I also did a little more work on my princess bride dialogue test.

Just couple of wacom (intuos 4, woo!) tests…

I couldn’t get into animating these guys today so I played around with some sub-surface scattering for the skin.

and another one…love those W poses :p …

Hey! I don’t know if I still have a job or not – so now I can work on my AM stuff as much as I want!
I’m not sure if I should be happy or not.

Anyways, quick video on how the face rig works!

And some more character development crap!

The last couple of weeks after work, I’ve been trying to rig this character. I hope to finish it in time an upcoming short film I’ll be starting when I return to AM in a few weeks. There’s still a lot of things to test and fix to make sure it’s ready. But big thanks  to the guy who made the advance skeleton script. It saved me so much time getting the rig to work the way I wanted.

Character design could be better but I tried to make the rig as simple as possible while keeping a stylised look. I mainly did this so I just easily throw on a different outfit for another character in the short.

I think bits of a few characters from films and shorts that appealed to me leaked into the design slightly but I think thats sort of unavoidable.

Since I’ve been on break from AM I havn’t animated anything so I thought I’d do something simple.

Kissingbook blocking 1

UPDATE 1 (Day1): Base on feedback from the above link, here’s an update: Blocking 2

UPDATE 2 (Day2): Base on feedback from the above link, here’s are a few links of the progress made today: Blocking plus, Spline, Face pass

As suggested by a few people, I added a prop to break up the his eye contact with the off screen character. Also made him sit back at the start so he’s not all in one spot for the whole animation.
I’ll probably have to redo the legs on FK as it’s been a paint trying to clean them up on IK :(

UPDATE 3 (day3): This is probably my last pass on this. There’s still a few polish bits I’d like to do but I’m going to leave this one for now. I was mainly going for speed on this test and this one from planing to completion clocked in at 22hrs.
I’m quite please with the results but looking at it now I should have probably had him interact with the book more. I just wish I thought of that when I was planning the shot.

face cam

Thanks for all emails and comments on this shot. Your suggestions helped out a lot!

I did a little blog cleaning and deleted the progress reels because the multiple loads for each mov file was slowing down the page.
But I’ve had some time lately to put together a demo reel which is really just a selection of shots from the progress reels located at

flowerfoe.com

Also some quick sketches, its been a while.

A while ago my AM mentor, Charles Alleneck, shared a little tip on how he observed people for timing without a stop watch. It blew my mind at the time and it still does. It was such a simple but helpful way of breaking up syllables into frames.
So, the concept is:

Watching people while cycling the words “one one thousand” makes the whole process a lot more fun. So, if you see, say…an arm swing and it takes “one-one..” that would be 12 frames. Although 12 frames for an arm swing is rather slow. It might have to be done a few times to make sure its correct. If it was just “one” then it’s 6 and if you didn’t manage to finish the whole word then it would be around 2-3 frames.

So throw your stopwatch away… possibly at the next mean looking dude you see and find out long it takes to hit him…and how fast he starts running towards you!