Sunday, June 22, 2008

The fine art of polish

Something that I'm trying to incorporate into my work flow is polish. Polish is your final pass on your animation, where you go back in and tweak your splines and clean up any bad bumps. It's something that's expected in my classes and on the job I can imagine.

Problem is that there's little documentation on how to polish. I'm hoping someday someone will write a good tutorial on approaching polish on a scene.

Anyways, just for fun, here's my one person dialog exercise before polish and after.


1 Person Dialouge - No Polish from Graham Ross on Vimeo.


1 person Dialouge from Graham Ross on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Here's some good resources I found. Here and Here, both courtesy of Keith Lango.

6 comments:

Aziz Kocanaogullari said...

hey graham!
you got "keith lango's" tutorial for polishing. just in case you didn't know: http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/polish.html

Andy said...

Graham bam thank you ma'am! Nice dialog test, bro. As far as polish tutorials, in addition to the Keith Lango tut that Aziz mentioned, there's also this audio interview Andrew Gordon did with John Kahrs all about polish.

Polish is a tricky stage because it's all too easy to "over-smooth" your splines and deprive your performance of the life it had back in the blocking and rough stages. Having watched both versions of your dialog piece, focusing on the lip-sync in particular, I feel like you may have lost some of the snap and interesting change of shape the mouth had in the pre-polish version. Like when he says "di-VORCE" I totally feel it in the first version, but it seems too soft or just doesn't fit quite as well in the second version. Just my two cents, I think it's working really nicely overall.

Graham Ross said...

Thanks guys!

Terry Song said...

GOOD STUFF, GRAHAM!

AND WHATS YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS???

Andy said...

Aw man... I think this one takes the cake.

How much polish is too much?

Graham Ross said...

Thanks again!