Often times when I’m working I’ll be listening to an album or podcast, sometimes having a documentary related to what our current project is playing in the background. However, every now and then I’ll throw my headphones on and hours will pass and I realize I hadn’t been listening to anything at all. It’s those times I find myself getting “in the zone” easiest and for the longest periods of time. I’ve found that a way to help myself concentrate is to have the best of both those worlds by listening to a white noise generator of sorts. Rain and thunder off in the distance, a bubbling brook, rustling leaves or a fireplace popping every now and then. There are a couple sites I go to for this. The first is a very simple and easy to setup website called A Soft Murmur. A more complex and expansive website is MyNoise. These sites have really helped me with concentration, and it sure beats listening to silence through headphones.

Since Ben Fox has started working with us, I’ve learned a lot. One thing I learned is that I’ve been doing things the hard way (or at least terribly inefficiently). One of the tools he introduced me to is UV passes in Maya. UVs are just floating numbers between 0 and 1 that designate what pixel should be seen where. It’s for that reason that you don’t necessarily have to apply textures to your models in Maya. You can just apply the textures in your compositing software (in our case After Effects). There are some limitations with this method, such as reflections or final gathering that would be calculated when you add your texture in After Effects, but for simple things it works very well. In the past I would output an image sequence for an animated texture to bring into Maya, but by using this method I can just apply it to the UV output that was set up in Maya.

How do you apply a UV pass in Maya? Apply this shader to any object of your choice (which was quickly put together by Ben for me). Then rendering with a 16 bit or higher image format that allows you to bring the sequence into After Effects and apply your own texture using this effect made by François Tarlier called ft-UVPass.Be sure that your Project Settings in After Effects are set to 16 bit as well. Excelsior!

I thought I’d throw a couple extra Maya related things that I didn’t include in the previous posts.
The first is a shelf button that switches to your custom viewport setup and turns off all your selection options except for nurbs. I find it handy for quickly diving into a scene when it’s time for animating.

 

1. Setup and arrange the viewports to your preference. In my case I use 3 viewports, a perspective cam with everything except polygons and nurbs curves turned off, the fisheye render cam (that I sometimes swap for an aim camera for animating characters) with only polygons visible, and lastly the graph editor (which I sometimes undock).
2. Save the layout by going into one of the viewports and choose:
   1. Panels > Saved Layouts > Edit Layouts…
   2. New Layout
   3. Pick a name (in my case it’s FragOut)
3. Go to Windows > Settings/Preferences > Shelf Editor
4. Create a new shelf button with a name and icon of your choice
5. Right click on your newly created button in the shelf and choose Edit
6. Paste this in the command tab:

 

select -d;
setNamedPanelLayout “FragOut”;
string $panelsAll[] = `getPanel -type modelPanel`;
string $current;

for($current in $panelsAll){
modelEditor -e -allObjects 0 $current;
modelEditor -e -nurbsCurves 0 $current;
modelEditor -e -nurbsSurfaces 1 $current;
modelEditor -e -polymeshes 1 $current;
modelEditor -e -manipulators 0 $current;
modelEditor -e -manipulators 1 $current;
DisplayShaded;
}
setObjectPickMask “All” 0;
setObjectPickMask “Curve” true;
modelPanel -e -mbv 1 modelPanel4;

 

 

You’ll want to make sure to use the correct name for whatever you named your layout.

 

The other not so complicated thing I’ve come across is a motion path tool from Tool Chefs. It’s an incredible tool that’s super lightweight and has a ton of functionality (drawing arcs and moving keys without moving on the timeline). Definitely check it out, it’s worth it.

Animating the Wright Brothers was a combination of lessons learned from Solar System Odyssey, and techniques used in Grossology and You. Firstly, during the scriptwriting phase we wanted to limit their on-screen time. One of the biggest hurdles of Solar System Odyssey was too much character animation and too many characters. Second, we wanted to build the characters in a way that was the least work, but still plausible. We decided the best way to accomplish this was to make them “stick figures” that were drawn by a person (who we don’t necessarily need to introduce), with the faces animated to imitate a photograph that was cut-out. This sped up production in two ways:

 

1. With the bodies modeled as pencil lines/sticks, it made skinning the character much faster.
2. The faces are animated in After Effects with simple animations compared to Grossology and You. A major problem that happened with Solar System Odyssey was spending time creating hundreds of blendshapes between the three characters, only to not use them in actual production due to time constraints.

 

The way I rigged the face was using the same technique from Grossology and You, albeit much simpler. Since a bit of the charm is the crudeness of a cut-out, the only secondary motion I added was on Orville for his mustache.

One of the concerns of going with stick figure characters was the arms/legs getting lost when passing in front of other parts of their bodies. I had to do some careful staging when it came to animating, but I made a quick test animation to test the concept.

Rigging and texturing the character in Maya was only a little complicated, but not nearly as time consuming as doing the same for the characters in Solar System Odyssey. The most complicated part was rigging the head. I wanted to have control over the twists and bends of the paper head, so I used a lattice driven by clusters and set driven keys.

 

The eyes are animated in Maya, using set driven keys to move the UVs on a sphere that was flattened. The reason I flattened a sphere instead of just using a flat plane was to distort the iris’ shape and speed when approaching the side of the sphere to give a sense of depth.

 

For the faces in Maya, I didn’t want to have two planes squished together for the front and back of the photograph since there would be a good chance they pass-through each other when the head is turned or distorted. The solution for me was to use a single plane and have a shader for their heads use a condition node to show different textures for different sides of the plane. When I hooked up the transparency to the shader it behaved strangely, so I fed it through a ramp node which fixed the problem.

Lastly, for a final touch I wanted to help push the idea that they’re drawings and make them a bit more interesting to look at. I made a quick cycle between blendshapes to make the lines wiggle a little and give them a bit more life. I figured it’d also help in case there were any breathing holds I wanted to do down the line.

 

Now on to the animating.

 

The tool I used the most was aTools. It is an immensely useful tool created by Alan Camilo. It has tween machine built in for keying, and made it easy to set up control group pickers for quick selections. You are also able to turn on arcs for your selections to find and fix weird translations. I heavily recommend it.

 

As for hotkeys, here was my main setup:

 

J – timeSliderClearKey;
K – timeSliderCopyKey;
L – timeSliderPasteKey false;

 

Using the keys < and > I can hop between keyframes, using J for deleting them, K for copying them, and L for pasting them.

 

I also found the hotkey \ useful for zooming in on the viewport without moving the camera. Since sometimes I can’t fall back on using my flat playblasting camera used for animating, I needed to use the fisheye one instead which doesn’t always see everything.

 

That’s the long and short of it. I did the usual routine of storyboarding, animatic/previz, shot some reference, and then began animating. Unfortunately, even with the shortcuts I did for building the characters I still ran into a bit of a crunch animating, due to rendering and lighting issues with the office that needed to get resolved. I’ll save that one for another post. Due to the office hangup, each scene needed to be completed in a week to a week and a half, but this time the characters were simpler and fewer in number, making this goal much more achievable. I’ll end this post with a short clip and the storyboard that preceded it, to show a bit of the process:

 

There were a lot of things I’ve picked up over the past couple projects that I wanted to share. It’s a bit of the process and includes After Effects expressions and using hotkeys for animating in Maya. This first part details how I animated the characters in our show: Grossology and You. You can see a trailer for this show on Fulldome Database:

http://www.fddb.org/fulldome-shows/grossology-and-you/

 

Much of what is posted here can be found in the Digital Tutors series Rigging and Animating 2D Characters in After Effects by Dan Gies, which can be found here: http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/796-Rigging-and-Animating-2D-Characters-in-After-Effects

 

At the start of the Grossology and You process, we wanted to make sure I had enough time to animate the characters. We went with a game show type format, which meant we’d need multiple characters representing contestants, a show host, and a character for the audience to identify with. Two ways for us to help lighten the load on my end were to have a limited amount of time we’d see the characters, and to make them very simple in rigging. The lessons we learned through Solar System Odyssey really drove these points home. I spent roughly 3-4 weeks sketching, modeling, texturing, and rigging each of the three characters with The Setup Machine 2 and the Stop Staring method for the faces. Unfortunately, this caused the time allowed for animating to be crunched, and sadly, the work put into the character’s faces was unused along with unpolished body animation. In total, there were roughly 15 minutes of character animation in the show with a minimum of 3 characters on screen at all times. It was from this lesson that we made sure Grossology and You had a significantly smaller amount of time spent with the characters, and they would have only what’s needed in terms of rigging.

 

 

For Grossology and You, I had the pleasure to work with the artist for the Grossology book series, Jack Keely. Jack sketched up character designs for us, and when they were finalized sent them my way to get rigged.

 

The process for the rigging was mostly straight-forward. I used Dan Gies’ tutorial on Rigging and Animating 2D characters, and adapted it for the simpler drawings (his tutorial also included things like animating bump maps IIRC which I didn’t opt for using). The character’s body (in this case Boogie) was rigged using DuIK.

 

A major expression used in this process is to parent Puppet Pins to Nulls. Here is the expression:

 

n=(pickwhip null of choice);

nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);

fromComp(nullpos);

 

And an example from Boogie:

 

What this allows is the use of DuIK to create the Inverse Kinetics used to control the puppet pins. It also allows for other fun ways to control the character.

 

I worried that seeing 2D animated characters on the dome might not be that interesting to watch for long periods of time, so I decided to have a lot of secondary animation to keep it interesting. I also wanted it to be automated for the most part, to help save me time. Using the nulls controlling puppet pins, I could accomplish a very basic sense of secondary motion by having the movement delayed.

 

I took the Null controlling the Puppet Pin and used a frame delay expression to “parent” it to another null. Here’s the expression:

 

cX=thisComp.layer(“null of choice”);

pX=cX.toWorld(cX.anchorPoint,framesToTime(timeToFrames()-1))[0];

cY=thisComp.layer(“null of choice”);

pY=cY.toWorld(cY.anchorPoint,framesToTime(timeToFrames()-1))[1];

 

PosX=pX;

PosY=pY;

 

[PosX,PosY];

 

I can then parent that controlling null to whatever I’m animating the position of, in this case Boogie’s head:

 

On my next post I’ll talk about what I did for tackling the characters in our newest show, Take Flight!