Dhruv Govil

Animating: An animators prerogative

Prerogative. I always spell it perogative. And then I think of Perogies. yum.

But with all that rigging and scripting talk, I should say my main focus is still on Animation. so here’s a few updates about that:

As many of you know, I’m currently studying traditional handdrawn animation to bring up my animation chops. We’re in the middle of creating our final films.

Right now I’m almost all signed off on the rough animation(the real thinking part). I have 3 scenes left to final tomorrow and then I can start cleaning them up and animating.

This is about 2 weeks ahead of schedule (not counting the Christmas break in there…it would be a month with that included). This is surprisingly unstressful too. I’m not staying after regular hours like we all did in 3D. I leave at 4 to come home and work on other things and I’m flying through all these things.

I feel incredibly productive.

It’s not all 2D though. I also just started another 3D animation piece. It’s about 530 frames of super cartoony animation that I’ll be finessing bit by bit to add on to my reel. I’ll post updates with it soon. Let’s just say it’s inspired by a certain cookie eating fiend. Not me. :-D

That’s all pretty much. Oh and I’m off to London on the 17th to visit my doggies…and family of course.

Rigs and Code: Animator’s Escape

Some animators like to do Sudoku to take a break, some do crosswords and some read a book. I like to do technical stuff like coding and rigging. Does the same job of putting my mind in a different place. And after working all day on my traditionally animated film, I need it.

So with that in mind, I’ve recently started coding and rigging quite a bit. Nothing fancy on either end.

I have a rig in progress with the following things in mind:

• Animator and workflow friendly: everything should be intuitive no matter what rig you’re used to animating on. There’s been a large influx of rigs lately that are so unintuitive/messy for the animator and I want to avoid that. Not saying I’ll succeed in all regards but that brings me to the next point.
• Modular and clean rigging: Every section is cleanly separated. No rigging exists in the bind groups etc… This is something I also don’t see in a lot of rigs. The ability to rip something out/place something in without breaking anything else.  Again, I’m not saying I will succeed in this regard either but this approach means that if I can’t succeed the first time, I can keep going back and fixing it without any legacy headaches.
• Appeal: this is something I would just love my character to have. I’ve been studying a lot of character design lately and what constitutes the enigmatic concept of ‘appeal’. I hope my rig will be easy on the eyes.
• Female: Why are there so many male rigs? There are modifications to Norman and there’s Morpheus of course, but otherwise rigging is a very sexist affair with few good female rigs. I recently did an animation with a female rig, and all the issues it had were infuriating 
• All inclusive node: I want the rig to exist solely under one node in the Outliner. That means no Display layers by default, or Selection sets. This goes back to the point of being workflow friendly. Norman is one of the few rigs that does this well, it leaves the outliner and display layers clean for the animator to work. I will include an alternative to these methods in the GUI (upcoming).
• All inclusive scripts: The andy rig does a great job for this. it has one .ma file that I can easily port everywhere and all the functionality exists inside that one file. I do not think it’s the animators responsibility to place all the rig bits in the right place just to animate. This will hopefully also include an inclusive GUI.
• Render indifferent: A lot of recent rigs come with Mental Ray shaders. I use Renderman. On the one hand, including Mental Ray shaders means that the casual animator will be able to get great results without setting up shaders, but it’s also a pain for any one else to replace shaders. I would like to ship my rig with a default of Maya shaders (hence supported by every renderer) and the GUI allows the switching to different shader setups.
• No limits: This one will be very hard to implement, and I doubt I’ll get it right the first go, but it’s something every animator wants. A rig that doesn’t limit what you can do. 
• Friendly GUI: I love the Malcolm rig for animating. But the cluttered abxpicker GUI makes me cringe. I would ideally like to create a GUI akin to the HumanIK GUI in Maya 2012 with a focus on user experience.

So with that in mind, look out for v1 of my rig at the end of January, time permitted. I could have done a lot more than this right now, but my school project takes precedence over the rig. 

As for scripts, I’m learning Python and how to use it within Maya and with a multitude of other programs. A few things I want to create time permited:

• A renderlog emailing script: It will email you when a render is complete with a log file so you can see what failed and what didn’t.
• A better playblast UI: a friendlier playblast UI, that can predictably save settings and have a few more useful options.
• A framecounter and shotlabel script
• A render setup script: it’ll create an interface for the un-techsavvy animator to setup their renders. The interface will be common to all render engines so they dont have to adjust to each different render too much. It will also create a corresponding After Effects, Photoshop or Nuke file with all the connections setup to go.

Everything but the render setup script is pretty close to done. I’ll need a little time to finess them but look out for them.

IDK if anyone noticed, but I fixed my Tumblr to Worpress script a while ago. Unfortunately, I need to finish it up a bit to allow for individual post pages on Wordpress but that should be simple as pie.

And then I need to spend a little time with CSS and optimizing the site down again.

That might take a while because of how little time school leaves me with. 

Tumblr - Wordpress broken

So for the next few days, my Wordpress blog link will redirect to this Tumblr page since my wordpress script seems to have magically broken itself. Lets see.

Why Cars 2 is so heartbreaking

So for the last 3 years of my life, I have been striving with all my might to be an animator. For the past 3 years of my life, I, like many others, have used Pixar as the bar that I measure myself to.

Till I am more than just good enough for them, I am not good enough.

That’s why it breaks my heart to see Cars 2. Seriously…what just happened?

Cars 2 was an example of very lazy writing that even Michael Caine (who was somehow terrible too) couldn’t save. It was a complete loss of company fundamentals.

To me, Pixar is the company that pushed 3D Animation to be a great storytelling tool, to be something believable. They pushed the idea that you can always make something better, and they let the ideas of a formerly great company live on. Now, ironically part of that same company, they too seem to be falling down that spiral.

I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t expecting much from Cars 2. It’s prequel was yet another movie I can barely remember if I wanted to, but I’d never want to. Again, technically this is a great movie. You can’t fault it’s animation, its visuals. It’s gorgeous. Where it falls flat is what made Pixar so great: Story.

Coming out of movies, I try and rationalize the things I didn’t like to see what the filmmakers may have meant. It’s a good excercise.

Coming out of Cars 2, I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t defend a single damn thing in there.

It felt made for kids. But every Pixar movie was a kids movie that adults enjoy equally.
It felt commercial. But Pixar made toy story. Which was a great film.
It had no passion. Except John Lasseter is extremely passionate about this world as he has constantly mentioned.
It was forced by Disney. So was Toy Story 2 and 3. Contractually, they had to make those, and both turned out great.

I just can’t defend this movie. It’s not terrible if it were a straight to dvd holiday special…but it’s a feature made to celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest studios ever to exist.

You know what bugs me most? Constant exposition, weak dialogue, weak VO directing, nonsensical plot twists, cheap cop outs? No, what really kills me is they threw the idea of ‘plussing’ out the window.

At every Pixar presentation I’ve been to,their MO has been that if something can be improved, it should be. A concept from the old Disney days.

Well PIXAR, I think you could have plussed a whole ton of shit in this movie!!! What happened to the company that wrote an entire paper on how where a rats mouth corner points, changes how we perceive him.

All in all, I’m disappointed because if I hold myself up to Cars 2, I feel purposeless.

So here’s hoping Brave blows me away.

Reflecting

It’s funny, because when I was in high school and after graduating, my teachers constantly told me how I would not be anything succesful and would never amount to anything.

Granted, I wasn’t exactly the best student. Back home, it didn’t matter if you were a bright and creative student. You were shoehorned into this dogma of synthetic benchmarks that aren’t much more than seeing who can remember their shit best.

The thing is: Schools were built around very old efficiency ideas of cramming as much knowledge into a human as possible and then send them out into the big world.

 The problem was:

a) I could never memorize data like the other kids. I could figure out things as fast as they could recite it, but just pure cramming was never my thing and the pressure to do it was mind numbing.

b) I was just not interested in theoretical applications of data. Yes, the teachers told me why it would be useful in the future. But what can I do with it now? 

Thankfully education systems are finally figuring this out. But back then, I actually did terribly in my A levels. Which was a shock because I was amazing in my O levels and scored highly(national highest in fact) in the only creative field we had: English.

But that brings me to why I’m proud of myself today

When left to my own devices to study, where I can appreciate the application of what I know, I excel highly. I think I only realized that recently with the help of people around me.

I genuinely have the respect of people around me, who regard me as someone with knowledge on a great deal of subjects and who is also multi-talented. 

This isn’t me blowing my own horn. Just for once, I’m sure that I’ve put all my naysayers to shame. For most of my life, I’ve been ostracized for not living up to the ideal norm, but now, people (many far better than me), acknowledge me  as being someone worthy.

So while trying not to get an inflated head, today I’m just going to sit happy and smile that I’m finally not a giant failure. (That part of life can wait a while to hit)

Also I should be incredibly thankful that my parents are great because for the most part they’ve never forced me to be the norm and have more than supported me in every way in being who I want to be.