Author: Greg2B

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Daily 365 Downloadable Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Lesson 6 Homework



This is my submission to roberleger.net Xpresso Lesson number 6. The image above will goto the vimeo screen cast that I have of it working. Unfortunately I was not able to render the full quality screen cast due to to time but I will render the full quality one and switch it out.

The only issue is reading the Xpresso nodes, so for that I have created a mini gallery here so you can check it out. (WordPress is having some issues so this will be up in a bit.) You can also check out the My Xpresso setup in the C4D file as well. My set up it pretty much the same for each item just different ranges on the range mapper.

I made a little teaser at the beginning using the android droid mascot. I did all of the movement  with the(2) animators except for the hands and head. Oddly enough though the item I used to show the espresso is a an apple iPad…

 

 

 

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Animation News Daily 365

Cool Golf Mini Prev + Legend of Korra

So apparently I made  the mistake of rendering my cool golf animation at my preview render instead of my full render so I have a mini preview for now until I render the full thing.

Any avatar fan will probably have good guess about what this is. It’s a image from the upcoming series Legend of Korra the follow-up of Avatar the Last Airbender. Other than one other image of Korra’s back this is the first time any one has seen her up close that I know of.  It’s a pretty epic picture showing her already using fire with her natural element of water.

For Avatar fans this is highly anticipated show which makes this new image sweet yet sour since it seems now that the show won’t air until 2012 instead of late 2011, November.  So fans will have to wait a little longer for this to come out. One can only hope that I will be as good as first series with anticipation so high who know what might happen if it’s not as good or better than Avatar The Last Airbender.

 

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Daily 365

Xpresso Task Test Droid

This is a quick render I put together to test my Animator for Robert legers Xpresso task. This one took me quite a while to get working, I had a complicated setup like most it seems before he gave the hint about just using a range mapper. Which helped  but I still had some trouble getting it to work even though I’ve used the range mapper even before I started these tasks.

So I watch some of his older tuts and it clicked that I was just using the wrong values to map every thing. My setup is fairly simple I think just takes a lot of repetition of connections to get it to work for the different values. I say in the Vimeo Xpresso group that other people where having some trouble as well. Some of the solutions seem somewhat complicated for my taste.

This scene was inspired by the android commercials with their mascot.

I will post my final file after I tweak it bit and maybe add some more controls.

 

 

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General

After Effects For the IPhone

Since tonight is a render night and I retracted my post from the day before I though I would still write about an interesting picture that has been going around twitter. I found out about by a retweet from @beerad.

This is an interface for After Effects for an IPhone 4. I have no idea if this is real or not but regardless would you want to use this? I think I would try if it I could although as it stand the interface is obviously not usable. I know there are editing apps out their for Iphone and other smart phone devices but the ones I’ve seen are designed to work in a small area where this is obviously not.

I have tried an animating one for my android and it was hard to use and not really intuitive.  It would be neat to work on stuff on a mobile devices though such as an Ipad or another tablet but I doubt the touch interface would lend its self to programs like this well.

I wonder if their will be a day when programs that are only made for desktop/laptop computers will be made and usable on small screens and would anyone use them?

 

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General

Vote for me – more shameless self promotion

This is just a quick post to add to yet another place where I’ve posted to vote for me. I suppose if I did it every where else I should do it on my own site so here it goes.

Vote for me in the the AETuts+ Photoshop contest #19

http://ae.tutsplus.com/articles/news/aetuts-photoshop-contest-time-for-your-vote/

You can also vote for another one. I did (including myself) since some of them are really cool.

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Daily 365 Downloadable

Minion Character Rigs

I thought it would be cool if I cleaned up my my rig for the minion character and posted it so people can play with and maybe make their own cool characters. It’s noting to pretty inside so this is one of those as is type of files.

The rig has the ability to control the eye(iris) position, the eye lids for the top and bottom independently (lazy eye), both lids at once for a squinty look, and a full close. The mouth has 4 poses including smile, which I fixed now so that each range corresponds to a pose (ie: 0-.99, 1 to 1.99, etc…). Before I just had 0,1,2,3.

The arms are fully IK and so is the feet but it only allows for small movement since he has now legs… There is an also controllers for the middle top of the head and the bottom by the legs to add some extra movement.

It’s self contained in a zip file.

My other quick submission is my style frame for the cool golfers logo animation. I finished all of the animation correctly now which looks pretty good. I was planning on rendering it to today but I ran out of time.

My goal with the final design is to try and make it seem on top of the grass or some what coming out of it without a light really beaming down on it.

I still need to work on the lightning of the logo and I notice some errors in the text.

The biggest error that I missed though is that in all of my previous submissions I spelled golfer golgers. It’s funny how you can miss things like that. I wish cinema had a spell check for times like this. I’m sure someone made a script for this.

 

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Daily 365

G2B Logo/Title Idea

Something that has been long over do is having some sort of logo to title that I can identify with for my work. Above are few ideas of about 60 or so variation I worked with. In developing it I wasn’t sure what sort of image I would use for representation so I decided to go the type route.

The type is based on the killogram font that I modified. The 1st and 2nd row are essentially the same except the G is pulled in at angle slightly. The second column I adjusted the how the G and 2 come together.I think I’m leaning towards the ones on the left.

The two at the bottom are the long form version. The second one is the standard text minus the adjusted G. The third row I took out part of the edges for each letter to make it look like it’s cutting into it. I working on trying to make it look more as a whole piece. I thinking of having one version for the short and an 2nd for the long version.

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Daily 365

Tuts+ Minion App Intro Final


 This is the my final tuts+ minion app intro animation. I submitted it aetuts+ contest since I was inspired by their Despicable Me tutorial. I made it seem more like an app by adding a finger that clicks on of the minion and he starts dancing. Not sure how this would work in the real app though….

The animation for this final part went pretty smoothly. I was able to rig the second character fairly measly know what to do from rigging the first one. I also notice some flaws I missed before such as the teeth actually taking the color shift of the character and not staying white. Not a big issue but its noticeable on the red minion.

The other flaw I noticed is the shadow on vector minion is a little off. I have expression setup on the cg one to follow just the x but it didn’t apply correctly to the other so I just animated the shadow.

I really like how vimeo keeps the aspect ration of the video regardless of its size unlike YouTube. I’ve seen it done on other videos but not to this extreme on the vertical axis.

Now the only thing left is for figure out how to get this in the app and the rest of the app working. If only the app inventor would stop disconnecting after 5 mins.

 

Sound Effects from flashkit.com

BG music from music-for-video.com

 

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Daily 365

Tuts+ Minion App Intro Animation


This is the animation I started that I might submit to the tuts+ contest. Might because it clearly is unfinished and I don’t want to submit something partially done. Although sometimes it’s better to have something instead of nothing I don’t want to submit this yet.

We will see the dead line is tomorrow…today. Regardless of if I submit it or not I have had a fun time working on this. My major snags was deciding how I want to set up the character. I think I procrastinated for a but trying to think of the best way.

In the end the body, arms and feet are separate parts. I used the puppet tool in combination with the DuDuF IK script to make the arms and feet IK. using this script makes making IK chains so easy then it use to be using Dan ebberts ik expression where you had to adding the code in your self.

I added few puppet point on the body to add a little more movement which is probably unnoticed because if I push it too far the arms look out-of-place. I also have controls for the eye-ball, eye lids, and the mouth with few poses.

I have another minion that I made so that there are two different ones  but I haven’t rigged it up yet.

One flaw I notice is when the arms switch directions from bending up to bending down. I need to work on making it smoother.

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Daily 365 Downloadable

Despicable Me Minion Tuts+ App Day 2

I worked more on my possible submission for the aetuts contest although i need to work out more of a clear idea for what I want to do. My submission for today is more work on the app I started yesterday.

I wanted to increase the functionality of the app so that it does look completely broken when the phone is flipped. I also wanted each minion to link to their respective sites.

I was able to figure out how to have different images for the screen orientations and link the minions to their sites. My issue came up when placing them. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to layer object and place them. The I used the image sprite which seems to like to jump around and not stay still.

There doesn’t seem to be to many option for alignment so I might be asking the forums for some help if I can find some one with a similar issue in online resources. You can check out my source if you want below.

MinionLayout