Matt Forcum is a professional Motion Graphics artist. He currently works at the Iona Group, and lectures in 3D character animation at Bradley University, Illinois. In his spare time, he works on a web comic series called Robot Beach, all about a Robot who dreams of surfing, and his adventures with his friends, a crab and a seagull. We speak about the strip, his short film project, Anabelle's Bistro, and many more topics of common interest.
These techniques are simple in and of themselves, but together, provide the basis of a powerful workflow.
UPDATE: For Slightly Chaotic below, I've added a quick screen grab to illustrate the scene hierarchy.
Everyone can come up with their own, and it is dependent on your project. In this instance, a camera rig is something I'd use again. Each asset might be imported into another scene at some point. Below is one example of how to split up your library:
This works within the context on a single project. Later, you may want to put your camera rig - or any other assets - in a higher "universal" folder, much like a texture library you may use for multiple projects.
Finally, if you like the show, why not nominate the process diary in the 5th annual podcast awards?
Nominations close October 18th, so get nominating, and pass this on! Some categories which might be suitable are: Education, Cultural/Arts, or even just general. I don't expect to win, but seeing a nomination would be nice. Cheers, guys, and see you back here in a week or two for the WIP video.
Steve Ogden is a professional 2d and 3d artist. He currently works at Firaxis games, but in his spare time he works on personal projects, such as Moon Town. It was originally planned as an animated web series, but Steve decided to switch mediums in order to get the story out in a much more effective and immediate way.
Steve happily discusses his inspirations, past work, and thoughts on storytelling.
In other news: my personal dot-com is now live! Head on over to paulcaggegi.com now and check it out. I'll still be keeping this blog up because it drives the podcast, but I shall be using the dot-com to host various files and extra content.
Welcome to this month's work in progress video. I offer a couple of tips this month, to enhance your rig, using action constraints, and set-driven shape-keys.
I like to use these techniques to enhance an already functional rig. They can add some extra deformation specific to the area you wish to control.
Action constraints can be assigned to multiple bones/objects, all driven by the property of a control bone. The example I show here is a simple hand pose, using the Y-scale of the hand controller as the driver.
You can build whole libraries of poses this way, so that your controls are alot more functional when animating a character.
Shape keys add specific deformations to areas where the armature is not deforming the bone adequately. One such area is the shoulder joint. By creating a shape key, and using a control bone to drive it, you can quickly fix problematic deformations around areas like the shoulders, driven only when the character is posed a certain way.
There are more applications of these two methods. I like to use them to allow brow furrows to appear when a character scowls, or biceps to flex when a character clutches his fists - the possibilities are limitless.
I hope you gain some insight into how to set these techniques up on a rig, and apply them to your own rigs in future.
REMINDER: I have to take the process diary on a necessary hiatus next month, so no updates will be posted during that time. However I will respond to any feedback, comments, or emails you care to send me.
Paul Caggegi is a Sydney-based Video editor and 3D Motion-graphics designer. He is currently working on a short sci-fi anime vidcast series entitled "Character Development"
