Animation Dailies - an open group

I've created an open animation dailies group / mailing list for any character animators out there (especially students working alone) who want to share work in progress on personal projects.  We'll see how this turns out!  2D, 3D and stop motion are all welcome!

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Dailies and Old Work

To keep myself motivated I'm hosting dailies over on blenderartists.  Join in if you like, criticism is always welcome!

Secondly, its always really nice when someone posts some of your work, even if its an old piece that you're not particularly proud of any more, its good to hear that people are still enjoying watching it.  Cycling blog Two on Four Wheels featured one of my pieces from last year, Au Soleil.

Copying Poses with Constraints in Blender

Often I find that I need to use the copy and paste pose buttons to get a smooth transition when animating a ChildOf constraint.  Blender's built in copy and paste pose buttons ignore constraints so I coded my own.  Basically select the bones you want, run the 'copy pose to buffer' script, then change frame to after your constraint influence has been changed and run the 'paste pose from buffer' script.  This way you can get nice smooth transitions across those constraint changes...

Last Bit of Modelling

Well that's it all done.  Every set modelled, and finally Jonny's 'leaving home' rucksack finished and weight painted.  Click to enlarge to see the topology.  Just animation, rendering and compositing left to go.  After nearly 3 hours of careful weighting, I'm going for a run.  Then I'm going to tidy up the rig, make a quick low poly version, then get back to animating the last twenty or so shots... two weeks to go!

Recalibrating

Just to let you know, the slight service intermission was caused by me being busy recalibrating at Glastonbury Festival.  I went there with Simon, working for Oxfam, which is definitely something you should look into if you like festivals, are skint, or want good karma.

I'm back at the grindstone now.  I spent yesterday trying to make fixes to the first 22 shots which I completed for my college final submission.  I got great feedback from fellow tube intern Henri Hebeisen (of glowing robot lights and mushroomer fame).  Today I've been prepping backgrounds and modelling the last 13 sets.  Here's a screenshot of working up the alpha channel for a camera-mapped shot, which I thought looked quite nice.

Meet The Composer: James Whittle

I'm absolutely thrilled to announce that James Whittle is producing the soundtrack for my current short, due to be completed by the end of next month.  James is an incredibly talented composer, instrumentalist and singer, and has just finished his degree in Music at the University of York.  James has worked on some fantastic projects and its an honour to have him on board, so draw the curtains, turn the lights down low, put on your best headphones and take a listen to one of his recent works, 'Violent Cannon'.

VIOLENT CANNON by James Whittle

Things That Go Bump In The Shed

Thank god for Bullet Rigid Body Sim, saving animators' time.  Only 38 crashes and two corrupted files (thankfully I had backups) later and I've got a second and a half of falling spades to show for it (I've hidden all the characters by the way, so as not to spoil any surprises).  Sometimes I think there are demons in my computer.

Those warped meshes on the right aren't me forgetting how to model, they're just shadow catchers for the comp over the matte painted backgrounds which should be pretty funky.

Big thanks to this post on blenderunderground which reminded me how to use Bullet - its been a long time.  Looking forward to a merge of Aligorith's Bullet GSOC soon.

Edit: on second thoughts, this had my little brother and I in stitches... we're easily amused.