Chucking Rigging out a 13th Story Window With as Much Force as Possible.

So, Google Chrome no longer works on my laptop because my Mac OS is old.  My desktop PC, within the span of 2 weeks, has gone from dust collector to primary computer.

And consistent readers will remember my rant about wallpaper.  Thus, this:

My attempt to take adorable up to 11 while maintaining realistic proportions.

I love Photoshop CS6.

In other news, yesterday I reached an epiphany.  I am not a rigger.  I can model, UV map, and put a bone system in place -- heck, I can even paint weights if I must -- but once I reach setting up a control system for it all, it's grinding hours of frustration.  FK/IK, pole vectors, splines, face rigs, locators, handles... dislike.  Dislike it all with a passion.

And as of yesterday, I am completely ok with that.

So in light of that epiphany, here's what's going to happen.

1. I am going to make a simple skeletal rig for both Butterfly of Doom and Dripbird so I can place them in some other position than a t-pose.  Nothing more.  They will not be animated... in 3D.  (Dripbird lives in 2D now.  He's finally getting to stretch his wings.)
2. I will finish UV mapping the fossa skull.
3. I will finish coloring Butterfly of Doom, Dripbird, and the skull.
4. I will render a video each of charater/object posed on a turntable in both color and occlusion passes.
5. I will post the 3 videos and accompanying stills to my portfolio/vimeo/blog/gallery.
6. All of the above will be completed one at a time so I can get my homework done.
7. I will celebrate when all three are done, take a week off, then go model something new.  Maybe a ninja hamster.

Earworm of the Day: Elements by Lindsey Stirling because you can never have enough dub-step violin. (To be fair, it is a narrow category.  Reaching saturation would be highly unlikely.)

Hands-On

I totally forgot to upload this Monday.  Wow.  I'm scatter-brained.

Matt Owl asks "Am I in the right century?"

In other news, today I applied for my degree conference (did I spell that right?).  If all my records are filled out correctly, and everything administration wise goes right, then an official paper that says "B.A. in Animation" should come by Christmas.  (I hope.)

In the mean time, I have the supreme hilarity of having a Motion Capture class and a Hand-Drawn Animation class back-to-back.  Yes, I go from the most automated form of animation to the most hand-crafted form of animation within the span of 3 hours.  I love my life.

I also love traditional animation.  Here's a bird jumping for an apple:

Earworm of the Day:  Due to my rule of not repeating earworms, I've officially got nothing.  Pick your own catchy tune and jam out to.  Heck, let's make it interactive.  Post your own earworm in the comments (video link is optional).

Two Lady Birds

First, I would like to introduce the newest member of my puppet collection: Julia the marionette.

Julia strikes a pose.

Though I decided Julia was a female bird (or hen I suppose?) in real life most female birds aren't anywhere near as colorful.  It's the males who are invested in putting on a show with long feathers and bright hues (remember that anytime a woman in media evokes a peacock fan.  Peahens are a little more conservative with the tail feathers and are usually brown and green.)

With my recent work on Dripbird, who is definitely male, I started wondering what the female bird of his (totally fictional) species would look like.  And thus I sat down and created Damselbird:

Damselbird, female counterpart of Dripbird

Besides the brown and green coloring (to camouflage against undergrowth) Damselbird has shorter tail feathers and crest feathers, as she would only be using them for communication and defensive postures rather than for showy mating displays.  Her wing feathers are the same length as Dripbird's because, though their species is mostly flightless, they use wings for extending jumps and balancing when running.  The female would need to be equally well equipped for jumping and running, and so the wings stay the same.

I would like to make a Damselbird in Maya in addition to Dripbird, which I don't think will be too hard.  I'd just make a duplicate file of Dripbird and do a pallet swap and a scale function on the feathers.  As for what I'd do with them?  Well, a cute short about Dripbird courtship wouldn't be out of the question (being cartoon birds, you know it'll be just a little sillier than what you've seen on Animal Planet).

Earworm of the Day: Your Love is a Song by Switchfoot

Avian Emotions

Beth will willingly dive into battle with aliens, robots, crime lords, and homicidal librarians... but spiders?  She doesn't do spiders.

I bought a bag of coffee for my dad today and put the bag of beans in my backpack for safe keeping.  My favorite sweater was also stuffed in there.  Now my sweater smells amazing!

In other news, I've been working more on Dripbird.  His legs and claws are now fully rigged, as is his face.

It lives!!! Buahahaha!

Unfortunately I waited till now to create the master locater thingy (usually seen as a big set of arrows at the character's feet).  Everything is grouped under it.  The problem is, when I grouped everything under the locater, the neck sorta... went nuts.  Like translating the character would turn it into an alien giraffe. So for the moment I'm back to square one on the neck.  But that's ok.  At least I have books to tell me how to do that.

Earworm of the Day: Trip the Light by Garry Schyman and sung by Alicia Lemke.  As seen on the fantastic video called Where the Hell is Matt? 2012.  Seriously, it's great.  The scuba-diving part is my favorite.

Rainbow Alarmclock

First, the drawing I mentioned last time with the clock and the frying pan.  For context, it's set the morning after giant killer roaches invaded Dennis and Beth's house and they had to barricade themselves into Beth's room.  After a tense night with little sleep, well... Beth's a little jumpy...

Frying Pan of Doom indeed.

And I know the sizing here makes it super hard to read, so here's the transcript:

Dennis: Zero to deadly in 2 seconds.  I'll have to remember that.

Beth: And it was the nice one with the colored numbers too...

And for the record, Beth's clock with the colored numbers is real.  I got it at Target several years ago.  Sadly, they don't seem to be carrying these anymore.

Also worked more on Dripbird today.  I'm reasonably happy with the leg rigging, or at least I'm totally sick of it and just want to be done.  The skin hasn't been connected and weighted yet, so I attached some cubes to the rig so it could be seen and made this walk test:

Earworm of the Day: Germs by "Weird Al" Yankovic

Geeking Over Movie Trailers

At long last I am making progress on the rigging of my CGI character Dripbird.  As of this writing he has controls to make him blink, look at things, raise/lower his crest, bend his neck, lean his body back and forth, and move his legs and feet.

Screen-cap of Dripbird rigging in progress.  The control shapes are a little hard to see.

I am still not happy with the controls for the legs and will probably re-do them (It is not unusual for me to repeat a step 3 or 4 times before deeming it worthy of keeping).  This build continues to be a lesson in problem-solving and info-gathering as I am doing this on my own time and without the guidance of a professor.  That, and all my old text-books only show how to rig characters with plantigrade feet.  They do not address how to rig a digitigrade character, which seems to be a horrible omission considering everything from horses to cats to dinosaurs walk on their toes.

I also re-did the UVmap for Dripbird because that's another thing I was unhappy with (and I do believe this was my 3rd go at UVmapping this character.)  With all the mapping I've been doing lately, the new map for Dripbird was relatively quick to assemble.  It took somewhere between 11/2 to 2 hours to complete, which might be a personal record for mapping on a character this complex (mind you I had also hit the "smooth" command already, so there was 4x as many polygons to deal with as well).

A render of Dripbird standing in a very harsh lighting (sorry about that).

In other news, I've become fascinated with 2 movie trailers, both large-scale CGI stories: Epic and Rise of the Guardians.  Rise has got me the most interested of the two, which requires some analysis because I hate holiday movies.  Ok.  I don't actually hate them, but I seriously dislike them because they tend to be simplistic, cheesy, predictable, and impart empty aesops.

But look at the trailer for Rise of the Guardians.  Seriously, go click the link, I'll give you a few minutes.

You back?  Good.

Holy cow! This is freakin' awesome!

I shall make a list:

1. Jack Frost's character design is a barefoot kid in a hoodie.  Instantly likable.
2. The Easter Bunny is Australian.  It took a day or two of pondering before it totally makes sense. (But it totally makes sense.)
3. Santa is a more traditional European "Father Christmas".  A big, burly lumberjack dude with a thick accent and a big fur coat.  Much cooler than a fat guy in red saying "Hohoho."
4. They appear to be fighting a guy who gives kids nightmares.  Nighmares.  Not "threatenting to cancel Christmas".  Not a story about "that one kid who didn't get what he wanted under the tree".  No.  A guy who invades kid's dreams and turns them into visions of 4 horseman and hellhounds.  An actual super-villain in a holiday movie.  Now this I've gotta see.

As for Epic.  Well, I have to admit it's visually beautiful, but I think 90% of the awesome comes from the sound-track.

Earworm of the Day: The Lightning Strike: Part I by Snow Patrol

Drawings Everywhere

Kids these days.  They expect me to be updated on the latest Pokemon.  Well I'm not.  Kid in question replied "Just make some up then".  So I took his advice.

Three mons from my own brain. 

At some point I turned my attention to three Kenlilian cousins.  It's hard to tell them apart without fur-colors to keep them straight.  Perhaps I should color these in.

From left to right: Ve'an (5), Zaav (16), and Gen (10).

After Zaav says something snarky to Gen.  Ve'an's just trying to keep up.

And finally, I must complain about Facebook's "Timeline" thing they're apparently forcing on us.  It's far too visually cluttered for my taste.  A mono-tasker's nightmare.  Ugly as anything.

And yet... they give me this blank space called a "banner".  I simply can't pass up the chance to personalize my virtual space.  Being an artist, a simple photo won't do.  No, I'm plotting out an epic character collage.

Thumbnail of epic character collage

Lemons and lemonade.  Fun will be had.

Earworm of the Day: The Rescue by Adam Cappa  I've mysteriously had this stuck in my head these last few days.

Simple as Algorithm, Bird, Calculus

I call it a drip bird. It is made entirely of NURBs shapes for those who know the needed bravery that entails. I don't understand the NURBs fear. Didn't give me any problems.

Well... except for the one thing with the feet, and the seams... and merging the body and neck... and...

Coloring, interestingly enough, is done entirely by ramp shaders. Yup. That's it. Lots and lots of ramp shaders. The feathers are all duplicates. It really was a lot more ctrl + D and scaling than actual modeling with CV points.

Am I talking CG babble? Sorry. I'll stop.

Suffice to say it's still a work-in-progress because, though it's cute, it can certainly be better. Maybe I'll make a family scene with them when I'm done.

In other news, my MEL Scripting teacher is out to get us! No, really. He has a thing for trick questions. It's really annoying. And the Pythagorean theorem? It's everywhere. Maya practically runs off the Pythagorean theorem. So, if you want to be a successful CG artist, start memorizing: a^2 + b^2 = c^2 OR c = sqroot (a^2 + b^2) . Life will be easier if you don't have to relearn this concept once every year.

Game design isn't much better. Game characters move in algorithms. *head-desk*