Victor Vinyals' blog

My old demo reel, just in case...

2020-10-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

I'm currently putting together a new showreel but, in the meantime, why not sticking here the old one?
Hope you like it!

Scarecrow animation by Ravi Kamble

2012-01-19T04:33:00.000-08:00

This is a nice and subtle animation featuring one the character rigs I did for Ben Rush's film "Lucy". Great work Ravi!

You can find more details about the project checking out the production blog at http://anatomyofanightmare.blogspot.com.

I will prepare a video demo showing how this rig works. Hopefully it'll be posted soon!

Birdseye "Super Crunch"

2012-01-19T04:10:00.000-08:00

The last rigging work I did for my colleagues at Vando (http://www.vandostudio.com/)
Nice character design but also quite a challenge as we needed to rig several characters in a short period of time for this commercial produced by XYZ and directed by Tim Kentley.

Aardman's "Twistmas" for Family Channel

2012-01-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

These are the last characters I had the chance to rig for "Twistmas", a series of TV stings for Family Channel created these last Christmas by Aardman Animations.

Directed by Darren Dubicki and animated by Mat Rees, it's been once more really good fun to rig these kind of characters and, most of all, to work again with my old Bristolian friends!

Anomalia 2011 Rigging Course

2011-11-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spent two weeks in the Czech Republic giving a Rigging Masterclass. It was part of the Anomalia professional training courses which take place at the European Training Center in Litomysl, a beautiful Bohemian town close to Prague.

Once again, it's been a great experience to share with the students (actually professionals of the field most of them) our ideas, techniques and also a good knowledge about all types of czech beer brands, thanks to the local guys!

Sooo, I'll be looking forward to going back to Litomysl in the future for the next course. Thanks a lot to David Tousek for all his effort on organising the courses and counting on me for the rigging masterclass. And thank you so much to all the students for being so enthusiastic and for their patience!

ps. And thanks to Vasilis for this self-explanatory drawing, a great advertisement for future students. Plok!

Cow rig for Aardman's "Moo"

2011-11-17T02:26:00.000-08:00

Recently finished this character rig for a new Aardman's commercial, created for Colman's new instant beef gravy. Directed by Bobby Proctor, and nicely animated by the great Mathew Rees.

It's been interesting to deal with the biped-quadruped rig issue. As usual, we used two different rigs, but in this case even two different models were created and rigged for each version.

Check out the final animation here, hope you like it!

Rigging Masterclass at ESMA

2011-02-25T03:59:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from Montpellier where I've spent 4 days at the ESMA school. It's been great to give my rigging workshops there, but the best thing definitely being with the students and helping them with their short-films projects.
They're doing an awesome work so their character rigs are high-level, amazing! Hope I will have the chance to see all the finished films in the next Jury.
Thanks a lot to Gerard Raucoules for being such a good host and teacher!

Aardman Centra Hurling Stings

2011-02-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

Character rigs I did recently for Aardman. Javier "Karry" León was the CG Supervisor for this short clips, animation by Hugo García.

Skyscraper in action!

2010-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Dreamwork's animator Mike Walling has prepared a great Body Mechanics animation webinar for Jason Ryan Animation site. It has two parts, Animation Walk Through part One: Planning, blocking, & Blocking Plus, and Animation Walk Through part Two: Splining and Polish. You can check it out at http://jrawebinar.com/index.php?option=com_rokquickcart&view=rokquickcart&Itemid=1

The cool thing for me is that he's been using Skyscraper, the character I built and rigged for iAnimate school. Take a look at the webinar's teaser and see the rig in action :-)

Dog rig for Aardman Animations Video Demo

2010-10-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

Hey, as promised, here's a short demo showing the Dog rig in action. As mentioned before, for this character the Aardman guys didn't need a complex rig but rather a quick and flexible one. I didn't put any fancy features but had to pay attention to the skin weighting in order to achieve good deformations and volume preservation. Hope it shows how sometimes it's not all about complexity, simple rigs can be effective and good fun. Time spent on building it: 5 days. Model and blend shapes done by Martin Blunden.

Dog rig for Aardman Animations

2010-10-19T11:05:00.001-07:00

This is one of the last characters I've had the opportunity to rig for Aardman. The design is pretty cool! Rigging-wise it's been a nice challenge, mainly due to his thick body and the overall volumes, and as well because of the squash & stretch and the flexibility needed.

I will post a small video-demo showing the rig in action. By now, here you can see one first posing & rendering test the Aardman team did right once I sent them the rig.

Cheers!

Rigging Courses at Pepechool

2010-10-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

This happened a while back, but considering I'm trying (really hard) to catch up, I'm just posting it now.
I was giving two week-end rigging masterclasses at Pepe-school-land, here in Barcelona. Body setup, and Face Setup, that is.

http://www.daniel3d.com/pepe-school-land/seminarios/charsetup_victor/charsepup_I_victor.htm

It was amazing to see the classes fully booked and to share knowledge and experience with all the other riggers. Really good fun!!

The Businessman rig and Pixar animators, at Anomalia 2010

2010-10-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

After months and months of receiving the most amazing feedback from a lot of people around the world, and asking if the businessman rig would be available online, it's now the time to actually do it.

The first step has been to lend the character rig for the Anomalia 2010 animation courses, organised by David Tousek and with Pixar animators Rich Quade and Andy Schmidt teaching right there, in the Czech Republic.

More on this subject later!

Skyscraper character

2010-10-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

The students at iAnimate.net have been working for a while with the first character rig I finished for the school, Skyscraper.
This superhero guy has been designed by the mighty J.M.Oli, creator of the original businessman design as well.

For the original high-res image and more amazing stuff, check Oli's website :

http://www.nibbledpencil.com/

iAnimate school

2010-10-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

One month ago, Jason Ryan started his new online animation school:

http://www.ianimate.net/

It's a great opportunity for animation students all around the world to get LIVE classes from the master's. The great thing for me is that I'm having the opportunity of building the character rigs for them. Thanks Jason!!

ehem!...

2010-10-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a shameful while since my last post. Let's put it like this: too much work! Let's try to recapitulate what's been happening. Look above!

CG mouse for Javier Fesser's film "Camino"

2010-01-15T00:30:00.000-08:00

This is quite an old one, but i'm guessing it's gonna take long before i put it in a future reel, so here it is...
Modeled and rendered by Javier Leon, animated by Hugo Garcia and Gaston Emery. Character Rig done in Maya, no muscles used.

CG mouse from Victor Vinyals on Vimeo.

Running plans

2010-01-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

Today after a reaaally cold long-run, i agreed with my old friend Xavi to look after his training for the next Barcelona Marathon, in March. These are great news since it will be the excuse for me to start again with my own running routine yihaa!

Let's start!

2009-03-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

So I've finally decided to start a new Character Rigging blog. I'm expecting to post all sort of contents though, so hopefully you'll find here not only rigging tutorials and ideas but as well some other interesting CG and not-CG stuff. Welcome everybody!