"It Doesn't Work!" - How to Solve Tech Troubles

Why Doesn't It Work?

"It doesn't work"  is a problem frequently encountered by our students at BNU.

Remember that every technical problem, no matter how infuriating, has a solution. One of the key skills our students learn at BNU is how to solve problems - and find solutions, so that production work can continue. Digital artists face an endless stream of technical hiccups.

Free Script Toggles Control Curves On and Off

Morpheus curves

Below is a very useful MEL (Maya Embedded Language) script for Maya animators, developed by Justin Barratt, and one which we are recommending for all our students. It's a very useful tool, used to toggle the visibility of your animation rigs' control curves on and off.

All you have to do is paste the lines of script below in your script editor in Maya (under the MEL tab) and then save save it to a shelf in the usual way. 

Once you've done this, it should help to speed up your workflow and make you a faster, and better, animator.

Optimise Truong Maya Rigs for Unreal Engine

Truong CG, who creates many of the best free (and nearly free) rigs for student use, has released the video above to optimise his rigs for Unreal Engine.  All of Truong's latest rigs are fully compatible with Unreal Engine since they are all joints-based for both body and face. However, for Truong's older rigs, this video will help optimise the rigs for use in Unreal Engine, giving all the advantages of real-time rendering. 

What Kind of Laptop Should Our Students Buy?

What kind of laptop?

"What kind of laptop should I buy?" is a question that we are often asked at Bucks New University. 

Computer specifications change regularly and much depends on exactly what you want to use your laptop for.  But let's say you want to buy a laptop capable of running Autodesk Maya, for computer animation and to render out your shots.

What sort of laptop should you buy, and how much do you need to spend? BNU Animation Master's Student Amedeo Beretta offers some advice to our students.

Blue Zoo and Real Time Rendering with Unreal

Blue Zoo's Tom Box at BlueGFX Expo

Blue Zoo's Tom Box explained the Blue "real-time animation pipeline" at the recent BlueGFX Expo in London, exploring new ways to speed up the animation process.

Tom described Blue Zoo as a studio that, since its inception, has "refused to accept industry standards", and has forged its own path in the industry.

Recently Blue Zoo have been pioneering the use of real-time rendering using Unreal Engine - trying to find ways to make the production process faster and more efficient. 

What Kind of Laptop Should Our Students Buy?

laptop computer - will travel

"What kind of laptop should I buy?" is a question that gets asked whenever we start a new class of Masters' students at Bucks.

Our online MA in animation is a purely distance learning course, and that means that our students have to provide their own hardware and software.
The main software we use, Autodesk Maya, can be downloaded for free from the Autodesk education site.

Back Up Your Data!

Hard Drive - full of moving parts

There are few things more depressing than being told by a student that their hard drive has died, and they have lost all their work.

Losing your data means starting afresh, going back to the beginning to start again the long, slow slog of building up a demo reel.  It's hard to over-stress the importance of backing up your data. It's a pain in the neck, and it takes time, but never forget that a hard drive is a delicate piece of technology filled with vulnerable moving parts.

Hard drives don't last for ever and, like all tech, will (eventually) let you down. The secret is to back up your data. But how best to do this? We take a quick look at some of the options.

Keyframe MP - Video Playback for Animators

Keyframe MP Overview from Chris Zurbrigg on Vimeo.

KeyFrame MP - Video Playback for Animators - is an excellent video playback tool that does the job that QuickTime Pro used to do - only even better.  Most free video players, such as Media Player, won't give you frame-by-frame playback, making them of limited use to animators.  KeyFrame PM is a video player specially made for animators, with super useful features like scrubbing (with audio), single frame advance - all the stuff you need as an animator to play your work back frame by frame and trouble shoot the mistakes. At $79, KeyFrame MP isn't free, but it's much, much better than most of the free stuff out there. And, since Apple has stopped supporting the cheap and cheerful Quick Time Pro, KeyFrame MP now fills a big gap in the animator's tool kit.

aTools - The Animator's Swiss Army Knife

aTools - "The ultimate free utility belt for Maya Animators"

aTools is a free download for Maya that describes itself as "The ultimate free utility belt for Maya animators."

aTools was created by Portuguese animator Alan Camilo, and is extremely useful for all kinds of animation tasks in Maya.

Endless Reference for Animators - at YouTube

Using live action reference to inform your animation can be one of the best ways to get started as an animator.

I have used live action reference many times on many films, especially movies with human characters, such as The Road to El Dorado and Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron, and especially on action shots where the motion was complex and hard to get right.

What is Redshift? - by Lyuboslav Angelov

Go to any animation or vfx festival and you will hear hair-raising tales of super-long render times, of waiting for days on end for a single frame or batch of frames to render.

In reality, CG artists need our renders to be as quick and efficient as possible.  Long render times increase our costs and take too much time to get things done.

Recently, Bucks animation undergraduate Lyuboslav Angelov has been getting great results from Redshift, a new rendering tool - which has also been adopted by leading London studios such as Blue Zoo. We asked Lyuboslav to explain how Redshift works and how students can benefit from its speed and simplicity.

Autodesk Releases Maya 2017: Mental Ray Is Out, Arnold Is In

Autodesk has just released a new version of Maya, titled Maya 2017 (I know, we're only half way through 2016) - which now features an entirely new system for rendering your images. 

The old ray trace renderer, Mental Ray, has been dropped, and Autodesk have chosen Arnold instead. For those of you have have never used Arnold before, and might have some catching up to do, Animation Apprentice student Lee Caller has helpfully put together a YouTube playlist of videos that will walk you through the basics of the Arnold renderer. 

Arnold is a great renderer, and no doubt a significant improvement on Mental Ray. However, there is a catch, and it's a pretty big one.

How to Load 3DS Max Files into Autodesk Maya

Visit a website like Turbosquid and you will find plenty of cool stuff, much of it free, to help you with your animation. You might want to download a set, or a prop, something to make your shot come alive.  After all, you don't want to waste precious time modeling complex props and sets - you want to get on with your animation.

But what if the only available file type for download is a 3DS Max file? Max is a popular platform for learning animation and, while is it much less widely used in industry than Maya, there is lots of great free content out there in the 3DS Max format. So, what we need is a way to import 3DS Max files into Maya.  Fortunately, it's pretty easy when you know how.

Why Animators Should Go To Siggraph in August

Siggraph 2015

This year Siggraph is taking place in the Los Angeles Convention Center, from 9-13 August. Siggraph is the world's biggest conference on computer graphics. Like FMX in Stuttgart, or the Annecy animation festival, it is the perfect place to find out about the latest technologies, meet other animators, find the big recruiters, and figure out where the industry is heading. It is, in short, a window into the digital future. Obviously, not many of our students will find themselves in LA this summer, but for those luckily few that are, we highly recommend attending Siggraph - and events like it.  There is nothing quite like it to give you a unique insight into the the new technology that is driving the development of the animation industry.

Make Your Own RenderFarm With Backburner

Render by Gilles Tran - Wikimedia Commons 

Rendering, as my old tutor at Escape Studios used to say, "is where everything starts to go wrong". Here at Bucks we expect our students to present finished, polished work for their assessed submissions, properly lit, textured and rendered out. But this poses problems - render times can be long and, as deadlines loom, any technical failure can be fatal to a timely submission.  So, in the absence of a high-end render farm, how do students render their work on time? The answer is Backburner - the poor man's render farm.

Nicky Brown Brings Compositing Masterclass to Bucks Today!

Compositing made easy

Bucks welcomes visual effects compositor Nicky Brown today to teach our students the secrets of Nuke, now the VFX industry's leading compositing software. Nicky has extensive experience working in the visual effects, animation and games industry, having worked on projects at the BBC, on Planet Dinosaur, and on app games such as Walking With Dinosaurs.

Renderman, Free At Last!

Pixar's Renderman, one of the leading industry software packages for rendering high quality animation images has at last been released free to students on a non-commercial basis.  Pixar's RenderMan is used throughout the CGI industry for the creation of stunning visual effects, and is highly recommended for student use. So what are you waiting for? Download it here now!

Instant Rigging at Mixamo.com

Mixamo.com. Instant rigging!

Rigging is one of the more complex and technical parts of the animation pipeline. In brief, rigging is the process of putting skeletons into our digital models. It is the way we bring them to life with controls that can be used to give a performance. The rig in a CG model is a bit like the armature that goes into a puppet. But what if we could automate the process, and speed it up? This would eleminate (at least in theory) hours of labour. One company that is leading the field is Mixamo, creating automated rigs through their Auto-Rigger tool.

Free VFX Tutorials at Our Next Open Day at Bucks - Saturday 21 February

Model your own Gul Dukat at Bucks for free! Image: Wikipedia

Saturday 21 February is not just any old Open Day at Bucks. As well as the usual tour of our state-of-the-art facilities, Bucks tutors Dave Creighton and Nick Brown are offering free tutorials in specialist VFX software Mudbox and RealFlow, giving our prospective students a unique insight into the digital pipeline of the growing animation and visual effects industry.  So, if you come along on Saturday, what exactly can you expect to learn?

Handbrake - a Great Way to Reduce Video File Sizes

Handbrake. Free to download.

What is Handbrake? Handbrake is a video transcoder,  a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. It's super useful for reducing the size of big video files without losing quality, and best of all - it's completely free.