One Lesson i Learn from Sony Animation
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- Hi guys
in this new animation tutorial i wanted to share a lesson that i learn during my time in Sony Animation when i work on hotel transilvania 3
every time you you wanna achieve a certain pose, and you feel stuck because the rig limitation...dont give up, but use maya blend shape to achieve the exact pose that you need.
this could help to improve drastically the quality of your shot and show to a potential recruiter or a supervisor that you are willing to do the extra mile to get the job done.
hopefully you can get a better chance to get hire by the studio that you want
if you have any question drop a comment below
the rig is provide by Animation Mentor
![What Level Is Your Art? [Scribble Kibble #39]](/img/n.gif)
I worked on marvel movies and you don't want to know how many corrective shapes the hulk had to have. Yes he did use a psychotically crazy muscle system. But he still needed to have this type of system at the tail end of everything. Your advice is pure gold for incoming animators.
Thanks for sharing 😊
@Hangry Bunnies From Mars
And I thought working at an IT help desk job was tedious. I can't even begin to imagine how many man-hours were put into animating the Hulk. It looks phenomenal!
The hulk looked amazing, I hope I get that good.
I think I saw it some where that they did the same for the Spider-man movies. Every single frame needs its own blend shape for that particular pose to work. Crazy stuff.
I think the plugin ‘Shape Animation Tool’ will help。
Sir mujhe rig send kardo please
Tell the composition artists to stop drawing characters with weird super natural and unrealistic joints and poses.
If you don't understand how the "after" pose is so much better than the "before" pose, leave the industry. You're not cut out for art.
Key words: gesture and negative space.
@@Sukuraidogai If someone prefers a more realistic pose, that doesn't mean that they aren't "cut out for art". Art is one of the if not the most subjective thing to exist, and for anyone to be not cut out for it is an absolute lie. Art is for everyone, even if they disagree with you about it. Please don't say things like that, it'll only do harm.
In my opinion, I prefer the more simplistic and cartoony pose that we got as a result of the fixing, but just because he doesn't isn't proof of anything in regards to whether he should bein the animation industry. The before model is more realistic (by comparison), and some people like that, even if you and I don't.
If you like realism, just take a photograph and stop bothering people in an industry specifically iconic for its expressiveness.
KeiRo Multiverse Personally, I’m with you about the photograph thing, but people who prefer realism are not necessarily people who don’t need to be doing animation. Since he watched the video, he clearly knows the other way, making his decision one out of preference rather than ignorance. And I feel like an artistic choice like that can be disagreed with, but shouldn’t be disrespected. Especially not to the extent of telling the poor guy to quit animation in general.
@@Deacon8or
Oh, he's the "poor guy" even though he was the one berating the composition artists in his OP? Okay.
For those working in Blender:
Blend Shape -> Shape Keys
Rig -> Armature
Controller -> Just another bone with a custom shape
And that's why animators should know a little about rigging! :3
And modeling.
Do animators generally not learn that? We have to at my uni for the animation path.
@@lAcedUpLiss what uni do you go to? i think in online anim school its not learned. i could be wrong tho
Even from the pose, I can tell that's supposed to be dracula. haha. Thanks for the tutorial! Even though I'm using blender, it's giving me ideas on how I'll be using this technique for my own animations!
Yeah, right? Look Like Hotel Transilvania so much in the shapes of the character!
When he capitalizes almost every word but "i"
Noehoemoe and “f”?
İ
and doesn't use the past tense of "learn"
@@ilusions4 no
amazing!!! I ve always asked myself how sony got those sharp cartoony perfect poses.. But how does that work with the keying of all? when u change the geometry and then key it, in the next frame wont you need to change the geometry again? Ur videos are making me more motivated then ive ever been ! thank you and keep it coming! best regards
My life was so grey until this amazing tutorial came into my life. I tried it just now. I wanna cry at how beautiful the animation world just got for me.
GAME CHANGER.
Thank you so much for this!!
Happy to hear that
Great tutorial. a follow up tutorial to show issues you may have encountered animating in and out of these heavily adjusted poses would be very useful . Keep up the good work
Yes, I'd love to see how you animate out of this pose. Is it best to reset the model or carry on deforming it?
Exactly the same question I had! That'd be hella helpful please!
Hi!, I think that this is especially a good method for the kind of animation that Gendy likes, strong pose to strong pose, with fast transitions where you can *hide* your inbetweens in the broad movement, and the audience will mainly experience the aesthetic of your graphical *held* pose. Pixar and Disney type of more fluid animation would be harder to acheive with this technique, or maybe after they do a first pass of animation with the rig that they have there could easily be a second pass of shotsculpting that focuses on beatuifying the silhouettes, and is as tedious work as it sounds. :/ but Alessandro should know the whole answer. :P
@@juhada yes it work best with snappy animation, and when you hold a pose. But you can also use to fix bed deformation
Yupp! Me too.... Please show it in the next tutorial... How to animate through these blendshapes. I saw this technique for the very first time. Thank you a lot for sharing this... Please make the animation video. It will help us a lot. Thanks again.
I know next to nothing in 3D animation, but watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs made me realise how Sony was willing to go the extra mile for its animation, getting really cartoony and not being afraid to deform meshes, redo the character geometry for like a ten frames pose or things like this instead of just animating a rigid 3D rig. I think this comes down to your explanation. So yeah, the bottom line is that it does matter in the end product, even if we can't quite pin-point what it is as a general audience.
Thank for the video!
this is SO important and does not get any attention in schools. there is a common phrase in conventional learning, "don't break the rig". I can't stand when animators think they are limited by the rig. thanks for sharing ur experience from Sony
Art shouldn't be limited by technology.
technology suppose to serve the Art, not the opposite IMHO.
well when you are on show schedule which is 95% of pro animators, you don't have time for blend shape.. not only that, the pipe doesn't even allow us to use blend shape.. we do as close as possible with the rig, we don't get offmodel and we convey the message of the shot.. that's all we're asked..
@@renarddubois940 hotel Transilvania was a show on schedule. 50% of the shot required a blendshape. A lot of vfx show require corrective shape as well.
@@acamporota tartakovsky?
Well Done Brother. Blend Shapes. Amazing
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
Hint: if you pick the "Global" falloff mode in the Soft Selection palette, you can edit multiple meshes at once.
Just noticed the captions recognize Allesandro's Italian accent but decide to try to auto-generate in Italian, despite him speaking English...
damn, you really got in and dirty to achieve the best possible pose.
but how do you spline it once you've messed with the vertices?
good question, this technique works best if you are holding that pose. (look at the stile of hotel transilvania 3 and you get an idea) or if you are moving really fast frame by frame...if you are using the blend shape properly should hold well enough...sometimes tho i have to do other small blend shape to correct some imperfection...yeah a lot of works for sure.
hope this answer your question
If you were an internet ad, yours would read, " ONE trick to improve your animation that they didn't want you to know! Technical Directors HATE him!"
Thank you for this video. Will be doing this in the future.
Thanks for these tutorials.
FYI pressing B and middle mouse adjusts the soft selection falloff on the fly.
That particular pose is an adaptation from the Animators Survival Kit where William's ask Milt Kahl if he ever listens to anything while he animates I think ;) (Page 40-44)
Thanks man
Question for you. How do you select the vertices in the blend shape? I am going to the geo for a rig and have unlocked everything, but still when I try to select by vertex and translate I can't select anything, much less translate. Would really appreciate your help.
i dont even animate but i watched this.
This is new for me! (Don't know about rigging) Doesn't it f-up the model & adjacent frames ? Is it non destructive?
Hey! Great video man! I was wondering if this may cause any trouble if the character is referenced and its used in many other scenes. (?) I mean like in a short film or something.
Thanks for sharing!
Depends on the pipeline. But on Maya I think you can use it on reference too
Great video and very useful but a little too long to get to the point. For those of you wanting to learn the technique he used at Sony, jump to 6:53 in the video. :)
Ha I knew it had to Be Hotel Transilvania!
This was amazing, so many times I ran into the "I can´t get the pose like I want it". This is incredibly helpful, thank you!!!!!
Glad you like it
alessandro how should i go about undoing the blend shapes on the next pose without it looking weird?
Please provide this rig character 🙏🏻🙏🏻
thank you! but do you have to animate it in bend shape in each frame ?
Really helpful!!
While we add different poses through this type method
If animation has any problem like the poses playing
Like the poses are moving the edges
How much suffering only of thinking in correct a lot of poses by blend shapes ;A;
Thanks for sharing it!! This explaing why pro animations looks so cool!!
Sometimes I was stuck in don't breaking the rig, and that was so irritating!! Because it limit you much
Can you tell how you locked the Outline/Grease Pencil, because i tried it and when i zoomed into my model,the outline remains on it's default place. Thanks!
Hi! I have a question: Let's just say I am able to re-create that pose from the director's note by using this method, but how do I animate all those vertex around the model? How do you keep every thing under control and the shape change smoothly between poses? Because I feel like even if I'm willing to do this for one pose, making it work for the entire sequence would be a problem since those vertex would move unpredictably
Apparently no clear answer to this very important concern. I was also wondering if those were keyable, can be turned On and Off, etc. I think this is only good for held poses? But even that, I wonder about the keys during transitions on an actual moving animation.
Sir please send me this character link for practice
I hope they will work on a Knack movie or animated series.
Super valuable, Thanks!
Wouldn't editing the mesh mess up the rest of the poses though? or do you edit it as a shape key so you can turn it on and off?
How to fix it during spline stage?
So if you have a bad rig the fix is to go a level deeper and remodel the mesh
Where can i download this model!
What if the rig does not live inside the scene, but is referenced in?
the original one looks so boring incomparison to edited one by hand
What is the name of the 3d character ?
Please share this character rig to me
but it can be animated by this method? or it is just for the pose?
@@christellaluyindula4073, That's called animating to keyframes, yeah. Which is a naming convention 3d software took from 2d animators.
Even thoungh I’m noob to 3d this video is helpful and fun to watch :) Keep up the good work!
something tells me Hotel Transylvanian used this a lot
can you share the Rig
I'm not sure, but I think B is the hotkey for soft selection and M controls the falloff. Great video anyways. I thought that rigs in big studios had more controls over the skinned surface, like selection sets that could be changed to achieve greater control over the character.
- Tapping B toggles soft selection on and off; holding down B and dragging middle mouse controls the size.
I've never thought about using blendshapes like that. Really thank you for your tips and tricks. Sony is recently doing amazing animations. How do you interpolate this blendshape in the graph editor to avoid too strong transitions between a normal pose and the sculpt one?
I am glad you like it... The best way is to transition fast into a golden pose. And hold it. Like hotel Transilvania
awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It wpuld be god to see how you blend in that pose in your animation, Thank you for the tutorial :)!
definetey you need the help of god when you use all those blend shape in your animation ... :) glad you like it
How blend shape can use in animation? Could you make a video on this?
Same concept, but you will key the blendshape in and out
Rig file
Insane! Thanks for sharing your insights!! :D
why dont you use the humanik system from maya to rig your character *?
Because this one is more flexible
Can I use the LATTICE tool to create these sharp poses?
Sure
Very useful tutorial. You changed his body mesh. But result is perfect. Likr.a mesh animation.. do you have another experiences ???
Thank you for sharing these amazing tips!
Very nice. I've learned a lot. I am going to apply my methods to my animation work in blender 3D. I've never really thought to use blend shapes in this fashion
awesome Tutorial :) thanks ...more tutorials on cartoony animation would be great :D
Hey did you ever do a follow up to this video showing how to do this on an animated character? i do the exact thing you do in this video, but then when I scrub the timeline maya crashes. every time. no matter if it's DG or Parallel evaluation mode. Wondering if you have any tips for this.
try a different version of maya
@@acamporota good idea! which version works best for this? i'm on 2024
First comment! 😊 love your tutorials keep on making more tutorials
Hello
Alessandro Camporota
Nice tutorial... i just have a question.. do you create your blend shapes in the beginning with blocking or do you add it at the end in polishing ?
Thanks :)
At the end in polishing
@@acamporota Thanks a lot .. very helpful !!
UA-cam auto generated captions is on Italian .. Make it English plz
Grazie Alessandro! Essendo nuovo in Maya, cercavo da tempo un tutorial su come usare i Blend Shapes in questo software. Sto usando il rig gratuito di Franklin dell'Artella, ma odio il fatto che non ci sia un controllo per le pieghe della maglia all'altezza gomiti. Ero gia' a conoscenza di come usare questa tecnica perche' uso anche Blender e grazie al tuo video ho visto come usarla anche in Maya e raggirare il problema!
Hello! Im an animation student, thanks for video! I was wondering, for example you broke/modified everything so much for this pose, to go back to "normal" you do this in a different file to change it or how do you not "mess it up" afterwards? thanks!
Such an easy thing to do yet so different! THANK YOU!
It seems to work great when applying this method on a rig with no animation keyframes. But when applying the same method on the same rig while it has a bunch of animation, it crashes on pressing the Add Target button. This even happens on a simple cube with just 2 keyframes.
Do you have any experience with that and how to fix it?
So far it looks like you can only use this technique on posing still images, but I would love to use this technique during the animation process.
I'm using Maya 2019 BTW
thanks for this! Would you do these shape corrections in blocking or Polish?
At the very end, this is the past pass
@@acamporota thank you so much. I was about to go in and start doing this during blocking, I guess that would have been a nightmare.
maya 2016 ha questa funzione ? è davvero un metodo molto interessante per migliorare le pose
very helpful video. super quick posing of body and face of Jules rig. Thanks Alessandro
It’s kinda coolSony has the animators do this work. In other feature/vfx studios it’s passed off to a shot finaling department to sculpt those fixes
Do game animators use blendshapes? Since they only export skeleton data
No...if there is any blendshape is done by riggers
@@acamporota Ahhh ok I see. This still looks like a good idea to learn this even though I want to become a Game Animator.
Utilissimo tutorial, non pensavo che si potessero fare certe cose senza andare a modificare troppo il modello di base... grazie mille!!!
Wow, Thanks for showing off some great information! The difference between the first and second pose is pretty incredible! I have a couple of questions if you don't mind?
Do you run into any technical problems when doing things this way? such as weird motion blur or bad blending between key-frames?
Do you find yourself getting into creating a lot of blend-shapes per shot? or Do you find you can often get away with only one or two?
Do you ever get push-back from Technical members of the team? This seems like a bit of a brute force workflow, and I can see techy people having a problem with it.
Thanks again for making this video! It goes a long way to explain how Sony Animation gets their amazing unique look. Cloudy and Hotel Transylvania are such standout series for animation.
You are a crazy Boss for this!! Thanks.
Hi Alessandro, I followed your tutorial and it works great. However, is it possible to apply a blend shape to a part of the body after the animation is done as polish? When I try applying the blend shape, the character stays at that blend shape and doesn't move. Thanks in advance!
Do you have a video that goes a little more in-depth on blend shapes. I don’t really understand how you get from pose to pose with this method. I know very little about blend shapes and I’ve never used them like this before. I can’t really emulate what you are doing because it’s unclear to me how you did it. I can’t find any videos other than people making multiple shapes out of spheres?
That character looks pissed, lol. Great video here.
I wouldn't have the legs directly perpendicular to the floor like that. If you try standing in this pose, the legs naturally tilt back slightly and the butt sticks out to balance the forward lean of the upper body. Otherwise, you'd fall over.
Realism isn"t the goal, here. Expression is. And on a more basic level: Following the sketch.
can u talk slower ? i can't understand you
omg, this is super helpful!
Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
I wont complain about rig's limitation anymore.
That's the right attitude
Great stuff, I really appreciate you taking the time to create these videos!! Thank you, very helpful!! :D
Aha, so you can create blend shapes for specific poses. I was under the impression that you have to create the blend shape while the character is in bind pose, which would be extremely cumbersome.
Great video! But how do you do this in an animation? I can image how you can hide the blend in a snappy transition but how about slow and more fluent movements?
so Questions:
I noticed that the rig geo does not have a skin attached directly, so I take that the rig is living on a second piece of geo that blendshapes to the final. If so, I take the animators are responsible to some degree on dialing their correctives on top of the rid deformers during animation.
Correct
Tutorial fantastico! Grazie mille :)
I had a shot where a character with a huge upper body, big pecs and small head, was supposed to be flat on the ground on his chin and chest with the feet upward..
took me hours to get it right and I'm on show schedule
Alessandro great to find you here in youtube. You might know me from AM. Great work here!
THIS IS BEAUTIFUL! Thank you so much!
Hey could you make a video on how to study a rig so you can learn to create your own? Thanks. anyone you could recommend to learn?
Good point! Thank's for sharing mate :)
this is amazing. thank you so much
This is why Riggers and Animators don't always get along, also this is something that only works on a still frame. You'd have to repeat this process for every frame if it were an animation. This is terrible advice, I would not follow these steps.
believe it or not ..in Sony, animators have been following this advice for many years..to create a style that is quite unique...but what do they know about animation right
@@acamporota I don't doubt that, but it's not a great way to achieve good results, there's many issues with this approach, you're undoing the modelers Geometry and UV's, you're misusing the rig the rigger did, if you've got a bad rig, then get someone to make you a better one, in a professional environment, a rig should do everything it's intended to do, either for that shot or for the entirety of the project. This also brings more possibilities for errors and non-uniformity between frames. Also, the concept you're using as reference is far different from the model itself, you're basically trying to make a character the shape of another when the two are very different in size and shape. All of this leads to poor animations, inconsistent results, more time spent working on the scene, higher costs due to the extra time, what you say took 4 days, could've been achieved in less than a day using a proper rig and animation techniques.
@@MMOTCRPG what you say make sense in a standard production... But when you work on a show like hotel Transilvania or spiderman into the verse. Your director will ask you to achieve specific pose that the rig simply won't allow...because the pose is quite extreme.. And those request will come 65% of the time. So you can either tell excuses to your director, and they will reassign the shot to someone else. Or you have to think out of the box and achieve what he wants. Even in big production rigs have always issue.. You can't stop from Animating because of that. Thats the reason most studio have tools to create blendshape or corrective shape to fix those things. Nobody enjoy doing those stuff....but if you don't do it.. Someone else will... And in general is alway appreciate when an animator can think out of the box to fight for his vision, even if is painful.. It show the love for the art..
@@acamporota You make quite a good argument, can't disagree with you there. I would suggest holding down the B key to resize your smooth selection range though. and you can toggle the tool by tapping the B key.
Subscribed. Thanks!
Amazing advice Alessandro! I just used your advice to push some marketing stills at work! Thanks for posting!
My pleasure
very nice tutorial! Now I following you and like this. Keep going!