11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - fifth pass from djotaku on Vimeo.

11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - fourth pass from djotaku on Vimeo.

11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - third pass from djotaku on Vimeo.

Just need to lip sync the lil guy.

Just a little more left on the lil guy, then lip sync and final touchups!

11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - second pass from djotaku on Vimeo.

11 Second Club - Nov 2007 - first pass from djotaku on Vimeo.This is my first pass. I’ve gone through and animated nearly everything for the character on the right (mancandy) except the lip sync. To see it in full HD awesome quality, follow the link containing the video’s title right under the video.

I’ve just finished up my second pass. I finished up Mancandy’s animation and did the arm/hand animation on lil guy. I think it’s coming along very well for my first attempt at something like this. I’m going to set it to render tonight at respower and I hope to find all or most of the frames to be done by the time I get up tomorrow.

The 11 Second Club is a great animation learning tool and a fun contest. Every month they post an audio file that is approximately 11 seconds long (it’s 12 this time) and the members create an animation to go along. At the beginning of the next month, the members vote on the entries and a winner is declared. The emphasis is on the acting of the characters and the backgrounds/props are not supposed to matter. I thought it would be a great thing to do so that I can work on my acting, especially emotions and lip syncing. When I saw this month’s clip, I knew that I had to enter for the month of November! It’s a clip from one of our favorite movies, The Birdcage. I will probably be posting my progress as I work on it. Look for my progress over the next few days.

Ok, I got a better version uploaded. The video is MUCH better quality and the audio is better as well. However, the conversion to flash caused it to go a little out of sync. It’s still not as bad as it was before. Still, for someone like me who’s trying to share their creative vision, it’s quite annoying. Enjoy the improved version. To see my original version, just follow the Vimeo link and download the original .mov file. You’ll notice that the first part is a bit more in sync.

I finally finished rigging up Nick’s body. His face is yet to be done, but at least I finished up this milestone. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to start work on the facial rigs right away. I’m leaning more towards beginning modeling on my next character, Wallace. This is because at the NY Blender Conference (which was awesome!) I spoke with Bassam about how he handles facial animation and he told me he used latices in combination with shape keys. Every other book I’ve read uses shape keys exclusively or armature-driven shape keys. I figured that while I’m thinking about the type I’m going to use that I can hold off on that and make an armature that will allow me to achieve good results as well as not being a real pain in the butt to use. Also, I’ve done a lot of work on this armature and added a lot of constraints, which I’ve never done before. I think I’m going to make this my general purpose rig for human characters for a while, so I’d like to take the time to get it right - or as right as possible. Then, after a few shorts I’ll either refine the armature or create a fresh one.

I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about 15-20 minutes to get set up.

Collisions from djotaku on Vimeo.

But you may notice a problem here. The ball appears to accelerate as it leaves the bricks. That’s because the tutorial was just a quick example of how to do the task at hand. So I set about to find out what was going on and why my ball was not obeying the conservation of energy. It turns out that the settings as described in the magazine kept continuously giving the ball energy. So I had to adjust it so that it would only get energy at the beginning. After that, I got something much more realistic.

It’s something I need to keep reminding myself as I work on getting myself more and more competent with Blender and 3D animation in general. For example, check out the complex rigging I did for Nick’s hand for “Sugar”:

It’s not complex in the sense of having a ton of bones, but complex in the sense that it has a few pointless bones. I tried to come somewhat close to “reality” by making sure that the bones of the fingers are connected to the bones of the hand. These bones don’t really do anything as I don’t want a hand to be able to bend there. Afterall, I don’t need to duplicate anatomy. I don’t have hips or anything like that. The body will move just as well with less bones and will be less complicated for moving if I simplify it as below: