Run!

Some of my friends remind me of trad animation lately, so I just gave it a try. First I tried it on DS Animanatee found at Goro's blog. Then I found the software is having trouble with saving file with some colors in it. So I switched into Flash. I wish Animanatee could handle saving properly tho because it's so nice and fun to play with DS all the time.

Doing 2D animation is hard! I find myself relying too much on 3D benefits these days. I find wonky spacing everywhere but it's so hard to go back and fix those, while we can tweak on curves in Maya.

Maybe I should have gone more extreme with this, or more experimental way. Because it's so much easier to do something very hard to do in 3D. maybe next time, dunno.

Happy New Year 2008

and I'm still working slowly. Sorry for lack of post, I actually got some messy doodles to share with but I'm lazy enough not to set my scanner up here and do some settings of my newest friend Vista. I rather go to bed or go online and play counter strike (and get pwned!) Let's hope more to come soon.

I hope all of you had a great holiday.

wip.

Those are still WIP.

It's been a while since I've made this post, here's what I've got so far. Obviously I'm working slower than ever before because of my job. But it's been a lot of fun to think about all of obstacles that I'm having on those characters. I've plotted out some of rough sketches for about 15 seconds sequence for them. then I pre-rigged duck character and made him a move, just to see how he could be moving. Then, some issues on his legs has popped up. Because of design issue, he got such a short leg and it's been aligned in the center of the body, which is not right from anatomical standpoint. Maybe it looks okay on the picture, but those placement of the legs can give the audience some weirdness when he's on the move. So I have to either change his design or animate him like snappy way so that audience won't notice. I'm still thinking about this issue.

Katie, the girl character. I think she got some cuteness but it's not quite there yet. So I've gotta work on that, too.

Rigging part is not that hard for me since that's exactly what I'm doing everyday at work. I've got a lot of techniques like matrix calculations since I'm out of school. so my speed for working on rigging had been improved. But still, making something able to work for telling a story is not easy. It's not easy. I tend to complain on bad management of bad director. they say go to left at first, and all of sudden they start saying go to right. but yea, it's not easy.

P.S. I hope I could have more time to doodle around. I've bought some nice artbooks recently and getting inspired everyday.

Cats will dance, anyhow.

This small dude is from personal project I'm working on. My friend wanted to do facial rig. She, Amy, is my working buddy sitting next to me in the office. Since her speciality is in facial rigging, I will ask her to do so, and I will rig up his body and animate. I got some story for him but not sure how much I can go with it. So I might end up with only animation test. But yea I think it's great chance to work with friend and exchange our knowledge.

The company I'm working on, they made a rig for the feature Valiant, so we do have great resource on feathers. I'm in the middle of researching it. Although I won't do crazy feather setup on him.

I also wrote some scripts and am rewriting my Arc script now. so there will be an update in a short amount of time. But don't expect me high, I'm working hard every day and doing some freelance job as well. Plus, I'm also being crazy about knowing about Matrix now. Matrix is good. and fun.

So yea it seems like I'm busy. I guess I am.

My thoughts on Rigging.

As I proposed before, One Japanese company wanted to see my rigging skill. So I have been working on rigging last 2 weeks. It's been a while since I haven't done much of rigging these days, so I felt rusty. At the same time, I'd learned some of new techniques, so that was really exciting, too.

As my process goes, I just felt my rig sucks. I thought it's pretty cool at some point, but next morning I just feel so bad. It's like drawing or animation. And my presentation is not that good like my friend told me. It was a bit fast fowarded. I sent them a link already, so I hope the company can see what I'm capable of.

Some ppl might see my strong influence on Disney type of rig and GUI. That's true. Since I've been having strong interests on both Technical side and Artistic side of Animation, I have been always searching the way that advances this new medium, in both ways. Then I turned out really positive on the concept of Broken Rig and Bendbow.

It was just a puppet while back when I was in Japan 4 years ago. 3D animator had only ability to rotate some joints, and some IK. But what 2D animators have been doing is not just rotating the joints. They do whatever things to get the shape on the paper. So compared to 2D environment, 3D animator had a huge restriction.

New techniques like Broken Hierarchy or Bendbow has been introduced a while back. And I think this is really great advancement for 3D animation. Althought I haven't broke my rig that much yet, in a good Broken Rig, Animator can easily have the shape that he/she has in their mind. It's more like pencil than puppet. Animator can apply what they know easily, such as Line of Action, Squash and Stretch and Successive Breaking of Joints. I even think Bendbow brings some life into the model.

I think same thing would happen, In next 3 years, we probably see totally different rig. I'm sure that rig would have much less restrictions. As technologies progress, Animator can have more controls, in another word, Animator will have more responsibility to design things on the screen more than now. It's getting close to the pencil IMHO.


Anyways, here goes my reels. for those who haven't checked my latest Animation Reel, I will post it here as well. I noticed things I need to improve, both on Rigging and Animation. So I'm working on it, but always comments are welcome.

Rigging Reel. 46MB Quicktime Sorenson3
Animation Reel. 17MB Quicktime Sorenson3


Sorry for geeky post. I'm tired now. wanna do some Animations, and yeah, drawings!

Siggraph 2006.

Here is my latest animation, still working on it.

I will be flying off to the Boston this weekend. I'm so excited, after all that'll be my first Siggraph. I'll be busy for running around Job Fair Booth. I hope I can get some good experience at there.

I'm also attending some meetings. I'm in for Angie Jones' BOF, so if you are an Animator, and attending that party, I'm looking for seeing you there. I'm not that much of party animal, so I might be a little shy, but I wanna meet a lot of ppl at there.

Have a nice weekend.

Back to Analog

I keep hearing the suggestion that it's better to have a marker so that we can draw some arc or lines on the PC monitor. But I'm using wacom tablet for all of my PC work then, I thought it's okay if I use jsGreasePencil. I had been so stupid that I didn't try by now even though my teacher suggested me to do that.

Just grab a cheap transparent sheet (I'm using left over of trasparent shopping bag), and cheap china marker (just 70 cents in my nearest art store). I just taped the sheet on top of monitor then I can flip that whenever I want to.

The thing is, I feel the same feeling as 2d drawing when I grab the china marker. It's different feeling than grabbing tablet pen. So I seriously feel my brain is switching away from 3d technial brain into 2d drawing brain. In that way I found it easy to pick up some bad tangents, tenshion and better line of action.