Simon Taylor Animation
From student to professional animator and the odd tip here and there

Greetings one and all and yes, you too!

I thought I would take this opportunity to mention a new series that started airing this week, which I worked on last year and was in fact my first job as an animator!

The series is “Castle Farm”, a pre school show created by Corrina Askin and produced by Impossible TV for Five’s Milkshake show. It’s such a brilliant series and has been great fun to work on and I learned a lot. One of the most important bits of knowledge I came away with definitely has to be animating at speed to a TV schedule (roughly a minute a week) whilst still keeping up the quality. My biggest tip for any animators out there going into TV animation for the first time has to be even if you’ve got a daunting number of shots to get done, take time out to plan. Even if it’s just a couple of minutes in your head. It will save you a huge amount of time in the long run and will minimise trial and error.

I’m still working at Impossible TV and having a great time on a new series for Chorion (whose brands include Mr. Men & Little Miss, Noddy and Paddington Bear to name but a few) as well as finishing off my studies at Animation Mentor (only a few weeks left to go!). I’ll be posting some videos of my most recent work soon!

Best be off now and in the meantime, you can see Castle Farm weekdays on Five (in the UK) at 8.50am!

Ciao for now!

Simon

Castle Farm
Impossible TV

Chorion

Greetings!

For my most recent Animation Mentor assignment I knew I wanted a few shots that were really close to the character’s eyes. Now, because I’m very picky about these things I knew it would annoy me if the geometry of the eyes looked jagged, even with the character on the highest quality the eyes still looked like this:

No Smoothing

So why not just press the smooth button in Maya a few times? Well, you can do that but it will really slow down render times. This is where Mental Ray’s Approximation editor comes in handy!

1) Make sure Mental Ray is loaded (Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Plugin Manager -> Mayatomr.mll)

2) Select your mesh and go to Window -> Rendering Editors -> mental ray -> Approximation Editor

3) Under the section “Subdivisions (Polygon and Subd. Surfaces)” click the “Create” button.

That’s it! And with mimimal added rendering time (for this frame it added about a second) the frame now looks like this:

Smooooooooth

Just to confirm, this will only work if you’re rendering in Mental Ray. Hope that’s useful, happy smoothing!

Simon

www.simontayloranimation.com