MasterClass – Animating Animals: Tips and Tricks to Animating Believable Animal Characters in a Live Action Feature by William G from CGMeetUp Team on Vimeo.

Leyendecker master copy, painted in Photoshop

initial drawing and palette

I did the work in Photoshop working as if I were using the sight size method.  It incorporated a lot of measuring and seeing.  Then I created a palette to use avoiding just grabbing colors from the original. That doesn’t teach anything.

Started in with the under painting.

Here is the digital image I worked off of.  It is a close up section of the painting below that someone had the privilege of seeing the original and photographed it.By getting into the details of this painting, I was able to see the mastery that went into the painting.  Leyendecker wasted no stroke.  Everything was so precisely put in place.  Another fun exercise.

Here is a compilation of animation I created for Drawn, produced and published by Big Fish Games.  These two games, Dark Flight and Trail of Shadows, have been a ton of fun to work on.  The games are great to play and beautiful to look at.  What I really enjoyed about it is that I was able to animate using several different tools.  I got a chance to provide hand drawn animation, modelling and animating in CG and post production effects in After Effects.  There’s much more I’ve done for the games while animating in the level editor but you’ll have to play the games to see them.

original design done in B&W.  By using strong diagonals, I wanted to create a sense of drama.  Once Violet saw it and thought it looked scary, I new the design was working.

Here I started adding more detail.  Some people had to resort to climbing into mine shafts risking suffocation while others scrambled into shallow rivers during the drought that occurred over the summer.  Winds blew upwards of 100 mph and trees were falling all around.

I’m working in color now, slowly filling in more details.  I found no reference of the characters scrambling to get into the water so I shot some video reference of myself.  We’ll see how that turns out.  I still have a long ways to go.  Hopefully I can finish it up soon.  I’m open to critique if anyone wants to offer some.

It’s these emotions or stories that, if I can capture them, make an image more interesting.

This is a tutorial I wrote up a couple years ago when I had to create the illusion of a section of canvas tearing off of a painting.  I’m so glad I wrote it out since I’ve had to resort to using it every few months for a new effect.  Of course I didn’t discover the method on my own.  I had the help of several other tutorials available online.  It was a while ago so I can’t remember the original postings.  Anyways, thanks to those so generous to offer helpful hints online.  I hope this might help others as well.

For this purpose I used a Polygon for ease of texturing, though Nurbs tend to tessellate better for rendering…or something.

Create a polygon primitives>plane>□ and set the Width division to 5 and Height division to 6

Create a CV Curve along the path you would like the paper to travel.

Select the polygon plane and shift select the curve, go to Animate>Motion Paths>Attach to Motion Path □

Note: in this instance X is up and Z is the direction of the path I want to take.

Set Front axis:  X

Up axis:  Z

World up vector: 1.000  0.000  0.000

Apply

The plane will follow along the path

With the plane selected go to Animate>Motion Paths> Flow Path Object □

Divisions:Front 6  Up 2  Side 5

Lattice around Object

Check Local effect

Local effect: Front 6   Up 2   Side 5

This creates a lattice around the plane that follows the curvature of the path.  My preference is to select the object and scale it down slightly to make the lattice more visible. With the lattice selects I adjust it’s divisions

S Divisions 6

T Dicvisions 2

U Divisions 5

(divisions can be changed to give more or less control points to the lattice)

Animation timing of the paper can be controlled by adding keys to the U Value on the motion path.  Select the motion path, or curve, and in the Channel Control/OUTPUTS motionPath1

Highlight U Value, right click and Key Selected

Double Sided Texturing can be created as follows

For this purpose, I’m going for the look of a piece of canvas with a painting on one side and a canvas back.

In the hypershade, Create Maya Nodes>Surface>Blinn and name it DSTexture

Next create a Blinn and name it front.  This will eventually have the texture added to it, but for now I made it red.  Create a Cloth node from 2D Textures. From General Utilities create a Condition.  This utility is used for making a two sided material.

Middle mouse drag the back node onto conditon1 and select colorIfFalse, from the pop up menu.. If it doesn’t appear than select Other…, for more options .

The Connection Editor opens up and from Outputs select outcolor and connect it to colorIfFalse in the Inputs.  Repeat the process for the front blinn, but this time connect the outcolor to colorIfTrue. What this does is create a condition that determines which texture is shown depending on the orientation of the object to the camera.  The connection should look like this.

From General Utilities create a Sampler Info.  Middle mouse drag the SamplerInfo1 node over the condition1 node.  In the Connection Editor attach the flippedNormal in Outputs to firstTerm in Inputs.

Middle mouse drag condition1 over DSTexture and connect the condition1.outColor to DSTexture.color, in the same manner the previous nodes were connected.

Select the polygon plane you’ve created and, in the Hypershade, right-click DSTexture and Assign Material To Selection.  When the plane is rendered both textures should be visible with the color red, from front1 (blinn) on one side and back (cloth) texture visible on the other side.

falling paper