Release. Pressure. Animate.

scalability and bendiness in all of the body parts. The setup created contained many
controls (like most rigs nowadays.) Back than I thought that developing tools for the
character handling process would be the best starting point for development since this
seemed to become the most overwhelming task at that stage. Thus I chose to develop
tools for the selection of the character, the actual posing of the character and managing
its data. We needed speed and simplicity while the rig contained an extensive amount of
complex features. As already explained this makes it even more important to have tools
that help with posing and the management of the characters. This was my initial thought
and this was the main reason why I focused on developing character handling tools for
Mac „n‟ Cheese.
With a small introduction into our pipeline and file/folder conventions for Mac „n‟
Cheese I‟ll introduce our initial planned overall workflow. We had set strict file naming
conventions and folder structures. Furthest down it looked something like this:
- Work>
- History>
o Shot6.mb
� Shot6_01.mb
� Shot6_02.mb
� Shot6_03.mb
� Shot6_04.mb
This was our file/folder structure for a single shot. We thought that by separating
revisions we could always easily find back the file we needed. The same principles were
used for playblasts of the animation. We also divided global tasks, like Gijs van Kooten
was head of story, Tom Hankins was art director, Guido Puijk was our main assistant and
I took the tasks of lead (supervising) animator and technical director. Since we had
designed our file/folder conventions and global pipeline beforehand I focused even more
on the character handling with my tool development, because we felt that the strict
conventions we had discussed for file naming and folder structure would take away most
of the management trouble often associated with production.
From this focus I started focusing on the development of already presented ideas and
tools focused on the character handling. But as more and more of the concepts actually
came from the production process of Mac „n‟ Cheese it was hard to incorporate even all of
the presented tools within only the character handling session in our team‟s workflow.
Nevertheless, I‟ve tried to create working proof of concepts of the ideas and tools
presented which I felt that at that moment in production was still useful to invest
development time in. From start to end in the production I‟ve focused on the creation of
5. Stress testing the toolset
1
3
4