've become jaded of seeing the same rigs in countless work online, so I decided to also push my rigging chops and build a stock rig of my own.

The idea is to have a simple character that I can use to practice animation. With this exercise, I also want to push my modeling and rigging techniques to the extreme, by adding a lot of functionality (especially extreme squash and stretch abilities).

I am also pushing my limits by trying to make this character as close to my cartoony drawing style as possible. I'll periodically update my progress on here, and if I deem the final result worthy enough, I'll even make the rig available for free download.

So far I've built the head, and have been undergoing RnD on more efficient ways to set up the functionality of the dorsal-ventrally elongated eyes that are commonly found in my characters.

-Evan B.

Canis lupus familiaris

this one's self explanatory...

A Note on Paleoart Compositing

This is something that has bugged me for a long time now, and only realized what the problem was in the last few years...so here we go. 

Over the past decade and a half there has been a major surge in paleo-themed educational programming on networks such as the Discovery Channel. Despite all of the advancements in the technology behind these sorts of programs, there is one aspect of them that never seemed to catch up... despite it being a simple fix that any trained compositor should know how to do.

Many of these programs like to simplify the production process, as well as enhance the believability of the images by filming background plates, and compositing the animated extinct beasties into the shots. This is a great technique, which provides photo-real environments (since, well, they are real) without requiring digital artists to recreate entire paleo-environments from scratch.

Putting aside any problems and inaccuracies in modeling, shading, or animation of the creatures, these programs almost never seem to be well composited into the environments. Sure lighting is taken into account, secondary effects like footprints, splashes, or rustling of plants are added, and everything is done correctly when rendering the images out of whatever package they may be using. But what needs to be realized, is that simply rendering the thing out and slapping it on a background isn't all it takes to sell these things. It is only the first step.

The images need to be tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, then watched, and re-tweaked until they are as integrated as they can be for the given production timeline and budget. Most of the time, the images are very close to being final, but there is always one part that the people working on these programs somehow always miss.

Film has artifacts. There is film grain, motion blur, depth of field, lens flares, noise, lens distortions and film scratches that happen as a result of shooting live plates. When images are rendered out of CG software, they have a tendency to look too clean. These clean, sharply high resolution images layered on top of filmed footage (with plenty of grime and artifacts) simply look wrong. It takes the viewer out of it. The fix to this is to dirty up the rendered frames in the composite. It is way easier to dirty up clean, sharp, unnaturally perfect renders than it is to clean up dirty film. I understand that a lot of time is put into the textures and shading of the animals, and one might not want to dirty up his or her images because of all that time put into making everything beautiful, but these renders are only one element of the final image. If the composites aren't convincing, the viewer will have a hard time believing they are looking into the  past, no matter how good everything else is.

It is a very simple fix that not enough people seem to take the time to do. Adding and adjusting grain, noise, and defocus nodes to a comp, as well as simply grading them properly, is a relatively simple final step to making these things feel fully integrated. 

Here's an example to help illustrate this from a personal school project of mine (click image for larger view):

This post was inspired by the fact that I just finished watching David Attenborough's  "First Life" on discovery channel in full HD. It was gorgeous, and the animation, and shading in particular, of the critters was truly top notch...possibly even the best I've seen on the Discovery Channel to date (the rendering of Opabinia was particularly inspiring). 

This being said, the final step in compositing mentioned above wasn't taken into account as much as it should have been. It was way better than a lot of these types of programs, but some things still seemed just too sharp. It took me out of the informative narrative and encouraged me to write this post. 

Sorry for the length...I really didn't mean for it to go this long. Moral of the story, we need better (or at least more attentive) compositors in the realm of paleoart programming. The end.

  -Evan B.