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Check out this impressive student animation from Denmark. “Elk Hair Caddis” is Peter Smith’s graduation film, and it just makes me eager to see what he’ll come up with next. Granted, it’s inspired (and he lists his inspirations on the vimeo page for the film); but he’s drawing inspiration from the right places and it’s [...]

Two things I’m a sucker for: Stop-motion, and old proto-animation toys like the Zoetrope. The two come together neatly in this recent commercial:

Wanna know how I made this toon shader? Read on… Toon Shader Basics If you know the basics of a toon shader in Maya, feel free to skip ahead to Building Moom’s Shader. A simple toon shader in Maya is a surface shader fed by a ramp containing two colors: The fill and the outline. [...]

Here’s the counterpart to the prisoner run cycle I posted earlier. Like that one, it’s got plenty of issues, but it was fun to animate as a quick study. It’s a heavy run, contrasting the prisoner’s extremely light one. His size and shape got me thinking he’s a mean cop, but somewhat dull and oafish. [...]

Here’s a run cycle I animated as a class demo. I’m teaching a Game Animation class this Fall, and I needed to brush up on Character Studio! Here’s what came out. It’s a 10-frame run at 30fps. Since his feet are tied to a chain, I imagined him running with short, extra fast steps, and [...]

Some folks have asked about the process behind the look of my recent scenes, the Bee Chase and the Stair Fall. I’m starting a series of posts to answer those questions. I’d like to start with the backgrounds, even though (as you’ll see from this post) they were created after the animation was done. I [...]

He loves flowers. Too bad he’s terrified of bees. Another cartoon animation exercise. The focus of this one was to come up with a simple story and animate it to a musical beat. It started as an assignment during my last APT session with Keith Lango. Big thanks to him for the assignment, and for [...]

Here it is! The cartoon test I’ve been finishing up. I did most of the animation during my last APT session with Keith, and then tweaked it afterwards. I also wanted to try a loose, rough style of rendering and backgrounds, to go with the animation style. Nothing ground-breaking here in terms of animation, but [...]

or “The House of Small Cubes”, if you so prefer. Whatever the name, it’s a deeply elegant and touching animated short. If the goal of art is to evoke and amplify what it is to be human, then this short IS art. Directed by Kunio Kato. Winner of the 2009 Academy award for best animated [...]