Alike Progression Shot from psl

Animation progress reel forAlike Short by Pepe School Land.

EISKO Facial Rig Demo

Facial Rig based on captured expressions (3d Scans) by EISKO. Check out there webpage for workflow on detailed facial rigs.

Transfer UV onto a rigged and animated model in Maya

Transfer UV onto a rigged and animated model in Maya. from Marko Vukovic on Vimeo.

Handy little tutorial to transfer UVs without creating junk nodes on the actual bind rig. You can use this technique of tweaking the Orig Shape node to quickly update you rig mesh with updated new model with the same topology, run multiple meshes with the same base Orig Shape mesh and such. #rigTips

#rigTips on Faster Character Rig

#‎rigTips‬: Avoid using a lot of contraints in a rig unless it is absolutely important (needed). To create a stable, fast rig use parent child hierarchy based relationship for rig objects like controls and joint. Often time a direct parenting is the best solution of fast, intuitive and scalable rigs! Using a direct connection from controller to driven joints also speeds up the rig. This is applicable for FK joint chains. Lot of the time, we use constraints from controller to drive these joints which in greater number significantly slows down the rig (for complex rigs). In the fig. I used the locators to store the offset position of each joint, so that we can directly connect from control object to joint to maintain offset.

Always use a proper rig hierarchy system: Hierachy in a character rig is similar to a book library where you have a lot of books kept in each department in an orderly manner. Think about it, let say there is no library and we have books all over the place, you will be spending a lot of time searching that one specific book you needed! Well that is the same case with a character rig, your PC will have to process each of those nodes to process the calculation, hence a slower rig. Below is an example of a standard rig hierachy for character setup. :)

ü  (Character)_ALL                                                                                (Top Node)

o   (Character)_TRS                                                       (Transform Node)

o   (Character)_PP                     (Puppet Parts Node)

§  (Character)_IK           (IK handles Node)

§  (Character)_SKL        (Skeleton Node)

§  (Character)_CC          (Control Curves Node)  

§  (Character)_LOC         (Locators Node)                               

o    (Character)_GEO                                                                      (GeometryNode)                                                                                                

o   (Character)_XTR                                                                                                              (Extra Node)     

e.g.

ü  Momo01_ALL                                                                                                                                                   

o   Momo01_TRS                                                                                                                                   

·         Momo01_PP                                                                                     

§  Momo01_IK

§  Momo01_SKL                                                                   

§  Momo01_CC

§  Momo01_LOC                                                                                  

o   Momo01_GEO                                                                                                                                 

Momo01_XTR         

       
Join us at Puppeteer Lounge for educational training Character Rigging Worskhops!

SKIN (FAT) Simulation Webinar with Ehsan Kiani Teaser “Demo” (16-4-2016)

SKIN (FAT) Simulation Webinar with Ehsan Kiani Teaser “Demo” (16-4-2016) from Puppeteer Lounge on Vimeo.

Watch the Demo Teaser of Puppeteer Lounge's Exclusive Webinar Event on SKIN Simulation with guest instructor Ehsan Kiani :)

Special thanks to Puppeteer Lounge's guest instructor Ehsan Kiani for sharing all the tips and trickeries on FAT & SKIN Simulation inside Maya.

Blender Feature Request: Constrain bone extrusion to local axes of previous bone

Blender Feature Request: Constrain bone extrusion to local axes of previous bone from Chris Offner on Vimeo.


#‎Blender‬ Feature Request: Constrain bone extrusion to local axes of previous bone by Puppeteer Lounge student Chris Offner.

"THE GIFT" (created using "MARZA Movie Pipeline for Unity")

 

Very cool. An entire shot created with Unity 3D. 

Last Breath by Yousuf Abbas

Last Breath from Yousuf Abbas on Vimeo.

Love this fun little animation by Yousuf Abbas. Really liked the idea of how the animation is based on an anime fight scene. Nicely done!

Using the anime fight scene as a reference for animation sure is a fun way to experiment and enhance your skills! For those of you doing some body mechanics exercise, go through some japanese anime and manga series, choose a few shots and give it a go :)

Illustrations to 3D Making of

Illustrations to 3D Making of~ from freebird on Vimeo.

Making 3D Model based on 2D Design!

Setting up Multiples on Character Rigs

Here is a quick #rigTips on Setting up the Multiples. 

Multiples are traditional animation gimmicks to give you those wacky cartoon look, more like motion blur these days but 1000 times more cooler if you implement properly in 3D animation. Watch the video below which shows multiples on Eyes (yes multiples can be applied any where):

Now the trickery... Well the trick to creating Multiples is pretty simple! You might be wondering on creating each and every rigs one by one from scratch!! Well, let us keep it simple, the idea is to just select the nodes associated with any limb and Duplicate special with input graph connection (Yes that Duplicate Special button/command is the magic wand :). Works like a charm!!!

To make it even more simplier, easier and convenient without much headache; just duplicate special the main character node (See the image below). When duplicating special, make sure you have "Duplicate input graph" and  "Assign unique name to child nodes" is checked on (Very important, we want all the input output connections well connected and ofcourse with unique name for every nodes.) After a few second, minutes or more, you have multiple copies or clones of the same rig. Now, just some clean-up and organising to do which I will leave it upto you! And ofcourse you will also need to show hide the mesh parts which you can simply achieve by detaching and separting mesh parts for head and limbs, simple stuff, just make sure you don't delete the mesh history; finally some tweaking with the shader for blending transparancy and that's pretty much it. (Check the image below for breakdown :) 

Implementing multiples will slow down the rig as you know we have multiples for every rig, so I think it is wise to create 2 version of rig one featuring multiples and the other the standard one OR you can make some smart connection on the visibility of multiples mesh to show and hide depending on user input to make the rig faster to compute.

Well that's all folks! Easy as a piece of cake. Well go on, add some multiples on your rig, let us bring back those good old tradinal animation back into CG!

Check out this cool site for reference on many trickeries (gimmicks) used in traditional animation: http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/

For more exciting topics on character rigging, feel free to join Puppeteer Lounge training workshops at Puppeteer Lounge! We offer a wide range of training workshops! 

We now offer an exciting new course called Super Toon Character Setup which goes over creating a super cartoony rig featuring multitudes of animation gimmicks.Watch a quick demo here ;)

BTW do check out a quick animation test below with multiples!

FLEX Super Toony Animation Test from Puppeteer Lounge on Vimeo.

Classic Linear vs Dual Quaternion

How often do you use Dual Quaternion Skinning Method?

Notice how Dual Quaternion method preserves the volume (very important). There is also a 3rd option called Blended Weight where you can paint the DQ and CL influence on bind mesh.

The dual quaternion smooth skinning method is designed to eliminate these undesirable deformation effects. While linear smooth skinning allows a mesh to collapse or shrink when a bone twists, dual quaternion skinning helps to preserve volume in the mesh, creating more realistic deformation in those problem areas.

BTW feel free to take a look into these wonderful tech demos on skinning & deformation.

Fight 2D-2014

Fight 2D-2014 from Neeko on Vimeo.

2D fight animation reel by Nicolas Leger.

Jimmy Hulk morph

Jimmy Hulk morph from Jimmy Gordon on Vimeo.

This is cool! Just in time when we are preparing this Hulk Setup Workshop at Puppeteer Lounge! This is some serious Voodoo magic, all of this in less than an hour!

Ted Dance Moves

via GIPHY

Ted show off his dance moves...

Join us for animation training workshops at Puppeteer Lounge :)