iAnimate Podcast

I was asked to be a part of the iAnimate podcast series, the results of which can be found here

I'll be an instructor on their upcoming creature workshop on Flight and fantasy creatures. More information available here

Goose Animation from Bird Flight Demo

I recently did a bird flight demonstration at an animation conference called Move Summit in Scotland. It's always a fun, if a somewhat daunting challenge to animate in front of people - not least because anatomy expert Stuart Simida was in the audience!

In the demo I created a basic flight cycle using a goose character, here is the animation below with an added background and glide.




I've also added a donate button to this blog. Many people have contacted me to say that they have found my bird flight tutorial useful. That is great to hear and I am happy to give this and my other tutorials away for free but the website does cost me money to host and I don't really use it for anything else now. So if you have enjoyed my bird flight tutorial and you have a spare buck or two I would really appreciate the help and you would make sure the tutorial continues to be a resource for yourself and others to use. Many Thanks!

Article and Archaeopteryx Exhibit

For the last 8 month or so I'be been creating a museum exhibit featuring the bird-like dinosaur archaeopteryx as part of my current research, here's an article on the ideas and processes behind it.

https://theconversation.com/flight-of-the-living-dead-how-animation-brings-extinct-species-back-to-life-86737

And here are some pictures of the exhibit itself

The bones assembling into the animal

Flying

Standing

Walk Cycle Creation Time-lapse

This is a recording of my process for animating a walk cycle in Autodesk Maya. I created the video as a tutorial for the animation students of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. At this point in the course the students have already created a walk cycle using 2D, drawn animation so I aim to show a process that follows on from their traditional training. However, I hope this video will also be helpful to other animation students or anyone that is interested in learning more about the computer animation process.



There are quite a lot of pauses, extra camera rotations and general mouse waving as I was talking as I was animating. 

XROMM and Biomechanics Studies Benefit Animators

Some of the latest research occurring in biomechanics could be of great benefit to animation - especially VFX where recreations of creatures is often focused around being as realistic as possible.

I had the great honour of visiting the Royal Veterinary College last week and a piece of imaging technology that caught my eye was the XXROMM machine - a camera that films x-ray images. It has some limitations, only shooting a confined area means it's only able to capture small animals in full. However the images of these animals are very illuminating.

Here is a partridge scrambling up an incline under X-ray (XROMM)



As I've mentioned before, birds' wing bones are often hard to locate (due to the feathers) so to get a clear look at them is very insightful. It's also interesting to see and try to understand how their legs work too - the first joint (femur) is often hidden and, although the overall leg construction is similar to mammal quadruped hind limbs, it does not adhere to the same constrained linkage - which often keeps the femur and foot more or less parallel to each other.

I hope to write more about how bird legs work as well as how and why they evolved soon. But I digress. I was particularly intrigued by the implication of the advanced use of these machines -  by using twos XROMMs at different vantage points it is possible to 3D track animal bones as they move.

The study mentioned in the video above looked into the mobility of two different suborders of turtles  - those with their hips fused to their shells (Pleurodira) and turtles' who's hips are free to move (Cryptodira).

Cryptodira

Pleurodira

As you can see, the study quite conclusively shows that the turtles who's hips are free to move, use this ability to increase the range of movement from their hind limbs and therefore have a much better walking performance. Which is interesting in itself, but for me, the ability to watch how bones work in an animal while they move is truly fascinating. The article can be found here.

As 3D animators working with an animation rig we are generally trying to animate from the bones outward - the muscles, skin and fur usually being added by other departments. So the idea that we may be able to finally see what these bones are up to in real creatures under all that soft tissue could mean a much greater understanding of animal locomotion and an advancement in terms of realism in their movements.

A library of XXROMM movies can be found here.

Flight Page Update

I've just completed a quick update on my bird flight page - now the videos should play in all browsers. I received a few emails saying they were broken, technically there was nothing wrong with the movie files but unfortunately that type of embedded quicktime has fallen out of favour with most browsers. I could still get them to work on safari and internet explorer but on chrome and firefox they were bust. So now they're embedded from vimeo. However, if you want the movie files to study and step through, as animators are want to do, you can download the quicktimes from the vimeo page.

Just in case you don't know where the download button is on vimeo

Cloudy 2 and Mune Showreel

I thought it might be nice to put some of the work from the two animated features I did back in 2013 and 14 into a mini reel. The first film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 was a real challenge for me, I had done a lot of VFX creature work coming into it and adjusting to the style of animation took some time. As the project developed I gradually became accustomed to it and started to think more in the style, pushing poses more and able ignore my instincts toward realism. I feel the animation leads and supervisors felt this too and I was gradually trusted with bigger, more interesting shots. I think the highlight for me, is the Chester shot where he is presenting in the arena, I really tried to push the poses, gestures and arcs is this shot. It's a level of stylisation that I would never never have tried prior to this project.

The film project I joined after Cloudy 2 was Mune: Guardian of the Moon, unfortunately this film doesn't seem to have come to much, which is a great shame because the design and colour work are really stunning. I really like the film and feel very privileged to have worked on this small, artist driven project. Animation-wise, I feel that this film was really good for me as it cemented some of the things I had learned on Cloudy 2. As one of the more senior animators I was given some really interesting shots to animate and, as the animation wasn't as stylised, I felt I could combine my knowledge of creatures, weight and anatomy from VFX with the zip of the Cloudy style. I think I grew a lot through these two projects, learning a huge amount and becoming a more confident and competent character animator.