undsoo: Tools

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Thursday, June 5, 2008

PoseMAN 1.2.4

I try to be as fast as I can in my workflow without compromising quality. There are many tools that can help you with that, one of them is having a library of poses you made for you character(s).

Hands or any body parts which have a lot of joints can be a huge time sucker when it comes to posing them out correctly. I recommend that you have a few basic poses for your characters, ranging from body poses, hand/finger poses to facial expressions. For hands you would have a basic relax, a fist, maybe a pointing pose, an angry tense pose, etc. basically covering the basic emotions and gestures. Same goes for the head, add happy, angry, sad, bored, etc. to your facial library. That way you can block out your shot in no time.

There are many pose library scripts out there, but Michal showed us PoseMAN and it looked really cool, very intuitive and with great features (for instance to be able to use only 10%, 20%, etc. of your pose). Head over to highend3d for the script and more details and images, as well as video demonstrations.

PoseMan v1.2.4
- GREAT FEATURE: Mix pose with slider!

PoseMAN
Character Pose Manager. / Based on Character, Sections (body parts) and poses.

Some functions
- Unlimited characters, sections and poses
- Works with any character, object, node, etc..
- Works with referencing
- Capture thumbnails pose on the fly
- Rename Character, Sections and Poses
- Add / Remove controls poses
- Reorder Sections and Poses
- Mix pose slider!
- You can apply pose and MIX pose in 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%
- Easy to share, just copy and paste /poseman directory or Character directory

Fufure updates
- Save animation clips

Youtube videos Final Version (1.0.7)

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

More Hotkeys

After going through the Custom Nurbs On/Off you can start setting up a lot more similar hotkeys. Sometimes you don't have a GUI for the fingers, so you need to go in and select the individual joints of the fingers. I would set up buttons on the shelve for that so that you don't have to repeat this, but it's also handy to have a Joints On/Off hotkey.

I try to have all the major functions around my hand that's on the keyboard. So besides the translate, rotate and scale, and the nurbs on/off, I set "Previous Frame" and "Next Frame" to the keys 4 and 5.

Go into your hotkey editor and in the Categories scroll down to "Playback Controls". I then modified the hotkey assignments for "PreviousFrame" and "NextFrame" to "Alt+4" and "Alt+5".

Custom Hotkey - Nurbs Controller On/Off

Here is a handy hotkey that I use all the time and that can speed up your workflow.

When I have a scene open, I divide my window setup like this:

The outliner on the top right, so I can see what I have in my scene, constraints, locators, etc. whatever I set up for the scene. On the right, the render camera, because that's what I am animating to. Bottom left my graph editor for sweet animation tweaking and to the right my perspective camera to move around my scene.
Speaking of moving. Ever had the problem that you would suddenly move your render camera around because you thought that it was the perspective camera? And then you loose the position because you didn't keyframe the settings? The moment I decide on the camera, I lock all the channel attributes, just to be safe.

So I'm looking at my scene through the render camera and see that the arc on the head turn is not quite working. Now I want to select the head controller so I can tweak the animation. Either you select the CON in your character GUI, or your switch to a different camera that has your controller curves set to visible, or in the camera panel view you go to show>Nurbs Curves, etc. Most of the time it involves a few steps and it would be cool to have it faster.

So you can set up a hotkey, so that when you push a button (and hold it) the curves appear and when you release the key the curves are gone. I'm a lefty so my example layout is based on that but it obviously works for righties.
Being left handed means that in my work setup, my right hand is on the keyboard with my index on the "W"and ending with my middle finger on "R", and my thumb is on "Alt". That way I control the camera and the translate, rotate and scale functions. My pinky and index would control two other functions but I rarely use them. With that finger layout I chose the key "g" for my "show nurbs" hotkey, because I only have to lower my finger down to that key, it's very close and accessible. When I push "g" the curves appear, when I let go the curves disappear.

How do I set this up? First open your script editor:

Then in that window go to Script>Echo all commands:

and Edit>Clear All so that your script editor is clean and empty:

Now you have to decide for which window this hotkey will work (or you set it up for all windows, but I'll go ahead with just one). As you can see above, my rendercamera is always in the upper right window, which is panel 4. The panel layout is like this:

Seems kinda odd, but that's what the script editor is telling me... So I'm going for #4. What you do you know is go to Show>NURBS Curves (my check mark was off). Then look at your script editor and this is what you get:

The line that's important for the hotkey modification is "modelEditor -e -nurbsCurves 1 modelPanel4;". The #1 means on, when you turn the curves off, you'll see a 0. And the window that I chose for that is modelPanel4.

You then go into your Hotkey Editor by clicking Window>Settings/Preferences>Hotkeys...

In there you will scroll down to User. in the Catogories section.

Then click on New, give it a name (I gave it nurbson), and paste the line modelEditor -e -nurbsCurves 1 modelPanel4; into the Command box. Click Accept. In the "Assign New Hotkey" section, I put in g for the Key. The Direction is Press. Assign that. You might get a message saying that another command is already assigned to g, but I just ignored that. Repeat all this with a new New command (called nurbsoff). Name it g as well but for the Direction you select Release. Assign all that and Save it. You are good to go.

So now you go and push and release that button with panel4 selected and your curves will appear and disappear, allowing for quick selections.

Dry Erase

This tool will help you out A LOT. When you want to check your spacing, or track your arcs, or explain something to someone else by illustrating it on top of your animation, then drawing on your monitor is the solution, but be carefull, no permanent marker, no Sharpie, use a DRY ERASE marker, like the ones from Expo.

So if you need to track the spacing of a bouncing ball, then choose a point of reference, either the middle of the ball, the top or the bottom, then start drawing a mark on your computer (every frame, every 2nd frame, where ever you need it to be).

If you do a walk cycle and you want to check your figure eight arcs on your arms, then choose the wrist, something "stable". I wouldn't choose a hand or a finger, because that part of the hand is going to move differently than the arm.

Class F.A.Q.

As students send me questions I will post the answers here for the rest of the class. Make sure that you check this site daily, as class updates, critiques and lecture (extensions) are being posted here.

Homework - the moment you are done with your clip and you need feedback, post it on your site (or any site that offers hosting), which is the preferred method, or you can send me the clip via email. Make sure you keep the file size small.

Movie Files - they have to be Quicktime, with a frame counter visible (go to this site for frame counter information or download it directly here). To keep the file size small, use the H.264 compression codec or Sorenson 3 as you export your .avi file to quicktime.

Kinovea - for critiques I will be using the Kinovea player, which lets me draw on top of frames and write notes among other features. The critiqued file is saved as an .mkv file, so please download the player (it's free) from this website.

- Once you did the playblast in Maya, open that .avi movie in quicktime. Then go to File>Export..., choose Movie to Quicktime Movie, then Options. Under Settings use H.264, Key Frames: Every 100 Frames, Quality around 65. OK all that and save the file. Voila.

Syllabus - you can choose the assignments outlined on the AAU syllabus or you can make your own syllabus. Think about what you want to do and what area needs improvement. Do you need more practice with cycles? Do that. More acting? Body mechanics? Look at the body of work you have right now. Ask yourself honestly, did I completely master the basics? The conventional order of exercises would be a bouncing ball, then a character walk, jump, weight lift, pantomime, monologue and dialogue. Since a lot of you are graduating in a semester or two, you might have done a few if not all those exercises already. But again, did you master them?
As you prepare your own syllabus, make sure that you don't take on too much. Give each exercise enough time. The main point though is that you have to go beyond the exercise. Your clip has to stand out not just animation technique wise, but also from an entertainment point of view, the presentation (by that I mean the staging, the composition of the shot, not a fancy render (which helps but is just the icing on the cake)), etc. You need to be creative and avoid the current cliches. How do I know what is cliche? Take a few hours and go through people's reels, sites like the 11secondclub, animation forums, etc. After having seen 200+ clips, you will know what is being overused.

Animation Clips - Focus on making your clip more than just an exercise, give it context. Don't just have a guy lifting a box. Who is that guy (or girl or thing), where is he and why is he lifting this box? Avoid the default model (grey Norman for instance), give it character.
When doing a walk cycle, please have at least a front and side view visible in ONE movie.
When doing a bouncing ball, please use "side" view camera, not perspective, unless it is for more elaborate shots where the composition is telling a story. If you are doing the basic "heavy, medium, light ball" exercise, please have all three balls in one movie. And again, a frame counter should be visible.

Your own Website - get a host as soon as you can. Your site doesn't need to be fancy, just clean and professional. Don't wait, you need an online portfolio ASAP.
Don't have movie files on it which are 100MB. Yes, broadband is nothing new, but still, try to keep the file size small.

Audio Files - before you start with a monologue/dialogue clip, send me or show me at least 5 different ones. Really try to get the audio off a DVD, so that the quality is high. It's okay to find something online, but once you decided on the right clip, get the sound from the DVD because web clips usually are of poor quality.
For full guidelines, read this post.

Maya Setup - set your animation scene to 24fps

Future classes - read this post

Tata
Jean-Denis

Animation Links, Tools, Tutorials and Resources

Here you will find an ever increasing collection of links regarding all things animation.

Spungella Animation Workshops

Academy of Art

Class FAQ and Links

Animation Portfolio Tips & Reference:

Animation Workflow Techniques:

Rigs, Tools & Tutorial Resources:

Book/DVD Resources:

Recommended Sites:

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

AAU Class F.A.Q., Links and Resources

This post is for my current/former/future AAU students and has a condensed collection of links, which will hopefully be helpful to them.

Technically I want my students to be exposed to as much animation information as possible, but for all the general animation links, feel free to check out the "Animation Resources" section.

But for now, please make sure to read the:

"AAU Class F.A.Q."

- here you will find answers related to our class and if not, let me know!

You obviously need animation rigs in order to start your shots and most students are using the "Norman" rig. Since I prefer that you tweak "Norman" at least a little bit so that he's not just grey, I want to point you to Nair Archawattana's

"How to modify Norman Tutorial"

which gives you excellent step-by-step instructions. I also recommend that you play around with other rigs in order to make your shot(s) more original and fun. To see most of the free Maya rigs (I'm adding new rigs whenever time permits), please visit:

"Animation Buffet"

There are already a lot of rigs available and the selection is growing. Have fun!

Next up are very handy tools which can speed up your workflow:

& Of course this list is not final and I will add new tools but so far these should do the trick.

Not that you have all the time in the world, but I still recommend that you go through as many previous posts as possible. Hopefully my Summary Lists will speed up the process a bit:

You can also use the "Labels" for specific browsing (both on Spungella and Academyanimation).

Finally, just in case you need to be up-to-date with AAU dates & events, here's the:

"AAU Calendar"

That's it so far. If there is anything you want me to add, please let me know.

Setting up Lables

Starting to set up all the necessary labels, links and posts for Spungella.