Time in Motion.

Hoo on Who

davesplace — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:53:17 +0000

Gave an interview for David Hooies wonderful podcast Hoo on Who. I have never given an interview before and I don’t think I did a very good job. In a way I was totally unprepared for it. He expected me to remember links for my own website

Got me thinking though, how little of my own work is actually on line. Apart from a the test animations here and a few other things I don’t actually have a website. I used to have a website years and years ago, but it was a lot of trouble to maintain - this was before youtube and vimeo made it easy to store video data externally from your website. I would have to encode up .asx and .asf files and store them in my allocated web space. Maybe I should think about putting up more work online - or at least devising an wasy way for people to see my work. Worth considering.

Heres the websie address:
Hoo on Who

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new robot

davesplace — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:10:29 +0000

rigged up a new member of the pirate crew this week. It is a homage to Robbie the robot from Forbidden Planet

Robot pirate model from Dave Animator on Vimeo.

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Yo Ho Ho!

davesplace — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:26:27 +0000

Just a little update with stuff I been working on:
Been doing pirate related stuff at work, namely a chest. It was cool to to something really squashy and stretchy

On a Pirate-related-theme. the robot pirates in Dressing up are coming along nicely. Been making a bunch of miscellaneous characters who job is to cower in fear as the captain walks past. they are fairly simple design

I have kind of handed in my notice with regards some unpaid freelance stuff i have been working on with mocap. Its been taking waaaaay too much of my time. so In a few weeks when I have met all my obligations I should be able to spend a lot more time working on Dressing up.

Pirate Chest Animation from Dave Animator on Vimeo.

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getting old…

davesplace — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:28:36 +0000

Went to see A and the Wildhearts Last night. Last time I saw A was 5 years ago and I was jumping up and down like a lunatic.
Last night I was so lethargic it was not even funny. Its kind of sobering to realise you are one of the ’stand at the back crowd’.

Also I read today that Oliver Postgate has died

I grew up watching Ivor the engine and Bagpuss . I have some place a radio interview he gave to Phil Jupitus talking about the little things he would knock up to make animation. Little additions to a Bolex camera, Usually made out of Meccano. I think in many ways He was a very British Animator, Part Artist, Part technician and with just the right amount of eccentricity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7773124.stm

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/

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minor update.

davesplace — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:24:32 +0000

managed to fix the robot rig, am about halfway rigging the second robot pirate, just got to sort the facial controls out and it should be good to go.

the third pirate will be complicated. I plan to use a particle system to define states and blend between rigs based upon the state. this may or may not work, it needs investigating.

the fourth pirate will be more straight forward with a simple blending rig
i did design a 5th pirate this morning which should be simple and should move in an interesting way
the trick here is to make each robot look as individual as possible but as easy to animate as possible. i have decided that each robot should have something interesting to animate either a way of moving or a way of emoting, generally the robots are, in effect, moving props, the film only bother with a few main pirates but obviously we need some’extras’ to fill in the crew. i think these will be a lot simpler and probably be interchangeable

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4mations is ok!

davesplace — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:43:32 +0000

Well I have been assured that 4mations has not been canned and it seems to be undergoing a load of maintenance. which is kind of reassuring:)

managed to fix a bunch of issues on the rig, it was probably a good thing the rig broke because rebuilding it again I was able to take in the lessons learnt making the rig originally and re-make them a little more efficiently which should be good news when animating with the rig
on a downer, I have been told that animblogspot doesn’t not yet support chrome, hence all the difficulties i have been having getting video to embed. Looks like I will have to install another web client in the interim

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rig not working now

davesplace — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:49:37 +0000

so I loaded up yesterdays rig and…nothing

all the custom attributes I made had disappeared

started again with a blank set of CAs and added them one at a time re saving the file each time.

got everything looking ok, restarted max to see if all the new CA held together
now the scene is invalid

trying to find a recent autoback is proving complicated also

on a related note of things not working , i see that 4mations is still down. its a slightly worrying development. I can guess what’s happened, the plugs been pulled. C4 have gone to students and colleges saying put your content up and the students are interested but it takes time before any viable content would be ready.

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first test footage….

davesplace — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:52:18 +0000

I have finally moved into my house, a mere 4 months after buying it!! The first thing i did was to set up the home studio to do work in.

have spent a bunch of time rigging some for the pirate robots up the production. Got to re rig another robot due to horrible scale issues but i am quite happy with how this rig is turning out, just got to set up to wobbling Castor and handle head rotations

for another robot i have made a small tool to help automate animation tasks which i will be uploading a video of here at some point.

Robot rig #1 from Dave Animator on Vimeo.

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Flipping FLIP!

davesplace — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:56:02 +0000

Just a small note really that the Flip Festival started last night. Wont be able to attend today but tomorrow I will definitely be checking out the Stuff!!!!

By Now mike and Rachel will be high in the clouds winging their way across the pond Happy landing guys One good thing is with them out of the way temporarily I can really jump on some outstanding project work. Really got to get working on The Mocap and Film projects!!!

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Smart animator V1.0

davesplace — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:14:58 +0000

finished up a new tool yesterday for adobe Photoshop.

I have a bunch of smart objects in my photoshop layouts that are MASSIVE renders from 3ds max,the smart object has been resized to fit nicely in my layout but there is a problem. I could do with saving out the individual frames of the MASSIVE smart object the same size as the resized graphic.

thats where Smart Animator comes in. It takes a smart object, acceses all the images inside then spits each frame out as the source graphic to a specified location and filename. Took about 10 minutes to output 50 frames of animation but it would have took longer to do it by hand.

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