Crow References

I've been thumbnailing like crazy trying to plan out the layout and blocking before I even sit down at the computer.  I started going through the film on a scene-by-scene basis then realised it would probably be better if I'd begun with some character-trait walks, runs, flights etc. to show how each of the four different characters moves.  For reference on the crow flight I've split up some videos into frames and overlayed the 'keys' (or every frame where there's space on the page).  It has the same effect as in the multiple exposure photos you see in Edgerton's Stopping Time.  Hope these are useful bits of animation reference.

Crow landing close time intervals from here.

Crow landing larger time intervals from here.

Crow flight extreme keys only just after take-off.

Every frame of a crow take-off.

Crow-flight with real-time spacing from this footage.

Re-boarding the Crows

So I'm re-boarding the Crows for what I think is the 8th time in its exceedingly long history.  I think I'm nearing final... only 28 more boards to work on today then this revision will be ready for comment again.  Huge thanks to Julz, Marie and Kimmo who have been untiring in their suggestions and criticisms so far.  Character model sheets are also almost complete.

I also found a great review of David O'Reilly's External World here which I thought I should share.

Wing Rigging Revisited

Half a crow with a folding wing.  The animation is a quick pop from shape to shape but it does show that there are hardly any ugly intersections at long last!



I started off with Jared Reisweber's Excellent Wing Rigging Tutorial then subdivided each individual feather's bone into a chain to help animate follow through and flex in the wing.  I added some flex controls for each group (primaries, secondaries and tertiaries) and wrangled the rig into a folded up position, and a couple of tweak controls to manually adjust the angle bisection used to fold all the feathers up.  I baked the animation from open to folded out to 3 shapes (a half folded, three-quarter folded and fully folded) then spend a few hours vertex pushing to make sure there were no severe feather intersections.  I used the blend from shape tool to smooth out irregularities between shapes caused by my vertex pushing.  I've still got quite a lot of reshaping to do on the rest of the body. and head then finally some decisions to make about the rest of the rig.  When I get the whole rig completed I'll post it up on blendswap.

In other news Chris Perry's 'The Incident at Tower 37' has finally been released online. I had the pleasure of being an intern at BitFilms out in Western Massachusetts for three months last summer. I realised after watching 'Tower' on vimeo that in my three months at BitFilms I never found the time to sit down and watch the whole film end to end (I was busy working on Bassam Kurdali's production, 'Tube'). While the visual style isn't entirely to my own tastes, 'Tower' is certainly a very powerful and intelligent piece and it's great to see the play counts soaring - Chris' film deserves every bit of exposure it's getting. Evan's fantastic score really completes it so make sure you've got your speakers turned up!

Birds and Fish

Quick Crow Flight Cycle

Might give it another go with a simpler setup when I get a moment.  Its still a struggle to get the wings completely folded up.  Rerigged the shark with a much simpler setup to get the simple sine wave propagating nicely, he's still a little dead for now though!

Updated - thanks to Frankie Swan for some great tips.

Week 1 Line Test

Week 1 was a free brief.  Here's a man trying to catch a crow, from the end of the week to the start of the week, every line test in reverse order!