Moho Forum

We have been working on a short film on and off for the past few months and as the film progresses we are posing blog entries about the different stages of production, so today we did an example of a character rig we built using smart bones, we thought it might be interesting for people to see. Although it seems you can have as many different character rig styles as there are clouds in the sky sometimes.

The Video is one produced by our director explain the smart bones and what they control to the animation team.

http://www.amanandink.com/?p=1339

We hope you enjoy it and if anyone has any questions about the construction just let us know.
Jeremy

I love the look of the short film, as I do all your work. Thanks for posting this as it was, indeed, very interesting. I just spent about 20 minutes reading through the blogs and looking forward to getting back there
When will we be able to see the completed film?

Thanks Dale
Ah the finished film, sometimes it is the most elusive of things. Although we did submit a rough cut to our first film festival today and we have one scene left still in progress. But we should have more clips appearing on line soon.

J

I've enjoyed your video years back showing your method. This one is just as inspiring and blog is great too. Thanks for sharing.

K so slightly on the same topic and to celebrate the premier of our short film on Sunday and the Galway film Fleadh here is a short teaser to the movie

https://vimeo.com/70027275

And as little something for the ASP community, here is the fully animated ASP scene from the teaser, it was animated by Julian Côme from ithinkasia, who did a great job with the animation of not just scene but on the film as a whole.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vloc1mbrpj6zm ... _sc005.zip

It uses smart bones for different elements in the rig, please see the link above for an explanation and it needs to work with the scripts folder that is also in the zip file as this lets us parent smart bones to each other to get the effects to work between different smart bone layers.

And feel free to use the cat model for other animations if you like, non commercial obviously, we would love to see what you do with him.

Enjoy
Jeremy

Not sure I understand the use for the script but overall the cat character is amazing.

Especially noteworthy are the absolutely amazing mouth switch layers! The quality of the expressions with such a few switches is amazing. The interpolation is perfect and incredibly well done. Blew me away. I was sure they must be done with bunches of mouth smart bones creating an infinite variety of mouth positions. I was shocked to see just that small batch of mouth shapes. Very inspirational.

I liked the idea of having the animatic in the corner as a reference. Also, the use of multiple arms is clever. I started doing this as well because using a switch layer was problematic for me. Thank you so much for sharing this.

Thanks guys, it's always good when people appreciate your work. With the expressions and the arms we try to build anything that is indicated storyboards, but still make sure the animator has a range of arms and expressions available to them to play with.
The animatic in the corner came from the director needing to constantly refer back to it plus its for the audio for the lip syncing.

J

love it, great style and character - and thanks for continuing to share your processes!
Good luck with the film!

your work is very interesting, but i dont understand, how is the function of the script mg bone parent, Can you do a videotutorial ?


thanks

HI

The reason behind the parent bone script is to have the squash and stretch smart bone action control all the vector layers at once. So we created the smart bone on the parent layer and did the squash extreme and the stretch extreme on all the layers but the smart bone wasn't controlling deep enough inside all our other bone layers, so by using the parent script and copying the smart bone from the top most layer to the other bones it applied the smart action to the layers deeper in the model.

We also used the same technique on the pupils to control all the expressions in eyes switch layer at once, so that the pupils directions in all expressions could be moved at once, thus if the animator switched the expression in the middle of a blink the character was always looking the same direction.

I hope this helps explain it
J

hello people of a amanandink


I send a email to your email , perhaps you could give me advice about of a one animation

thanks

thanks a lot for your advice is very useful, keep in touch

Very nice rig!
Good and clean organization, makes it easy to use... and the squash n stretch control is cleverly implemented.

No Problem goas10 and thanks Hans.

J