Morgan Loomis

Norman for Blender

Morgan Loomis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:38:48 +0000

This is so cool, I didn’t realize that someone ported Norman to Blender. Nice to see Creative Commons in action! I’ve been playing a bit with Blender recently, it’s a really impressive piece of software for being free and open source, and I’m curious if it can be a serious alternative to Maya for personal work. I haven’t tried animating in it yet, but now I know there’s a rig I can use!

Norman for Blender

Hobbit Trailer Online

Morgan Loomis — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:31:07 +0000

I’m excited:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/thehobbit/

Reel Feedback Free Day

Morgan Loomis — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:08:30 +0000

A while ago I posted about Reel Feedback, a website started by some talented animator friends of mine for giving students and job-seekers professional feedback on their animation reel. Well, they’re doing a free reel review event next month in the Bay Area. If you’re an animation student getting ready to look for work, I highly recommend you check it out. It will be a great opportunity to get solid feedback on your reel, and also to just hang out with some fun dudes.

Greyhound Runcycle

Morgan Loomis — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:44:20 +0000

This is Dotty, one of the neighborhood greyhounds.

Stop Motion Tintin

Morgan Loomis — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:15:33 +0000

I had no idea this existed:

Devo Sketches

Morgan Loomis — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:18:35 +0000

I finally got around to doing a couple whippet sketches, nothing too fancy but it feels like it’s been forever since I’ve drawn anything, so I thought I should make a record of it. Whenever I get around to modelling this character, I’m thinking I’ll go for this level of exaggeration, rather than too realistic or too cartoony.

Interview with Phil Tippett

Morgan Loomis — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:27:30 +0000

In this interview he talks about Jurassic Park, Star Wars, good and bad film making, and even mentions Tintin: “The motion capture stage is where directors go to die.” I always love hearing his take on things:

http://blog.mondotees.com/2011/09/03/check-out-the-full-phil-tippett-mmm2-qa/

Sneak Peak Tintin Clips

Morgan Loomis — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:46:38 +0000

Yet another post without any real content, other than to re-share stuff that has been released online. Here’s a look at 5 clips from Tintin. They’re spoilery, fair warning…

Avengers

Morgan Loomis — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:11:54 +0000

The first trailer was just released for Avengers, the project I’m working on now. I have to say it actually looks like it will be a pretty fun movie:

Two New Tools

Morgan Loomis — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 06:26:06 +0000

I finally got around to publishing two new tools, ml_convertRotationOrder, and ml_lockAndHideAttributes. They’re pretty straightforward, nothing too fancy, but I’ve found they can be useful to have wrapped up like this. Head over to the tools page if you’d like to check them out.

ml_convertRotationOrder.py is for changing the rotation order of an object that has already been animated. Sometimes you start animation without considering the rotation order, or the needs of the animation changes and you realize a different rotation order would be better. One way to preserve your animation is to bake it out to locators, but this tools goes through and uses the xform command to change the rotation order on each keyframe without affecting the orientation. It’s a faster and more accurate process.

ml_lockAndHideAttributes.py also does pretty much just what it says. It’s a wrapper for quickly being able to lock and/or hide attributes by selecting them in the channel box, and then unlocking and unhiding attributes without having to open the obnoxious channel control window. Unhiding will show all default and user defined attributes on a node. I have these commands set as hotkeys, which makes it easy to troubleshoot rigs when you need to quickly look at hidden attributes or move locked nodes. You can create hotkeys easily by right-clicking on the buttons in the UI.