Indianapolis Artist/Animator Paul Schmitt has joined us as an Editor and contributor to the site. Paul does some amazing work and I’m sure we’ll see some great things from him here on the site. Welcome Aboard Paul!

IndianapolisAnimation.com

For those of you using Autodesk Max there is a new plugin at the lab. Autodesk has titled it Geppetto after the puppet maker from Pinocchio lol. I like it. Anyway, the link below has all the information and download links so that you can get started playing with Geppetto.

Oh! I almost forgot.. look for the link in the page below. Autodesk Bought Evolver which is a company that offers parametric character creation.. the good news!! You can download as many as you want for free… create your own itterations.. very awesome! Even if you don’t use Geppetto you’ll love these characters. They are rigged and you can export the mesh, textures, and rigs in many various formats which makes them importable into, not only MAX, but many game engines and software packages. Check it out!

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/geppetto/

Hello gang, I’m Paul Schmitt – a local animator in Indy. I’d like to show you the kind of project that I’m putting together. This project I have going involves animating the art made in Adobe Illustrator, colored in Photoshop and animated as Flash files.

This is really an old Chuck Schultz Charlie Brown story if Tim Burton directed it – plus some blood and gore. There is way more production art over at The Man Who Bled Roses Movie blog.

The file above, is a story board page from a long scene in the main character’s colossal corporate job. His office building is a sprawling, over-crowded rat maze.

The pencils pages for the main scenes are all re-scanned into a studio computer and being digitally inked. The cleaned up art then readied to be animated in Flash.

More art from this and other projects will get posted as soon as I have a chance to do so.

Copy code for Roses on your site:		Copy code for Roaches on your site:

Visemes are a concept introduced to me by the guys at Di-o-matic. Visemes are the visual representation of phonemes in lip sync animation. When a character you are making a lip sync track for moves his or her mouth it is oftentimes used to simulate speech.

While there are a large number of phonemes in language there are only a few visemes.

If you are making facial morph targets for your lip sync you actually only need about eleven.

Vowels consist of A, E, and O. And actually U/W can be represented by the same viseme.

Consonants are even easier. B, M, and D can be represented by one viseme. S needs it’s own but C and H can be represented by one viseme.

Then there will be the tongue visemes these consist of L which needs it’s own viseme. T, H, and D can be represented by one viseme. And finally N.

Lastly you have the teeth which only consists of one viseme. F and V.

Hopefully this is helpful to all you lip sync animators. I will possibly be putting some visual representations of these at some point. I’m learning as well so most of my time is spent on modeling and texturing for 3d characters at this point but as my project progresses I should have some nice samples to show.

If you are a local with lip sync animation experience I’d love to hear your thoughts. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at sumo911@hotmail.com!

Brad

Indianapolis Animation welcomes you to our new site. We’re putting up several sites right now and I’m doing them all by my lonesome so bear with me. I’ll have all the kinks worked out. I’m trying to find an easier way for people to add links but I might have to do it the old fashioned way… not to mention working on the other sites as well. Anyway, I’ll fix all that and then we will unleash ourselves on the world. So if you visit now… check back soon. We’re rockin hard.

If you’d like to be a part of the site email me at the email in the footer! We’d love to have your contribution.

Thanks,
Bradley Stone

http://www.bradleystone.com