Fluffy!

Fluffy come home!

My entry for the Artist’s Ambush this week.

2006 FCTV Spots

The Archery Spot on YouTube

With only a week between Further Confusion and I, I thought I’d better try to get some animation done. With the help of my good friend Jon, we managed _TWO_ thirty second spots. The first, which I did solo is a rather simple 3D project created in Maya 5.

King Artie on YouTube

The second piece done in a scant four days is hand drawn, with ink and paint in ToonBoom. Jon did the keys, I did inbetweens,cleanup, ink and paint, and the sound composition and mixing.

Dailies

Pencil test of opening shot for the ‘Give your child half a chance’ short. 320×240 15FPS silent, 225K Requires Quicktime 7 codec.

Changes at Half Circle

Finished a major website redesign. A ‘games’ section will be added soon to cover some of the Flash and Java games I’ve put together. There should also be new animation up soon. I took some time off posting ‘finished’ works to study motion. Lots of fflour sacks and stick figures. Stuff I’m enjoying and happy with but it’s not worth posting. I’ve also been busy in the still-arts. These get posted under the art section but generally don’t feel significant enough to update the main page.

Finally, I should announce The 1.3 version of my BVH exporter is now available at this link. This version fixes a couple of calculation problems for a small set of values and adds an option to change the rotate order of the joints for the root joint and child joints.

Along with the BVH exporter, you can click here to download a fully rigged model which is compatible with Second Life, an interactive social environment available for free on Mac and PC, where you can model, animate, and interact with other people in real time.

That’s all for now. New animations, art, and games coming soon!

Free BVH importer and exporter for Maya 5

BVH or Biovision Hierarchy is one of the standards for motion capture. It’s a straight-forward text-based file format which defines a system of bones. Curiously, while this format is available for many 3D packages, it wasn’t included in Maya. I needed it for a project so I searched the web and found an importer and a spec, and proceeded to spend the next few weeks learning smart-sounding words like Euler Angles, Matrix Rotations, and Quaternions. Now it’s complete! An improved and debugged BVH importer and a glossy BVH exporter Both are written in MEL and have been tested with Maya 5.0.1 on the Macintosh. Any questions, comments, complaints, feature requests, bug observations, etc should be directed to e-mail.

FCTV 2005 Commercials are Up!

Faux News

Dancing Hieroglyphs

Decisions Decisions

For 2005, I decided it was time to make FCTV commercials that weren’t all tags for FCTV, and were, instead, wear little vinettes of their own. The dancing hieroglyphs, however, is in keeping with the year’s theme of Further Confusion and is a list of the major people working on the channel. I think I gave myself the shortest of all the entries because that wall scene was a royal pain. Anyhow, it was great year with lots of good people!

DeAnza Animation Stand Restoration

Restoration of the DeAnza animation stand (an old 16MM stand from the former Colossal Films studio) is now well underway.

• The stand is fully re-assembled and all of the wiring has been checked.
• Manual composite motion controls are currently very loose but appear to just need adjustment.
• Counter-balance weight needs to be reduced, but camera head motor is operational and responds to control.
• All lights function well and mounts are solid.
• Platten glass cylinoid is not operating, suspect damaged connector is at fault.

Further repairs and photographs in a few days.

-DV

The November 10-Second Club

This month’s 10-second club seemed like a bit of a challenge, a very rapidfire dense monologue by Jim Carey excerpted from Liar Liar So I gave it a try.

Watch it here!

Free as a Bird complete!

After a lot of delays and a lot of work, Free As a Bird is now complete. At almost two years in the making, this project blends tradition and computer 2D animation techniques. Everything was drawn, inked, and painstakingly hand-colored with charcoal, then photographed on an old Nelson Hordell animation stand with a digital camera. From there, work was ‘cut out’ with Photoshop and composited together with After Effects. Runtime for this film is approximately 4 minutes. File is a 5.5Meg Quicktime Movie.

Recent Events at Half Circle

Just because the news hasn’t been updated doesn’t mean there’s been no animation.

Recently completed, a 20-second title for a youth program for the West Bloomfield Township Public Library of Michigan

Also, completed,
a cute little chase scene, sort of testing out the basic screen-planning mode features of ToonBoom.

Coming up for October, Free as a Bird should finish post production and finally be complete.