In AnimSchool’s Animating Characters class, instructor Keith Osborn shows how to convey line of action and weight on a character’s walk.
Come join all the students learning online at AnimSchool.
Category: Dave Gallagher
Today we are interviewing not one, but two people! Xin and Florent are the makers of “The Answer”, a short animation film using Animschool’s Malcolm Rig.
The short is now featuring in Vimeo’s “Staff Pick”collection. Check it out:
Both of them are now applied to our 3D Animation Program. Lets begin the interview!
Hi guys! Can you start by telling us where you’re from, your experience with character animation and background?
Xin: Hi, I’m Xin. I’m from Beijing. I always wanted to be a animator since I was a kid and they told me knowing how to draw is going to be benifical even if I want to be a 3D animator in the future. So I started my professional Fine Art training since I was in primary school. Since then I learn Fine Art for nearly 10 years before I went to Teesside University to get a Bachlor of Art Degree in Character Animation in the UK, where I gained a lot of 3D Generalist skills as well as animation skills.
Florent: I am from Toulouse, in France. I have always been a big fan of animation and video games but for some reason I thought about it as a possible career pretty late and I studied different subjects (including food processing…) in the end, after graduating in computing science in France I decided to move to England and learn animation.
We both studied at Teesside University, in England, where we graduated from Bachelor of Art in character computer animation. After our studies, we both got hired as animation interns by Ubisoft in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. We are now still working at Ubisoft and we decided to study at Animschool on our free time to learn more about animation as our University course was very oriented on CG generalist skills.
How did the idea for the script came up? Who was in charge of what in the short?
Xin: Of course, it is slightly based on real events. My partner Florent was shaving in the bathroom with his electric razor, and some minutes later, he came back in the room with a half shaved beard and his razor which was out of power and the cable was nowhere to be found. With this idea in mind, we also wanted to find an idea about how he could finish up shaving in a funny way. I remembered reading a famous self-helping book based on “The law of attraction” and which marketing is based on a “secret” linked to many historical figures and conspiracy. And so we decided to make a parody of it.
Florent: We shared the different tasks according to our skills and what we wanted to do.
Both our dreams were to become character animators after university so we evenly shared the animation.
For the pre-production, after defining our story and getting some rough shot ideas, Xin draw an amazing storyboard (see panel). Xin’s storyboard was so clear we even used it as the main reference for the environment design.
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| A panel from the storyboard |
We both modelled and textured environment and assets.
Xin took care of Malcolm rig modifications, the 2D/motion graphics and compositing Florent did the shading, the lighting and the rendering.
And just a word about the book narration voice actor: Fernando Zamora. Who worked with us remotely and did an amazing job. Thank you again 🙂

Can you tell how much time did you guys spent per day on it and how long did it took from start to completion?
We started over the summer to be ready to animate at the start of the academic year so it took a part of the summer and half of the academic year (because we had another project), so around 5 months spread on a year.
The days were busy, we did everything from home and it was an average of 9-10 hours/day. A lot of hard work but it was worth it in the end 🙂
What did you guys think of the Animschool Malcolm rig? Did it meet your expectations on the production of the short?
From the start, this project goal was to produce the best character animation we could make to showcase our animation skills. To get the best results, we had to give up the idea of using our own character.

Quickly, we decided to use a Free Rig which allow us to have maximum performance of the character animation. We choose Animschool’s Malcolm Rig due to its flexibility after we saw many great animations including a short animation called Mistakes on the 11 Second Club website. The runner-up of March 2012 gave us a great idea of how flexible and controllable the Malcolm Rig’s hands are.
The Malcolm Rig has an amazing facial rig. The eyebrows and mouth in particular allowed us to have greater facial animation without being limited by the rig itself. Of course, the body rig of Malcolm is fantastic too. The controllers on his limbs enable us to have great line of actions during the animation.
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Malcolm flexibility and deformations
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Can you share the main process for the character animation and model modification?
This is the animation workflow we used for this project:
- Video Reference Recording – Record video references of ourselves for the animation.
- Character Animation Thumbnail – Decide the character’s actions by drawing out the storytelling poses.
Example of thumbnail drawing for animation
- Blocking Animation – Blocking of the storytelling poses of the animation and establish the rough timing of each movements.
- Spline Animation – Change stepped animation curves to spline curves.
- Polish Animation – Add textures to the spline animation and clean the curves in Graph Editor.

Model Modification
Geometry Modification
To fit our purpose, we wanted to personalized Malcolm geometry and textures. Considering the complicity of the rig, Xin didn’t dare to make too much changes on the geometry, otherwise it might result some problem on the rig. The main modifications are the general face shape was sculpted to be rounder and the hairs were removed to leave space for a Maya hair system
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| Malcom face modification |
We also gave him a shirt collar to add some detail. The collar is animated by 6 blendshapes to reduce shoulders intersection once animated.
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| Blend Shapes for Malcom’s collar |
Our issue was that only Malcolm’s face was UV mapped. We did not know at that time that uv mapping a rigged character would not end well 🙂
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| When we though skinned character’s UV were still movable |
After doing some research, Xin found an article from a blog called Anim Bizz, talking about how to transfer UVs after rigging. A “Shape Orig” node includes the information of the character before rigging. Therefore, a UV transfer can be applied to this and it allowed us to UV map Malcolm’s body.

Hair System
For the hair, we wanted the non-dynamic hair system since dynamic hair is not necessary and it requires more work to do with the simulation which is way too complicated for us. Xin followed a course talking about hair system on DigitalTutors.com and had a basic idea how to build up the hair system with curves.
The idea was to create curves where we wanted the hairs to be and apply hair systems on them. Three layers of curves were created to had more realism and volume to the hair.
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| Layers of curves for more realism |
These little guys were quite an inspiration 😉

For the Beard and Eyebrows, we used the Maya Fur system.
So after all these modifications, the character looks like this:
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| Malcom after a complete makeover |
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| Detail of Malcom’s new textures |
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| The “new” Malcom |
What were the main challenges for this short?
Hahaha… Everything. We basically had no experience using Maya for more than animating a basic walk cycle and lip sync exercise for University. Every aspect was new and we were constantly doing research and learning: how to rig, how to shade, light and render, how to use hair and fur .. and well .. how to animate. Thanks to a lot of great ressources online (including AnimSchool Youtube channel, Digital Tutors, countless blogs, univeristy feedback) we managed to get to the result we wanted.
Hair and fur were particularly difficult because there is less content about it ( how to create, how to render)
Oh! and having a big mirror in the first shots didn’t make things easy ^^ (Camera angles, lighting, rendering and compositing)
What was the technology involved in the creation of the short (render, software, hair system, etc)?
The render was done using Mental Ray in Maya. It was done in parrallel with the lighting and shading. It took a lot of time and a lot of experiment. Here is an example of the process to find the lighting:
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| Several attempts in finding the correct lighting |
And so on until we could get it right:
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| The final lighting set that made into the final version of the short |
Most of the shiny/reflective materials are Mental Ray’s “mia_material_x”, the rest are Lambert materials:
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| Mental Ray’s architectural materials are good for cool a realistic look. |
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| Another example of Mental Ray Area light and shadow transparency node use. |
The other software we used were:
- Maya 2013 for all the 3D (including non-dynamic hair system and fur)
- Adobe After Effects for compositing, 2D and motion graphics
- Nuke for some of the compositing (motion vectors)
Any advice for animators that want to start production of their own short?
The only advices we can give to people who want to produce a short film are the ones we wish we had heard/followed before we get started most of them are probably obvious and specially relevant if you are still studying:
- Keep it simple: Especially if you are alone, it is hard to find the line between challenging yourself and putting the bar too high.
- If the goal of your short is to demonstrate your animation skills, We advise you not to try making your own character/rig. (Unless you have time and you are an amazing character TD/ rigger 🙂 ). There are a lot of rigs available out there, and as far as we know, Malcolm is by far the best. (No, Animschool don’t pay us to say that !) 🙂
- Find a subject/story that get you really engaged. So you don’t throw everything by the window some months down the production.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us through Vimeo or our websites:
We thank Florent and Xin for this interview and hope to see more works from them in the future! If you want to learn real character animation taugh by professionals in the industry, come apply now!
Today we are interviewing AnimSchool student Jilmar Altamirano. Jilmar is taking the 3D Animation Program at AnimSchool and is showing some real talent in his animations!
Hi Jilmar! Can you share a bit about yourself, where you’re from, experience with animation prior to AnimSchool, and background?
I’m 20 years old and I currently live in Gainesville, FL. I was born in Ecuador and when I was 12 years old I moved to the US. When I was little, like most kids, I loved watching cartoons and playing video games. In particular, a video game called “Skullmonkeys” which I really enjoyed. At that moment I did not know anything about animation, or that people actually could make a living off of it. A few years ago I remembered about “Skullmonkeys” and decided to get it again. I still loved it. That’s when I started to do some research about animation and began to practice stop motion animation. After months of doing stop motion, I switched to computer animation.
Skullmonkeys in-game animation
The first year of my learning experience I watched tons of tutorials learning as much I can about modeling, rigging, lighting, rendering, etc. I really enjoyed all of those, but animation was still my priority. Learning animation with tutorials or on your own is very limited. So I decided to take my education further. I did not choose a college because of the poor reviews a lot of them got and how expensive they were. I looked into online animation schools. Luckily I found Animschool. I was really impressed with the student showcase, and the characters were very appealing. So I applied and here I am blessed to be doing this interview, and to have a very supportive family, friends and instructors.
Who are your favorite animators and artists?
I really don’t have a favorite animator or artist in particular; but if I had to pick I would say the whole team responsible for creating The Neverhood / Skullmonkeys because without them I probably would have never found my passion for animation. I also look up to my Animschool instructors. They are all great animators who are very supportive which inspires me to keep pushing myself.
We can see a very good foundation on your shot for your Body Acting class assignment. Can you describe how the idea came up and what was your process?
The idea of having a Halloween theme on my animation just popped in my head for some reason. It could have been because Halloween was coming up and also because I wanted to use the awesome “BoneApart” rig.
I won’t take all the credit for the idea, my story was improved by my awesome instructor at the time, Trevor Young, and at a general reviews class with another great instructor, Tony Bonilla.
I did not know I was going to do a cartoony piece until the middle of my first blocking, but I just felt like it needed to be snappy and it would just add to the comedy of the shot.
For the blocking I always try to block on 3’s or 4’s, but since this was a very snappy animation I found myself having to block on 1’s in those transitions.
For splining, I find it easy because of how much time I spend blocking. I just have to go through all my curves, cleaning them up, making sure the mechanics are there and the arcs are clean.
For polishing, I would say I focused 75% of the time I had on the kid and 25% on the skeleton. Since the kid was the focus of the shot I tried to polish him as much as I could, going frame by frame checking that every arc was clean.
You also have a great shot for the Character Performance class. Can you share your process from start to finish?
Picking audio clip: When I picked this audio clip I was telling myself: “what have I done? This is going to be way too hard for me.” I had no experience with dialogue shots, so I knew it was going to be very challenging for me from the beginning.
I listened to the audio like a hundred times. The character sounded very crazy and manipulative. I pictured the character in my head but when I would try to act it out it just wouldn’t be the same.
Reference: My instructor, Marcelo Sakai, recommended me to study Mother Gothel from Tangled, so I did. I watched all her clips from the movie a bunch of times. I shot a lot of reference; I mean a lot, maybe like one hour of footage in total. I also had a lot of help from my wife who acted it out. She helped me see a more girly performance and she made some acting choices I would have never thought of.
Blocking: Finally got my reference and after the fourth or fifth week of class I had my first blocking pass. It had a few story telling poses maybe 4 or 5 with basic facial expressions.
Blocking Plus: I added a lot of breakdowns, blocked on 3’s and 4’s. I refined some facial expressions and blocked all basic mouth shapes.
Spline: I splined the body first, cleaned all my curves. At this point I found myself getting more into the character, and finding facial expressions that fit the dialogue better. After spline on the body was done, I splined everything on the face except the mouth. I cleaned those curves, and then moved into the mouth, pushing the shapes. I had a lot of fun with those mouth shapes.
Polish: At this point I focused mostly on the face and hands, going frame by frame checking every arc, even the arc of the corner of the mouth. Also pushed mouth shapes even more. Added more fleshiness on the face and I worked on the hair.
I am really happy with how it turned out at the end. All my instructors were very helpful and supportive throughout the whole term.
How did your instructors help you achieve the desired quality in your animations?
My instructors are very supportive. When you tell them your goals for the term on your first day of class, they won’t stop pushing you until you reach that goal. They are all very talented artists and that is why my animation has improved so much over the past year. I tried to attend to as many extra classes offered in Animschool as possible.
The General Review classes have been very helpful. The instructors there care about your progress as much as your main instructor.
I can’t thank all of them enough, and I can’t thank Animschool enough for having all these amazing instructors!
Any advice for your fellow students?
Always try to challenge yourself on your assignments, try different things you haven’t tried on your previous work, like different styles (cartoony or realistic), different workflows, if you have only animated guys, then try animating girls, animals, robots, etc. Experiment a lot.
Don’t give up! If your assignment isn’t coming out like how you hoped, don’t get frustrated just keep working on it, it will look great in the end. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback.
If you send your reel to studios and don’t hear back from them, it doesn’t matter: just keep improving your reel, and keep sending it to more studios.
Today we are interviewing animation student Nanda Van Dijk. Nanda is very talented in the digital arts realm and is taking the 3D Animation Program at AnimSchool.
Hi Nanda! Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself, like your background and experience before AnimSchool?
Animation
has always been my passion. As a child I was always drawing and
watching animated films. I went to the Utrecht School for the Arts in
Holland and studied computer animation and visual effects and graduated
with a master’s degree. I learned a lot about creating animated films,
from writing the scripts to making the storyboards to the production
itself. There wasn’t really an option to specialize yourself in
animation. The Dutch animation market doesn’t really work with
specializations so the school trained me to be a generalist. Because I
didn’t learn much about animation at the Utrecht School of Arts I taught
myself as much as possible. I was hired in 2010 as a 3D artist at
Mediamonks, a creative digital production agency, right out of school
and worked there for two years. In 2012 I started Animschool in class 4.
I showed my work to Tony Bonilla and he told me that I had enough
experience to skip the first 3 classes. After 3 terms at Animschool I
had to take a couple of term breaks to work on a feature film. I had the
opportunity to work as a 2D key animator at the Anikey Studios for the
Dutch feature animated film “Trippel Trappel”. Currently I am
working as a freelance 2D and 3D artist in my own company Anim.nl and
I’m back at Animschool to resume my classes.
This term I’m taking the
Advanced rigging class as an in between class to learn how I can
make a high level facial rig and next term I will take class 7 in
Animation.
You seem to be comfortable with digital painting, rigging, modeling and animating. What area do you like the most and why?
Animating
is still my favorite area, I always loved acting and character
development. But the most fun for me is is to design, model, rig and
animate an entire character. It’s great to have control over the entire
process. To animate a character and make it come to life is always a
magical thing, but to make your own creation come to life, makes it
extra special. When I started to animate in 3D at school there weren’t
many great free rigs to work with like the amazing Malcolm rig that
Animschool offers for free. I had to work with rigs like the Generi rig, a
very unappealing basic free rig. Some of you will probably remember him
with mixed feelings, haha. This is one of the reasons that I wanted to
make my own models and rigs so that I would have appealing characters to
work with. This is also one of the main reasons why I picked Animschool
over the other schools to go to. Animschool has some of the most
appealing and professional character rigs that I have come across.
Who are the artists that inspire you?
There are so many amazing artists that
inspire me. Everyday I try to look at blogs with artwork. A couple of my
favorites are, David Colman, Peter de Séve, Greg Dykstra, Loralay Bove,
Ryan Lang, Pascal Campion, Barbara Canepa, and lots and lots more. And I
have a lot of very talented Dutch friends who inspire me every day as
well, specially the illustrations by Lois van Baarle and Wouter Tulp,
two amazing artists. And as for animators, I’m a huge fan of Glen Keane. I
love his animation style and the appeal his characters have. When I
went to CTN in 2012 I watched him animate the little Mermaid. That was
very inspiring to watch. And of course the animations by the nine old
men are a huge inspiration for me.
Can you share your process from start to finish on your shot with Mr. Bones for the Body Mechanics class?
That
animation was so much fun to make. I had an amazing teacher, Tim Crawfurd. He has over 12 years of experience working at Pixar. I
couldn’t have asked for a better instructor. It was also a coincident
because Tim is also from Holland. That was a lot of fun because we could
sometimes speak in our native tongue with each other and make small
inside jokes. The assignment for this term was to make a short pantomime
story with one of the simpler Animschool rigs. I loved the look of the
Mr. Bones rig so I decided to create my story around him. I knew it had
to be a Pirate story because Pirates are simply awesome! The idea for
the character to lose his arm came really quick to me but it was very
tricky to think of a way to communicate this idea to the audience. First
I had to establish that the character lost his arm and that he still
had to find out himself that his arm was gone. It all depended on the
timing of the animation. If he noticed his arm missing too quickly the
audience wouldn’t have noticed it themselves yet so they would miss the
punchline. I really had to think about a way to direct the eye of the
audience to the missing arm so. the yawn, and the looking for the arm
helped to stage out this scene. It also helped the performance to give
the character some real personality. After figuring out the staging and
the blocking I polished my animation, modeled the stage for the cave,
modeled and rigged the bat and did the lighting and shading. To really
finish the animation I asked Dave van Luttervelt, a very talented
composer, to do the sound design and music for me. I’m very pleased with
the end result. I hope you’ll enjoy it as well!
You
worked on Trippel Trappel, a dutch feature animation film. Can you tell
us more about the film, your role and what challenges did you face in
the production?
Trippel
Trappel is produced by il Luster in co-production with ViviFilm,
animated at Anikey Studios. The story is about a couple of pets who want
to celebrate the Dutch Holiday ‘Sinterklaas’. Sinterklaas is very
similar to Santa Claus, he also brings presents to children through the
chimney. The pets want to get presents too so they’re going to find
Sinterklaas to bring him their wishlists. The film is still in
production and will be released October this year in Dutch and Belgian
theaters. This will be the first fully hand drawn animated feature from
Holland since 1983. When I learned about this production I made an
animation test and the studio asked me to be one of the Key animators
for this film. In the studio they use TV paint and Wacom Cintiqs to
animate. Unlike the old Disney films I didn’t work on just one
character. More like in 3D I got an entire scene and had to animate
everything in it, so I had the chance to animate all the main characters
in the film. It was very fun to do but also very challenging especially
because I normally work in 3D and now had to animate by hand in 2D. I
had about two weeks to learn how I had to draw the characters and after
that I got my first scene. Because the movie is funded mostly by the
government there isn’t a big budget to work with. So I had to work very
quickly and still try to keep the quality as high as possible. It was
very challenging and hard work but I think it payed off.
I’m very impressed by the quality of the animations made by everyone in the
studio and I know that it will be a very beautiful film when it’s done.
Here
is a small teaser of the film. This piece is animated by Marcel
Tigchelaar, our supervising animator. The official trailer will be
released around February.
is a small teaser of the film. This piece is animated by Marcel
Tigchelaar, our supervising animator. The official trailer will be
released around February.
This is the Facebook page of ‘Trippel Trappel’:
What do you think is the most important thing you learned at AnimSchool so far?
I
think the most important thing is to really think about your scene
before animating. Thinking about what is happening in the scene, what
the character is thinking. If the character says one thing but thinks
something else. How you can use staging and timing to improve the
performance of your character. Thinking about every eye dart and every
small movement why you are animating it like this and if that is the
best way to communicate an emotion or thought. Most of the time I work
on short projects with very tight deadlines and then I just start to
animate and see where I’ll end up. In Animschool I finally have the
chance to really take my time to focus on small details and work on my
acting skills.
We thank Nanda for her time, and be sure to check out her awesome works on her site, LinkedIn profile, Facebook Page, Vimeo Page and Behance!
Great tips on posing your characters by AnimSchool instructor and Head of Animation at MPC Los Angeles Jean Dominique Fievet.
This is an excerpt from Jean Dominique’s class on Animating Characters Term from the AnimSchool 3D Animation Program. To learn more about our courses, go to our website.
Dave Gallagher goes over Eyad Hussein’s facial rig poses from AnimSchool’s Advanced Rigging class. Dave focuses on appealing shapes and directionality.
This clip is from one of AnimSchool’s General Review sessions.
AnimSchool offers General Reviews for 3D modeling, rigging and animation
students several times a week, for those who would like an extra
critique.
Dave Gallagher goes over Dennis Borruso’s character design that Dennis is planning on modeling in 3D. In this Review Dave discusses line flow, straights vs curves, and the spacing of facial features.
This clip is from one of AnimSchool’s General Review sessions.
AnimSchool offers General Reviews for 3D modeling, rigging and animation
students several times a week, for those who would like an extra
critique.
Come join all the students learning online at AnimSchool. Apply for the Fall Term now!
AnimSchool’s founder, Dave Gallagher, reviews Ernesto Ruiz Velasco’s 3D model. Dave goes into detail on how to increase appeal, focusing on making a character look more youthful.
AnimSchool has these General Reviews for animation, modeling and rigging
students every week for those who would like an extra critique outside
of class.
Come join the over 150 students learning online at AnimSchool http://www.animschool.com/
AnimSchool’s founder, Dave Gallagher, gives great modeling tips while demonstrating how to achieve character appeal, when reviewing Gustavo Forster’s 3D model.
AnimSchool has these General Reviews for animation, modeling and rigging students every week for those who would like an extra critique outside of class.
Come join the over 150 students at AnimSchool http://www.animschool.com/
Dave Gallagher, founder of AnimSchool, reviews Gary Hsu’s 3D model from his Intermediate Modeling class.
AnimSchool students can learn 3D modeling. This review was done during AnimSchool’s General Reviews. General Reviews are held once a week for those students who can’t attend their class review and those wanting an extra critique.
Character Design by Brent Gordon.