Monday, August 22, 2016

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Friday, May 6, 2016

Action Exercise by arthurnal

If you're not following this guy in Vimeo, you should now.


Action Exercise from arthurnal on Vimeo.


Monday, April 4, 2016

Change rotation curve colors in Maya

When I was working with mocap data at Ubisoft, one useful thing that I found when I was using Motionbuilder was that it was possible to change the colors of the curves in the F-Curve editor. You could change any curve color, either it was a custom parameter or the X rotation axis.

The most important benefit for doing this is that by changing the color of the most important parameters, they automatically become more recognizable.

Since working at Larian Studios here in Quebec I've been working exclusively in Maya, and I missed having this option. Not really because I have tons of custom attributes, but when I see the Graph Editor, it's hard for me to quickly recognize which curves are Translation and which Rotation. For example, in the image below, you can't really tell which is which.



Lucky me, there is a way to change the colors in Maya.

The only thing you have to do is (in the Graph Editor) select the attribute you want to change and then click on Edit and select "Set Curve Colors..."


This option will open a dialog with to panes or sides: One contains the attribute you selected and the other one the new color. Click on the color picker and select the color that you want for that attribute.


If you want to modify the color of additional attributes, just select them in the Graph Editor and click on the "Add" button in the Curve Colors dialog window.

Once you have change the colors, just close the dialog. In my case, after changing all rotation attributes, the result looks like this:



As you can see, now I know which are my rotation curves just by looking at the Graph Editor.

Some remarks:
  • These changes are part of your Maya environment now. This means that, in my case, the rotation curves will always show this colors, no matter the object selected or which scene I'm working on.
  • In the case of the rotation colors, I recommend changing to something similar than the precious red green and blue colors. This because the rotation manipulator will not change the colors to match this new setup, so in order to keep some link between the curves and the manipulator, is better to things similar.
I hope this helps.

Cheers!

P.D.- The rig shown in the images is the Joe Rig. You can find it here.

Links, enlaces et liens

http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/download-free-versatile-3d-characters-11618979
Free rigs!!

http://www.catsuka.com/news/2016-02-07/dofus-livre-1-julith-en-salles-depuis-cette-semaine
I love the style of this film! The link is in french though, but you can still watch the videos.

http://www.animatedspirit.com/weight/
A nice post about adding weight to 2D animation.


http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/16/epic-games-shows-amazing-real-time-motion-capture-demo-for-ninja-theorys-hellblade/
I find this tech more helpful to both the director and the mocap actor because they can see the character realtime. For animators, they still have to clean up the data, so no change there.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/toonz-software-used-studio-ghibli-futurama-made-free-open-source-138111.html
It's out! Download it here!

http://www.dualshockers.com/2016/03/15/ubisoft-introduces-motion-matching-the-first-step-to-next-gen-animation/
I've seen a similar demo last year when I was working at Ubisoft.

Overwatch - Alive Animated Short | PS4

Friday, March 18, 2016

Below - Death's Door

This game looks crazy good! The mood and the music (by Jim Guthrie) fit so much with the overall theme of the game.

BELOW -- DEATH'S DOOR from CAPY on Vimeo.

Unity GDC demo - Adam - Part I

The lighting looks excellent in this demo! Looking forward for part two. :)


PC Gamer Weekender Divinity: Original Sin 2

A peek of what our next game here at Larian will look like. It's a very ambitious game, but if we pull it off (and I'm sure we will), we'll change the RPG landscape.

And by the way, Swen didn't memorize the presentation. He really knows this much about the mechanics (and the story, and the features, etc) of the game.



Tuesday, March 8, 2016

LMPicker - Controller Selection tool for Maya

This tool just changed the way I see Marking Menus! Really cool idea!



Sunday, February 21, 2016

Ray rig from CGTarian now available for free!

Head to the link below, fill out the form and start animating! :)

http://www.cgtarian.com/character-ray/download-character-ray.html


CGTarian Ray Maya Character Rig

Links, enlaces et liens



https://www.toolchefs.com/?page_id=225
Some really good tools for Maya.

http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/creating-the-illusion-of-speed/
Cool read with some tips about motion blur and how to create the illusion of speed.


http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021791/Animation-Bootcamp-The-Animation-Process
The animation process behind Ori and the Blind Forest video game.

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/making-of-uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end/
A brief behind the scenes look at Uncharted 4 video game.

http://ow.ly/Wbjrd
DreamWorks pipeline explained by Skipper

http://www.twitch.tv/finespline/profile
Ben Sanders Twitch channel. He has A TON of hours of content about animation. Worth to check it out.

https://www.patreon.com/morganloomis?ty=p
Morgan Loomis has created a Patreon page to support him create tools!  
 

Thursday, January 28, 2016

ed by Taha Neyestani

This is absolutely fantastic!

ed from Taha Neyestani on Vimeo.

Epic explains animation tech behind Paragon game

These two videos are long but totally worth it. There is a lot of stuff that could be very useful (and applicable) to other systems.