Mr. Blake's Art Diary - Part 1

I've found this site a while ago but it had so much good stuff on it that I procrastinated a post about it. Well enough is enough (plus it's slow at work right now), so here we go. This is just a best-of that I found interesting (goes back till 2006), ranging from animation tips and tools to just cool stuff. There is obviously much much more, so I encourage you to go through the posts yourself since I will only post animation (kinda) related posts.

(There is a lot of stuff worth mentioning, so this will be part 1. On Monday I'll post part 2.)

- First off a piece of artwork by Mr. Blake which I really like (street scene)


- Next up is "Graph Editor Redux 1.1.0". Follow the link and download it from highend3d. The download comes with a handy PDF for instructions.


- "Frenzied Fauna: From A to Z" has really funny and cute creatures by Michel Gagne. His site also displays his work on/for "Ratatouille", "The Iron Giant", etc.



- If you want to have your animation controls invisible while you work but still be able to select them, then check out "Keith Lango's trick for invisible viewport selections in maya".

- Here's a huge collections of character animation scripts by Aaron Koressel. ackNewGraphEditor sounds good (any tool that improves the graph editor is worth a look), then ackSliceCurves sounds awesome. It "inserts a key at the current time into the currently selected curves while preserving tangents". Good to have. Much more there, go check out the list.
There's tons of good stuff out there, so stay tuned.

- Check out Deter Brown's Animation Mentor Demo Reel, with some cool animation and nice renders.

- Storyboarding tool as well as many other production related tools.

- ShapeShifter is a web based animation program. Very simple but a lot of fun.


- Gesture Drawing for Animation by Walt Stanchfield. There used to be a pdf collection online, but since an official book is coming, it got pulled. Check the site for an update on when the book will be released.

- Feng Zhu Design. Go to the gallery section and check out the beautiful artwork. There are also workshop DVDs and much more.




- "Pencil" is a free Windows/Mac/Linux animation program (2D)


- "Maya Tutorial Muscle Rigging" by Fahrenheit Digital

- Veerapatra Jinanavin's Animation site - you might recognize his older work, very cool though!



- "Supercrumbly" collection of MEL scripts (auto rigging script, bookmark your curves, etc.)

- "PoseLib" lets you set up a library for your poses. (direct link)


Don't stop there though. "SeithCG" has a great post to his "Flushed-Away" Animation Process, with a clip showing initial blocking to final animation.


- "ShotView for Maya" - This is a tool by Cameron Fielding for a clean maya viewport. I think I linked to it before on this site, but it's always worth linking to it again


- "sparth - by Nicolas Bouvier" is an awesome blog with fantastic artwork

This one was done on the Nintendo DS using "colors".