Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Late, late Tuesday post!

Trying to keep at least a weekly progress report going.



Playing around with the FlexMotion tools (a very cool way of implementing spline IK) in Messiah Studio. I gotta say, this program has shot to the front of my preferred tools list. It's a shame it's been kind of buried by the dominance of Maya (not a knock against the venerable program), because MS easily has the simplest and best tools for animation. And the latest version, Messiah Studio 6, was released yesterday.

So, I'm just playing around with using curves to drive arm movement. Even though this is the dreaded 'twinning' that animators are warned against using, I was only testing the curve tools and not trying for any kind of finished animation. Interesting test and I will probably use FlexMotion for the arms, at least in certain shots.

8 comments:

MrGoodson2 said...

Pretty dang cool I'd say. Think I'll have a look at this tool. See what street retail looks like.

MrGoodson2 said...

Not bad . 299 pro edition

MrGoodson2 said...

Aha. I see the catch. It's not actually a modeling tool. It's the rig, animate, fx and render tool.

Surly Bird said...

Right, Ellis, it's purely focused on animation.

If you are looking for a cheap (as in completely free alternative), I would point you to Blender. It is a seriously good production tool and does it all: Modeling, UVing, Rigging, Animation, Texturing, FX and more. It has a built in compositor and a video editor (I stitched the three different takes of this animation together in Blender). It even has its own game engine (never used it).

Runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux. And it's completely free. I would take Blender as a threat pretty seriously if I were the higher ups at Autodesk.

MrGoodson2 said...

Thanks for that tip. I'm focusing on making myself more-better at After effects right now. I'll post some of those dabblings eventually

Davis Chino said...

Very cool! Glad to see Surly remains hard at work!

Tom Moon said...

What Marty said. I'd love to be able to play with animation. One day I'll download Blender. You have an impressive array of talents sir!

Surly Bird said...

Thanks for all the kind and encouraging words. More stuff coming soon!