Animators Resource

Gotta love the web! There is so much good stuff out there! John Paul Rhinemiller emailed me about Animators Resource and as the name says it's a great site you should visit for resources and links to animation material!

How to Cheat in Maya 2010: Tools and Techniques for the Maya Animator

I highly recommend this book by Eric Luhta to every animator starting out in this field. There are nice little tips for seasoned animators as well. What's really great is that this is purely about animation in Maya. It's not a Maya book that covers the software and has one little chapter about animation, it's an animator's workflow in book form, covering everything you can imagine that has to do with animation in Maya. So go get it!

Nintendo's Free Animation App for the DSi

The flipbook animation software, known as Moving Memo in Japan, is relatively simple to use, letting budding animators draw, record audio and upload their creations to the Flipnote Hatena web site.
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DSi animators not willing to share their creations online can simply share them via built-in wireless or store them to an SD memory card.

For more information and examples check out the post @ Kotaku.

How to keep your eyes fresh

It's easy to get lost in your shot and focus on details, then you show it to someone who's never seen it before and they see mistakes that are super obvious.

One thing you can do while watching your shot is to mirror it (check comments on how to do that in quicktime, thanks Rico!). You'll be surprised to see how much of a difference it makes.

Why do I post this? I was reading news on James Cameron's Avatar on Dark Horizons and it looks like he does the same trick to keep his eyes fresh:

I think something happens to filmmakers, which is that they watch their own action sequences so many times that they actually learn where the next image – where the subject coming in in the next image is. So they’re already looking there. But the audience doesn't do that. So, I actually watch all my action sequences bilaterally transposed. Flopped. When I get it all cut the way I think it’s supposed to work, I’ll watch it backwards. I don’t mean backwards in temporal order, I mean in a mirror, right? I’ll watch a movie in a mirror.

So my instinct to look where the next thing’s happening gets short-circuited. It’s actually – you realize how dependent you’ve become on your own watching process. But it goes back to that thing I was talking about before, which is – you’ve got to be able to watch your own stuff with fresh eyes, to anticipate the audience’s reaction. I think it’s an art, and I think it’s a discipline.

Of course why wouldn't he do the same, but it's always fun to know what pros are doing.

exercises for tendonitis and carpal tunnel

You should obviously consult a physiotherapist if you are in pain, but these exercises are pretty good. Might be all in my head, but I've tried this and I swear my wrists feel much better. :)
Found via Haha.nu

Moving Memo - DSi flipbook app

From Kotaku:

Finally, we got a peek at Moving Memo, a flipbook-like application that, well, lets Nintendo DSi users create flipbook animations. It's a surprisingly user-friendly looking tool, with previous animation "cels" overlaying the current cel to give budding animators frame-to-frame reference.

Moving Memo also allows for music and sound effect additions, as well as the option to upload animations to a web site to share with other users. The potential for Moving Memo to showcase impressive works of animated art is exciting, not to mention a great community driven marketing tool for DSiWare's offerings.

Cool!

[updated] On vooks.net via Tim's post there's also a demo video to watch:

- pic source

Stopwatch for Animators - iPhone App

Cartoon Brew points to "Animation Timer", an iPhone app by Randy Cartwright. Head over there for more info, it's definitely useful.

Reminder - compress your movies!

Hey guys,

when you send me a movie, please make sure to compress them in order to keep download time to a minimum. I get files that are 15MB, which I can compress to 250KB. That's quite a change.

This is from the class F.A.Q. *cough cough*:

- 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.

I do uncompressed playblasts, then export using H.264. Small files, good quality.

Kinovea - new tool for my students

Thanks to pateta3d over at the 11secondclub forum I've finally found a player which lets you step through a movie frame by frame, but which also lets you draw on top of it. There are many more features included, so take a second and check them out @ the kinovea features page.

The player is free, so there's no cost nor hassle involved. I would use the mirror download link (the other ones gave me corrupted files).

From now on I will be critiquing movies using that player. The file with the included notes will be saved as an .mkv file. The cool thing about is that each frame containing notes, or drawings or whatever feature you use, is listed one after the other below the clip and tool bar (one in this example screen shot).

The only drawback (so far - the next big software update will fix it) is that audio is not supported. So for dialogue clips I will still use quicktime for playback and switch to kinovea for notes. Hopefully we can use it in class (I assume the lab techs need to allow the installation of new software on the school server).

Cheers
JD

abxPicker

Here's a quick reminder to check out the "abxPicker" tool that was mentioned yesterday. It's a huge time saver and you should definitely add it to the list of your workflow tools. I added it to the MEL section @ Animation Buffet, so head over there for more details.

Parenting Objects

A fellow animator (thanks Anand!) mentioned a parenting script called "Parentmaster". I'm just going to paste what he wrote, since it says it all:

• For referenced models, if you go to the reference file, open the parentmaster script ( a tiny window will pop up in the top left corner of your workspace). Then click on the contoller of the model that you need and then right click on the first button in the parentmaster window, it will say 'create parent groups', click on that and you are done. Now in the actual animation scene you can easily parent and unparent, by selecting both the controller and the object, and clicking on the parent button in the script window

• The script creates an extra group on top of both the contoller and object and then parents them. In the outliner, if you select these extra groups, you can actually see a green key on the timeline, which is the parenting key. If you wanna shift the parenting in the timeline you will have to shift the keys for controller, object and these green keys too...otherwise weird stuff will happen.

Visit the link for video tutorials! Thanks Anand!

- pic source

iPhone Animation Applications are growing

Update: Huge bummer. I just got one of those styli for the iPhone and they are totally useless. You need to push REALLY hard, otherwise it won't register any contact, which is lame. But might just be me or that stylus. Did anybody else have more luck?




Within a short time frame we got 3 animation apps for the iPhone. Now all we need is Slingbox and SCUMM games and I'm in heaven! :)

"Watch it change" is the latest release and focuses on Stop-Motion only.