flux

Now this is my favorite kind of animation: whimsical, joyful and freewheeling; but not random for randomness’ sake. Co-written by Maurice Noble, who sadly didn’t live to see the finished short.

This is a great example of limited animation that doesn’t feel limited. Enjoy!

Question: How do you keep creativity alive in the face of tight [...]

I just saw this oscar-nominated short. It’s not everyday we get to see fun, cartoony exaggeration done right in CG. This one’s well done, and nicely storyboarded too.
When Pixar’s Presto came out, I was pretty excited to see cartoon animation in CG. Over time I’ve realized that while Presto had some great movement, the overall [...]

A sketch of “me” for a class demo on building characters out of simple geometric shapes.

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. This ramp isn’t [...]

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 [...]

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.

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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 the [...]

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 doing [...]

The third in a series of cartoon style paintings (after the clouds and the mountains).
This one’s based on one of the tree thumbnails I posted earlier.

Enjoy!