Friday
Sep182009

The Guerrilla CG Project

If they ever ask me to teach an Intro to CG Animation class, I would start each new topic with a video from the  Guerrilla CG Project . They are so well done, so brief, and so clear . . . I think educators in every field should take their cue from them. Here's one example, for starters:

Friday
Sep042009

Kyle Balda - Animation Master Class

Former Pixar/ILM/Weta animator Kyle Balda did a great class for 3D World Magazine called "Animate the Hollywood Way." There's literally hours and hours of "over the shoulder" footage of him animating a two person dialogue shot. Here's the links for those videos: 

Part 1 and Part 2.

For anyone who doensn't have twelve hours to kill, here's Kyle's excellent synopsis of the whole 3D World Master class. Enjoy.

 

Friday
Aug072009

Keith Lango on Posing

Keith Lango is a man who's done his time in the animation trenches.  He's worked at Big Idea, Blur, Reel FX, and DNA studios.  I'm sure he's got his reasons why he chose not to stay in "The System" - among them traveling through South America, delivering much needed medical supplies to impoverished people - but now he's got one of the best animation blogs and tutorial services on the Net.  Here's one in two parts on the Art and Philosophy of Posing. 

 

 

Tuesday
Jul282009

Victor Navone's Spline Tutorials

As I've posted before, Victor Navone is a folk hero for those of us in the animation world.  He made "Alien Song," a classic short film (and it is short, only one minute) that went viral, and landed him an interview at Pixar.  Now he's one of their main dudes.  His website is one of pure altruism for upcoming animators, and his tutorials should be curriculum for any animation program. Here's links to Navone's tutorials for anyone with a fear of Splines in the Graph Editor.

Sunday
Jul192009

Maya Floating Channel Box Button

Although I'd love a full sized Wacom Cintiq tablet, the $2000 price tag is way beyond my budget.  Aye, the $1000 price tag for the 12 inch Cinitiq isn't exactly cheap, either.  Nonetheless, the mini-Cintiq is a pretty worthwhile piece of hardware, and at this point I wouldn't want to design or animate without it. 

That said, when you're using the little Cintiq, screen space is ESSENTIAL.  And anyone who's animated in Maya knows that the UI gets a little . . . cluttered.  True, you can toggle to a full screen view (CTRL + Space), but you lose the Channel Box, which is a vital organ when animating.  So, after many searches for vast stretches of time, I found this script over at the the Autodesk Area forum, posted by Michiel Duvekot:

window -widthHeight 200 600 myChannelBox;
formLayout form;
channelBox cb;
formLayout -e
    -af cb "top"0
    -af cb "left"0
    -af cb "right"0
    -af cb "bottom"0
     form;
showWindow;

Thanks for posting this handy little script!