This is the planning for a secret animation sequence. It's an easter egg on this website. ;P It's done sometime ago already and I thought I'll just upload the thumbnail stage here. Cheers! :D
The objective of this short animation is to encourage viewers to voice out their fears and thoughts about death. The concept is to show that the more we fear death and refuse to break the silence of death, the more we will live our lives in vain!! That is what exactly happened to Mr. Blue Ball! So let's share our fears and break the silence on death today!
It's for an Eyeka Asia Competition. Spent a total of about 15 hours for this from scratch. I learnt a lot from creating this piece of animation in such a super short time. It's a lot of fun trying to make creative decisions as quick as possible Not forgetting the need to fight away the temptation to fix all the relatively minor artifects.
There wasn't any time at all for refinement so please forgive the final gather artifects in some areas. oh, and the primitive modelling.. Some of the shots should be held longer because the text cannot be registered by the audience.
Despite the super tight schedule, I understood the importance of a timing reel and hence created a super quick timing reel before I went into the production phase. Shall upload that soon too!
In conclusion, it's an rewarding excercise working on this short animation. Hope you enjoy it!
Here's one of the winning entries for CGSociety's Secret Agent Challenge by Ishan Shukla. This entry won the Video Individual Excellence Award. Congratulations, awesome work Ishan!
I find the art direction super cool and overall very impressive for an individual effort. Will like to share it with you guys :)
Latest Update (6 September 2009): Ronald Fong's 11 Second Club August Entry Finished 60 of 188 entries! That's about top 32% and I'm happy about that! I will strive to bring this percentage down in my next entries. :D
Here is my entry for the 11 Second Club August 2009 Competition! :D
I had some difficulty uploading my clip to the competition earlier, hope it gets through! This is my first submitted entry to the 11 Second Club!
I learnt from this exercise that I have to keep my poses simple and "stupid". I had some poses which were much more difficult to read that what I have now, but I discarded them after generous critiques from my friends. If I find time, I'll pose a compilation of my work in progress before I arrived at this final. I am aware these poses can be greatly improved and I have some unusual acting choices here, but nevertheless and most importantly, I can feel that I'm improving!
Critiques and comments are most welcomed!
Title: Spooky Spooky
Description:
2 buddies landed themselves in a spooky environment.
One of them, Charlie, gets duped into scouting the eerie passage! ><
Time Taken: Approximately 35 hours
Transcript:
"I'm not sure what we've got here Charlie... but if we've got what I think we've got, we've got something! There's one way to find out..."
Software: Maya, After Effects
Skills showcased: Character Animation, Compositing, Lighting and Rendering
As part of receiving the Lucasfilm Animation Singapore Outstanding Project Work Award [Animation], I had a 3-month internship opportunity to be part of the Lucasfilm family for Summer 2009. I was so excited to be part of one of Singapore's largest animation production studios!!
This internship program, known as Jedi Academy Singapore, has just ended last week. During my stay at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, I have made many fantastic new friends and learned a lot of new things.
As an animation trainee, I discovered a whole new perspective towards character animation and I feel that my character animation skill has improved a great deal. I hope to be able to put these newly acquired skills to good use in my personal projects and future animation work.
Once again, thank you Lucasfilm Animation Singapore! It has been an awesome summer! I'm off to catch the all-important National Day Rally 2009 Live on television! :D
I have picked up a little bit of Maya Embedded Language (MEL) Scripting in my own free time and have quickly written two scripts which can be helpful when rigging characters.
The Shape Switcher Have you ever come across rigs with controllers which are difficult to select? You can now use the Shape Switcher Script to swap away controllers which you do not like. It has proven to be useful for animators and riggers.
The Curve Color Changer Having different colors for different controllers in a character rig can save a lot of hassle when trying to select the right controllers, especially in the case of differentiating the limb controllers of the left and right sides. This little utility can help you change the curve colors of either the shape node or the transform node (override color) depending on your preference. Once again, it can be very useful for both animators and riggers.
Though they are meant to be used for rig controllers, they can largely be used for any Maya Dag Object. :)
If you have any suggestions to improve the script or report any bugs, please feel free to email me.
Enjoy! :D
The MEL scripts are written by Ronald Fong with the sole intention to help himself and fellow digital artists who wants to learn. Use at your own risk and do not use them for commercial use.
Here is a wireframe version of the 3D MINI Cooper S Lighting and Rendering Exercise I did earlier. By the way, there has been some queries on how to achieve the rendered wireframes on 3D models. If this information is of help to anybody, tt is actually done using the mental ray contour simple shader.
Description: In order to convey the message of "Impossible is Possible" in line with the new Coke Zero Campaign to reach out to youths, our concept revolves around this mighty Coke Zero can which is able to survive all forms of disasters, just as how we youths will be able to overcome the seemingly impossible adversities we face in life! Impossible is possible, just as how it is possible to have real Coke taste and Zero Sugar!
Hello everyone! :D
This animation is created by my buddies and I (Ronald Fong, Lee Yong Yi and Tan Zi Chao) of Channelbox for the Eyeka Asia Coke Zero Video or Animation Competition.
In this production, I worked on mainly on the compositing and editing, look development, developing the ink stroke and fluid visual effects, the cars and buildings modelling and animation and the coke can rig.
I'm glad that Channelbox has matured a lot through this production, in terms of communication, coordination, quality and the possibility of effective online meetings. We are a team!
You may view our work in progress thread here You may view our Eyeka Asia Coke Zero submission here.
Hello! I worked on a F1GPSG Singapore Eyeka Video / Animation Competition recently :)
The objective was to promote www.f1gpsg.com as a hub for F1 fans. Instead of just showing my passion for the sport, I wanted an additional touch to have the viewer think about what this sport means to him or her. Here's the final product which I submitted on the 29th of March 2009:
Description: A play of words in the introduction to spark the viewer's thoughts. The viewers starts questioning what exactly F1 means to him or her. The tension builds up and awakens the viewer, who will start to find out more and share with the rest of the world about F1!
Hope you'll like this video! You may view it on Eyeka competition website itself here.
Testing the rig. I's quite challenging to tweak the cloth simulation, but I've to admit that it'sa lot of fun!
I'm currently doing up the facial controls for Digiron. He's largely animatable already. I just want pump up the rig a little bit more before I begin animating him into the shots.
I'm eating the schedule a little, especially the animation time but I'll be able to make it up. :D
I was reading about this in the papers this morning.
Here's a link to their popular franchise Winx Club
If I'm not wrong, Rainbow is the top animation studio in Italy! Italian animation studio Rainbow is putting $25 million into a new gaming unit here in Singapore. And it is by far the biggest investment here!
This is gonna be so cool! Looking forward to the vibe in the interactive digital media industry in a few years to come! :)
We have put a lot of effort into this Eyeka Asia Creative Challenge and we are very excited about it!
Just a couple of days ago, the winner of Eyeka Asia Creative Challenge is announced! It's us, Channel Box!!
We are so so happy!! :D I'll like to thank Ms Grace, Mr Jacques D and my two buddies Yong Yi and Zi Chao for making this possible! Thank you guys! Can't wait to show you guys what we've been up to so here goes! Hope you'll like it!
Our objective was to create an engaging animation that will inform the audience about the pronounciation of eyeka.
Simple visual elements are used for audience to relate better. For instance, the mouth literally provides a visual demonstration of the pronounciation of 'Eyeka'. Therefore, the concept allows the audience to register the correct pronounciation of Eyeka without much complexity.
Chasseur de Dragon is now on the big screens in Singapore! I remember Yong Yi and I hunting all over Paris for the art book for this film! Didn't manage to find it in the end, such a disappointment.
In any case, our master Mr Kyle Balda is the animation director for this film! It's gotta awesome. Gonna catch it very soon! :D
David Sproxton and Luis Cook from Aardman, the home of Wallace and Gromit, had a discussion session after the screening of some of Aardman's works. The question and answer question was really interesting, so I thought I'll jot some of them down here. I cannot remember everything, word for word or every figure, but I guess the idea is somewhat like that, may not be too accurate :)
Q: Do you have life at Aardman? A: In the past we used to work day in and out, now with advancement of technology, we adopt a 5 day work week. So we have time for ourselves during the weekends.
Q: How do you find your animators? A: Source from institutes and we have portfolios and resumés coming in. From there, they are trained to be stop frame animators or 3D animators. It's interesting how stop frame animators can convert to 3D animators much easier than the other way round.
Q: How many animators do you have? A: All the times, it depends on the scale of a project. The size of the team grows and shrinks based on the projects. For feature film length projects, the number of animators can go up to 40, whereas for short films or commercials, there coould probably be 5 to 8 animators.
Overall, I found the talk really beneficial. I love The Pearce Sisters and a commercial (I forgot the title) which interviewed different creatures "Why will you do when you fear?" there were two comical cockroaches inside hilarious! And the Mcvities one too. They have really interesting concepts and execution here and there. Awesome!
Some changes to make :D Poster falling off when he bangs the counter. Overlap his turn when he says "we don't need no badges". Overlap in eyebrow to not make him so rigid in the last flare.
CG Contest 3 Animation organised by my lecturer, Mr Frety.
Updates from Work In Progress 2: Refined lip sync. Added facial animation. Changed background to avoid misunderstanding. Added in the overlaps for most of the actions.
My Story: Most wanted fugitive trying to get pass the customs with a bad police disguise. The custom officers asks him for the police badges.
Transcript Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!
Well, I have plans to rig and animate the MINI Cooper S I'm working on now. Mr Frety kindly introduced me to the mental ray car paint phen shader for my MINI instead of the layered shader I'm using now. I will try that out tomorrow :)
Meanwhile, I looked up on some videos of the MINI C S in action to observe the movement.
Quickly modelled, rigged and animated this leg. The objective of this exercise was to research on how to rig a animator-friendly leg. I was inspired by the character setups Mr Kyle Balda used for some of his animation demonstration in class. :)
Came across something really interesting the other day. An ingenius player by Chaos Group. Many people are used to fcheck which comes with Maya, which plays image sequences. If I'm not wrong, it's something similar to fcheck just that it has a lot more features! Looking at the features list, this player can come in very handy
Key features • Layered sequence playback • Realtime interactions • External device output • Industry standard file format support including HDR, EXR, CIN, DPX, SGI, TGA and more • Variable framerate playback • Infinite workspace • Global and per-layer aspect ratio • Layer flip, scale, position and crop • Color controls including lift, gamma, gain, brightness, contrast, hue and saturation • Exposure and soft clip controls for high dynamic range images • Ability to save a composition • Export composition or single layer as sequence or AVI/Quicktime movie • Export composition as Adobe After Effects JSX script • Export composition as The Foundry Nuke script • Copy layer to clipboard as Nuke script • Layer-based cache • Full, half and quarter cache resolution • Brush Layer • Brush Sequence Layer • Adjustment Layer • Clipboard Layer • Framebuffer Layer • Layer blending modes • Alpha channel source • Depth channel • Productivity tools including copy/paste frame, email frame/screen, replace with, open with, locate in explorer and more . • Multi-core processor support • Built-in HTTP server for remote collaboration • 64-bit version • Extensive command line support
My Final Year Project Presentation went very well last Thursday.
However, that was not the end of the production. There were still more effects to be done and composited in while some of the passes requires rendering. Other than these, it's more or less close to completion.
I will be planning a 10-day schedule and work tightly on wrapping up this production because I belieave that dragging this production on will only make things worse.
In the meantime, I will concentrate of completing numerous personal projects too.
Hi, I just came across this interesting blog entry :) Renders of Pixar's upcoming feature film "Up" were revealed at San Diego Comic Convention International 2008.
Mr Kyle Balda, an experienced animator who has worked on animated features at Pixar and ILM was in Singapore for the past week. During this time, he conducted an acting and animation workshop at NYP-SIDM. Some of my friends and I recently attended his masterclass at Gobelins in Paris just before this Singapore session, and we flew back to Singapore for his masterclass in Singapore. Despite that, I still learnt a great deal this second session!
Today is the last day of his workshops and I took the opportunity to clarify all my doubts on animation. Just to summarize, he is very generous, pleasant and patient when sharing his tips and tricks, and the best part is, he makes his animation techniques very easy to absorb and digest. For me, it's only after his masterclass that I know what is character animation (physicality vs acting & performance).
As with everything that I learnt, I will continuously put to use his teachings into my animation so that I will keep improving and I will not forget. I have a good chance to practice my character animation now because I am working on a short film production for the school right now and it's in its animation phase! Great! I really appreciate everything he taught us.
Had a photo-taking session at the end of the masterclass and hopefully I'd be able to get my hands on the photographs and I'll post them here. :D
I will be working on character animation tomorrow!
GOBELINS Summer school 2008 in Paris Character Animation From June 30th to July 11th, 2008 Find out more
Hello guys, I believe this will be my last post in Singapore before leaving for Paris to attend the Gobelins Summer School 2008!!
I'm very excited to meet people from all over the world with the common interest of animation, be it the lecturers, guest lecturers, or the other students attending this summer school. I'm even more thrilled to meet the students of Les Gobelins and to see their amazing work and how they work to achieve the result.
Given the numerous attractions in Paris, I believe this will be a very enriching trip in terms of exploring their art, culture, architecture, history and of course animation! :D
Now, I've got to do some preparation for the trip. I'll be back in Singapore a couple of weeks later! See you!
Hi guys, I jumping around the CG Sites and ended up at Shawn Kelly's Animation Tips and Tricks blog. After reading a few recent entries, I found this entry to be very useful for an animator. I believe it will kind of help if us when we are animating so that we don't get lost during the process. Nice tip, I might have it printed out and pin it up at my work station. :)
On 30 June at Hortpark. My team and I won the Judges' Choice Award category! The prize was some cash and more importantly an internship at Infinite Frameworks! :D Hopefully I will be able to go for the internship. There are some issues because I have had my attachment programme already. Probably somethings can be worked out to schedule the internship after graduation :)
Judges' Choice Award winning animation entry from students Oh Han Wee, Goh Peng Fong, Tan Zi Chao, Ronald Fong Ren Kai, Lee Yong Yi.
