Reference Plane

After watching the amazing lecture Cameron Fielding gave at the Pixel Challenge, Reverse Engineering Video Reference. I started using his technique to analize my reference files.

I use a small rig I've created to be able to switch from the "linear" reference to the selected keys.

The bulb at the left holds the frames, allowing you to retime your reference creating holds and speeding up some parts. The right one will hold your keys, set that one to stepped just key your most important frames.

Make sure you set your tangents to linear on the green bulb and stepped on the red bulb.

The cross at the top will let you switch from linear to stepped and it will allow you to also hide and show your reference plane.

You can download the python script here:  GitHub - ReferencePlane.py

Save the file in your "scripts" folder and then run a python command from maya:

import ReferencePlane
ReferencePlane.create()

Grommash Hellscream

My friend Daniel Orive has been really kind to allow me to work on one of his sculpts.

He has been working on this amazing fan art. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about rigging for videogames.

The whole rig has one single joint hierarchy and it has already been exported to unreal engine. The video is rendered in Marmoset toolbag, the skelmesh and the animations have been imported there for the artist to fine tune the viewing results.

 I will keep pushing the rig and the animations trying to get things like parent switching to work.

Spline Bomb Rig

It required a few extra features like the bolts to follow the geometry all the time and then be able to separate from it.

There's no parent switch at the moment but my idea is to work on one for both the cap and the bolts.

At the moment I have no idea how to add space switching to a rig, so it's going to be my next adventure :)

Ninja Theory

This past months at Ninja have been amazing. I'm very lucky to be here and to have met so many talented artists.

Ninja has now made public their work on Hellblade and Disney infinity 2.0. 

Personally I see this as the just the begining of plenty much more exciting things to come :)

Playback tweak

Every once in a while I see myself editing an exsisting animation and while working on it I like to preview / playback only what I'm working on.

Although you can do this via playblast by selecting the range in the timeline, I couldn't find a way to do it within the viewport itself.

This small script can replace the built-in maya playblack module. It will work exactly the same way it already does but adding the function of playbacking a selected number of frames, changing the range and setting it back how it was when you stop the playback.

To replace the maya preset, go to settings / preferences / hotkey editor and create a new hotkey either python or mel, depending on what you have, then assing a key  (maya default is Alt + v) and enjoy! :)

You can just copy paste the text depending on which language your maya accepts, if you want to have as a script just right click and save as...

rangedPlayback.py
rangedPlayback.mel

Splinebomb Intro Animation

This weekend Matt Bugeja, the creator of Splinebomb posted a Game of thrones podcast and took this opportunity to release a new intro for the website's logo.

I was lucky to get to work on this when we were at Pixomondo, it's a very simple rig but I had a lot of fun with it.

Games Animation by: James Marijeanne

Ex- Ninja Animator and current Konami Animator James Marijeanne has just started posting some Animation tutorials for video-games.

He is breaking it down in a very clear and understandable way. This first video is about his process, planning an attack stating which are the things you should keep in mind and to make it work for video-games.