Timing and Spacing

I went to the course on "Open Season" at Siggraph this year. Before the course, I wasn't too excited about seeing the movie. Afterwards however, I was pretty eager to see it. It looks like it has all the right elements: a good story, a great look, and great animation. Hopefully no fart jokes, but that might be too much to ask.

And now we have a nice book showing even more of the artwork than we saw at Siggraph. The layout of the "Open Season" book is similar to the "Monster House" book. It's got a lot of little insert pieces (postcards, booklets, etc). However, the slipcase is much nicer and more heavy-duty than "Monster House". There are also a few foldout pages.

Initially, I thought the Disney Treasures books have influenced the designs of the "Monster House" book and this one, but it seems to be a trend that extends outside of animation books. Tonight I saw a book on Audrey Hepburn that was a similar format with reproductions of letters, pictures, etc.

I used to hate foldout pages, but once I started looking at art books, I realized how great they are; they allow you to look at a large piece of artwok without having the binding hide a large strip down the middle when the piece spans two pages. Unfortunately, this book didn't use them very effectively. There are some drawings and paintings that span two pages (particularly in the visual development section) that they didn't put onto foldout pages and there are foldout pages that just have a number of small pieces on them that don't utilize the larger size of the foldout. What were they thinking?

Here is the book out of the slipcase:

They have postcards for all the major characters (and many of the secondary ones as well). They come protected by bits of tissue paper. This is the one for Elliot:

This is a foldout with pictures of the props. It looks like a store catalog. Here it is in the book closed, and then with one flap opened up.

This is a foldout showing scales of the trees next to one of the characters (Beth). Here it is closed and then opened. These are attached to the book with a strip of glue. It's unclear to me whether you're supposed to be able to remove them or not. You can really see the Eyvind Earle influences at work on these tree studies by Mike Humphries.

This is a booklet with extra information on the characters.

The book also comes with a small poster (11"x20" maybe) folded in an envelope in the back of the book.

I have my usual complaints that the books aren't technical enough and don't go over the development process more, but that's to be expected. I'm still undecided whether I like this style of book (with all the little pieces) or a more standard book. However, I really don't want this trend extended to the point that we have paper dolls of the characters or little games and activities embedded in the books. I want these books to be all about the art and artists.

All in all, this is a great looking book with a bunch of nice art. I haven't seen the movie yet, but will be going this weekend.

Posted by David at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Look at all the animation goodies that Amazon delivered to my door this week:

I've got a lot of reading to catch up on this week!

I'll do another post later today about the "Open Season" book.

Posted by David at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Okay. Wow. The format of this post looks terrible... I'll see what I can do in the next day or so to get it fixed...]
[Better, but some of the code is broken across lines. Oh well.]
[Correcting the code fragment. It had my fix in it as originally posted.]

I just spent about twenty minutes debugging a problem with someone else's MEL script.

The script I'm trying to use has the following code snippet in it:

{
  string $currentSelXform[] = `ls -sl`;
  string $currentSelShape[] = `listRelatives -shapes $currentSelXform[0]`;
  if ($currentSelXform[1] != "")
  {
    warning "No base mesh loaded. Please select only 1 polygonal mesh to load.\n";
  } else {
    if (`objectType $currentSelShape[0]` != "mesh")
    {
      warning "Base mesh must be a polygonal mesh. NURBS and SUBD surfaces are not supported.\n";
    } else {
      textField -edit -tx $currentSelXform[0] currentBaseMeshTextField;
      print ($currentSelXform[0] + " was loaded as the base mesh.\n");
    }
  }

I select the menu item that calls this, and nothing happens. Now if you look at the script, every path prints either a warning or a message indicating success. Why was this doing nothing when I call it?

Turns out that the script was bailing out on the call to the objectType MEL command. After nosing around, I find the shape node for the object I was selecting is called 'subdTessShape1'. As it turns out, I've duplicated this shape many times. Guess what the shape node for all those duplicates is called? Yep, 'subdTessShape1' (this surface started out as a subd surface and is now a polygonal mesh).

This line:
  string $currentSelShape[] = `listRelatives -shapes $currentSelXform[0];
returns the shape name in $currentSelShape[] as 'subdMeshShape1'. When this is passed to the objectType command, it just bails because (apparently) it doesn't know which one.

listRelatives should be called like so:
  string $currentSelShape[] = `listRelatives -shapes -pa $currentSelXform[0]`;

So, MEL scripting Tip #1:
When passing object names around, always use full path names. When getting object names from listRelatives, use the -pa flag to get the full path.

Posted by David at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking for a new sketchbook to work in and found one that I started using two years or so ago and abandoned (for no particular reason, I'm sure).

I think I did these in about twenty minutes. As you can see, I didn't have the fingers and toes thing down back then either. I tried in the second drawing (I probably had a little extra time).

All these were done in pencil. Again, some of the scans are chopped off at the feet. These are in an 11x14 sketchbook, and it doesn't really fit onto my scanner very well. I guess I should look into some stitching software.

With this one, I was trying to be a little looser.

Unfortunately, I think I've probably backslid a little; I'm not sure I could do these today. Better get to some life drawing this week.

Posted by David at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)