MoCap project: "Swordplay"

Here's another project I've been finishing up in my spare time. A couple months ago I helped set up and then trained on Ex'pression College's fancy new motion capture stage. During the installation, I got in the spandex suit with the "ping pong balls" stuck all over it and ran around pretending to be the giant monsters or the sexy space-age women which my movements were being mapped onto in real-time.

The training culminated in recording a session with myself and another student actor which became the 30 sec bit of animation featured below. I took the raw data and cleaned it up, fixed glitches, merged different takes, finessed poses, and hand-keyed the hand and facial animation to bring the characters to life.

In case you're wondering, I'm playing the skinny character with the white shirt (screen left). And check out the photos below for more silly goodness.


(be sure to watch in full screen)

Original Mocap to Final Result Comparison:

...just chilling

...showing my feminine side

(this is what happens if you step out and then back into the volume)

...and students mocapping...a T-Rex?

College Lacrosse 2010 - game trailer

So you may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. This has been due largely to a project that I have been working on for the past few months in my spare time.

A while back I got a call from a Lacrosse coach in Pittsburgh who was looking to make an indie video game. I knew nothing about lacrosse, but the project sounded exciting, so I jumped aboard. I worked with only one programmer, and for almost all of the production I was the only animator--only artist, really. Two lacrosse players came in at the very end to help me out with a couple animations in the crunch period. But basically this is a video game made by two people in only a few months. It'll be available in the next week or two on Xbox Live. When the game releases I'll put up some behind the scenes stuff, and a better showcase of my animation for the game.

Until then, here's the recently released trailer for you to check it out:



And here's a link to the Facebook group.

DIY iphone/ipod touch stylus

Ok, sure, there are a bunch of articles on the topic of making a stylus for your touch-screen devices. So what justifies this one?

Good question. I wanted to see for myself if these things actually work. Answer: YES.

Now, most people don't need a stylus to get the most out of their iPhones. I find it useful for sketching, doodling, and thumbnailing animation. I also have fingers of great girth. So if you have your reasons for wanting one, but don't feel like spending $15 on a fancy stylus that comes in pretty packaging, read on.

To compare, I have two types of home-made styluses. The first one is made from an exacto-knife which cost about 4 bucks at Walgreens. Just screw off the blade portion of the knife and use the base--done. What you need to make sure of is that it is a metal handle, since the iPhone/Touch is sensitive to the electricity transfered from directly touching the device with our skin. Also, check to see that you get a flat, smooth end so it does not scratch your screen protector. You need a little more than 1/4'' of thickness for the device to recognize the contact.

The other stylus is made from things you probably have around the house. I took a standard ball-point pen and removed the tip and ink. The other end I sanded smooth (optional) and covered with a piece of tinfoil about 2'' up the sides from the bottom. A piece of tape will hold it in place, and you can rub the covered tip and edges on a piece of paper to smooth out the foil. Voila, a nice, light weight stylus. In the end, I am surprised at how well they work.

This concludes part 2 of my series of useful things you can make with tinfoil and 60 seconds of your time.


Take a second and let me know if you found this helpful.

Cliffside Drive

I finally had a chance to rekindle my love affair with the straight line and work in the low-poly + ambient occlusion style that I love so much. Here's a piece that I did for a friend recently. I'd love to take this set and animate a chase sequence with it some day. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Tales from the Crib: moved!

Yeah, it was starting to eat up my blog. So the good news is that it now has a location all to itself--no other fish in the tank to eat. Yay! And you'll find the new address at the end of this post.

I like tumblr's slick themes, as opposed to most of blogger's, and there's a Random button that will show you a random episode (makes sense for this/is neat). The only thing I haven't quite figured out is if it allows for comments on posts, as I love to hear from my readers. Anyone know about this? So head on over to the new location, add it to your reader of choice, and enjoy!

All previous episodes now live HERE.

Animation Rigs: Juicebox

Click image above to Download

Here's another rig of mine, made in Maya for my Animation 1 classes at Ex'pression College. I wanted to give the students an alternative to the Luxo Lamp rig they have used in the past for the inanimate object assignments.

It has the ability to rock back and forth on it's base, squash and stretch in the mid section, and an IK/FK switch for the straw. It's a fun character to animate with...kinda the 3d equivalent to the traditional flour sack idea. Enjoy!

New Website

Every now and then I take a look at my website and notice how terribly designed it is, so I crumple it up, throw it in the trash and start over. It's kinda sparse right now, but the thing I like about the design is that it'll be easy to add more content as needed. Take a look and let me know what you think! Here's the updated JoesShorts.com

Trek

Yes. Yes. And yes. More to say later.

Doodles

The internet presented me with this free app for the mac called Paintbrush which is similar to the old MacPaint or windows users could relate it to MsPaint. It takes me back to high school keyboarding class where I used to doodle images like these. Ah, nostalgia.

Animation Rigs: Eyes & Brow

Click image above to Download

Another simple rig for Maya. This one is great for practicing eye and brow animation. There's a lot that you can do to change the spacing, size, and shape of the eyes and brows, so download it and check out the ReadMe for usage notes.

Here's a very quick test I did with the rig to see how it animates. You have to be careful to maintain volume in the brows as you pose them, but it's a fun rig, if I do say so myself. Enjoy!

Animation Rigs: Ball

Ball Rig 1.0

Click image above to Download

Here's possibly the most simple rig ever. For the bouncing ball assignment in the animation class I taught this term, the students worked with a rig that was...well...lacking. So after looking around a bit, I decided to just rig up my own. It has one control to move, rotate, and scale the ball, and another control to squash it.

This rig was made in Maya 2009, but will work in previous versions. Check out the Readme.rtf in the .zip file for usage notes, and let me know if anything breaks. Here are a couple screen caps of it in action!

My Son's Favorite Book

For some months now it's been hard keeping baby Joe off of our counter tops and out of our bookshelves. He enjoys turning pages gets very focused on the images, sometimes laughing at this or that. But there's one book in particular that is hard to keep him away from.

Any guesses?


The Illusion of Life, actually. Of the hundreds of book he has to choose from, almost every time he will crawl over to my animation book section and pull out the huge hardback and (with my supervision) flip through the pages looking for the illustrations. I finally caught him on film, so there's the proof.
'At a boy!

busy teaching

So posts have definitely been sparse lately, both on this blog and the starfish blog. This is a direct result of me preparing for my new job! Saturday was my first day teaching animation classes at Ex'pression College in Emeryville -- just down the road from Pixar. For the next five weeks I expect to be swamped with both working out the fine points of the lesson plan and teaching the classes. For now, here are a few videos showing off the "Stromotion" technique developed by a company called Dartfish for use in analyzing an atheletes technique. For the animator, it's a pretty great for analysis of timing and especially spacing. (follow that link in quotes to see all the videos on Dartfish's site.) It seems this technique has been around for a couple years, so maybe this is old news but it's new to me. Enjoy!