For some time I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about user interface in rigs. When making a rig, it’s easy to forget about who is going to actually use our creation: some guy who called himself “animator”.
So, it is quite common to end up with an incomprehensible mess of bones and objects that cannot be animated by human beings… not like us, Rigging Gods.

So, besides the working mechanisms we set up in a rig, there is a user-interface (UI) that we need to develop in order for the animators to deal with our creature.

We might agree that the UI has to:

1. reveal which controllers are meant to be used in the easiest possible way. This means that the controllers should be easily found at glance.

BUT, also to …

2. avoid those controllers to “get in the way” of other controllers,

and

3. avoid to occlude the character while posing.

and since we are asking… it’d be also good if

4. the controllers could explain by themselves what they are meant for

Yeah, animators could be demanding…
(more…)

Back to rigging stuff.

Hinges are tricky. Some of you might agree, others might not, and a number of you might ask “What are hinges anyway ?”. A hinge is a bone that does not inherit rotations from its parent. So it behaves like a hinge or almost like one. Note the “almost” part.
(more…)

That’s right, in Licuadora Studio we started posting tutorials about different parts of our pipeline.

First issue is about compositing and was written by Ivan Hoffmann, our famous “Compoguy” :D.

He explains how he did one of the shots from “Superagentes: La nueva generacion“ movie that was filmed here in Argentina. This particular shot I was asked about many times while I was at B-Conf 2008, so for you guys here it is.

Check it out ! (and check our demoreel if you missed it !)

Regards

(BTW, I’m testing new website design so don’t worry if you see some stuff missing/not working here… )

I have received an invitation for an exhibition of Hisk Institute graduates in Gent, Belgium. Reading the names of the graduates, I realized some of them were students in the Blender Course we gave with Jason last year, and somehow I felt suddenly happy.
(more…)