It’s a wrap!
Bassam here, blogging from the Spark office in Rome,
a weekend since we finished the CNIPA project.
It feels sad to be leaving Rome so soon (I only have 2 days left)- I had a great time in the city and in the Spark studio.
Project nitty-gritty:
Total running time is 8 minutes, which encompasses around 5 minutes of 3D animation (plus credits, plus a 2D title/intro sequence). The project took around 2 months (I think) though animation and rigging happened mainly in just the last few weeks.
The most amazing part of the project (for me) was how quickly Maya animators adjusted to working in blender- it really only took them 2-3 days to be totally comfortable in the new environment, and they were animating like MAD! Lead animator Dino Figuera alone must have averaged about a minute a week, or even more, of pretty high quality stuff- he was lead animator for the project, and did the bulk of the final animation.
We had a lot of fun working, tweaking the rigs to add controls or features, and changing the way things happened. After the first character, the main aspects of the rigs were pretty much locked, but I still managed to make several nice “discoveries” along the way- better ways to do IK/FK switching (doing it the “Maya way” as suggested by Dino) and fun with animated constraints and lots more.
Just to show a typical scene, here’s a little screenie. The character is linked from a library file, but we often added local constraints to the scene with no problem. Kudos to Ton, Aligorith, Brecht and all the blender developers for how well things were working.
So that’s it for now! I’m off to enjoy the ruins at Caracalla and Appia Antica- Peeeaaaaccee!
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By “Maya way” do you mean having 3 separate chains, 1 IK controlled, 1 FK, and one doing the deforming? The deforming one gets weighted to both the IK and FK and the strength of the constraint determines ik/fk?
If that’s the case, I’m going to have to try this in Blender.
Thank you Bassam , Blender is growing strong in italy and with people like you (and Enrico Valenza too) working on projects like this in Italy , we can all see what great results we can achieve with Blender and maybe open our minds to this point of view and the open source ( sadly in italy we are still too much closed and sceptical about this matter)
Ciao.
Mike, exactly what I meant. It works much better than trying to blend the IK influence in practice.
Davide Berti, well, the Italians I met must have been the cool open minded ones
OH!
Thanks Bassam!
Maybe we are!
Ciao
Francesco
Thank you very much Bassam for this article. It is great to hear that experienced Maya animators were co comfortable with Blender.
Hope to hear more details concerning “Maya way” IK/FK switch
Coincidentally I have started some day ago the thread in matter at BlenderArtists, so every one will be glad to hear your advice and Maya attitude.
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