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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]