After Graduation...

If anyone is looking to do this stuff after you get out of here, and you've got some friends in California, this program sounds pretty intriguing:

Rhythm & Hues Apprentice Program

I'm sure a bunch of other companies have similar things set in place, but I ran across this while doing research for my paper and thought I'd post it on here.

Dynamics

This movie is brought to you by Remembrance of Drinks Past. I rendered the particles interacting with geometry example I showed in class. Note how as the sphere starts rotating the particles no longer bounce off straight but get deflected in the direction of the turn. That's friction for ya!

I also rendered the simple rigid body example:

Sand Art is UH-MAZING!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

She won the Ukraine's version of America's Got Talent. Truly, very creative! And I thought it was a unique way of animating something, here particularly, its sand.

Enjoy!

PS: Don't forget about THE EGG!!

And the Oscar Nominees for Short Film (Animated) are...

French Roast



The music and the acting is what makes this short successful. The story is original and captivating It takes you in the cafe, literally, and grabs your attention until the last second. I really like the fact there is no dialogue, meaning that it relies solely, on the acting, composition and lighting (like a b&W movie). I loved the simple camera work (zoom in, zoom out, and dolly shots) that allows the story to progress without being distracting. This is not the case with the window, I found the reflection of the glass to be a bit distracting especially in the part with intense lighting (the part where the guy was high from all the caffeine). The character design is based on stereotypes, nevertheless, the acting is great and is what gives them a personality in the few minutes they are on screen. You can tell they did their research when the waiter picks up the glass of wine in a very graceful way; I really enjoyed that part. I like this film overall and it's a strong candidate (my personal favorite) to win the Oscar.

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty



I like the way this story began and the combination of 3D and 2D animation makes this interesting. It's a different take on the Sleeping Beauty tale but with a predictable ending. I did manage to watch the whole thing although it felt like half an hour rather than 8 minutes.

The Lady and the Reaper



Agh.... actually, this started great. For the first few minutes I was enjoying this a lot until it got all cartoon-ish and my suspension disbelief went out the window. It has great a concept, too bad it goes downhill after the first few minutes.

Logorama - Trailer



This looks awesome! It would have been my favorite if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't watch the whole movie online. There is a longer trailer on their website. The story is really great!

Wallace and Gromit "A Matter of Loaf and Death" - Trailer



not a big fan.

And the winner is...

For me, it's between French Roast and Logorama. But i'll go with Roasted Coffee just because it has coffee.

What do you guys think?

Meindbender

The latest Computer Graphics Society newsletter links to an article on the Swedish animation studio Meindblender. It contains this movie about a quite complex rig they built for a character they used in a series of Cartoon Network station calls:

Rigging Duplicator - Meindbender from Paul Hellard on Vimeo.

First Texture Assignment!

This is what I created for the first texture assignment - I'm taking it as an independent study this semester. I wanted it to look kind of like a crime noir scene. The paper towels did it.

Spidy Walk

To create this animation, here shown in playblast, I hand animated just one leg. It turns out to be relatively easy to copy animation from one attribute to another with a time offset. If you want to copy the X translation of leg 1 to the X translation of leg 2 but with a 12 frame offset, the expression looks like this:

LegTwo.translateX = `getAttr -t (frame - 12) LegOne.translateX`;

The -t flag tells the getAttr (= get Attirbute) command to query the value at a specific frame. "frame" is the current frame.

Shmoo!

Shmoo was originally a Lil' Abner character, then at some point in time found his way into Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Apparently he was pretty darn popular after WWII.

So now you know.

Shmoo on Wikipedia

AI Spiders

Spidy

So why am I posting a spider movie?

Encore une Animation Française

Get Out
by Esma-Movie

Yet another French student animation from ESMA (via Drawn!). A group project of course.