Welcome to the Archive section of the blog!

Maya free Tips #05. Polish proxy helpers

Posted on January 15, 2023
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

Being a bit more fluent with DaVinci Resolve, I was a bit more creative with that one :-) I hope you like it, it was a lot of fun to make!

Credits to all the people featured, it is all for educational purposes under fair use restrictions.

Featured in the video are :
https://vimeo.com/benjaminwillis
https://twitter.com/alwanneroy
and https://www.instagram.com/bbrunoliveira/

Maya free tips #4. Selection sets

Posted on January 15, 2023
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

Tip #04 for my Maya Free Tricks series. “Selections sets” a Production shots case study.

As an animator, your role is to create memorable shots from scratch but sometimes, you might be asked to take over someone else’s shot which can lead to a bunch or surprises. Here are are series of tricks to get out of tricky situations.

MAYA FREE TIPS #3. The power of alembics

Posted on December 21, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

New week, new Tip #03 for my Maya Free Tricks series: “The Power of Alembics” with a new animated intro and music.

Follow the hashtag #freeMayaTipswithMoustache on Linkedin to stay updated and don’t hesitate to share.

If you don’t happen to work at a top feature studio, it is quite unlikely your rigs are fully compatible with Maya’s Cache Playback or Parallel evaluation so working on shots with several characters can be extremely painful and slow, unless you know about Geometry Caches and Alembic caches for example.

Here is the link to my GitHub profile page and GPU generator script:
https://github.com/OliveMoustache/Public/blob/master/mighty_GPU_generator.py

Maya free tips #2. Wai Khru the easy way

Posted on December 21, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

Second tip of my Maya Free Tricks series, follow the hashtag #freeMayaTipswithMoustache to stay updated and don’t hesitate to share.

It is quite unlikely your character would need to perform a Wai Khru but most likely your character would need to act while kneeling and this can seem very tricky at first if you want to get clean arcs on your pelvis.

Maya free tips #1. Pesky keys.

Posted on December 21, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

First tip of my Maya Free Tricks series. I am not exactly sure what format those tips will be in but today it is a video as it is a simple trick for situations where you find a stray key in the graph editor.

Additional info I will add to the video on the next update.

if you want to isolate the annoying control, copy and paste the name of the control after the following Mel command. This will select the offending control.

select -r

Keep an eye on this space for more basic to advanced animation tips or follow the hashtag ##freemayatipswithmoustache on LinkedIn

Maya free tricks!

Posted on December 4, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

I am about to launch a series of tips and tricks for Autodesk’s Maya animators covering things that are probably not known by new or non-technical users.

With close to 15 years of experience in Maya as animator, modeler, character TD and possibly TD, I have acquired a vast amount of knowledge that could help non-technical animators to optimise their animation work and better understand the intricacies of CG animation.

God-like superpowers

Posted on November 12, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Character design, Drawings, Education | Leave a Comment

I am one of those art snobs whose goal is nothing less than to be able to draw like the late Kim Jung Gi and only rely on my imagination to create work.

It doesn’t have to be that way!

If like me, you are only at the start of your artistic journey, this mindset can hinder your efforts and be detrimental to your progress.

We take for granted that all the best work is created from imagination and undermine how much research and references can participate to the creation of the most exciting artwork.

Kim Jung Gi himself was not creating art out a vacuum, instead he was digging into a mental library he crafted over years of studies. Years of looking at and analyzing references.

Few weeks ago, my fellow Basque Vis Dev artist extraordinaire Sylvain Marc, unveiled his new Schoolism class and looking at the trailer, I was once again in awe at his very distinctive work characterized by simple bold shapes as statements and intricate details … as whispers. I am feeling poetic this morning. As you can see on the trailer, Sylvain gathered a very large collection of buildings and clocks references before opening Photoshop and this is certainly what makes his work stand out compared to artists using formulaic and generic assumptions.

An other example I would like to mention for the use of references to give more umpf to your work is the character design of 10 years best selling manga: Once Piece.

I am not an avid One Piece reader but I can’t help going back to Eiichiro Oda’s best seller and marvel at his striking character designs.

For a very long time I simply admired the bold designs and once again assumed they were created out of thin air when in reality, real characters and caricatures of those real characters are what the world of One Piece is populated with.

Had I not came across this fantastic post on Quora, I would have never thought about it and just assumed Oda was just gifted by god-like abilities.

There are a ton of examples on the thread so make sure you check out the article :

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-people-can-look-like-anime-characters-without-changing-their-looks

That’s it for today, I hope this article will incite you to look at references for inspiration and stop behaving like an artist snob!

“Arcane” (Fortiche/Riot games)

Posted on August 5, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

_{[Just to organise things a bit, instead of having separate posts for the same movie, TV show, I will keep updating the original post so you should consider those blog entries as work in progress and would invite you to revisit them once in a while.]}

I am surprised I never posted about it… ah actually I did on Facebook but the way things are going, it is time to get back to blogs.

So like an UFO, Arcane crashed in our tidy little animation garden and blew everyone away.

The cel-shaded look wasn’t revolutionnary for anyone who has been in the industry for a while. It immediately reminded me of Aardman’s Pierce Sisters and even more “Meet buck” and “Salesman Pete” by Supinfocom dropouts Marc and Denis Bouyer .

Personally what blew me away was the story and the acting. Jinx acting is just unbelieavable and is a masterclass in secondary action. I will have to write a blog post just on that topic! The acting and the story wouldn’t work as well if they weren’t also served by some incredible storyboards/layouts and camera work obviously.

So here is a collection of behind the scenes, interviews, related articles and interesting videos I found on the net starting with the first of a 5 parts making-of series that just got released:

The following Making-of video is an older one:

Interview with Arcane’s anim sup Barth Maunoury”Our goal was to find a good balance between realism and ‘cartoon’ style. Since our characters have semi-realistic proportions, they have to move and behave in a realistic way with weight and solid body-mechanics. But to keep the appeal and avoid any uncanny valley effect, we also had to bring traditional animation techniques. That’s why we didn’t do mocap [motion capture] but only keyframe animation that allows us to control our acting performance and aesthetic.”
https://mashable.com/article/netflix-arcane-league-of-legends-animation

Alexis Wanneroy shares how the most successful Netflix show of all time came to fruition
https://blog.syncsketch.com/production-spotlight/arcane-fortiche/

“The bad guys”

Posted on April 28, 2022
Filed Under Animation, Education | Leave a Comment

Let’s celebrate Dreamworks’ latest feature: “The bad guys”. A movie that brings a breath of fresh air in an industry where things tend to look a little bit too similar as explained by director Pierre Perifel in the Inbtwn interview.

Here is the trailer followed by an in progress list of trailers, interviews and behind the scenes material.