What better way to start off a blog than the BFX festival? This is the second year of Bournemouth’s Animation and VFX festival with a host of guest houses coming down to speak, including MPC, Framestore, Axis Animation, Chaosgroup and much more! It has also been such a pleasure to take part in the national BFX compeition for students, comprimising of 8 teams battling out for 7 weeks to produce a 30 second animation. During the summer I made many friends and learnt so much by taking part in this compeitition. The team I was in was called “Team Beard”.. funnily enough there were 3 other facial hair related teams too just by pure coincidence! (And there we were thinking we were original!)

We had a great variety of talent in our group and covered all parts of the pipeline. I was responsible for all rigging and cloth simulation and played a major role in compositing. Having not experimented with Maya’s nCloth before this was a huge learning curve – I had to make sure that I worked close with our modeller (Tom Getty) to produce clothes that would avoid as much intersection and headache as humanly possible. Dispite spending 2 days pulling out hair and very stressed, I managed to achieve a result I was really proud of with the help of autodesk’s documentation and a few web tutorials. It was great to produce a rigged character with many layers of clothing without having knowledge of nCloth before the competition.

Rigging is the area I want to specialise in, and in this project time constraints proved to be a major challenge. During the opening weeks I wrote various scripts in anticipation for both Sinbad and the Roc so that when the models were passed on it allowed me to quickly create the control rig and focus on the more artisic nature of rigging such as weight painting and blendshapes. Having rigged a crow in a previous personal project I was already familiar with the anatomical structure of a bird.

Here’s our Team’s final video: