Some animation

So here's a taste of the animation. There's still some things to be done, like fixing some BG's and adding candy jiggle layers and stuff, and of course some audio to replace the metronome, but the timing is pretty much done.

Mission: Accomplished

I've graduated. I'm certain that I have. Last Friday, I met with the Thesis committee and showed my assembly reel, which has the character animation completed, but lacks the tight editing and effects layers that will imbue the film with a nice lustrous sheen. And sound, it needs some sound, but I've got that angle covered.

So despite most of my presentation being fraught with technical snafus, it went very well. Well enough that at the end, I filled out a form and was warmly congratulated by all present. It was very nice, but also something like running a marathon for so long that when you cross the finish line, you continue running past the cheering crowds and out of sight, with the fat ornamental finish line ribbon trailing from your face.

I'll post some BGs when I get a moment, and also some clips when I get the effects dropped in. Keep checking.

Also doing some writing...

It's a walking bomb that can throw a punch, and Tokyo SWAT uses it to kick beaucoup kaiju ketsu.
Smart Bomb began as a pitch for an action show where I work at CNS, and now as Suma Tobakudan, it will be a mini-series independently published by Standalone Comics. Shawn Toshikian and I just finished writing Volume One. Jeff Wamester is doing the art, with Joe Suitor designing the monsters. Check the Standalone webpage and blog for status updates. It's going to be chou sugoi.

Star Wars by Saul Bass

Just saw this on the BoingBoing.



Very nice.

You Call This a Crime Scene?

By this point, you may have noticed that pretty much everything is lacking outlines. This was a decision I made before I started animating, which grew out of a test to see if I could animate characters without drawing and inking and coloring. Instead, I'm animating layers of colored shapes that make up the characters, if that makes sense.

I decided to do it this way for two reasons. First, it can be a time-saver. Not having outlines means eliminating a cleanup/inking stage, and sort of eliminates a coloring stage as well.

Secondly, I'm not crazy about Flash's brushes, so getting decent lines means going back and forth to Illustrator, which isn't worth the hassle, especially since cut and paste between Flash and Illo has been broken since 2004.

But I'm kind of missing having outlines. I still have them as a first step, drawing stuff out in Illustrator:



I'll use that one Illustrator drawing as a starting point for when I get into Flash, so there is a little cleanup, but usually just once per scene, not for every extreme or key pose. Here's what this guy looks like all Flashified:



I can live with no outlines this time around. But having no inlines means I have to find some other way to define where the character overlaps itself. I thought I might avoid overlap all together by forcing myself to have strong silhouettes for every pose, but it's a lot harder to not overlap once stuff starts moving. My solution is to separate overlaps with gradients. It looks okay in still images, but in motion, it looks like everyone has dirty forearms.

So, back to animating by building up layers of shapes. It's really not any different than what you would do by roughing things out on paper. I still do the big masses first and layer on top until I get to the secondary action passes. Here's a wireframe version of a grappling sequence. Click on the thumbnail to see the animated GIF:


Each colored outline is a separate layer. Almost everything is shape-tweened, except for the hands and heads, which are symbols. The luchador's face appears to hang off his head because it's masked off except for the top corner of his brow. It looks correct when it's rendered.

Smoke & Pixels

So I want the exhaust trails for the vehicles in this film to be scribble lines that expand or "bloom" the longer they hang in the air. I figured I'd try to implement Maya's Paint Effects for this.

In order to be truly lazy, I found a way to have the paint strokes derived from curves that trace through particles affected by a dynamic field. Geez, did I really just write that?

It is a bigger pain than it sounds like, but now that all the work on the front end is done, I have a way to generate a variety of scribble styles and and shapes with relatively little effort.


Firstly, make lots of dots.


Then, connect them.



Add texture, and call it done.
Also handy for endorsing checks.


Big Thanks to the indestructible Brian Coffee for his Melscripting help!

Animation Nearing Completion

So I'm plugging away to get this film wrapped up in the next couple months. The animation for the shots is nearly complete, and then it's moving on to effects and BGs. Oh, the BGs.

Anyways, here's a pre-grappling showdown between our lucahdor protagonist and a hot rod UFO-flying goon, complete with amped-up metronome track.

And yeah, it's on 3's. Is that a problem?