UPDATE: been a bit

UPDATE: Feb 2017

Had some setbacks. I live  just outside Baton Rouge Louisiana. Back in August we had some flooding. We had to evacuate for about a week. Was lucky the water went under me so I didn't loose much.  I was staying with family for a few months and work on Ebil was stopped. Restarted again in 2017 but have not posted anything.

Blendrig5 Results

Smooth!

Just finished weight painting my bones of Ebil with Blendrig5. It took me many hours to paint all my bones. I think my model is not symmetrical somewhere and my X mirror weights is not working having to paint both sides and try to make them match. I am supper happy with the results I am getting. I have not created any shapekeys yet. I'm not sure if I will for the Oil spill project.

Here is my test render of the updated rig.

Blendrig 5 test results.

  

Testing the Blendrig5 addon

Still Alive

Still working on Oil Spill episode. Modeling props, sets and new characters. I have been reading a lot about the Blendrig5 addon by Juan Pablo Bouza. I was never happy with Ebil's rig. I have been avoiding the issue. I did not want to step backwards in this project. However, after reading some documentation and watching some videos I tried it out. This project has been in my head for a long time, a little more will not kill me.

Mostly out of the box blendrig5 test. I have not yet weight painted the bones (hands, feet, and face not fully rigged). I am super impressed with the quality of the deform at this point. The learning curve is much steeper than rigify and the process is more time intensive. But the results are magnitudes better. Rigify does not have deformers the way blendrig5 does. I was kicking myself for scope creep and going backwards to use the blendrig5 but I am so glad that I did.

Here is a quick 80 frame render to look at the deforms and compare to my earlier tests with rigify.

NEW

Blendrig5 test

OLD

old rigify rig. from ebil fitness camp 

 Note: The gote will be attached to the glasses bone later.

Blendrig5 was developed by Juan Pablo Bouza. Check it out!
Check out my Ebil fitness camp I did a few summers ago.

Oil Spill: Penguins

Birds of a Feather

Working on modeling some simple penguins for the Oil Spill episode. Need a bunch of these little guys.

Penguin concepts. Click to enlarge.

Procrastination and pipeline

Took a break from Ebil to update some other project and develop some new skills. But I have been done with that for a month or more. Picking Ebil back up is hard for me. I'm very good at procrastination. I'll tell you more about that later.

One good thing I have been doing is keeping notes and tracking of my progress. This makes it much easier to pick up where I left off. I have been using a freeware program called task coach (link)

Task coach

Task coach is a souped up todo list. More than keeping a list of task, it allows you to create categories and nest your tasks. I created a category for characters then broke that task down into Model, texture, and rig. Each can be broken down into subtasks. The program will track you time spent on each task. You can also leave notes. It does not support teams directly, but as a one man band it fits my needs well.

My task organization for character development

One of the many problems with taking a break from a project is skill creep. I have learned new techniques and honed old skills. The desire to rebuild existing assets is strong.

linking and posing workflow

I have been linking my Ebil files using the import>link command and it has its limits, but I am getting use to them, or learning how to use them. I have Ebil modeled and rigged for this project (may revamp for a later episode.)
workflow:

1. Open my current ebil .blend file with my rigged and skinned Ebil.
2. Select all of the elements I want to pass down the chain (model, rig ,rigify bones and custom shapes)
3. Create a group for all of these objects(CTRL+G) name it something useful.
4. Open new .blend file
5. import>link the group from the current ebil.blend
6. import>link or append the rigify script for the U.I.
7. select the rig and create proxy
8. Create pose library for the rig.
9. Select the proxy rig and the mesh and create a new group name it something_poses
10. save file
11. Now I can link that group into my scenes and animate

If I need to update the model or rig I edit the current .blend. If I want to add or edit poses I edit the *_pose.blend

Quick render of the current Ebil rig.

Animatic Workflow (After Effects vs Fusion 7 vs Blender)

Shiny Shiny New Toy! Software!

Recently Blackmagic software made Fusion 7 free with only a few restrictions. This excited me as a free motion graphic alternative to After Effects (AE). I have been trying to stay focused on Ebil, I have been avoiding new software so as not to take away from my production time with Ebil. I figured I would use Fusion to build my animatic as a learning project and get my animatic done. It took me a lot of hair pulling to get the swing of things. I could have done this in about 30 mins or less in AE. I've never used a node based compositor before. The user community on Fusion seems tight lipped. I guess all the pros using it are busy being pros. Whatever the reason (a hot topic on the forums) there is a huge lack of free Fusion tutorials online. You can easily find the basics if you want to do VFX compositing or 3D importing. But I failed to find any tutorials I could follow to give me the skills to load a sequence of images (storyboards) and time them out to an audio file. After many hours of struggle I did manage to load the files into nodes and chain them together. However Fusion 7 lacks the ability to display the audio clip alongside my visual clips in realtime (or I could not find it).

Animatic Fusion 7 comp

After a week of struggle I decided to pass on Fusion 7 for the time being.

Back to Blender (Bender 3D 2.73a)

So it hit me. Blender has a sequence editor already built in. So I took my frames into blender, and I was able to create a sequence in a matter of minutes. Granted I do have years of experience with Blender, but I have never used the sequence before. I did need to watch a few tutorials on the ins and outs. These were very easy to find, and there were dozens more available if I need them. 

Animatic Blender comp

It was a very simple matter to import my audio file and sync it with my storyboard renders.

So for now I will continue to work within Blender.

Project notes:

Making progress on Fart Demon using volumetric texture. Decided to avoid physics sims for this short. I will cheat and use censor bars to comically melt my crowd. This should take a huge amount of time off production (R&D, simulation, Render overhead...)