Author Archives: admin

SuperBeard!

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A little animation sketch with the great ‘Blurp’ character from iAnimate. The dialogue is from a Conan O’Brien podcast where he was talking about the recent Superman movie. I thought it was a funny line and it might be fun to play with the context of it.

Tools used : Maya 2014 for animation, After Effects for some simple compositing of the background + ZBrush Fibermesh (for the beard!). All elements were hand animated.

 

Scripting Reel 2013

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I love to Animate but I hate to do mindless repetitive tasks.. so I script!
Various tools I’ve written over the last couple of years for Maya, Cinema 4D and ZBrush, in MEL, Python, COFFEE and ZScript.
Some of them are available to download on my website graphite9.com, others are just for me right now 😉

iAnimate Workshop 4 Shots

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I’m currently taking workshop 5 with iAnimate and am just getting started this week with my first assignment for it. In the last couple of weeks I uploaded my shots from last block. These are almost finished, but I’ll likely do some more polish on them after this next block ends before adding them to the reel on my website.

This first one features dialogue from the great Tom Baker, who played Dr Who on the BBC back in the late ’70s.

For my 2nd assignment I went for a very different mood, this is Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly having a bad news day.

I really had a lot of fun working on both of these shots and hope that comes across in the animation. I feel I learned a lot too, big thanks to my mentor Angie Jones. I’m delighted to be studying with Angie again now for workshop 5 as she is a fantastic teacher.

bhGhost Update 1-08

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By far the most popular script I’ve created so far is my ‘bhGhost’ tool for Maya. I’ve gotten amazing response from animators all around the world about it. Here’s the original preview video I made to demonstrate an early version of it.

Just the other day I was asked a question by the person whose lecture originally inspired me to create bhGhost, Jason Ryan (supervising animator at Dreamworks and founder of iAnimate).

Jason was wondering if it was possible to ghost only the keys in a selected range of the timeslider. Well, at the time that wasn’t possible but I thought it was a great suggestion so I added that function to it. Here’s a video demonstrating the new workflow. bhGhost is free to download from my Maya downloads page here.

There’s also a video I made on the general workflow with the original version (all of which is still valid) along with some tips on potential uses of it.

And one last video, this shows an earlier update where I added a function to create shelf buttons for different characters in your shot, making it much quicker to switch the ghost tool from character to character.

 

Welcome to the new Graphite 9 Blog!

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Greetings! Welcome to my new blog where I’ll be uploading animation, scripts, and general CG-related stuff.

A little about me : I am a freelance animator/rigger based in Ireland. I work with Maya and Cinema 4D as my main applications. I’m also comfortable with After Effects, ZBrush and audio applications like Cubase and Wavelab. I have a background in music but these days my main focus is character animation. As well as working as an animator/rigger I’m also a student of animation, I’m currently taking workshop 5 with online school iAnimate.

As well as the artistic side of animation I have an interest in scripting, I use MEL in Maya and Python in C4D to write tools that help me work faster. Every now and then I share tools I’ve made on my website. You’ll find links to those at the top of the page.