How to playblast h264 in Maya without Quicktime installed

Since April last year, Trend Micro have been urging Windows users to uninstall Quicktime because they had found two major vulnerabilities in the software and Apple had announced they would no longer be issuing security updates for it. This poses a problem for animators like myself since this particular piece of software is what enables us to playblast in the highly efficient h.264 codec.

Hot on the heels of my 5 year old "How to use Tween Machine" video, I have another hot tip for you Maya folk.

To get the codec back after having uninstalled Quicktime, simply start the installation process again (the program can still be downloaded on Apple's website) but at the point of where it asks the setup you want, choose "Custom".

Choose "Custom"

Then make sure to uncheck the "QuickTime Player" option. The player is the part that has the security vulnerabilities. The Essentials part contains the codec.

After that you are good to go again! That sweet, delicious mov encoder is all yours to abuse with crap animations. No need to thank me. Just send me money :)

Until next time!

Amour de Mimes – Progress Reel

This was made for a presentation we had to do in front of a 100 or more people. Originally I used Inception music, but for the internet I replaced it with a more subtle (yet very beautiful) track and light purple background instead of the original black.

We got pretty good apraise for what was presented so far, and we found out that all the other teams were at a similar production stage as us – which was a bit of a relief, although it doesn’t dismiss the fact that we still have a lot of work ahead.

Anyway, this video just briefly shows what we’ve done so far. Not all of it is there actually, and also it doesn’t really do justice to all the man hours that have been put in to the project by us five guys. Nevertheless –

How to use the Tween Machine

I created this video for a friend, but perhaps it will help a few others too.

Tween Machine is a little script that helps you create breakdowns. The video shows you how to install and use it.

What’s Pink And Fluffy?

It’s done!

A man who’s had a few too many to drink is surprised to find a woman standing next to him:

This was a really tough animation to do due to the drunken state. I’ve done my utmost to make this as good as I could and have learnt so much in the process. I’d say all in all, it’s about a month’s work. For 22 seconds of animation. That’s when I realised that well… art is never truly complete. There’s always room for improvement or other possible interpretations. So I decided to finish up and render it.. using Pixar’s Renderman :) I’ll talk about that in a later post.

Baby minotaur!

I can’t tell whether it’s cute, mischievous or frightening – but what I do know is that I never expected to do anything like this 😀

As one of our many non-animation related assignments in this animation course, we  had to make a high-poly character with some relation to the Narnia fantasy. I chose to do a Minotaur at first, but realising they’ve already been done so many times, I thought I’d put a unique twist on it. A baby Minotaur is not something you see often! Following this thought, I drew and sculpted (with real clay) a concept but ended up not being very happy with it. So I must now credit killintyme for their wonderful art, which I’ve based this model off.

As part of the brief, I had to lower the poly count from ~8million to a few thousand. Then export displacement, normal and diffuse maps. So all in all, I now have a little bit of knowledge in ZBrush sculpting/painting/exporting and importing it all into Maya.

Not ideal considering this is an animation course, but I had fun doing it :)

Animex: Meeting with Ed Hooks!

Animex is a week-long festival where professionals from many different backgrounds, countries and companies in the films and games sector come to Teesside University to meet and talk to aspiring students and hobbyists.

On Tuesday morning, Ed Hooks came in to see character animation undergraduates and masters students. This man transformed the way character animation was learned; he taught animators how to convey emotion and believability in their work. So as well as being a screen writer and actor himself, he also teaches acting to animators and published the renowned book “Acting for Animators”.

Our respect for this man is so great, that we applauded as he entered the room. He turned out to be a great guy and humble as well, and although he’s almost deaf in one ear, he still speaks clearly in a nice tone.

One by one, about 20 of us showed Ed our work, ranging from blocked animation to finished pieces. He gave brilliant, expansive feedback and made use of analogies when needed. Especially for mine.

I showed him my 6 Word Story. I asked him to ignore the horrendous animation, and just focus on the story telling. Being the last piece to be shown, it did quite shock the audience as it was the only “dark” animation. Ed sure had a lot to say about it though. He began with a little of admiration for me doing something so unusual and emotional. He then opened my eyes to what he called

“Masturbatory Art”

That is, art that you make for yourself for your own pleasure. He compared it to tribal meetings; when in old times, people would gather together and share stories. Some stories have purpose and are useful for the tribe. Then there are others, like mine, which is a story that wants to be told, but doesn’t quite have an audience for it. The lesson learnt is that although its good to create masturbatory art, you still need to shape it so that it’s relatable by the audience.

He also went over some of the hithces in the story telling, such as the purpose of the smoking man and where the baby came from.

At some point in the future, I would like to remake this short. At some point.

First poses with a CG character

Black dog has a secret… (Latest animation)

This is something I made for one of the modules on my course. Don't ask how I came up with it.

Brief: Black Dog

We had to make an animation involving a black dog, in the literal, metaphorical or whatever sense we wanted. The catch was that we had to use After Effects to make it.

My solution was to paint everything in photoshop and import it all into After Effects. I then moved them around the timeline and added sound and music. Voila, I created a really crude animation.

I really had no idea why we were forced to use After Effects for this – it’s not at all a tool for animation.

Fun piece to do nevertheless, and hopefully enjoyable to watch although you may not understand what’s going on until the end.

Distraught Teenager, Bastard Baby, Approaching Train

A Six Word Story?

I was assigned to make an animation based on a six word story written by someone else. This is a concept created by Ernest Hemingway, a very highly acclaimed writer. He bet his colleagues that he could tell a story in six words, and those six words turned out to be: “Baby shoes for sale, never worn.” And what a powerful six words they were. You think about it for a minute, and you start thinking well, why haven’t they been worn? And your mind wanders off to thinking about a back-story and what happens next.

My six words were chosen after wading through a long list on sixwordstories.com. Many of them weren’t very thought provoking or were too comedic; I wanted something serious.

Technicalities

I used a Wacom and Photoshop CS4 Extended’s new video layers feature. I later found this to very limiting because it was very difficult (if not impossible) to lift frames and place them back or forwards in the timeline. This meant that the timing of the animation is very poor as it was all done one frame after another sequentially.

In total, there are maybe 800 unique frames and it took me three straight weeks to draw it all. I worked on it every day, for the majority of each day. Traditional animation is extremely time consuming! Very rewarding though.

He can’t find “it”

This is the first animation I made in Edge Hill University. The challenge was to make a character interact with three different objects or situations.

Being my first animation, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. In fact I ended up making it just a few days before the deadline. In total, I drew 120 unique frames in a mind boggling 10 hours. It was this assignment that showed me how crazy animation really is; you simply can’t appreciate the work of Disney etc without having tried it yourself.

As you can see, the drawings and animation are very poor, but I’ve posted this as a basis for showing my progression through the years.