Short Film Category

For those of you who had your interest piqued watching the Academy Awards this past weekend, you can view the nominated animated shorts, including the winner "La Maison En Petits Cubes," here.

Tip of the Week: Tearing Off Panels

Camera panels in Maya can be torn off and moved around as separate, floating windows, just like the graph editor or outliner. To do so, just click on Panels > Tear Off (or "tear off copy").



One thing that I use this for a lot is facial animation. When I have a slider setup, I usually parent a camera to the root node of the control group and then tear that camera off. That way I have a little window with the facial controls in it that I can move around.



You can take it one step further. If you click on the little red Maya logo on the upper left of any window in Maya, you can un-check "Attach to Main Window." When you do this, Windows treats it as its own separate window on the task bar as if it were a separate application.

This is useful with a dual monitor setup. You could, for instance, detach the hypershader, move it onto a second monitor, and maximize it there. This lets you work full screen in the hypershader, while maintaining a full view of your scene.

Check out the January 4th Tip of the Week for more on maximizing your monitor space.

The Case for Benjamin Button

Let me start out by saying that I think the visual effects in both The Dark Knight and Iron Man are stunning, and that the artists behind them did a superb job.

That said, I think that this year's award for Best Visual Effects needs to go to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, hands down. Whether or not you liked the movie (I personally loved it), it's hard to deny the visual effects accomplishment.

The effects for the big blockbuster superheros are rehashed summer after summer. Certainly, they get more and more refined every time around, and both Iron Man and The Dark Knight were very well executed. But there was little that we haven't seen before. We've seen superheros, explosions, vehicles, and action sequences a million times. The effects practically jump off of the screen.

But the accomplishment of Benjamin Button is something different entirely. Here's a film where nine out of ten people can go see it and not realize it contains a single shot of CG (discounting the two very brief war scenes). When in fact the main character is CG for the majority of the movie. Leaping over the much discussed uncanny valley is one thing. Becoming seamless is another step entirely. A CG human character that is indistinguishable from live action.

I enjoy an action-packed visual effects spectacle as much as the next person. But when state of the art effects can be integrated to tell a story, the results are something special.

In a way, if Benjamin Button fails to win the Oscar for visual effects, it's almost that much more of a tribute. A film with visual effects so good, that nobody even notices they're there.

Tales of the Black Freighter

I've been looking forward to Watchmen, but I only found out about this part the other day. I had been wondering how they'd incorporate it. Turns out that it's being released on Bluray a few weeks after the movie as a fully separate animated short. Looks pretty cool:

Coraline and 3-D Cinema

Just got back from seeing Coraline. I really enjoyed it. The production design and art direction were beautiful. And the character animation, particularly the facial animation, was top notch. I'm generally pretty impressed by stop motion - I just think it's such an amazing feat in general - and the animation here was especially good. Major props to the artists involved.



The story wasn't spectacular, but it was engaging, and it meshed so well with the visuals that it's almost hard to separate the two. I didn't find the villain to be anything special (the secondary characters in general lacked development), but the hero was pretty well fleshed out and followed a satisfying character arc. I'm being pretty picky... overall, I thought it was excellent.

As for stereoscopic cinema, I'm not enthralled. In my opinion, it adds almost nothing to the movie, and at times it detracts. The illusion really falls apart during action scenes, or any time the characters or the camera are moving quickly. More often than not, it just feels like it's out of focus. In general I think it's pretty gimmicky, and I hope that it runs its course like it did in the 1950's. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the studio executives agree. All future Pixar and DreamWorks Animation films are slated to be stereoscopic (Jeffrey Katzenberg all but hails it as the "savior of the industry"), and I can only suspect that we'll be seeing more and more live action jumping into 3-D as well.

So see it in 2-D if at all possible, but one way or another Coraline is definitely worth checking out.

Tip of the Week: Object Creation

I've already written about how I like a lot of the new features in Maya 2009. Animation Layers are awesome. Soft selection was a long time coming. And Mental Ray has a whole load of new improvements.

But not everything's so hot. There are some things that have been going on in the past few versions that are more annoying than helpful. The one that bugs me the most is the "interactive creation" tool that comes up when you try to create a poly primitive. It's a matter of personal preference obviously, but it drives me crazy when I'm trying to work. I'm sure that plenty of people think the opposite and love it. But if you're like me, don't worry, there's a way to turn it off.

Go to Create > Polygon Primitives and uncheck "Interactive Creation."



Now when you click on the shelf buttons or in the marking menu or however else you create polygons, it will do it the old fashioned way. The same fix works for NURBS primitives, but you have to do it separately in the NURBS menu.



Please Autodesk, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Porch Set

I've had some time to work on my short film over the past few weeks. I've been making some real progress. Here's a quick look at the model for the set:

Spider Animation

Here's a cool tutorial that I came across that shows how to use set driven keys to build a spider rig. I like it because it's a very simple setup that produces a complex looking result:

Jan Sandström: Spider Animation

As with any automated animation, if you were to incorporate this setup into a production rig, you would want to include switches to turn it on and off or blend it with hand animation. Automation is great, but the animator should always be in control. You could use these same principles to automate secondary animation on a robot or all kinds of different rigs. (Picture gears and pistons that automatically turn and pump when the animator raises the character's arm). I'd probably use expressions instead of set driven keys personally, but the basic principle is there.

Tip of the Week: Three Books

There are so many books on Maya and different aspects of 3D that it can be tough to know where to start, so I thought I'd recommend a few of the ones that were most illuminating when I was first starting out. There's no shortage of good resources out there, and you can learn a lot from tutorials and blogs online. (Like this one, I hope.) But these three books were the most useful for me. They've been around for a few years now, so they may not have information on some of the newest features. But the fundamentals are solid, and for someone just starting out or looking to improve in a specific area, they're sure to help:


Maya Character Creation, by Chris Maraffi

Before reading this book, I was terrified of rigging and didn't want to get near it. Today, character setup is one of my specialties professionally. Obviously there was a lot of work and learning in between, but this book got me started along the way. It takes you step by step through the process of setting up a bipedal character rig. You'll learn how to use constraints, expressions, driven keys, custom controls, and lots more. There's a section on MEL at the end that's pretty good too. The best part, compared to a lot of the tutorials out there, is that it explains why you do what you do as you go along, so you really learn the underlying concepts and can apply them to completely different rigs.


Stop Staring by Jason Osipa

I'm pretty sure that there's a newer edition now than the one that I used a few years back. This book is a must read for animators, character TD's, and anyone modeling faces. It's approach to facial animation is completely different from the advice that's given out to most people when they first start out. And the facial rig that it shows you how to build is of production quality (at least in principal, if not in sheer detail - DreamWorks animators, for instance, have literally thousands of parameters at their disposal for facial posing). But this book will get you up and running with the general formula and give you the concepts you need to build from there.


MEL Scripting for Maya Animators by Mark R. Wilkins and Chris Kazmier

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You don't have to be a Technical Director; it doesn't matter what you do; you should learn some basic MEL. This book will get you started. It assumes no prior scripting/programming experience. Even if you don't wind up writing epic scripts, you're sure to use at least a few of the tricks you learn in this book, and you'll definitely come away with a deeper understanding of what's going on under the hood in Maya.