A while ago I had the chance of getting my hands on the ManCandy FAQ DVD, made by Bassam Kurdali. This is the first title of the "Open Movie Workshop" series, produced by Blender Foundation.

After watching about 7 hours of videos I have to say: this is a must have if you are serious about making rigging and animating with Blender.

The videos present some very clever rigging approaches figured by Elephants Dream director. Understanding these concepts will help you not only with humanoid rigs, but about every character rig you may face.

 

I found particularly good the idea of making a special video covering the 'basics' of what the viewer will face. Bassam took a basic low poly mesh and applied some modifiers, explaining what they do and why they should appear in a particular order in the modifier stack. These basic principles are heavily applied on ManCandy, and should be considered when you have to create your next rig.

The DVD is made to run on computers, not DVD players. Actually I found it to be a good choice, since a lot more footage could be included and - after all - you'll use Blender on a computer, not your DVD player, heh. ;)

Since I'm on Linux, all videos played painlessly, but I think it would be a nice idea to include a player (like VLC) to view the OGG files on other platforms. Maybe the absence of it could be due some legal issues, so I don't think it should be considered a flaw.

The videos have well thought annotations, used to make clear some concepts or even remember the viewer of some extra things involved (like useful keystrokes).

Another cool approach was the use of the 'vitruvian' Mancandy to visually extend the menu: if the user clicks on a leg, you get the video of how to make a leg rig, and so on.

 

When it comes to animation, the videos do exactly what Bassam stated on his ManCandy FAQ FAQ: they explain the technical side of it (setting keys, posing the character and so on). To get deep into animation, I make his words mine and say: go also get Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams (read a nice review of it) and the Preston Blair book.

Kudos for Bassam and Blender Foundation for making this great resource for all users around. As I stated earlier, it's definitely a must have! =)

The very talented illustrator Suryara Bernardi had just put her new website online.

She worked with Jovan de Melo and me on the Legends of The Amazon Forest animated shorts. There's a lot of cool new works there for your viewing pleasure. =)

Well, I won't talk about the Oscar winners. Oops, just did. =)

But, seriously: what I really want to talk about is about this very cool post about puppets (or muppets) I found on Spline Doctors blog.

Those muppets have very little controls, and require a lot of skills from the puppeteer in order to make them act like they do. In 3D, it isn't the huge number of controls that will make your animation stand from the crowd. An über-complex rig can help sometimes, but will not replace a talented artist moving it.

Really worth a read. =)

The last days have been the busiest in a long time at work. This is leading to a lack of posts here and, unfortunately, a severe slow down on my little animation project. =/

But fortunately all these time-consuming things have a precise date to an end: in the first days of March, I'll start to have a lot more time (even more than I had last year) to dedicate to animation. =)

And today I saw two neat things related to Pixar:

The first is about Toy Story 3 plot, that was briefly covered on the beginning of an article from The Wall Street Journal. I found it very cool that Pixar crew is dealing with the inevitable: Andy becoming an adult. In the movie, Woody and the other toys are dumped in a day-care center after Andy leaves for college.

The second, which I saw on André Forni's blog, is a very cool interview with Pixar designer Susan Bradley, responsible for things like typography and graphic design pieces seen in the movies. She talks about her recent work on Ratatouille and previous movie projects.

Saw on Spline Doctors a cool reference to another blog:

AWN Oscar Travelog, where Rick DeMott (AWN editor) travels along with the Oscar animated shorts nominees to chronicle their journey to the big night.

From the blog: 

"Read what the nominees feel about chatting with John Lasseter or having lunch with Jeffery Katzenberg or just how cool it was to stay at Skywalker Ranch!"