Bird Flight Masterclass - Clip 2

I've posted another clip from my Bird Flight Animation Masterclass. In this one I show how "Successive Breaking of Joints" bring fluidity to a bid's wing during the wingbeat. 

Find the full lecture on Gumroad: https://brendanbody.gumroad.com/l/zrzbdz 

Bird Flight Masterclass - Clip 1

Here’s an excerpt from my bird flight animation masterclass where I talk about one of the things, to me, that help make the movement of the wings during flight more convincing.

Bird Flight Animation Masterclass

I've compiled a lecture covering some my observations and ideas about bird flight into a 'masterclass' and it's available on Gumroad at https://brendanbody.gumroad.com/l/zrzbdz.

I'm very happy with how it's been received, the lecture has been online for less than a week and currently holds consistent 5-star reviews. 

Camera Blocking Class

Here’s how I used to explain camera blocking to students. I showed them this step-keyed animation scene staged in different ways. Often students, would present their scenes in a neutral way, often with poor composition and flat staging. Perhaps something like this -

Flat, Static, poorly-framed Camera Blocking



'Soap Opera' Camera Blocking
Here's the same animation but presented as a wide establishing shot, then a series of over-the-shoulders. It’s basic but works a lot better than before. The characters look more appealing in 3/4, we can read their expressions better & we know who to focus on at different points.



If we look at the camera placement you can see that the camera stays the same side of the characters. There is an invisible line between the characters called an axis of action and, to avoid confusion, we keep the camera on the same side of this line.



Cross The Line
Here I have the camera on the wrong side of the line. The characters now face the same way over the two shots which feels odd. I was always frustrated this ‘wrong’ version wasn't as jarring as I’d hoped. I think because we have the table and other character to orient ourselves.



Refined Camera Blocking
From our basic example we can start to plus it, enhancing the story with subtle changes. Here the shots gradually get tighter during the sequence ending up with singles on the two characters. This gives the middle part of the scene more intensity.



Further Refinement
We can take these ideas further, in this version I've also added dollies to the shots where the boy puts his head on his hands - emphasising his dreamy reverie. I use a stronger up shot on the girl as she stands and shoot the boy in a down shot, which gives her a greater feeling of dominance.

Sign Opening Shot
It’s interesting to experiment with the establishing shot, it can have a big affect on the sequence. Here, starting with a shot on the café sign emphasises the location.



Point Of View Opening Shot
Here I start with a close up on the boy character and add a point of view shot as he looks to the girl, now the audience are encouraged to see him as the protagonist in the scene. Their empathy for him will be stronger, giving his emotions and eventual rejection more weight.

Main Gaits for a Horse and Panther

I did these quite a while ago for an iAnimate creature introduction, part of me would like to redo them to fix all the mistakes but unfortunately I don't have the time right now, so I'm just posting them as they are. Maybe this is helpful to some animators starting out with quadrupeds.

Trex Scene

To learn a bit of Arnold, I did a quick render of a Tyrannosaurus scene I demonstrate in my iAnimate Creature Workshop. I also added some sound effects from https://freesound.org/



This is a video of the class, edited down to some highlights but will hopefully still give you some insight into my approach and process for a scene like this.



Since the animation was pretty simple, I thought the shot would benefit from some extra creatures. I hoped these would add some interest and a greater sense of life to the final result. Here I've highlighted these animations - a flying pterosaur and some small scavenging dinosaurs based upon compsognathus.

Weight Theory

Creature Animation workshop 3 - Lecture: Scale from iAnimate on Vimeo.

Here is a little animation experiment I conducted as part of my iAnimate fantasy creature workshop to demonstrate how I think about adding scale and weight to characters and creatures.

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.

iAnimate Lecture

Hello. Here's a little excerpt from the lecture I gave for the online animation school iAnimate earlier this year. I talk about birds.

Legend of the Guardians Showreel

Here's a compilation of some of my shots from Legend of The Guardians, a film I worked on for almost two years.

I'm responsible for all animation although there are a couple of shots where someone else animated the background characters - where Nyra says "Owlet, that one says you're his brother" and also where Ezylryb says "Soren, you did what was right". All cycles used in the flying shots are my own.

Eric Guaglione - The Early Years of 3D

3D animation is a rare profession, one where the average age of the people working in the industry is higher than the age of the industry itself. Eric Guaglione, Animal Logic's head of animation was one of the few people involved in the early days of 3D animation when the medium was taking its first tentative steps into creature and character animation.

Eric started in the film industry in 1982, the year that the original Tron film was released. In the following exert from my interview with him he describes starting work at Digital Productions where he was employed as a computer animator alongside Chris Bailey and Bill Kroyer, one of the animators on the original Tron film.

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Here are some examples of the work Eric describes. The opening sequence of the 1986 film Labyrinth is below and the 1988 Prudential Commercial where Eric assisted in creating the eagle can be viewed HERE.





I've done a bit research and I believe the Cray X-MP supercomputer is the computer Eric talks about at Digital Productions. It was used to render the high polygon count (for the time) models at film resolution. In 1985 Bell Labs (a research and development organization) purchased a Cray X-MP/24 for $10.5 million along with eight DD-49 1.2 GB drives for an additional $1 million.



It required approximately $12,000 per month for electricity, and approximately $50,000 monthly in maintenance. Many in the industry claimed that this kind of expense could not be justified by the kinds of contracts that existed in the effects industry at the time.


Here is a picture of Bill Kroyer working at an early 3D work station. An interview with Bill where he describes the even more bizarre process of animation on Tron can be found HERE.

I find it astonishing to think back to these first days of 3D animation and contemplate what it must have been like to try to create animation with a spontaneous feel with that equipment and the incredibly labour intensive processes involved. Current computer animators owe a great debt to the artistry, talent and perseverance of these early pioneers in this art form.

If you would like to hear more from Eric, you can find my previous 'Animation Bodcast' where he talks about an early Roger Rabbit 2 test HERE.