DannySouthard.com: Animation Archives

11 Second Club : July 08

Sorry for not updating in a while, but I ended up getting 11th place in the March 11 Second Club competition. Not bad! I decided to give it another shot and entered the July competition. Here's my entry....wish me luck.

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

11 Second Club : March 08

Back in the day, there existed a website called the 10 second club. Every month they would post a different 10 second audio clip, from a movie or TV, and animators of all skill levels created animations to the dialogue. At the end of the month, everyone submitted their shots and scored each other's work. Once the voting was complete, the animator with the highest overall score won.

For one reason or another, the site went down a couple years ago (not sure on the date though). Recently, however, a group of animators (I think mostly AM students) revived the concept and started the 11 second club. It functions much like it's predecessor, but this time the prize for winning is a critique of your submission by an AM mentor. Awesome!

I had always wanted to enter the contest, but never had the time with school. Now that I've graduated and had a month to relax, I decided to give it a shot. I'm not sure how I'll do, but at the very least I've got something cool to add to my demo reel.

Anyway, here is my entry. Enjoy!

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Quick and Dirty Lighting & Rendering

Warning: This is a Maya tutorial, so anyone who reads my blog for the animation, should probably skip this post.

A classmate asked me to show him how I light and render my scenes, so I thought I'd right a quick tutorial in case someone else might be interested as well. Here goes.

Below I will show you the steps neccessary to quickly light and render a simple scene with a box in an "infinite color" background. This technique only works if your scene doesn't have any walls. Indoor scenes require a more complicated lighting scheme and I haven't quite found a quick way to light those scenes.

Step 1:
Create a Maya scene with a polygon box on top of a backdrop. The backdrop is basically a plane with a curved back to it. You can create a smooth curved backdrop by applying a bend deformer to a plane and having the deformer only bend the back half of the plan. The front half is the flat surface that the box will rest on. The backdrop will help make it look like an infinitely empty space behind the object.

Rendering the scene as is with the default Maya Software Renderer will look something like this:

Step 2:
In the Render Global Settings under �Render Using� choose Mental Ray. If Mental Ray isn�t showing up in this box, you need to turn it on first. To do this go to Window --> Settings/Preference --> Plug-in Manager. The Plug-in Manager window will pop up. Scroll down until you see Mayatomr.mll. Make sure there are checks in the checkboxes for both �loaded� and �auto load� for this plugin by clicking in the corresponding boxes. Close this window. Now back to the Render Global Settings. Once you have changed the �Render Using� to Mental Ray, click on the �mental ray� tab below. Under �Quality Presets� choose �PreviewFinalGather�. Close the window.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

Step 3:

Change the Environment color of your camera to a lighter color. To do this, select your camera in the outliner (in this case I have a camera called RenderCam) and open up the attribute editor. Scroll down until you find �Environment� Change the Environment color by either pulling the slider to the right or clicking on the color and choosing a lighter color. The lighter this color is, the brighter the scene. Too light will blow everything out. In this case I just pulled the slider about halfway to the right.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

Step 4:

Add a directional light. Under Create  Lights choose Directional Light. Rotate the new light in the direction desired. In the attribute editor for the light, make sure to turn on Raytraced Shadows. You can also change the color and intensity here to for the desired effect.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

So this wraps up the tutorial. One thing to note is that you can get different color combinations by changing the backdrop texture color, camera environment color, or the directional light color. In some of my renders I liked using blue for the environment color (like the sky), and a light yellow for the directional light (like the sun). Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Please feel to correct me if I have made a mistake. If you have any crits or suggestions please leave a comment below. Thanks

Update:

As I have been using this technique for a while now, I have found that shadows can be too harsh. In order to soften them, you may need to increase the brightness of the environment color in the camera and reduce the intensity of the light. Play around with it until it looks right.

Also, I have found command line rendering to be much fast than rendering within Maya. To do this, make sure you have set the project to the appropriate folder within Maya. Command line rendering will put all the files within the last project folder set within Maya before you close it.

Anyway, close maya, and open the "command prompt" in the start menu (usually in the Accessories folder). Once in the command prompt, navigate to the folder containing your maya file for that shot. Type the following with changes:

render -r mr -fnc 3 -of tga -s 1 -e 250 -pad 3 -cam renderCam myshot.ma

You will need to change some of these settings to suit your needs

-r = the type of renderer. In this case "mr" stands for mental ray

-fnc = the filename order. In this case "3" = (filename)(frame number)(format) or in this case myshot001.tga. Typing in a 2 here changes it to myshot.tga.001, I think. I only use 3 because my compositing program can only import files with the proper extension. It thinks its a .001 file and not a .tga file.

-of = file format type. In this case tga = targa. If you want a jpeg file, then this should read -of jpg

-s = start frame. In this case I started on frame 1.

-e = end frame. In this case it ended on frame 250.

-pad = frame padding. 1= myshot1.tga, 2 = myshot01.tga, 3 = myshot001.tga, 4 = myshot0001.tga. I've had a problem in the past where I imported my frames into a compositor and frame 30 was put right after frame 3 or frame 11 was right after frame 1. If you give it the proper padding the program will put it in the right order.

-cam = the camera you wish to use. In this case my shot cam is named renderCam in my maya file.

myshot.ma = this is the name of my maya file. Replace this with the name of your maya file.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Golden Oldies (Continued)

I was backing up my computer last night when I came across three more animation clips. I'm not sure when I did these. I think I was trying out some new wire armature designs that were unsuccessful. In the clip with the character looking at his hands, the armature was my most sophisticated design yet. It was based on a design from a stop motion book I was reading. I spent a long time building it and everything seemed to work just fine until I tried to have him walk. He walks off the screen so fast in this clip because his feet break after his first step. The rest of his body works fine, but with broken feet, he was pretty much useless. If I can ever figure out how to make his feet stronger, I would love to do a short film with that guy.

In the clip with the character sitting down, I ran into more problems. It was based on my old, wire and bamboo armature design except this time I tried to flesh him out with clay. Though I tried to use it sparingly, the clay proved to be too heavy for the little guy, so I had to try and do something with him sitting down. Since I had no way of archoring him down, he kept sliding around everytime I touched him. I got frustrated and had him put his head down and then I had some fun with clay instead. The last shot is more fun with clay.

Lost and Found


Armature Test	Head Scratch	Fun with Clay
Size:5.7M	Size:12.6M	Size:23.6M
Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Golden Oldies

I had some spare time today (trying to relax before my life becomes insanely busy with school) and I took all my old animations that I only had on VHS and digitized them into my computer. Most of them are from the my first term in the animation program. In fact, the first one in the top row, is my first attempt at animation. It was crude, poorly animated and the recording is unbelievable bad, but I still remember laughing uncontrollably and realized that animation is so accessible. I had avoided trying animation until that day because I was afraid that I couldn't do it. Later I would watch lectures from professional animators where they'd show their visually stunning films and then tell us that the set was made of painted cardboard and the characters where nothing more than wire and toilet paper.

I still kick myself everytime I think of it. I should have started sooner.

Anywho, I may get more of a kick out of these clips that you, because its cool to see how bad I was. I'm not saying that I am any good now, but I'm not as bad as I used to be. I apologize for the ones that are too long, too short, and poorly animated, which is pretty much all of them. So if you are bored out of your mind and have exhausted every possible option for fun things to do, watch a clip.

Introduction To Animation: 3D Media (FTV66A)


Feed Me!	Abstract	Dancin'	Who Am I?	Kick It	Headache
Size:11.0M	Size:36.1M	Size:13.9M	Size:34.9M	Size:3.0M	Size:4.4M
Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No

Principles of Animation: 2D Media (FTV69)


Floursack	Candle	He Made It!	Z-axis Walk	Hammer-Time	Z-axis Billiards
Size:3.1M	Size:4.7M	Size:6.5M	Size:4.2M	Size:3.2M	Size:3.9M
Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No	Sound: No