Professionally, most of my work has been General TD and Character TD stuff. Rigging, pipeline, scene optimization etc. here is a list of essential plugins that have helped me get my job done. Keep in mind my list is not the ten best free plugins overall, there’s some other cool ones out there I really like, but these are my 10 essential I use all the time. (more…)

Cineversity keeps growing and growing, so much that I constantly discover new tutorials there myself when I go to update or publish a tutorial. I did want to point out some important ones that already disappeared from the New Tutorials list.

Both Bret Bays and Jon Ware, have done some awesome work on adding some Rigging Related tutorials. Bret has been doing a great series on Intermediate Rigging that is 9 tutorials now, and will grow a little more once I get Video 10 done myself.

Jon’s series is a little more advanced, it isn’t going to teach anyone how to make a rig, but actually how to adapt a a rig to work with motion capture data, so that the data drives the IK rig.

Finally Chris Chestnut has started what I hope grows into a really cool series of “as seen on TV” tutorials where they try to come up with a solution to recreate a cool motion graphics effect on TV. Most have probably been done in CINEMA 4D, some maybe not, and the setups they teach wont’ necessarily be how they were actually done, but each tutorial will try to simulate an effect seen on TV. Check out the first one simulating an effect from NBC.

Cineversity has reached 1275 Live tutorials and looks like it wont’ stop any time soon.

Week 3 and a second assignment done. Planning was the key goal in doing this assignment.

For Stu, the Pose was to be excited, and my main goal was to avoid the stereo typical jump in the air with arms out, but that turned out to be much much harder than I planned. A lot of what shows excitement is either the release of energy or the holding back of a lot of energy, but without facial controls or the ability to raise the shoulders, I found most of my poses simply didn’t convey what they were intended to so I had to scrap most of them. I crunched Sunday morning, to do some more obvious excitement poses like this one.

But I ended up going back to one of my first ones because I felt it did still convey excitement, while also telling a bit of a story, which I think was something I liked about last weeks pose. I think form now on my goal will to be not just to meet the pose but really try to tell a story with each.

Short tutorial on Ghosting in Maya for my fellow AM students.

First real assignment is done and handed in, I hope it goes well. Here is a progression form sketches I took at the mall, to a few attempts as posing Stu in the same poses, and then finally two revisions of the ones I liked the most.

And the Final one I submitted.