Scrubby

Are you an animator that sometimes downloads videos from the internet to use as reference footage for your animations, only to find that the compression format of the video makes scrubbing it frame by frame very difficult? All you want is to jump around between those frames with instant results, so frustrating.

Well here's a handle lil batch file for converting your video to a format that makes scrubbing between your frames instant and silky smooth.

DOWNLOAD SCRUBBY!

INSTRUCTIONS:

(WINDOWS ONLY) Put the 2 zipped files in the same location (ffmpeg.exe and Scrubby.bat) and then drag any video file onto Scrubby.bat. It uses ffmpeg.exe to recompress the video with keyframes set on every frame as a h264 mp4 file. After the command line window goes away you'll have a new mp4 file with the same name as the input file, only with "_Scrubby" added to it.

Joysplosion

Old Friend Wevr announcement

My VR animation project Old Friend was just announced on the Wevr site along with a quick interview/blurb thing. Check it out!
http://blog.wevr.com/tyler-hurd-wevr-122

The US Premiere will be at Tribeca Film Festival!
https://tribecafilm.com/filmguide/old-friend-2016

Also, here are some promotional screenshots:

CARDBOARD AND GEAR BUTTS

"BUTTS: The VR Experience" is now available on the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard(Android only, ios coming soon)


Links here!
http://buttsvr.com/#getbutts

Direct Link to Google Cardboard Android: UPDATE: Google removed BUTTS from the Play store. They said it contains "crude sexual acts". What a load of shit.

Announcement article:
http://www.roadtovr.com/butts-vr-experience-comes-gear-vr/

Another thing from a thing

A thing from a new thing

"BUTTS: The VR Experience"

With the expert guidance of Skillman & Hackett I transformed "BUTTS" into a VR experience. I gave a brief talk on it at the VR Cinema Meetup #2 today, and launched an official download website for it.

The website for "BUTTS: The VR Experience" is here: http://buttsvr.com

The brief talk is here: https://air.mozilla.org/vr-cinema-event/

Uncle Ben's - Teach Your Children

Really enjoyed working with Hornet on this 2nd Uncle Ben's spot.

Company: Hornet Inc.
Director: Gabe Askew

My Role: Animator. Sole animator on the previs and final product. Rigged and animated props.

Tweeny

Tweeny is a Maya in-between and overshoot pose creation tool similar to the Tween Machine by Justin Barrett.

"BUTTS"

I worked on this on and off in my spare time over the past 18 months. I handled everything visual, and I had help with sound. It's my most profound and stupid work to date.

Here are some quotes that I have collected from around the internet.

• "literally this is the greatest thing man has created. *also please note that the trees, rocks, clouds and mountains are also all butts" -.hardp!nq
• "Drama Friendship Closure Butts" - perplexingpariah
• "WHY HAVE I NEVER RELATED SO STRONGLY TO A VIDEO IN MY ENTIRE LIFE" -armin-arlert-defense-squad
• "A love story." -thelamarshack
• "This made me uncomfortable." -kingofredlines
• "Is the internet even real?" -ers--hoghet
• "First look at Pixar's follow up to the 'Cars' franchise" -AJ Jefferies
• "You, sir, are the greatest artist who ever lived." -Kevin Temmer
• "나혼자 기묘한 기분을 느낄수 없음 조금 뒤조심해야하나 암튼" -히스벌이하는 광분요정

Uncle Ben's - All Roads

Really enjoyed working with Hornet on this Uncle Ben's spot.

Company: Hornet Inc.
Director: Gabe Askew

My Role: Rigger/Animator. Rigged and animated backgrounds and props. Animated family at dining table.

Glacials Music Video

My directorial debut. A music video for "Sweet Tooth Pink Wrist" by the London based post-rock band, Glacials. http://glacials.co.uk/ I shot it with friends and did all the post work myself.

Buy the album here: http://glacials.bandcamp.com/

Nintendo Pokemon X & Y

I worked on this Pokemon commercial at The Mill. I re-rigged all of the Pokemon characters and animated the 2 shots that take place in the streets.

The Framework of Riggs

The following blog post is an explanation of how I structured the automated rigging system I wrote in python and PyMEL for Double Fine Productions called Riggs (after the main character Eddie Riggs from Brutal Legend), intended for individuals interested in rigging or character pipelines. Here's a demo of it:

Playstation 4 - Greatness Awaits

I worked on this Sony Playstation 4 commercial at The Mill. Rigged Killzone vehicles, Spiders, Diablo, Knack, Mechs, skeletons, and some other misc things. Animated Diablo, spiders, mechs, and a hoard of 150 skeletons climbing the base of the ferris wheel.

Remove Namespaces Script

When you import in Maya it's hard to avoid namespaces. They pile up and 9 times out of 10 you don't want them.

Here's a simple script that will remove namespaces for you. Select any item in the namespace that you want to remove. If there are multiple nested namespaces, it will remove them one at a time.

Unlock Nodes Script

You can't delete something because it was duplicated from a referenced object and now it's locked. How do you unlock it? Maya doesn't have a any way to do this without using a script.

Here's a simple script to unlock these pesky bastards.

Kellogg’s® Froot Loops® "Carl the King Crab"

I worked on this Kellogg’s® Froot Loops® "Carl the King Crab" commercial over at Nathan Love.

For this project I was the Animation Supervisor, overseeing the animation between me and 3 other animators. I animated the last 2 shots with the net. I also rigged and animated props.

Polly Pocket

I worked on this commercial for Polly Pocket over at Nathan Love. She turns a rainy day into a water slide, FYI.

During this project I was responsible for all the previs, layout, rigging, animation, and character simulations.

Liquid Floor

Particles

Batch Stabilize Footage

I had 240 video clips that I wanted to run stabilization on so I wrote this nifty script for After Effects that will take all your selected footage items, build comps for them, apply the warp stabilizer, and add them to the render queue. You have to then wait for the image stabilzation to process in the background for all the footage before it will render, which took an extremely long time with all the footage I was using.

At the top of the script there's a place to use a render settings template of your choice to apply to all of the comps in the render queue.

If you don't know how to install and run scripts in After Effects, read this.

One last word of caution. Running this script on 240 files crippled my machine and I ended up having to do it on chunks of 50 or so to keep things stable. It ate up all of the RAM and had trouble even just saving the file because of all the warp stabilizers.

DOWNLOAD HERE

UPDATE: I updated the file with Ryan McManimie's fix in the comments. I changed "Warp Stabilizer" to "Warp Stabilizer VFX".

Shader Fun

I've written some helper scripts for dealing with shader and render layer assignments called shader_fun, which includes the following commands:

shader_fun.export_shaders() - Store the mesh assignment info for all shaders in the scene and then export them to a separate maya file.
shader_fun.import_shaders() - Import shaders with mesh assignment info and reassign to meshes with the same name. Supports namespaces.

x = shader_fun.get_render_layer_ass() - Get the render layer shader assignments for selected meshes and store it in "x".
shader_fun.set_render_layer_ass(x) - Set the render layer shader assignments stored in "x".

shader_fun.save_mat_ass() - Save all shader assignments in the maya scene to an "ass" file.
shader_fun.load_mat_ass() - Load and apply all the shader assignments from an "ass" file.

Get started:
1. Download with right-click save as and save the file in you maya prefs folder in the scripts folder. For example c:/users/[yourusername]/documents/maya/scripts/
2. Import with the following python command import shader_fun
3. Run those other commands.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Hair From Curve Script

Maya's hair system is a really powerful rigging tool, but the implementation makes it difficult to cleanly integrate into your rigs through script. It creates a bunch of extra nodes you don't need, names the resulting dynamic hair "curve1", and there is no way of specifying when you want to add a new follicle to an existing hairSystem node.

So I wrote a bare bones script in pymel that will create all the necessary nodes and connect them for you without creating all that extra junk.  If you pass in an existing hairSystem node name, it'll be added to that, otherwise a new hairSystem node will be created with the given name, or if you don't include a name it'll just make one up.

DOWNLOAD HERE

A Snippet

A snippet from a little something I've been working on.

Honey Nut Cheerios

My first freelance gig was a few months ago for this Honey Nut Cheerios thing.  I animated the bear, the camera, and some props.  I had a very pleasant and enjoyable experience with the wonderful guys at Founding Fathers.

Fresh Skin

Turns out other folks have been using a script I shared with someone on tech-artists.org to help them with a particular rigging problem they had and I got an email about it because the tech-artists site is down so I figure I'll just put it up here.

The script is called Fresh Skin and it is pretty simple but very effective. It just duplicates the bound geometry, copies the skinning info over, deletes the original, and cleans up.  This fixes an insanely large number of issues but I wrote it a long time ago just to get rid of any unwanted history on a bound mesh.

1.Download below with right-click save as and save the file in you maya prefs folder in the scripts folder. For example c:/users/[yourusername]/documents/maya/scripts/
2. Restart Maya.
3. Select the bound mesh(es) you want to act on.
4. Run this command:  freshSkin;

DOWNLOAD HERE

Goodbye Double Fine Video

I spent 9 years being part of the wonderful family at Double Fine Productions. This goodbye love letter was my way of letting them know it was not easy for me to leave. It was also a good excuse to work on something creative outside of work that I felt strongly about.

Happy Birthday Korka 2011

A birthday present for my wife Korka in 2011.

Tools Reel 2012

A fast paced demo of my rigging and animation tools from the last 9 years.

The biggest of which is "Riggs", a modular automated rigging system written in Python/PyMel. At Double Fine the characters go through many stages of change so one of the focuses of this system was to facilitate that change and make it as fluid and simple as possible to make changes to full rigs.

It also had to be simple enough for animators with little rigging experience to use because the studio was too small for dedicated character riggers.

Animation Reel 2012

Samples of my animation work from the past 9 years. Most of it is from the critically acclaimed games of Double Fine Productions. The thing I'm showcasing here is JUST the animation.

Theory of Emotion

A Valentine's Day gift for my wife Korka in 2011.

Von Crunkenstein III, Esquire

A tongue in cheek music video for a crunk song that Matt Englund and I made.

Sweet Releases

A highly calculated study on the effects of screaming. Made with Matt Englund.

Happy Birthday Korka 2009

Clearly my best and most polished animation work to date, this birthday present for my wife Korka will have you on the edge of your seat.

Welcome to Blog

I'll be updating this blog with my latest work, thoughts, etc. Be it professional or personal, 2D or 3D, amazing or shitty, the world can view it in all of its glory, right here.

Starting with this: