The Benefits of Flat Lighting

Happy New Year! I hope 2017 has treated you well. You may have noticed that this blog was silent through the entirety of it.

I've been pretty busy at ILM since I joined. The past year I've had the great honour of being one of the lead animators on the latest installment of the Star Wars Saga. Star Wars has always held a special place in my heart and it's one of the reasons I got into animation in the first place, so there's something truly special seeing my name against a starry background. I hope as the weeks and months wear on and ILM releases official behind the scenes videos, I can share with you a bit of the hard work that went into this movie.

It's shaping up to be a pretty divisive film for the moment, but either way I'm proud of the work that we were able to bring to the silver screen.

And now, an animation tip. As I'm animating I'm always trying to look at my work with fresh eyes; I flip and I flop in RV or invert the colours, I zoom way out so it's tiny, I'll even rotate it. I remember running into an animator that would sit away from his machine and look at a mirror to get a new angle.

Something that's been helping me lately is flat lighting.

It breaks down a shot into it's most graphic shapes and provides a different perspective on your animation. I leave ambient occlusion on so I still get some definition and separation between shapes, but all in all, it helps me get a better handle on how poses are working and especially how they're working in motion.

I found at work that I was using it so much that I was getting annoyed with having to use a drop down menu. I started looking into making a toggle script, but couldn't immediately find the mel commands necessary to do it. Luckily, Google is my friend and I found out that some one else had already made a script, which you can find here. I've assigned this to Shift + 7 in my hotkey editor and I use it all the time.

I have a few other ways to refresh my eyes but I think I'll cover those in another post.

 Keep an eye on this space for more posts. My plan for January is to post weekly on Wednesdays leading up to an announcement at the end of the month.

Keep on key framing!