Critique - Date

Hey,

that's looks really good!

The girl especially, nice job!! I love how she puts the menu down, how the hand touches the table then how she slides out her fingers under it and how the menu drops. VERY COOL!
My suggestion would be to work a tiny bit more on how she picks up the glass. The lift is a bit too slow at the beginning, and I'm talking the first 7 frames or so, and if you look closely the fingers slide up the glass during that section. The combination of that makes the grab a bit off.
Love how she swings the glass around, that little twirle, good stuff!
I think she goes into her "OO" shape a bit quickly, the one around x350, you could soften that a tiny bit and have it happen later, right before she gets the glass on her lips. Then the lip contact with the glass needs be stronger, right now it feels a bit swimmy. You don't buy it that the glass is resting on her lips.
Is her hair going up because she puffs air out of her mouth? I'd also color the hair brown. It's the only piece that moves and since it's a separate color, it's as if you want to say "Look! That one is going to move!".

The guy needs also a bit of work when he picks up the glass.
Add more time when he drinks, right now he barely touches the glass and he puts it down again. Just a few more frames of contact.
I like how the glass is not flat as he puts it down, it's slightly rotated, good!
I would drop the ring at a much lower height, just above the glass. Right now it's really drawing attention to it. But I like the wine drop. :)
The hand he's holding up feels a bit swimmy and IK-ish from x304 to 322, especially towards the end of that range, where the hand goes up but the wrist rotates down.
Keep his right hand a bit longer towards him on x401, so that the arm is not just going up and then out, give it a little pause.

Sweet, keep going!

Cheers
JD

I'm rarely using the graph editor.

Crazy, right?

I used to love to go in there and tweak the curves until it was beautiful spaghetti heaven. But now, I almost forget about it. As I'm working on my own clips (I'll post some more this week-end and next week) I've been paying attention to what I'm doing, especially ever since I get asked by students and workshop attendees what my workflow is. And I realized that I don't use it as much anymore. In fact, for the current clip I'm working on I check my curves for moving holds and in case there are some hiccups that just won't go away due to some funky spline curve bumps, but that's it.

I love to work through the viewport with hotkeys for making my character CONs visible, I go frame by frame, draw and plot arcs using my dry erase pen or intense staring :), and check every now and then in my perspective view that my character works in 3D space. When I need to copy/paste keys, insert breakdowns, space out keys, convert from linear to spline (I block everything out using linear curves), etc. I use the Maya timeline for it.

The only time I go back and tweak my curves is when my character rig is light, so I can play the animation in real-time and adjust the curves as I'm watching it in order to get the right feel and timing that I want. But since I can't really remember the last time I used a light rig, it's an exception. Although Norman is very light and it would work with that rig.
Although yesterday I had to tweak a foot roll so that my leg would not over-extend during a hold and that required super small value changes, which I only got through the graph editor. So I guess for detail work like that I go back to it.

But by now I'm just so used to working by setting additional keys instead of tweaking curves, that I don't miss the graph editor. I don't have thousands of keys though, I'm still pretty organized and clean most of the time. I can't say that I'm a slow animator either (I think), so I don't think there would be a workflow speed improvement. It's still shocking though to me. Managing curves and splines or whatever you want to call it is always regarded as a holy grail, some people even have barely any keys and do everything through curves. I guess everybody has their own way.

What do you guys use? What's your method? Anybody else out there who almost abandoned the graph editor?

New SOS Workshop Signup Procedure - First Come First Served at all times

... and you can attend multiple workshops in a row. No sign-up date anymore. If you're interested in attending, please use signup@spungella(dot) at any time. For more information, go to spungellaonsite. Thanks!

Cheers
Jean-Denis

Sergio Pablos rough animation of Doppler

Think what you want about the movie, but the animation is great!

Sergio Pablos rough animation of Doppler from Haylee Herrick on Vimeo.

C BLOCK film

Love it! (thanks Bernie for the Tip!)

From the youtube info:

C Block is a short animated student film directed by Vladimir Kooperman at Sheridan College. Blog: tallrussian.blogspot.com Enjoy!

Skhizein - Genius short

All I can is AWESOME! Love the idea, love the look, love the music, love the voices, love it, love it, love it! This would make for a fantastic feature. (thanks Eric for the tip!!)

Skhizein from Josef K. on Vimeo.

Brendan's Bouncing Ball Lecture

Brendan Body put up an AWESOME tutorial and deconstruction of a bouncing ball. Don't be fooled by the "basic" animation idea, because he nicely demonstrates how a bouncing ball principle can be applied to a walk (human, squirrel or dinosaur). Go check it out! (thanks Brecht for the tip!!)

SOS Workshop #2 Details

The 2nd workshop is starting October 29th, 2009 on a weekly basis for a total of 16 sessions. It's every Thursday, 7pm to 10pm, same location as the first workshop.

There will be a two week break at the end of November and another break during Christmas for the holidays of course.

As always, if you have questions, consult the F.A.Q. and if you still have questions, just email me.

Joshua Slice Demo Reel 2009

Great work!

Joshua Slice Demo Reel 2009 from joshua slice on Vimeo.

Variations on a theme

valleydweller linked to a great clip for #animtip Tuesday. Imagine that was an assignment. To come up with multiple ways of entering a room while opening a door. :)
I like how halfway through the clip he starts to find a specific way.

Le phare

Awesome short (Gobelins rules!). I love the atmosphere of it, the score is great! (thanks Saul for the tip!)

Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation

I haven't seen it yet, but from the looks of it so far Elemental Magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation sounds like a very cool book. Check out the blog for it which has a lot of cool animation clips. You can get the book at Amazon.

Maybe one day we will have easy cloth and hair control on rigs.

Now, I can't comment on what other companies are using and I'm not talking about our rigs at work. I'm just dreaming of a super simple setup for cloth and hair, so you can "easily" do something like this:



Wouldn't that be a nightmare right now? You might tell the sim what to do on a broad scale, but you can't really animate, shape and tweak their clothes, hair, the napkin, the pillow and the blanket as easily as posing out your rig. Or can you?

The Runner - by Richard Spriggs

Neat video with making-of (thanks Omer!). Watch the clip here and find out more about the project here.

Official Toy Story 3 Trailer

Here's the non-bootleg version, via Apple.