andy’s art blog

I really enjoyed this one, mainly because Degas’ sculptures are just so brilliant to look at and study. I love the exuberance and joyousness in them; loose but still completely controlled and articulate.

Using just four colours - ivory black, titanium white, cad red and yellow ochre helped a lot… apparently Zorn used this limited palette often and I can see why. You can still keep temperature relationships correct (cooling with black and white, warming with red and yellow ochre), even if the exact colours are not accurate. Great for figure work and sculpture studies like this where drawing and values are the main concern.

 I used last month’s 11 sec club as a chance to try out my Pleb rig, and see what rigging problems crop up during animation. For the most part it held together well, though the makeshift IK-shoulder-elbow I set up for the shot to keep the elbow pinned to the ground could’ve used a little more finesse. Other than that, there’s still some tweaking to the face controls I want to do, and add some corrective shapes to the fingers. Here’s the shot rendered:

11 seconds, 2.38MB, 768×432

For the curious, here’s all the curves, nurbs and nulls driving the face setup. It looks a mess, but I assure you there is some method to the madness, and after it’s all hidden away the controls are, I think, quite nice and simple to use.

Primary face weighting is more or less done, now I just need to sculpt corrective shapes on the eyebrows and mouth to get certain expressions looking the way I want. Here’s some test poses of the weighting so far:

I just recieved in the post both volumes of Drawn to Life, a brilliantly put together collection of Walt Stanchfield’s Disney drawing class handouts. During art college I printed out and bound the pdfs that Animation Meat used to have of the notes, but it’s really much nicer having them properly published in book form. Plus it looks like there’s about twice as many handouts collected in the books than what Animation Meat used to have. In any case, Walt’s notes are priceless gems of drawing instruction, and I’m looking forward to thoroughly reading through the crisp new pages of the books and seeing what I missed out on before. Just flipping through it now makes me giddy.

On a related note, I thought I’d share this drawing done by Mr. Stanchfield which I managed to snatch up a few years ago, of an “Old Presbyterian Church”, Ballard, according to the writing on the reverse side of the picture.

Just for fun, I wanted to see what would happen with just the default envelope weighting applied to the finished mesh, no tweaking at all, no blend shapes. A quick pose later, and here you go:

Ok, kinda messy; but I’m happy that (excepting the blown-out areas on the head, chest and elbows) the rig has enough deforming objects set up that even default weighting allows for some decent posing, especially in the face. And the controls set up for him are fairly intuitive and easy to use, I’m trying to keep as many of the controls as possible on-rig, so it feels like pulling around a puppet or claymation rig. Some features built into the rig so far:

- stretchy IK/FK switching on arms and legs
- stretchy IK/FK hybrid on torso and neck with parent switching
- volume preservation for stretchiness with multiplier control to alter the intensity of the effect
- bendy controls on arms, legs, torso, and neck
- auto eyelids with tweak controls for sculpting eyelid shape

Up next is getting the envelope weighting in shape, and adding corrective shapes on the face and joints.