Current Events in the Studio

The past couple of weeks have been an exciting time. I was contacted by a Kaiju group to help them film their next Battle Royale! They’re fun people and they really enjoyed the quick sound-editing job I did on one of their live battles. It turned out, they also needed a director and storyboard artist, so I’ve been running through pages of layout and screen writing.

“Kaiju?” you ask? Men in monster suits smashing buildings! Click that link and watch!

When I’m not playing fangirl to the biggest monster movie star ever, I am still keeping busy! I’ve done a lot of still-art lately. (Check the DeviantArt and FurAffinity links to the right) And, thanks to the encouragement of podcasts like Michael Stackpole’s The Secrets and Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing I decided it was time to dust off some stories, edit or finish them and send them out for submission. My first submission Thylacine went out last night and more will soon be on the way.

I’ve also taken on a project to try to help a friend finish an ashcan comic, AND I’m going to finish that hideous baby animation that’s been sitting on the corner of my animation desk for the past two years! Really! I mean it!

Dozens of other things in the queue, but let’s get through these first! At any rate… I should be writing.

Hey Kids! We’re going to Disneyland!

Flash animated slideshow

I’d never been to Disneland before. The lines are incredibly long! Ride-queues are a great place to get a lot of drawing done and I made dozens of tiny sketches. When I got home, I decided to color all the little drawings and make a slide show of my trip. Much more fun than taking photographs! Please keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times and enjoy your trip through the wonderful world of my head!

PHP… Meet Flash!

PHP is really cool! For a long time, I’ve had little directories that were full of short animations that weren’t really great enough to post about or put in my main animation archive but were fun enough that I wanted to keep them. Rather than make a database to maintain them, I just threw together a PHP script that looks for stuff with the same names and creates a web page for it. Better yet. I made it smart enough to recognize flash animation and create HTML for it on the fly if it didn’t have some specific requirement. Keen, and a lot less hassle!

So. Here’s a couple of directories of weird little bits!

Artist’s Ambush Entries The Artist’s Ambush is a weekly get-together I sometimes join. The original idea was: A topic is created, you have 30 minutes to draw something based on it. I decided to be even MORE insane and try animating a concept in the same 30 minutes. I’ve had varying levels of success. You can find more on the Ambush at this location.

Flash Class Oooh! Holdovers from my school days taking a Flash class. Of course, it was never any fun just doing the required assignments so I always did additional weird and crazy stuff. Have a look.

Bunnies Like to be Counted

This is just a little short I did in a couple of hours. A friend posted this audio clip online and I felt compelled to animate to it. Yay for found audio!

Bunnies Like To Be Counted

Fluffy!

Fluffy come home!

My entry for the Artist’s Ambush this week.

2006 FCTV Spots

The Archery Spot on YouTube

With only a week between Further Confusion and I, I thought I’d better try to get some animation done. With the help of my good friend Jon, we managed _TWO_ thirty second spots. The first, which I did solo is a rather simple 3D project created in Maya 5.

King Artie on YouTube

The second piece done in a scant four days is hand drawn, with ink and paint in ToonBoom. Jon did the keys, I did inbetweens,cleanup, ink and paint, and the sound composition and mixing.

Dailies

Pencil test of opening shot for the ‘Give your child half a chance’ short. 320×240 15FPS silent, 225K Requires Quicktime 7 codec.

Changes at Half Circle

Finished a major website redesign. A ‘games’ section will be added soon to cover some of the Flash and Java games I’ve put together. There should also be new animation up soon. I took some time off posting ‘finished’ works to study motion. Lots of fflour sacks and stick figures. Stuff I’m enjoying and happy with but it’s not worth posting. I’ve also been busy in the still-arts. These get posted under the art section but generally don’t feel significant enough to update the main page.

Finally, I should announce The 1.3 version of my BVH exporter is now available at this link. This version fixes a couple of calculation problems for a small set of values and adds an option to change the rotate order of the joints for the root joint and child joints.

Along with the BVH exporter, you can click here to download a fully rigged model which is compatible with Second Life, an interactive social environment available for free on Mac and PC, where you can model, animate, and interact with other people in real time.

That’s all for now. New animations, art, and games coming soon!

Free BVH importer and exporter for Maya 5

BVH or Biovision Hierarchy is one of the standards for motion capture. It’s a straight-forward text-based file format which defines a system of bones. Curiously, while this format is available for many 3D packages, it wasn’t included in Maya. I needed it for a project so I searched the web and found an importer and a spec, and proceeded to spend the next few weeks learning smart-sounding words like Euler Angles, Matrix Rotations, and Quaternions. Now it’s complete! An improved and debugged BVH importer and a glossy BVH exporter Both are written in MEL and have been tested with Maya 5.0.1 on the Macintosh. Any questions, comments, complaints, feature requests, bug observations, etc should be directed to e-mail.

FCTV 2005 Commercials are Up!

Faux News

Dancing Hieroglyphs

Decisions Decisions

For 2005, I decided it was time to make FCTV commercials that weren’t all tags for FCTV, and were, instead, wear little vinettes of their own. The dancing hieroglyphs, however, is in keeping with the year’s theme of Further Confusion and is a list of the major people working on the channel. I think I gave myself the shortest of all the entries because that wall scene was a royal pain. Anyhow, it was great year with lots of good people!