Blessing the child

Interview with Miyazaki the "god" of anime. Creator of most popular stuff like "Howl's Moving Castle" and "Spirited Away."

This is the first interview he has agreed to in 10 years. You gotta love those Jedi man.

12 Animation Principles

Anyone in animation should be able to rattle off Frank & Ollie's 12 Principles of Animation. Google it.

However, what most folks might not realize is John Lasseter presented "Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation" at SIGGRAPH way back in 1987! He sought to bring humanity and artfulness into the emerging art form known as digital animation.

That is why John is THE MAN.

read the paper here

Robots on Sept. 27

I took my daughter to see the movie Robots when it came out. We loved it. Yeah, it's maybe not the greatest... But it was far above anything Disney has done lately. Robots is from Blue Sky Studios, the same folks who did Ice Age, and soon Ice Age 2. Now the original Ice Age DVD had some killer animation extras. Detailed accounts of character design, some good pr0n on how they animated stuff, etc. These are the things an educator like myself longs to see on a DVD. Not crap like on Finding Nemo, where some damn child farts around the office. That's a joke people. Can you please give the adults something to watch? Bury it five levels deep, I don't care, just put it on there!

Anyway, I was rather disappointed to see Robots will probably NOT have the depth of info Ice Age had. That's a shame. Robots had some intricate setups (like flying through the city on the "mass transit" system), which are great opportunities to show my students just what it takes to animate. The character rigs in Robots are probably pretty cool and accessible as well. Sadly, we'll never know.

Again, this is why I love Project Orange. When they release the models with rigs, I can finally learn HOW to do that in Blender. Of course, Blue Sky doesn't want their "secrets" to get out... Whatever. Information yearns to be free man! Oh well, check Robots out on Sept. 27 on DVD. I'll have the Amazon link when it's available.

Great 3d site!

Normally I'm somewhat underwhelmed by 3d sites. Turbosquid is really only useful to people with pockets of money, 3dkingdom is often down for the count, and 3dcafe has tutorials older than DOS.

But I saw on Digg.com (which I highly recommend) this great site:
3dbuzz.com

There are a bunch of training videos, which I really enjoy (fastest way to learn IMO). And there's a podcast... Nifty!