1)I come from traditional animation and i m not a technical guy,in ur opinion, how important is for an animator to learn rigging and mel?
The more you know, the better value you are to a company.. that being said, I know many amazing animators who know nothing of rigging and mel who are phenominal assets to the company simply because they're AMAZING animators.
My view is.. in cg, you're going to be working with people from different backgrounds.. td's.. riggers.. painters.. etc. The best way to work with them is to understand at least a little bit about what they do on a day to day basis. it's the same way that some of the best riggers are animators.. some of the best animators are also riggers, because they understand how to get what they want out of the rig.
So, I would say YES.. learn at least the fundamentals of rigging.. but don't let it overshadow your learning of animation. That should be your primary focus. The same should be said of riggers or td's.. learn what those who are going to be using your tools do & how they do it. .but focus on learning how to create your tools or light your shots best.
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2)How do u choose between the acting choices that comes to ur mind ,for a shot?do u have a process of filtering the choices out?
Tough question! usually the acting choices are influenced by the character and what the director wants. I'll try a bunch of things at first, but one choice usually floats to the top as being "in character". From then on, most choices are tempered towards that style.
Sometimes, however, it takes a bunch of tries.. it's hardly ever the first chioce that comes out being the one you pick. I've had a number of shots on Shrek 3 where I've started one way, and then a few days in had to change my acting choices completely.. causing me to grumble, but then eventually the shot looks much better than it would have.
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3)how do u build an international appeal into the characters?people behave diffrently in diffrent parts of the world,the key to any art is observation.I get to observe people of my culture and country ,who have diffrent mannerism then anyone else in the world.
Inter-whatical? haha just kidding! It's important to understand who your character is, what their background is, and where they're from. Based on that knowledge, you go and observe what people from that culture would do, and then try and emulate that as much as possible.
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4)how important is it for u,to get away from cliche`s. I have a seen a lot of cliche`d moves in movies latelty.
It's important, but sometimes it's so difficult! Especially with a tight schedule, sometimes you don't have time to explore various options when you want to try something that's not cliche. If you've got 10 feet of animation due that week.. sometimes you just have to go on your instincts and hope they work out. I've found that the best way for myself to try not to be cliche is to act out a shot a number of times and then try and pick the one that feels best. You can also avoid many common things, like telegraphing what you're character's saying (pointing at someone when they say "you".. stuff like that).
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5)Looking back at the recent releases from the major animation houses lately,the animation is top notch but i find the stories r not that great.Looks like they r being made just to release one movie a year.I'm talking about movies like chicken little ,shark tale here(this is just my opinion).stories that r being made here in asia have much better and original ideas ,like Spirited away.Disney has the same type of stories that they have been making,nothing out of the box there.What is your opinion on this?When do the industry majors in the westcome up with some thing out of the box?your views?
haha always a tough one.. personally I'm not sure how they decide what movies to make.. I would LOVE to see more adult oriented animation (not porn) being made here. It'd be great to try and do a real love story (again, not porn), or a comedy, or something that can be a bit more mature in it's nature. Maybe in the next few years there will be more of a market here for that kind of animation. It certainly seems that more people are opening up to animation as a story telling medium and not simply something for saturday morning cartoons.
First of all I would like to thank you for the huge amount of inspiration you have given the CG community! It has been great following your progress as an rigger/animator! Now, enough of that nonsense
why thanks very much!
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When not working I'm trying to find the time to animate as much as possible and hopefully become a better animator. My question to you is: How many people do you tend to show your animations to for critique and and are these people all professional animators?
I show my work daily to other animators at work & get lots of feedback from them.. also, the directors see it & in the end, movie goers see them!
Sometimes I'll show stuff to my wife as well, but usually it's mostly other professional animtors. The main reason for that is that I'm not doing any animation at home right now, all my animating is being done at work.. so it's pretty easy to turn around and show stuff to people who have been doing this way longer than I!
I do recommend that you show your work to as many people as possible.. it can only help to get more opinions, and then learn to filter out the ones that don't work for your current shot.
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I love showing my WIP in CG forums but sometimes I feel lost in all the different opinions.
it's a big skill to learn to take in all the comments, and then just use the ones that make sense for your particular situation. Every opinion matters, because it's somebody's valid perception. But not every opinion needs to be used.
Great questions and great answers. Trying to absorb it all the way to my cellular structure so that it permeates my very being!! Ok, that's a bit much.
LOL! crazy crazy..
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I have another question for ya since it seems pretty light compared to other Q&A's you've done.
yeah, wazzap with that? everyone already knows everything!
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When blocking a shot and hitting your major poses, do you ever come acorss a situation where you don't leave yourself enough space to get your character from place A to place B? For example, I was trying to animate a practice piece last year of a character who was acting drunk. He just had his "bell rung" from an explosion and his equilibrium was off. So I had him wobbling from spot to spot. But when I went to break down the steps inbetween there didn't seem to be enough room to get him where he needed to be and have the strides look natural. I hope that makes sense.
totally! it happens all the time.. less and less with experience, you learn to spot those types of things, but it does happen. What I usually do when I come across this is try and figure out ifI can stretch the length of the shot.. if that's not possible, then I try and keep the same idea, but re-work it so the character doesn't travel as far. Sometimes you need to just drop a few stumbles.. and while YOU know they were there and they would have been friggin AWESOME, the audience doesn't know, so it's okay.
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Also, if you have some animation that needs to be changed (it just isn't working) and it's smack dab in the middle of a zillion splined keys, how do you go about changing the motion. Do you edit the keys in Graph Editor? Do you delete the keys and start that section from scratch, tring to match the beginning and end of the other animation?
yeah, I always just sorta go.. .okay, part A is working.. part B is crap.. part C is pretty much okay.. then I'll set a key for everything at the end of part A, set a key for everything at the beginning of part C, delete everything in part B, and then re-do it starting from blocking. Over the years I've found that while this seems like extra work, in the long run it's MUCH easier and MUCH LESS FRUSTRATING than trying to push the curves to what you want.
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AND another one...it just occured to me, how many breakdowns do you do (on average) between your key poses before you convert to spline. I've read about some animators who key entirely in stepped mode until they have keys on every frame. CRAZY! But it gives them control over every frame of animation so the character is hitting each pose and the arcs are clean. Just wondering how many breakdowns you add.
It depends on the show, some shows I can show stuff in stepped mode and get good feedback from directors, other shows need things in spline mode sooner. On average, what I like to do is have a pose to show a hold, a pose to show the end of the hold (usually the transition out of the hold), a pose showing the start of the next hold, and another pose showing a bit of settle.. then again, a pose on the transition, a pose leading into the final hold, and a pose for settle.
Sometimes I'll do a breakdown in the middle of a transition, just to show what way the arm will bend and stuff like that.. but usually I work on those once I'm out of blocking and into first pass.
The forum is now closed to everyone except Jason. He has the option to answer any questions that he hasn't had a chance to get to, or if he'd like, just call it quits.
Thanks to Jason for taking time out of his week to participate. And thanks to everyone else for getting involved with your questions. I hope that everyone enjoyed themselves!
1. How do you deal with... microscopical motion, when you need to adjust just a tiny tiny bit of something, but especially when you have to adjust a ton a tiny tiny bits, frame by frame... like when working on a moving hold... and translating or rotating the joint is by default tooooo much. Is there a way to do it in Maya, like entering a "slow-mode", where you could move things slower than usual...? I have a pen and tablet, and I still find this difficult to do (in "normal-mode", where a tiny hand movement equals a relatively significant translation/rotation of that joint).
in maya you can turn off the display of the manipulators and just use the channel box.. then holding down ctrl+click'ndrag will make it move very slow!
Another thing you can do is use math.. in the channel box you can do something like *=1.01 and it will multiply the current value by 1.01.. or you can just add a value (+=.2) or something like that.
Luckily in our software at work it's built to handle things like this really easily, so I can usually just animate like crazy & then scale down pretty easily.
One trick that I've seen Cassidy Curtis do is animate a move really BIG and then scale it down quite a bit. Sometims it's just easier to get the timing right when you can really see the thing moving, and then when you scale it down, it looks just AWESOME.
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2. I can't believe nobody asked about working on Gollum's face (maybe too many have asked this before...?...) - how long did you work on an expression, how hard was to get an expression right, how hard was to get things flowing right, how did you handle all that detail, how much knowledge of anatomy did you have at that time, how was everything organized - what kind of workflow did you have, how does it compare to other facial rigs you've used since?
ah, gollum's so old school now.. nobody cares anymore.. haha We spent quite a bit of time getting the interface for gollum to the point where it would be quick and easy for people to get expressions that they wanted. You could store things like "mad, sad, angry, pissed, worried, etc" and then get back to them quite easily, and then tweak them on a muscle by muscle basis.. I probably have more knowledge of anatomy now than I did while working on gollum, but then I wasn't building the face rig. Bay Raitt knew TONS about anatomy when building gollum's face.. and he poured it all in there to the point where we didn't have to worry about it so much.
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3. Can you talk a bit about the facial rigs in Madagascar? I presume they're a combination of techniques, joints, clusters, blendshapes... but could you elaborate a bit on that, if you're allowed to... like what exactly were the clusters used for, or to what extent they used blendshapes (for correcting shapes only?)...
well, they're not done using traditional Maya techniques.. actually, they're done using the award winning facial system that PDI used on Antz, just modified and tweaked a bit. It's a muscle based system, where the character td's actually set up facial muscles that mimic what we have in our own faces, and then they break them up and exaggerate them a little bit to allow for all the crazy distortion. From the animator's perspective, we just have a bunch of attributes that we modify (jaw_open, cheek riser, etc) and the muscles do their thing, which pulls the skin. It does a really nice job of affecting various parts of the face the way you'd like it to.
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4. To get back on my older question you've answered a few days ago... how... really, man, oh, it... wow, aaaaah... duuuuuude, how in the world do you animate furry faces without being able to preview the furry end result...?
heh it'd be great if you could have realtime furry feedback.. but we're not quite there yet. In a few years maybe? But you just get used to it.. it's the same as animating a body that's broken up into segments because it's faster to animate than a full skinned character. You get used to seeing things broken apart, so it doesn't bug ya anymore. So with the faces, you get used to exaggerating motion so that when it's furry, you can still see your intent.
cheers virgil!
oh, and that moving name thing.. holy.. weird. while I was reading your message I thought a bug was crawling across my screen!!
anytime you're animating a group of people, it becomes very interesting to try and get the workflow to be simple. Here are my steps for animating groups of characters in a shot:
Determine who is the most important character (or characters) in the shot. Each shot should have at least one character that's going to be the primary focus for the audience (unless all the characters are looking at something).
Start with a very rough staging pass so you get an idea as to where the characters are, what they're looking at, and if they're moving, where they go. Do this for all the shots in a sequence, because you may need to change characters positions, and it's always a pain to do this after you start animating. The staging pass should be done in stepped mode, all the characters keyed on the same frames so it's not distracting to watch.
Now do a more finessed staging/blocking pass on your hero characters. Make sure that if they're touching, that they're both keyed on the same frames. I usually don't set up any parenting or anything at this point, unless the parenting is going to be on for the whole shot.
Now do a more refinned blocking pass again on the hero characters. Pay attention to where the audience's eye is supposed to be looking, and make sure that it goes there. This can be done by keeping the character you don't want the audience to look at toned down.. don't do any sudden movements. Then when you want to draw the audience's eye, do a big movement that sweeps their eye away from the other character
Now do a first pass (out of stepped curves) on the primary characters. The background characters can still be in stepped mode, it's really all about animating the primary characters at this point. Make sure that they READ well.
First pass of background characters. The whole idea here is to keep them alive, but not distracting.
Next pass of primary characters. Notice how much love these main characters get? It's because they're the most important.. they are where you should be spending your "money".
Facial pass of primary characters
Facial pass of secondary characters
Final finessing of primary
Final finessing of secondary
one last final of primary
that's the way I approach it.. there could be better ways, but this one works for me!
It's been great seeing your lectures on AM as well as listening to some of your crits, kudos.
thanks! it's a lot of fun doing it
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As a husband and a father i am always concerned about quality of life at a given studio. I moved from on-set film production to post-production because i was working 15 hour days, 6 days a week, and was physically exhausted. Since i've been in the game industry i've managed to stay with companies that believe it's important to schedule properly and manage the overtime and crunch times so that the artists don't burn out. However, I've heard plenty of horror stories about other companies and I know that it's something that appears to be "the norm" in film/TV/game production.
tell me about it.. as I've gotten older, this is a very very important part of my decision making process when going to a studio!
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So my question to you is, how would you characterize you quality of life at PDI? and the same question for Weta?
Obviously working weekends and working past midnight can be something that is brought on by the individual (ie. endless tweakers; slow workflow; perfectionists) but in some cases it can be the director or the studio that forces the situation (re-writes, date changes).
In your experience, would you say that the workload/hours of your fellow animators was within their own control, or more in the control of the directors/studio?
good question! at PDI the goal is to NOT have people work late. They really push against it, and want us to have lives outside of work. So we're leaving every day between 6 and 7.. in in the mornings by 9.. as long as you're getting your work done, they're very flexible. No working on weekends unless it's crunch time, and even then no working on sundays. You have to ask for overtime, and you might not get it.
At weta we were pretty much under the gun to get the shots out the door and it was an insane schedule.. 7 day weeks, I had a few months where I was pulling 90-120 hour weeks. Ugh. It was fun because the project was exciting and everyone was doing it.. but it was super unhealthy. After the shows were over you'd have a lot of people leaving on holiday for weeks to months at a time. I had to take 2 months off after return of the king because I was so exhausted (and I was getting married..woo!).
My own opinion about when I'll do overtime and who's going to pay for it has evolved over the years. At first I was so excited to be working that I'd do overtime whenever I could for free just 'cuz I loved my work. Then I got grumpy about it and would only do it if I was paid. Now, I'm somewhere inbetween.
If it's someone else's fault that I have to do overtime.. i.e. the script has changed, the schedule's too tight, etc. Then I'll charge OT. If it's MY fault, like I'm animating slowly, or I changed my mind, or I've been slacking.. then I'll suck it up and not charge OT, I'll just do it to catch up.
But I prefer not to work OT.. you gotta have a life outside work!
I had a great time answering the questions.. good q's everybody! I had to really think about a lot of them & try and come up with something interesting to say!
The forum is now closed to everyone except Jason. He has the option to answer any questions that he hasn't had a chance to get to, or if he'd like, just call it quits.
Thanks to Jason for taking time out of his week to participate. And thanks to everyone else for getting involved with your questions. I hope that everyone enjoyed themselves!
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