Night of Connections and Critique at the Walt Disney Family Museum by Tea Time Animation

A giant thank you to Tea Time Animation, particularly Lana Bachynski, Brandon Nason, Cody Lyon, and Frank Frelier, for hosting an awesome evening at the Walt Disney Family Museum with special guests from Reel Feedback and Women in Animation. It is an awesome event that not only brings together various departments of AAU from 3D, 2D, stop motion, to illustration and visual development. I even saw some VFX people there that were outside of the 3D animation but still wore the green flags that denotes them as such. Here is to hoping that this becomes an event that will be reoccurring, gather more support, and become even bigger and better! The night was split into two main parts. First there was mixing and mingling while at the same time Reel Feedback was taking reels to critique and a model was posing for us to design our own "Tea Time Disney Princess". The second half of the night had a keynote panel with Women in Animation, featuring Marji Bordner, Bonita DeCarlo, Angelique Reish, and Liza Ryus.

I wish there was more mixing and mingling and I had done more mixing and mingling, particularly with professionals. It didn't quite feel like there was a lot as Reel Feedback were off doing their critiques and WiA were around their tablet getting people to sign up for their new San Francisco chapter. Maybe there were more professionals around that I just missed. I also unfortunately missed a lot of the mixing and mingling as I had decided to spend some time drawing the model. It didn't feel like I was drawing for very long, as I had just a set of thumbnails, but before I knew it we were getting called to go down to the theater for the keynote panel. I wish that I had a reel to get critiques on, especially since Reel Feedback were critiquing a range of portfolios that night and not just animation like last time when I went to the event held at the Animation Collaborative. Unfortunately the one that I had just made was lost when my things got stolen and I hadn't made a backup of it yet nor had time to make a new one. I didn't know who she was beforehand and I was unfortunately unable to catch up to her to talk and ask some questions after the panel, but Angelique Reish is a lighting lead at Pixar. As probably the only texture artist and lighter hiding amongst all the animators and illustrators I would have loved to spend some time to ask her about a few topics in lighting and rendering.

The model, dressing up as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, was amazing and hopefully after drawing a few more designs and thumbnails I'll have a fabulous Tea Time Princess to post. The panel with WiA was amazing and inspiring even though I'm not a woman. Many great questions were asked, such as "What's the worst/ funniest mistake you made as a rookie during your first production/job?", "Do you have a mentor? And if so how did you go about establishing that relationship?", and "what advice would you give to the students". The responses were filled with wisdom such as "everyone makes mistakes, you just have to fix it and keep working", "mentors come naturally as the relationship is created as you establish connections with those around you", and "keep on working hard; don't give up, it'll all be worth it; don't let anyone else tell you that you can't do it".

Learning how to draw anything!

Here is a great exercise in learning how to draw anything! I learned this while at Tea Time, courtesy of Lana Bachynski. The exercise is simple with only five steps and each only takes three to five minutes. A fun way to time each step would be to play a song and however long that song lasts is how much time you have. Pick something that you want to learn how to draw.

1. Just draw. Don't look up what it looks like; draw what you think it looks like either from what you know or guessing.

2. Now go find an image and trace over it. Tracing helps you learn the details, structure, and proportions of what you are trying to draw.

3. Next draw your item based off of the image that you looked up to trace. While doing so you will be thinking about things such as basic shapes and form.

4. Draw it again but this time in a different pose or perspective. This helps you understand the physical structure and form of what you are trying to draw.

5. Now that you have a basic understanding, take everything that you learned and draw your item without looking at any pictures or previous drawings.

You're done here but another great extra step that you can add in is to do 10 small thumbnails where you play with stylization of drawing your item. Push the shapes, poses, proportions, weight, and so on!

This is the toucan that I did while at Tea Time!

Joey Gilbreath on character rig modding (Norman)

Tea Time Animation Club at the Academy of Art University invited Joey Gilbreath, an alumni of the school and currently a fix animator at Pixar, to come and talk about his time as a student and about character modding with the Norman rig. There can be said to be two types of students. One is those that go through the program focusing on their thesis and develops a great animated short at the end and can go on to win awards. The other type are those who focus solely on their demo reels and their focus is purely on finding a job. Neither of them are a bad direction, just different. Joey falls into the second category. As Joey talked about his time as a student he passes on a lot of good advice. As many have said, grades do not matter, only your work does, make sure to focus on one things instead of spreading out too thin. Pick one class per semester to focus on to put out quality to work. Do things for yourself and let your learning process be organic for the school doesn't just hand everything over on a platter. Most importantly is to make friends as other students are the most valuable resource. Not only can you learn from them but they are also the best critics and people to brainstorm with.

Modding a rig can be very beneficial to a demo reel. Recruiters watch reel after reel of the same character rigs and those rigs have gotten bland. Sparking interest is very important in a reel as you have to catch someone's attention within the first 10 seconds or people may just move on. Having a modded rig gives you something different that no one has and lets others identify with your work as people tend to remember characters. Additionally, the modding process is pretty quick, Joey was able to do it within a weekend, and saves a lot of time of having to model and rig a completely new character. While there may be many models and rigs around on the internet, you may need something very specific that can't be found and this fast and easy way allows animators to be excited for an animation that they want to do and express themselves.

The modding of Norman was a very interesting process that works well and fast. Ideally the concept can be applied to any other rig. A separate body mesh is used, modeled to fit the body that the animator wants and then using a wrap deformer, wrapped onto the rig. To do any changes to the rig itself without breaking anything, a blend shape was used, particularly for the face and to fit the body of the rig to match the structure of the outer skin better. One thing to keep in mind though is to stay away from the eyes, mouth, and around the joints to not break anything as they tend to have a lot of sensitive controls around them. Another area to note is the feet when doing modifications are the feet; make them thinner or wider but keep the toe length and orientation the same as the controls on the foot such as the curls and pivots rotate off the top point.

Unfortunately this modding process is seemingly only fit for students who are working on animation solely and do not care about other areas of production. It is another one of those massive cheats, similar to using flat shaders on everything and rendering that along an occlusion pass, so that animation students can just work on focusing on animating individual shorts. Unless the modding is done very cleanly and very exact, there will be issues down the pipeline, in particular with lighting and rendering. Aside from Joey using a bunch of blinn shaders and applying textures directly onto faces, one such example of an issue would be the mustache and muttonchops that he demonstrated wrapping. From animation perspective it looks nice as the facial hair deforms along with the facial movements but the mustache on the upper lip is a separate piece of geometry from the muttonchops instead of being one mesh which will cause issues with shadows and the occlusion pass.

Tea Time Animation Member Spotlight

Recently at the Academy of Art University's Tea Time Animation Club, we had a t-shirt design challenge to make our very first club shirts! My t-shirt design ended up coming in second place with 15 votes. The first place ended up going to Lana Bachynski, who is also the president. Not wanting to be "here's the club that I run, here's the blog that I manage, and here's the t-shirt that I designed", Lana was awesome enough to decide to feature me instead. Read my little blurb over on the Tea Time Animation blog and see my t-shirt entry below.