Joinin' Jamaroos!

It's funny...when I switched from 3D animation to technical development at Reel FX several years ago, I was pretty much ready to just let animation go and never do it again.  Even though several friends and colleagues responded to this change with comments like, "Once an animator, always an animator," I wasn't convinced.  I mean, animation at that time had sorta become an artsy synonym for "stress" in my book.  Why on earth would I want to pick it up again?

I bet you know where this is going.

Yup.  I'm animating again.

You know what else?

It's fun again!

Zap the zebra from Jamaroos

Early last week I sat down with Dale Carman, one of the co-founders of Reel FX, who had approached me about possibly contributing both creatively and technically to a side project of his called Jamaroos.  It's a series of interactive books for the iPhone and iPad (and related iDevices) that aims to entertain and engage young readers with fun stories and characters.  The first book in the series, Z is for Zap, is already available for the iPad on the iOS app store, with an iPhone version coming soon.

I quickly became interested in the project, and joined the Jamaroos team as a freelance animator/developer.  For now I'm helping to complete animation on the next book in the series, J is for Jag, but I hope to get a taste of the development side of things in the future.  And yes, I'll probably do a little voice work as well.  :)

So what makes animating on Jamaroos so fun?  After working on it for the past week or so, I think it has to do with simplicity: the characters are very simply designed and drawn, and the animation tool we're using has very simple controls for animating them.  This forces us to keep our animation simple, but don't think that simple means boring.  These books are all about rewarding kids' touches on the screen with entertaining moments, and I'm blessed to be creating these moments alongside my friend Barrett Lewis, one of my former Reel FX compadres and a creative lead on the Jamaroos project.  We're constantly throwing ideas back and forth, and are pouring all of our animation knowledge into these characters to make their performances as lively and whimsical as possible while working within the constraints of the animation tool.  I'm constantly amazed at what we're able to come up with using nothing but 2D images assembled into simple hierarchies, and animated mostly using position, rotation, and scale.  It's forcing us to think much more creatively, which just adds to the fun of it all once we see what we can actually pull off.

So yeah, I'm animating again, and I'm having a blast doing it.  What's more, I'm only doing it part-time, so I can do other work as well, like VO and acting...

...and maybe teaching?

More on that later.  ;)

Winnin' with minions, part 2

Dang, this just keeps gettin' cooler.  :)

Last night, another award was bestowed up on "Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem," the 3D ride film that was produced at Reel FX for the fine folks at Universal Orlando and Illumination Entertainment.  This one was from the Visual Effects Society, another of the major names in award-giving for the CG/VFX industry, and was for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project.

To win both an Annie Award and a VES Award in the same year may not be that big of a deal for some studios, but it's a huge deal for Reel FX.  Unless my memory is fading prematurely, the studio has never won an Annie Award, though several of its creations have been nominated in past years.  I'm not as clear about the VES awards.  I know the studio has submitted material in the past, and I think received nominations, but I don't recall if any VES awards have followed.  If someone at the studio sees this and can correct the record, I'll update the post accordingly.

Memory-fuzziness aside, to receive awards from both organizations in the same year is a major achievement for Reel FX, and I applaud my formerly-fellow studio minions for their amazing work on this project.  Even though I'm no longer with the studio, I was very deeply involved in the project while I was there, and couldn't be happier about this pair of awards.  While the bestowal of awards is never (or shouldn't be) the goal of any effort of this kind, it's wonderfully gratifying when one is received.  When that one becomes two, it's a double helping of awesomesauce.

Winnin' with minions

One of the final projects that I worked on at Reel FX before making the jump was "Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem," a ride film for Illumination Entertainment and Universal Studios.  It was a blast getting to work with Gru, the girls, and of course the ever-present minions, but it was quite a challenge at several levels, and many of the technical hurdles came across my desk at various points throughout the project's production.  I specifically remember spending several incredibly-late nights at the studio, feverishly cranking on code or troubleshooting problematic playblasts.  To say that I've got mixed feelings about the project is an understatement, so it was quite gratifying to surface from fixing some elusive technical issues on a freelance programming job to find reports that "Minion Mayhem" won for Best Animated Special Production in the Annie Awards!

Congratulations to all of my friends and former co-workers who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the job.  Y'all done good, gang.  :)

Regrets?

Six months ago yesterday -- July 24, 2012 -- was my last day of full-time employment.

Six months ago today was the beginning of my full-time pursuit of my passions: primarily acting and voiceover, but not forgetting programming, as I still like to get my geek on.

I mentioned this to my wife yesterday, and her first question was, "Do you regret it?"

As I stood there and thought about everything that's happened in the past six months, I really didn't know how to answer that question. In an odd way, it feels like it's too soon to tell yet. I've definitely enjoyed the many new experiences that I've had during that time -- things that I never could have done if I still had a day job -- but there have been plenty of times when I've gone to bed a total mental and emotional mess because I had no idea how we were going to pay for the next big bill that was due in just a few days. So far, though, we've been blessed with lots of little miracles in those moments of madness...

• a friend would pay us to watch their dog while they're on a trip
• a long-awaited check from a previous job would finally arrive in the mail
• my wife would pick up a new piano student
• I'd pick up some extra hours at a seasonal job

...and the list goes on.

Thinking about possible regrets, there's only one that comes to mind readily: I regret not setting aside more funds before making the leap. The first couple months weren't so bad, but it's been getting progressively scarier since then, even with the little miracles that still pop up to save the day.

Do I regret it?

Let me get back to you on that. I've got work to do.

"Animate a Face" now online!

Wow!  It's been a while since I've written anything in this blog.  Not terribly surprising considering my career shift, but anyway, I've got some awesome news to share...

My "Animate a Face" tutorial videos are now available online!

For those who may not have heard of this product, the original was released in 2004, and was a 2 CD-ROM set containing 15 videos -- nearly 4 hours of fully-narrated screen-captured material -- all about the wonderful world of facial animation, including a couple detailed lip sync demonstrations.  As I was reviewing the videos to get them ready for uploading to MindBites, it was a little weird seeing such outdated animation software (I used Animation:Master v10.5, per my contract with Anzovin Studio).  However, as I've said numerous times about this product, it was created with a focus on principles over programs.  The core material is all about animation, and is just as useful now as it was then.  And now, it's a heckuvalot cheaper!  The original CD set made its debut at about $50 if I remember correctly, but on MindBites you can buy individual lessons for a buck or two, or the whole collection for less than $15!

If you want to really dig into facial animation, check out this material.  Happy animating!

Today is my last day at Reel FX. It's been a fun eight years, but it's time to move on. From here forward, it's all about getting on mic, on camera, or on stage. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of the journey so far. It's been quite a ride, and I can't wait to see what comes next!

One of the pieces that I animated several years ago ties in nicely with my feelings regarding the next phase of the journey. It's probably my favorite piece out of all the work that I did as an animator, in part because I had so much fun animating it, but also because it represents (in some small degree) the joy that I feel when I have the chance to perform. I hope that you enjoy watching it as much as I did being a part of its creation.

Change is coming

In one month, my life will change. Dramatically.

I initially discussed this change with my wife nearly a year ago, and we planned to take action at the end of last year, but it just wasn't the right time. However, after a few more months of planning and thought and prayer and work, things finally started to fall into place. I announced my plan at work on April 30th, and now it's time to share it here.

As of July 25th, I will no longer be working at Reel FX, and will be pursuing acting and voiceover (and some other creative interests) full-time.

I'm both exhilarated and terrified at the thought of what's about to happen, but as I've been telling many people recently, I can't not do this. Years ago I thought that I would be satisfied acting through animated characters. It took seven years to learn that I was wrong. I then thought that I would be satisfied working as a not-so-mild-mannered programmer by day and dabbling in voiceover on the side. It took four years to learn that I was wrong there, too. This fire is just too strong to burn "on the side." It's begging for my undivided attention, and in a month, I'll finally be able to satisfy that request.

FWIW, this blog -- and my justinanimator.com web site -- will likely change just a touch as a result of this transition, though the exact nature of that change is still unknown.  I still love programming and animation, and I'd like to think that I can keep sharing elements of those interests here, but only time will tell.  Keep an eye on this space for more info.

Let the countdown begin!

Frames Per Beat Calculator

Shahbaaz Shah is awesome.  How awesome?  Well, for one thing, he's working in-house as a contract animator at Reel FX.  For another thing, he just passed along the link to this nifty little tool by Rich Reel that gives you a frame count (and a bunch of other spiffy figures) as you tap out a beat on the keyboard.  If you've got to animate anything that involves rhythm, this could come in pretty handy.

Kudos to Rich for making it, and thanks to Shahbaaz for passing it along!

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat!

Entertainment Weekly has posted a sneak peek at I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, a new CG animated short film featuring Sylvester and Tweety.  The short is one of three new theatrical Looney Tunes shorts that Reel FX has produced for Warner Bros, and one of two that feature revived audio of classic cartoon voice talent, Mel Blanc.  June Foray, another legend in the world of cartoon character voices, was brought in to voice Granny.


I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat will play in front of Happy Feet Two this coming weekend, while the other two shorts -- one featuring Daffy and Elmer (again with Mel's stellar vocals), the other bringing back Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner for more mayhem -- will appear in front of other WB features in 2012.

Auto-placing Toolbars

I fiddled around with Maya 2012's toolbar options a bit more today, and learned a few interesting things. The most interesting of all was the discovery of a way to auto-load a custom toolbar when Maya opens, and have it appear in the same position that it was in when you last closed the program. (This is all in Python, by the way; I'm not sure if it would work the exact same way in MEL.)

Saving Toolbar Positions

The first thing I had to figure out was how Maya saved toolbar placement. When I wrote the other day about fixing a co-worker's missing tool settings panel, I mentioned the discovery of Maya's startupMainWindowState settings file. I also found some flags on the windowPrefs command for saving and restoring these settings. Today I learned that when using those flags, the full absolute path to the file should not be passed. Maya only wants the name of the file; it already knows where it lives. So to save, it's as simple as this:

import maya.cmds as mc

mc.windowPref(saveMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Maya also saves the toolbar settings automatically when it closes, and we'll take advantage of this as we move forward.

Restoring the Toolbar
Immediately after you have built your interface and wrapped it up in a toolbar, restoring Maya's window state settings will move the toolbar back into its original position (assuming it had an original position when the settings were last saved).  Here's a quick example:

import maya.cmds as mc

window = mc.window("myWindow")

column = mc.columnLayout(p=window)

button = mc.button(p=column, l="Click me!",

                   c="print('clicked!')")

toolbar = mc.toolbar("myToolbar", content=window, label="Clicker",

                     area="top")

mc.windowPref(restoreMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Naming the toolbar is important, as this is what will allow you to re-position that toolbar automatically between sessions.  If it doesn't have a consistent name, it won't work.

Obviously the last line won't do much the first time that you run it, because there is no saved position for this toolbar.  However, move the toolbar to some other position, then close Maya, which will save the toolbar's position.  Open Maya, run the same code, and the toolbar should re-spawn in the same place where you moved it.

The next step is to make Maya auto-load your toolbar each time that it starts.

Auto-Loading the Toolbar
Maya looks for  -- and executes the contents of -- two files each time that it starts: userSetup.mel and userSetup.py.  If used, these files should be placed in Maya's "scripts" folder.  In this case, we're going to use the Python startup file to kick off our toolbar.

First, we'll need to wrap our code inside a function, and save it in a file.  Copy the following into a new file in your favorite text editor:

import maya.cmds as mc

def main():

    window = mc.window("myWindow")

    column = mc.columnLayout(p=window)

    button = mc.button(p=column, l="Click me!",

                       c="print('clicked!')")

    toolbar = mc.toolbar("myToolbar", content=window,

                         label="Clicker", area="top")

    mc.windowPref(restoreMainWindowState="startupMainWindowState")

Save this file as "myToolbar.py" into Maya's prefs/scripts folder, which is one of the places in the sys.path setting of Maya's embedded Python.

Now start a new text file, and add this to it:

import maya.cmds as mc

import myToolbar

mc.evalDeferred(myToolbar.main)

Save this file as "userSetup.py" into Maya's scripts folder.

The reason we're using "evalDeferred" is because Maya needs to wait to execute the UI code until it has a UI to work with.  If you don't defer the execution, Maya will crash before it even opens.

Close Maya and re-open it.  Your custom toolbar should automatically appear where you last placed it.

Notes on bird flight

A few days back, one of the guys at work posted a link to a really great page on Brendan Body's web site that has a LOT of awesome observations about bird flight and how to animate it. Brendan was a lead animator on Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, and "had a large role in developing the style of the bird flight for the film." You can see his application of these flight principles in his showreel from the film (inserted below). According to Brendan:

I'm responsible for all animation apart from 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.

Awesome work, Brendan!

Legend of the Guardians Showreel from Brendan Body on Vimeo.

New iPhone App: Coach's Eye

Earlier today I received an email about an interesting new iPhone app that was just released by the folks at TechSmith. It's called Coach's Eye, and while it's being primarily marketed as a tool for coaches (of various types), I think it has some definite potential in the realm of animation.

In a nutshell, Coach's Eye is a simple video review tool. You can load a video clip (from one of several possible sources), scrub through it, add annotations (or "telestrations" as the TechSmith folks call them), and even record vocal comments. Once you're done, save the whole thing and share it using the app's sharing tools.

So how could Coach's Eye be useful for animators? Here are just a few thoughts...

• Record a video critique of a piece of animation sent to you by a friend/colleague/student
• Create a series of action analysis clips where you break down animated or live-action footage
• Record reference footage for a shot you're animating, and make notes on specific things that you want to make sure to incorporate into your work

Right now they're offering Coach's Eye at a special introductory price of 99 cents. This deal won't be around forever, so swing on over to the App Store if you want to learn more.

And no, I'm not getting a kickback for plugging it. I just think it's cool, and wanted to pass the word.

Fixing Toolbar Issues in Maya 2012

One of the guys at work came to me with an odd problem: he couldn't get the Tool Settings dialog to appear. Clicking the middle button in the upper-right corner of Maya's main window normally makes this dockable dialog pop into view just to the left of the main viewport. In this case, it just made the viewport edge shift ever-so-slightly from left to right. It didn't create the usual drag bar, so we couldn't force the width using the mouse. Restarting Maya did no good. After digging into the UI elements, I found that the width of the dialog's main formLayout was at 0. However, forcing it to a different value did absolutely nothing.

I was pretty sure that Autodesk had to have created a way of keeping track of all those nifty dockables in Maya 2012, and it took a while to figure out where they put it. While the file where this data is stored is not exactly formatted for human eyeballs, I was able to read a bunch of things like "dockState," "dockControl," "dockWidget," and "toolBar", though, so I was pretty confident that I had the right thing. We closed Maya, renamed the file, opened Maya, and presto! The Tool Settings panel was working again!

If you run into this problem, the file in question is named "startupMainWindowState", and is the lone file stored in Maya's prefs/mainWindowStates folder. As I said above, it's not anything can can be edited manually (at least not easily). However, Autodesk did create a simple way to save and load the settings contained in this file. In the windowPref command, there are a couple flags that do the job: saveMainWindowState and restoreMainWindowState. If you make your own dockable windows or toolbars, those commands should let you save and restore their state so that you don't have to manually re-position them every time you make them. I haven't tested them yet, but I plan on doing so tomorrow, and will update this post with my findings.

Devils, Angels & Dating - Teaser Trailer

Over a year ago, I made contact with the director of an online collaborative animated film, and was cast as the voice of the two male characters. Later I was asked to record a Wonder Years-esque narration that would be woven throughout the film. The project has been progressing nicely, and a teaser trailer was just released that shows off some of the stellar work that's been done by the team, all of whom are volunteers. Take a minute (literally) and check it out!

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 5

In part 4 Dorian talked about some of his suggestions for new animators, and in this final part Dorian continues in that vein by answering the question, "Would you recommend that someone pursue a career in animation?"

tweenMachine Tangent Error

I recently began receiving reports of a tangent-related error in tweenMachine:

// Error: Unrecognized tangent type. Use spline, clamped, linear, flat or step. //

With the help of one of the guys at work, I determined that this will occur when you're trying to add a tween key outside the range of an attribute's current keyframes; i.e. if you try to add a tween key to an object on frame 105, but the object's first keyframe isn't until frame 110. Because there's no previous key to reference for the tangent type, the tangent type in the script will remain undefined, and Maya will complain when applying the tangent.

I hope to eventually add an elegant solution for this problem. For now, the workaround is just to make sure that all objects that you're trying to tween have keys both before and after the frame where you want the tween key to appear.

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 4

In part 3 Dorian talked about some of the differences between his first two jobs, and we begin Part 4 with another common question...

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 3

In part 2 Dorian talked about some of the work he did on Green Lantern at Sony Imageworks, and we kick off Part 3 with a question that crosses the minds of all new animators as they approach their first job.

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 2

In part 1 Dorian talked about his introduction to animation and some of his training, and we begin part 2 talking about his first job...

Interview with Dorian Soto, Part 1

It's been a while since I've been in here, and I apologize for the lapse in chatter. Frankly, I haven't had many ideas on what to post here, but knowing how I tend to over-edit these things when I finally get around to putting them together, I think I've largely been avoiding it when the ideas have come because I knew that I just didn't have the time.

However, something has come up lately that just may change all that. I recently started recording little vocal bits via the Audioboo service. A lot of it is just talk with friends, but I also plan on talking about various things related to animation, and will toss those up here from time to time. It's a lot easier to babble for five minutes, add some tags, and publish the recording than it is to sit down with the intention of writing a "simple" blog post (which is what this was supposed to be) and not take a half-hour to actually get the thing done. :)

One of the things that I got the bug to do with my Audioboo recordings is interview some of the folks at Reel FX. The first interview that I recorded was with Dorian Soto, who came on board as a contract animator for a couple months. Here's part 1 of that interview. Part 2 should be released shortly.

For more of my Audioboo posts, stop by my Audioboo profile page, where you can listen to them directly, and also find RSS and iTunes links for tracking them via other tools.