A Tennis Game - Jose Estrella and Dan Weiland

Facebook readers, click here to be able to see today's Featured Animation.

It's Thursday, and of course that means that you get another featured animation from around the world. And since I just finished up my Animation Production class, today's featured animation is from none other than yours truly.

For our class this month, we worked in teams of two to create a short (extremely short) tennis match. Each person was to animate two shots, the first animating the serve and one return, and the other person animating two returns. All of the models, rigs and textures were provided for us, we were to concentrate on just the animations.

"Two tennis shots? That's like... 4 seconds Dan. Tops. Sounds pretty easy."

Well it's not exactly Toy Story, but we were to try and make these animations look as close to "production quality" as possible. We weren't going for absolute realism, just something that's believable and entertaining to watch. Also, if we wanted to be an "Animator" for our demo reel, we needed to score a 90% or better in this class. So the pressure's on.

"Ok enough yammering. Let's see some animation!"

Woah there bud. Not so fast. First, we start with some real life reference. This will be used as a starting point for our animation. Here are the references for my two shots.

APR Forehand Reference - The best video clips are here


APR Backhand Reference - The top video clips of the week are here

After we do some rough thumb nails (hand sketched storyboard type things) of what we think the action will be like, we go into our first animation pass. This early on, we basically block in the important poses, just enough to "tell the story."

At this point we're trying to match poses between the real life reference and our scene.
Here's a few screen grabs for comparison.

Continuing on from there, we'll block in some of the "in betweens" - basically filling in the gaps and hammering out the details of what's going to happen.

Keep in mind, at this point the animation is just skipping from pose to pose. Even though it might look somewhat "fluid" it's just a slide show. Your mind is filling in the gaps. Between that pass and the final animation the computer will fill in some of those gaps, although I'll have to make a lot of adjustments to the way it does things to make it look better than just moving from point A to point B.

At this point in my animation career, it's very much trial and error. If something doesn't look right, you tweak it a little bit, try to find a better pose, and create another quick "playblast" (real time video to see the animation as it will look full speed), and assess if the changes you made are working or not. After any series of changes I'd make another video like this one, then watch to see if what I had done made things better or worse.

As the animation progresses, you start to move away from the reference a little bit, exaggerating certain areas and completely overhauling others. For example, in the Andy Roddick reference he kind of shorts the shot - he was in too close to the ball - so when he swings his arm is kind of crammed up against his body. In my animation, I chose to pull his arm out further away from his body so that it would look like a more powerful swing. That's just one example of the many eventually differences between the reference and my final scenes.

Also for this final pass, I have to go in and tweak all of the different animation curves. For this particular model, there were approximately 20 different controls (elbows, hands, feet, hips, etc), each with anywhere from 6 to 20 different variables that could be adjusted for any moment in time (translate x, y, z, rotate x, y, z, etc.) In the Graph Editor, you go into each curve and smooth out things, adjust the timing, add or remove keyframes, and so on. Here's a picture of all of the curves for each of the two shots.

You can isolate the different curves of course, and zoom in and out to concentrate on particular areas. I'm not working with that mess as is!

All of that leads to the final animation. There's certainly more to be done here, (there's no facial animation for example), but with the time constraints of the class this was where I had to leave it.

Once the animation was finalized, I rendered out the final image. This is when all the textures are applied and and motion blur is added (to make things FEEL faster). Each frame (at 24 frames per second) took about 5 minutes to render. To give you an idea of how simple this is, one frame of Transformers, if rendered on a single machine, would take 38 hours.

That's why they use more than just a single Macbook Pro for rendering over at ILM.

Once my partner and I had rendered out our separate scenes, we combined them to form "A Tennis Game." Enjoy!!

(Jose animated the blue tennis player, while I animated the red clad guy).

So that's it. A combined two months of work for 18 seconds, most of which was credits or titles. Still, I really enjoyed working on it, and hopefully you found the breakdown of the process at least a little interesting.

If you just came here just wanting a comic, come back Monday. I'll have one for ya. But in the meantime, the boys over at Enliv have switched to a Monday / Thursday schedule. What's today again...?

Wheezy Original Artwork

Well, it's late and I'm not going to be able to finish the comic tonight without sacrificing any sleep that I'll be getting before the first day of March's class, so I'm going to once again offer you a one sided compromise that you have no choice but to accept. I guess you could just stop reading my blog, but why would you do that when you know there's a comic coming tomorrow?

Anyway, one of my classes last month was "History of Archetypes and Mythologies." We studied a variety of mythologies from around the world, relating them to the gaming and movie industry where applicable. Turns out this stuff is applicable for just about everything. Every heard of a book called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"? Turns out that's Star Wars before Lucas thought of it. And Lord of the Rings. And Harry Potter. And so on, and so on...

But I won't delve too deeply into that, I'll leave that to you. One of the things we did for this class was digital artwork depicting figures we studied. So hopefully you'll enjoy some Wheezy originals, even if they don't have a punch line at the end.

Odin from Norse Mythology

Sacrificing himself to himself on the Yggdrasil

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Throwing his eye into Mimir's Spring to gain the Wisdom of Ages

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Balor of the Evil Eye from Celtic Mythology

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Kappa from Japanese Mythology

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My particular take on Kappas from Japanese Mythology.
It was said that Kappa's power came from the water stored in a basin-like depression in their head. They had an overwhelming sense of honor that could be used to trick them into emptying the basin by simply bowing to them.

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Well, that's it for now. Check back on Tuesday for a new comic as well as an upcoming web-comic related project that I'm pretty excited about.

Pyrats - Gobelins l'école de l'image Students

It's Thursday, and time for an animation from the wide world of ... well, animation.

Today's is another student film,"Pyrats", by a group of five from the Gobelins l'école de l'image school in Paris, France. "Pyrats" was made as an opening short for the Annecy 2006 International Animation Festival. According to the students' website, it was completed in 7 months, including the screenplay, storyboard and designs.

This is a 2D animation for the most part, although apparently some Flash as well as Maya was used to help out with certain elements. And we all know how much I love Flash.

The fluidity of the animation just astounds me, and the camera cuts which follow the action from person to person are just, well... cool. From the technical side of animation everything is really well done, and not only that, it's entertaining to boot. Enjoy!

"Pyrats" - By: Yves Bigerel , Bruno Dequier, Ben Fiquet, Nicolas Gueroux, and Julien Le Rolland

Facebook users and feed readers - click here to see today's video.

Steve Martin as ... Tobias Funke?

I've wrapped up my animation class for the month and, as promised, I have a new animation for you.

For this final project we took the same character we've been working with and animated him to a sound clip. We had a handful of clips to choose from, and we were supposed to choose one that we didn't immediately recognize. I chose one that I thought was funny but didn't immediately recognize as any particular actor. After listening to it for about the 900th time (literally), I finally figure out that it was Steve Martin from "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", but I didn't remember that particular scene, which is the whole idea so that Steve's performance didn't influence my "acting".

That's right. Steve.

We're tight.

So here it is. Hope you enjoy. Check back for a new comic sometime tomorrow.

Learning to Walk Again....

Well I promised you new animation and that you shall have.

The last two projects involved an actual biped character, so I've had to move on from juice boxes.
The first involved making this character (The Blue Guy) get up from one chair and walk to another. He was also supposed to convey some sort of emotion - in my case I chose "fear"... but really this was all about getting the mechanics of a walk down.

In the second project we were supposed to show a change of emotion. We were given a certain selection of scenes to choose from, and I chose the one where the blue guy is on a blind date. In my scene, he's not excited about his blind date, as it was his mother who set him up on it. (Thank goodness for mother's who don't subject their sons to blind dates)

I took a little from some old Tex Avery cartoons for inspiration on that one.

One more project to go for the month. I'll be sure and post it up here for y'all once it's done.

Have a good weekend everybody.

Back to School

During the process of deciding whether or not to quit my job and go back to school, I would frequently bounce my thoughts off a fellow alumni from college round 1, as well as one of the smartest guys I know, one Mr. Cody Ebberson.

I wanted to hear his opinions on my possible change in career direction because Cody was also considering returning to academia. Instead of going back to draw cartoons however, he decided to go the route of seven US Presidents and get his MBA at Harvard University.

I know I've been slightly delayed in my comic efforts of late, and I'd like to say it is solely because of the large work load I've been subjected to at Full Sail. Then I talk to Cody, and realize how ridiculous that excuse really is.

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Hopefully putting him in one of my comics will net me a cushy job animating a stock market ticker or something once he's a bajillionaire.

Don't forget to check out my latest animation in the previous post if you didn't yesterday.

This Message is Cody Ebberson approved...

I don't have a comic for you today. Again.

I know what you're thinking. "This reminds me of dark times in days gone by when Wheezy's comics would have months... nay... years between publications. I feel the end of the world is near. All must repent!"

Please don't do anything drastic people, let me explain. This month I'm taking a class called Character Animation, and so far it has been more demanding than any classes I've had before it. It's also been the most enjoyable. I have a project that's due today, and instead of taking Sunday night to make a comic like I normally do, I continued toiling away on my animation in the hopes of getting it as finished as possible before the final turn in.

So I, once again, apologize for comedic delay. Your comic enjoyment will continue tomorrow - so please check back.

Unlike last week's delay however, you get BONUS comedy as sort of a stop gap to a new comic. I hope you enjoy, since, although I would have a hard time turning down a career in web comics (I'm looking at you Penny-Arcade), this is what I actually want to do somewhere down the road.

The goal of this project I've been working on was to take an inanimate object, in this case a juice box, and make it seem alive. I wrote out a scene, sketched some ideas out on paper, then started animating.

So here you go. I hope you like it.

YouTube is being a little finnicky today, so if that embedded video isn't working, you can download the file here.

End of the month sleepy time...

I have two final projects due at 6:00 AM today (Monday). Then I have my next month's class starting at 1:00 PM.

It should be obvious to anybody who has ever picked up an Encyclopedia Brown novel that this insight into my schedule is a precursor to me telling you that I'm not going to have a comic in on time. Sorry about that. This school stuff is a lot tougher than round 1 up at UNL. Mainly because a teacher can fail you by saying "No.. that doesn't look quite right... I'm not sure what it is... but something is off." Stupid subjectivity.

Anyway, I'll get a comic in tomorrow, don't you worry. And to make up for it, I have a couple of extra treats.

First of all, here is one of my projects from an animation class. We were given a Knight character and told to animate him either sneaking, or walking. I chose sneaking, cuz that seemed like more fun. So here's that

The final project for that class was animating the same knight going through an obstacle course. I've been meaning to get that up here as well - hopefully I can manage sometime this week.

The second "I'm making up for reneging on the promise in my banner" goody is similar to my normal Wacom / Photoshop comics, in that it is a comic BOOK, made with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop. Johnny Nguyen, one of my buddies down here in Florida, recently came out with his first comic book. You can find it here (mildy NSFW - sorry Kevin):

http://enliv.com/comic/

Good stuff. Also - check out the "Behind the Scenes: Extra" features at the end. You might recognize a couple of people in those photo references.

Again, sorry again for the lack of comic. Check back tomorrow.

Just call me Henry Clay...

Ok ... here's the deal. I have a comic that's halfway done, and I have other things that I need to do this morning. I could finish the new comic quick and post a black and white version, OR....

I'll post a comic that some of you have already seen, and in exchange for your understanding, post the second comic later this week. Wednesday, let's say.

Sound good? Alright then. Glad we agree.

This comic was made for the JDE Alumni association newsletter. During college round one our dorm had an internet forum where we would occasionally hold surveys and the like. One such survey was the "Hot or Not" survey.

As I'm sure you already have surmised, considering my dashing good looks, I did pretty well in the competition. Some people, however, did a little better. Nowadays I'm finding that my success doesn't have quite the sparkle it once did.

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See ya Wednesday.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...

Another month has come and gone, and a new set of classes has begun. This month I'm taking another character modeling class (like when I made Tobias a couple months back), but with more emphasis on proper proportions with regards to human musculature. If that weren't going to be difficult enough, we don't get to choose somewhat obscure comedians to model this month. We have to create a 3d representation of ourselves.

It's going to be pretty challenging. Not only because creating something that looks like a particular person (especially one as dashing as myself) is fairly difficult, but also because temptation to take certain artistic licenses with this sort of thing is pretty much unavoidable.

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Hopefully I'll be able to get my project from last month posted sometime this week, so keep an eye out if that sort of thing interests you.

Is A-Ha still hiring?

Hey there folks. Just thought I'd give you another quick school update, since I know that's the real reason you come here. Sorry you have to suffer through so many comics to get to the good stuff.

In the event that both the movie industry and my gig with Dire Straights don't pan out, for the last month I've been working on some 2D animation skills during my aptly named "2D Animation" class.

This isn't Flash or anything like that. This is drawing on pieces of paper, lots of pieces of paper, then flipping them back and forth over and over again (like a flipbook), all the while erasing and fixing the horrible mistakes you made the first few times around. Once you've got to a point that you think looks good, you take digital images of all of your drawings, then make it into a video. The purpose of this class was to give us a good solid background in traditional "animation", that we can then carry over to the digital 3D world.

My teacher, Kathy Blackmore, was an animator for Disney for around 8 years, working on projects such as Brother Bear, Lilo and Stitch, and Mulan. Pretty amazing credentials in the 2D world. During the class, we did small projects that demonstrated various principles of animation.

So here's what I've been working on and although they look pretty simple, they took quite a bit of effort. I've looped all of the them because they're so short. Some are meant to be looped, others will have a bit of a jump when they go back to the beginning. Hope you enjoy!

Facebook viewers - click here to see the videos.

Now at least I've got A-Ha as a backup.

TWSS

I suppose it's only natural to become a bit more mature as we progress through life. One area which I've found this to be true is in the classroom. I tend to be more attentive than I was in college round 1, and I make a concerted effort to get as much as possible out of the lectures I'm attending.

That being said, there are times when I simply can't help myself. In this respect I think that my boy Mueller has me in the area of self control. Other friends of mine, however, I doubt could contain themselves.

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One of my professors actually said those words. Well, some of them anyway.

Who am I kidding. I'm not mature. I loved the movie Superbad (ANSFW) and I could watch this video all day long:

I just ... blue myself.

School update for those that are interested.

Last month I was in a class called "Character Design and Creation." As the name would imply, we are just in charge of ... designing and creating a character. This character could be based on whatever we want, so long as it hadn't already been created in some 3d form. Like a video game, or movie or whatever.

So I chose one of my comedic heroes, Mr. David Cross. Known to many as Tobias Fünke. If you aren't familiar with him, let me introduce you.

Well, here's my attempt at creating him in 3d. Sorry for the poor quality of the video.

Have a good week folks.

Show and Tell

Well, as promised I have some school work to share with y'all, and as per usual with school work I managed to find a way to incorporate Flash into things.

Over the last month I've been in a "Shading and Lighting" class. Basically, we were to create a scene from scratch, doing all the texturing and lighting ourselves. We could borrow the 3D objects from a stockpile they had available at school, but usually some modification was required.

The recommendation was to pick a scene that you had images for, so as you would have a reference to try and match. For my project, I picked Andy Dufresne's cell from The Shawshank Redemption. Not only did it seem like a decent challenge, but it gave me a good excuse for watching Shawshank about 20 times in a row.

Here's the result:

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In order to make this, I applied a series of 2d textures, images in other words, to the geometry, as well computer generated patterns, or "procedurals." Just to give you a better idea of the work that was involved, I put together a little Flash presentation to show you the process from start to finish.

Feel free to click anywhere in the Flash app to advance the image, although it will move on automatically if you don't do anything (after pressing start of course). I recommend clicking the Full Size link below to really see what's going on.

(Click here for full size version. Flash Player required)

Have a good weekend everybody.

I has a Comic

Well, it's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks for me, since the end of every month is basically like the end of a semester. This month has been dedicated to creating hard surface objects in 3d, basically anything produced in a manufacturing type setting (such as home appliances or video game controllers), as well as traditional art projects. You know, the kind with a pencil.

I plan on sharing a lot of last month's stuff soon, but this week in particular, we did some storyboarding. I've already shared my storyboard from last month when I made my first 3D animation, but this storyboard was just something to practice the art of storyboarding. I realize this is a bit of a cop out, but I'm submitting this as my comic for the week.

Oh yeah.... I busted out some Flash skills to make it a bit more interesting. Hope you enjoy! (It might take a little while to load on certain internet connections).

(Click Here if embedded movie does not load)

If you're not familiar with the image that inspired my storyboard, check out these sites.

Thanks to Ross for introducing me to this glorious image, and to Mueller for introducing me to the titular URL.

Hope everyone has a good Memorial Day.

This should at least get me a job with Dire Straits

For those of you keeping up, the beginning of May marks the end of my first 3D class, and thus ends my introduction to Maya. I believe y'all were promised an animation...

Well I thought I'd take you through the steps, from concept to final cut. This is the same pipeline major animation studios use, and since I'm now familiar, I'm expecting to start interviewing pretty much any time now.

For this particular project, each group was tasked with making a 6 second animation. Each member would contribute 2 props and 6 seconds of character animation for one character in the scene. My group, named Monkeys Out of Nowhere (Thanks Andy!) had five people, thus our animation has five characters.

The concept our group came up with was a western motif involving a gun fight between two poker players. My character was the bartender. To start with, we each made a storyboard that showed the timing, camera work, and overall action. Basically, it's a comic strip, so not surprisingly, this was the most straightforward part for yours truly.

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Once everybody had their storyboards finished, I created an "animatic". This is basically just a real rough animation using simple geometry and coffin-esque shapes for characters. Each group member would use this as a basic blueprint for animation, ensuring that nobody would walk their character through a wall or something. Just to give you the overall gist; two cowboys are playing poker. One gets up, shoots the other through a window. The sheriff busts in with a shotgun, and blasts the shooter over the bar. There's also a piano player, who runs away. Ready? Aaaaaand action!

Now that we had the basic blueprint, animation could begin. Everybody saved a personal copy of the animatic, brought in their rigged character (which I believe I shared with you in another post) and started animating. After each person was finished animating, everybody would share their animation for use by the rest of the group. Also, some environment detail was added (thanks JR) so that things didn't look quite so bland.

When creating the final scene, each group member was in control of their own camera work. The idea would be to "film" with an emphasis on your character, meaning that we would be producing 5 different videos. Here's my initial cut after animating and importing in the other characters.

Once that was finished, all that was left was texturing, lighting, and rendering (finalizing). We were limited to flat colors for our textures, so don't expect anything fancy. Of course if you have been expecting fancy - you've probably jumped ship to another blog by now. So now that you've suffered through the entire explanation of how I made it, here's my final animation.

Pretty nifty eh? Well, I think so anyway. In addition to that, we also had to do some individual work. For mine, I chose to do another 6 second animation. No lighting or coloring, this was just focusing on basic animation.

That's it for this month in Full Sail. Next month I'll be in a more advanced modeling course - so hopefully I'll be sharing some 3D models of ninjas, pirate monkeys, or maybe a T-Rex Who knows.

Oh in case you were wondering if this is how it's done in the real world, check out this and this. Admittedly, we skipped the voice talent part.

I bet His copy is pirated

We're well into this month of classes, and I've gotten to the point where I can begin making animations. Awesome. Simply Awesome. I'm shooting for something like this before next month is over.

Last week we created our characters, then "rigged" them. This essentially means we added a skeleton to the polygon mesh that we'll use to move them about. Dancing jigs, playing frumble... whatever I want them to do, I can make them do it. I'm essentially playing God at this point. My 500-ish polygon creations are at my whim.

Which I guess isn't like God. Cuz of the whole free will thing.

Anyway, here are some screen shots of my character and the rigging underneath. For this class we're just using "puppet" characters, because we haven't learned how to make the "skin" stretch with the movements yet.

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If you create the skeleton correctly, then a lot of the movements are taken care of for you. By pushing up on the foot, for example, the leg bends appropriately. If I lift the character off the ground, gravity takes his toes downward, as if I had picked up a doll cloth action figure.

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Of course with anything you're learning for the first time, there were a few bumps in the road. If I made the joints at the wrong angle or in the wrong order, I would really come out with some ... interesting results.

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I imagine that everybody who has tried learning Maya ran into this problem early on. It's just a matter of practice. The class I'm currently in is only a month long, so I'm cramming a lot of learning into a pretty quick span.

Still, it could be worse. I might have only had one day to create a fully functional person.

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The Definition of Irony

Well, I'm sitting here doing my homework for class tomorrow. It's grueling. Arduous. Painful.

I'm watching Field of Dreams.

Ok, all things sarcasm aside, Field of Dreams is a pretty fantastic movie. I don't like baseball. Kevin Costner can do simply horrible things to a role, script, or director's chair. But as far as homework goes, watching any movie is awesome.

On a completely unrelated, but probably more appropriate for this blog, note, emily recently went through an experience with one of her coworkers very similar to today's comic.

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Like emily and the character in the comic, I'm not gonna explain exactly what a fupa is if you don't know. I'd check Urban Dictionary if you're confused.
At this rate I should probably start getting advertising revenue from Urban Dictionary.

One last thing before I letcha go. Some of you might be wondering:
"Dan, is there any rhyme or reason to your posting? It seems pretty random to me, and as such, I find it difficult to know when I should or should not check your blog. In fact, I usually don't check it at all until you message or call me telling me you've posted a new comic, which is fairly presumptuous on your part. A few times you even reached over my shoulder and typed in the URL."

Unfortunately, I do not have any kind of real schedule for comic posting. I try to get out about 2 a week, and typically they fall on Fridays and Tuesdays. At least I think they do. But I could be totally wrong.

Sooooo, I've added a couple of links to the side of the ol' blog. They are methods of "subscribing" to my blog.

These are "RSS Feeds" - or Really Simple Syndication. Click on any of these links and you'll get directed to options for being notified every time I get off my college butt and make a post.

You can add 'Why Not' notification to Google, Yahoo or Bloglines reader utilities, or even as a widget in your Google Personalized Homepage.

Aaaand I'm done advertising for myself. Hope I didn't scare everybody away.

The Psychology of Ethics

I'm registered, I'm orientation-ed.... oriented I guess, and I've got all my materials for the first month of classes.

Scratch that, first month of class.

Indeed, this first month I'll only be taking one class. Since this is a Bachelor of Science I'll be getting, there are some General Education requirements that go along with all the awesome animation stuff I'll eventually be learning. Since I've already got one of those BS things, I get to skip out on a few classes here and there. This first month is supposed to entail two classes (for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week). "English Composition", and "Ethics and Psychology".

Well luckily for me, I already have an English minor so Full Sail decided to let me pass on English Comp stuff. Or maybe because they're so impressed with the flowing prose of my blog. Regardless of the reason, that means March is a Tuesday and Thursday undertaking - probably the lightest class load I've ever had at any level of school, with the minor exception of that one class taking up 8 hours on each day.

I wonder why, in this accelerated Bachelor's program, they picked certain gen ed stuff to cover and not others. I'm sure there's some guidelines that they must follow to be accredited, but why Ethics and Psychology? I guess so we don't end up being a bunch of animators that lie to their professors, audience, customers, or constituents.

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Class starts tomorrow. Hoycha!

School Supplies are Critical to making Friends

Today is officially my first day of being registered as a college freshman. Again.
At 9:30 AM I am required to be in attendance at Full Sail for orientation. This will be the first time I've actually had to be awake before 10:00 in about 2 months.

Horrid life I lead, I realize.

This whole going back to school thing got me thinking about the first time around, and how exactly I met all the people I hung out with. The majority of my friendships were instigated by living in the dorms with all the same people year in and year out. We'd leave our doors open, invite each other to the C Store as we walked down the hall, borrow movies frequently, and generally just hang out with anybody and everybody, at least once. It was so ... easy.

Full Sail, however, has no dorms, and not much of a campus to speak of. It's basically 4 buildings.
Since I'm now going to be commuting to school, the only chance I'll have to befriend my classmates will be actually during class. Considering a large portion of the students will be straight out of high school, I've got a pretty good idea of how my interactions with these youngin's will go.

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I guess I could just drift through school without actually making any friends ... but I think I'll give it a shot anyway so I have some people around should I need to pull a Dead Man on Campus.