Dog Topology

Here's how 'Blake' the border collie sheepdog is looking in wire form so far - 2100 faces, all quads, nice clean mesh topology with maybe just a few too many poles.  Struggled a lot with the head.  Wish I'd had access to a real dog to help with the modelling of this.  I've only given him front teeth as he rarely opens his mouth in the 'Crows' short.

Making good progress on the rigs.  The biped one is ready for re-targetting - a hybrid of my 'eskimo' and 'bally' rigs - using iTaSC for damped IK - no more popping!  The quadruped rig just needs layer organising and testing.  Jonny is pretty much ready to bind, just finishing off the Farmer's haircut, hat, glasses and coat.

Today's Top Tip: Workaround for buggy auto-weighting in Blender

If you're using auto-weighting in blender and you come across a complex mesh where it just isn't working - you probably have flipped normals.  Just tab into edit mode and W>flip.  If that doesn't work  my workaround was to build a much lower resolution mesh with nice clean topology for auto-weighting, then use this script which I quickly cobbled together to proximity copy weights.  It will copy all the weights from the source object to the target object, but be warned it will overwrite any existing vertex groups on the target, which you might be using for other non-binding related tasks.

Fake Plastic T-Pose

Jonny's nearly done, just some more work on the hair and cloth collision meshes before texturing, shape building and rigging.

Converting MonkeyJam Files to Spreadsheets with Python

I've timed out the 2D blocking for all 42 shots of my 'Crows' short in MonkeyJam.  Today I realised it would be great to have this accessible as real paper X-sheets which I could print and annotate as I work through the shots in 3D.  MonkeyJam beta's print feature seems pretty unstable and sometimes just generates junk, so I managed to hack together this quick python 3 script which will read the MonkeyJam '.xps' file and spit out a .csv file which you can then open in OpenOffice or Excel (or just open in notepad and copy and paste into a pre-formatted spreadsheet with all the right font sizes, column widths etc).

T is for Topology

...with which I'm wrestling....

Jonny's hands, arms, t-shirt, jeans and pumps meshes all work-in-progress, the most complete of my models so far, with some subtle asymmetry.  The head meshes and the farmer and dog are also pretty far down the line but still messy shape-wise.  Its awesome to have access to the tube project's character meshes as a topology reference, one of the perks of being an intern on the project!  Working in blender-2.57-freestyle - hopefully will have some python shader code going soon!

Crows First Animation Completed

First piece of background animation done!

Crows Work In Progress

This needs more comp and rain streaks on the window, and should probably be half the speed.


One of a flock of four.  Quite happy with this first rough.

Here's some diagrams of a toe-first running action I made from video footage of a barefoot kenyan boy.