I swear I'm not crazy, but...

Here we go. Everyone has little pet peeves when working with things, especially TD's. My #1 pet peeve is odd numbers. Not odd as in 7 or 11 (well, those bother me too, but that's another story). No, odd as in another TD just moved the slider and left it at this:

Seriously? It's not like it drives me insane or anything, it just grates on some inner nerve.  If I'm handed a scene where this happens, I won't even touch it unless it's a value that needs to be drasticly changed for the cloth/hair/fur/whatever to work.  But really.  Yeah.  I tend to work with values that end in 5's and 0's unless it's a really sensitive value like Input Mesh Attract.  It just makes things easier for me.

~Melissa

P.S.

...ok, maybe I am just a little crazy.

Introduction to Cloth Simulation Tutorial - by Me!

So I mentioned this tutorial way back in Bible times, but when I got that call from Dreamworks, they suggested I send in any tutorials I've written as well as my resume, demo reel, bla bla bla. That lit a fire under my foot to finish this up.

This is a written tutorial in .pdf form. This tutorial is for people who have never touched nCloth before, people who've only done the "drop cloth on a cube" exercise and/or anyone who's curious about nCloth and how they could use it in an animated shot.

Keeping that in mind, I kept this tutorial as simple as I possibly could.

It's about 23 pages long (I think), it's not very technical and it has a lot of pictures along the way to help keep things nice and clear. The only thing that I'm planning to do to this is add more images near the end of the tutorial, and maybe make this prettier... I dunno. If anyone has any questions/suggestions to make this better, I'll be sure to edit it and repost it as soon as I can. I'll make another blog entry when I've decided to no longer edit this tutorial, but that won't happen for a year or two at the least.

Until I get suggestions, enjoy Intro to nCloth v. 1.0

http://www.mediafire.com/?67z4411309o1lq9

Password: ncloth
(all one word, all lowercase, no spaces)

~Melissa

Jurannessic

JURANNESSIC is one of the trailers shown during the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2002. It has been directed by 5 students of the GOBELINS animation school: In-Ah RÖDIGER, Simon Pierre ANDRIVEAU, Yann AVENATI, Hervé BARBEREAU and Louis CLICHY.

Couldn't have said it better than the uploader. I watched this as a sophomore and was floored. I didn't know until just recently that this was a Gobelins product, but when I found out I just had to find it again. This was the first thing of Gobelins' that I ever saw and it seems fitting that it's the first [of many] Gobelin projects that I'll share.

It's only available in 240p, but I hope you'll enjoy it fullscreen.

~Melissa

Keeping up with the Jones'

When I was a Sophomore and Junior, I always felt bad about not knowing what was currently going on in the animation world. People would say, "Oh, have y'all seen the latest Gobelins short?" and everyone would be excited while I didn't even know what Gobelins was. My logical mind told me that it wasn't possible to have seen everything, but the artist in me just wanted to devour all there was to devour. You can't be expected to have seen everything, there's just too much out there, but there's nothing wrong with making an attempt is there? I don't think so.

I think I'll post shorts here every now and then, especially if I like the hair and cloth.

My first "pick" is Alarm, a short by the animation team MESAI.

This was directed by Moo-hyun Jang. I think this short is stunning. They went through great lengths to create a realistic environment only to throw a stylized character into it. It's almost eerie how well the two styles marry.

And, of course, I really like the cloth work. The hair, on the other hand, is a sticking point with me. I love to see polygonal hair move, but I think this hair is just a little too active. Eh, it might just be a personal preference. My teachers and fellow Hair/Cloth TD's tend to tell me my hair is too stiff. Anyway, watch Alarm. It's 8:50 long and well worth the time.

I hope you enjoy it in full screen and in HD!



~Melissa

Catching Up

The title of this post seems familiar. I think someone I'm following may have had the same one. Anyway, I got a call from a certain company

*cough cough*

and was told I could possibly, maybe, perhaps work over there for a few months and see what happens after that. After I stopped dancing on the ceiling, I updated my demo reel and finished that nCloth tutorial I was talking about almost a year ago. I sent it in, and now we play the waiting game. I'll keep the 1 person reading this blog current with that situation.

So, that means I can finally post an updated version of my demo reel and that Intro to nCloth tutorial. I want to add just a few more images to it to help clarify some things, but expect to see that stuff from me in the upcoming days.

I guess I should share with y'all the Kung-Fu Panda 2 trailer. Somehow it seems appropriate, I wonder why... With the close exception of How to Train Your Dragon, Kung-Fu Panda is my favorite Dreamworks movie. It's soooo good, and I'm really excited for the sequel.

I hope you watch it full screen!



~Melissa