Rodney

Hi doobie! There are several places we can hide objects and selections in A:M. We can also lock parts down which for many tasks might be better than hiding. As for Hiding, when Modeling look for an eye that has a red circle and line drawn through it over on the right. For locking of Control Points use the padlock icon. As of v18 we can also Shift Hide to hide (or Shift Lock to Lock) and the shift will invert the selection. Prior to v18 those processes generally require us to hit the period key to invert our selection just prior to hiding. If in a Choreography window you'll see in the Project Workspace listing an eye next to the item that allows the object to be hidden. Let us know if you can't find these. Edit: I should have mentioned... by default the shortcut key for 'Hide' is 'H. Draw a spline, select a part of it, hit H to try it. Hit 'H' again or click on the Hide icon to unhide.

Nicely done Robert! I always enjoy these multi-part performances. Impressive.

Mark... that is such a 'instant' classic. (although we all know it wasn't instant on your end!) What can I say except you are supremely talented. And you sure know how to hit your deadlines! Very well done!

Several short 'Making of' videos are online providing insight into the making of this ad. Here's one I hadn't seen until today that focuses on the 2D part: F9EmxVv4Gh8 These 'making of' video are short. This one right at 2 minutes long.

New Aaron’s Art Tips has been posted: 4qJUO1eO4Ws Summary (please pardon spelling mistakes etc. as I'm just typing quickly from memory and filtering content through my brain): Ads/Plugs: Wacom Cedric Hornsteadt's Pose Drawing Sparkbook (Note: I joined the kickstarter on this one and recieved it in the mail a few weeks back. Nice book... great gift for young artists especially! Concepts easily transferred to CG) Basic ideas/content: 'Drawing' from reality (that is to say... pulling the real into your imaginary concepts/work to improve upon and ground those ideas) Using Reference to ground the imaginary into reality Evolutionary Progression Anatomy/Bone structure Playing God Current freebie offered (not mentioned in this tip but now available on site): Sign up for Aaron's newsletter and get a PDF booklet: "How to Draw Elephants". Note that these tips generally run about 15 minutes to include intro, plugs, summary etc. Aaron is excellent at covering a lot of material quickly and concisely. General Disclaimer: I accept the term 'evolution' to mean living things adapting to a given environment although others don't differentiate in this same way. As creative creatures we evolve/adapt our creative concepts and ideas similarly. As such evolution is a useful if not unfortunate term to me. It fits but only when understood in proper context. It's interesting to note what is being described in this video is equally the 'ungrounding' of reality by adding to it a large yet logically progressive dose of pure fantasy.

Hey Shawn, it's great to have you back!

Here's a simple case to illustrate... How to reproduce: - Create a two CP spline - Lathe with 4 sections (other cross sections can also be used but 4 illustrates this error well) - Extract the top half out of the cylinder and rotate (for readying the shape to lathe a sphere) - Rotate by typing in 90 degree rotation on X axis - Note error introduced to Alpha and Gamma at top of "C" shape - Also note that this takes place prior to lathing the sphere

Late to the party here. Very interesting. I guess I haven't used that particular way to rotate a sphere although I do type in numbers to rotate things quite frequently. Like Rusty I prefer to type numbers in wherever I can. For some reason that rotation adjusts the Gamma/Alpha of those few splines at the one (bottom) pole. Adjusting those Gammas and Alphas back to 0 gets us back to a smooth sphere again. What is strange is that I can't reproduce the same effect with any other shape than a sphere. Further, if we simply create the spline to be lathed from scratch, lathe the sphere and then rotate the sphere after it is created the error isn't produced. Pressing further it appears that this error is setup prior to lathing. For example, if we invert the spline that will be lathed the error will be at the same location (now at the top of the sphere) Update: When lathing a 12 section cyclinder to extract the half circle for lathing our sphere we can more easily see the error at the end of the spline. (note that I'm working in v18 here)

Part 2 has been posted: The Cinematography of The Incredibles (Part 2) In Part 2 the author pulls in quite a few external reference from blogs he has visited to include Rad Segchrist, Matt Williams, Eric Goldberg, Mark Kennedy and more. There are also a dozen pages or so from 'Storyboard Tips by Giancarlo Volpe' (storyboard artist for Warner Bros Studio).

Update: My browser still won't play the second movie but it did let me Right Click, Download and Save. (Strange) At any rate: I'm set to view "Rigging Ian with the Poker Rig". Thanks!

While it's possible the camera is playing tricks on us I'd say this is more related to fluid motion and movement forward of the man/appendages. Suggestion: Add a Camera into the Character/Model and in Bones Mode place it to the side of the character so you can view (and render) then entire squence from the view of that Camera. Note that when created, Cameras inside Models will appear at the 0,0,0 coordinate and one of the best ways to get them where you want might be to type in the coordinates into the Properties Panel versus move it around. Then in the Chor or Action select that Camera as your view and you'll be better able to analyze the character's run as it'll appear as if he's running in place . You can place additional spline markers within the Character Model as well to establish registration points/marks as additional visual aids (similar to how we can work with stride length in cyclic Actions). To take the analysis to the next level you could then create slightly horizontal markers with the distance to give you a reference of the distance traveled. Ultimately with techiques like this we can replicate setups like Muybridge did at the dawn of animation by compositing all those frames together. Another useful method might be to move to a Right Side View... back out a little and then turn Onion Skin on and play with the frame/keyframe settings. This would let you see the how well your current movement is being inbetweened manually by you and as automatically interpolated by A:M.

Good Taste Makes 'Bad Taste' is a documentary on Peter Jackson's earliest work before his rise to fame with 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Hobbit'. It's easy to image that big time film directors appear fully formed but the truth is much more educational. Several videos chronicling Peter Jackson's early effort to learn filmmaking and special effects are available online and should encourage everyone that they can be creative filmmakers and animators too. Of particular interest to many here will be Peter's innovation and work in stopmotion and innovation when trying to produce quality results on little to no budget. QcxMUZjaT4s cK-q6IJ-qo0 buiEiFCHu98

I'm always impressed by the folks that understand the rigging process. Especially when they understand it to the extent where they can create and adapt their own. I viewed the "“Drop-In” Rigging method for Animation Master" video and there are some nice insights into rigging and workflow I hadn't noted before. One aspect I have struggled with is that of examining a rig to determine how it is working. (i.e. what is that control doing there and why do I need to use it) Another is to better understand how a model needs to be built to take advantage of a rig that is installed. (i.e. when is it ideal to modify a model's mesh because it isn't going to be able to take advantage of the rig that will be installed) Could 2014 be the year where finally I break through into rigging? I'd like to think so as I plan to devote time to learning more. I couldn't watch your second video "Rigging Ian with the Poker Rig". The video controls appear but for me don't work. Thanks for helping us delve further into the world of rigging Mack.

Fxguide is a great resource for the deeper aspects of math and animation. Here is a discussion on linear workflow and color space: http://media.fxguide.com/fxpodcast/fxg-090...linearlight.mp3 Several things I picked up: 2 + 2 = 10 (I didn't quite get this reference) Apple's gamma settings moved to 2.2 which aligns it with PCs. (Has this changed already?) When halfway across the values of a RGB channel we are only about 20 percent in value of intensity (don't hold me to this... I'm going from memory) Edit: With regard to the halfway point between 0 and 255 not being 127 I found this article that explains the difference as resulting from gamma: http://filmicgames.com/archives/299

I actually followed you there... which kind of scares me. I was intentionally vague there because I don't know the correct terminology to use to describe the line that can be drawn from a starting point to a finishing point within color space. In the case of a line drawn through color space I'm not sure anything except the start point and end point would need to be defined as the remainder could be determined based on those two locations. With any non-linear calculations some additional information must be present to at least define the color space. Could we at least conclude that the values between light and dark can be linear even if not all values are known or represented? For instance when proceeding from white to black we can predict what we will find in between. I guess what I find interesting is that when taken in isolation each of the channels operates quite linearly. For instance if considering Red we move from the darkest red (perceptually black) at 0 to a bright red at 255 on the RGB scale. Of course this scale is an artificial measurement designed to make sense of something considerably complicated. Where things get considerably more interesting is where we mix in Green or Blue as that immediately takes us off that linear path into another dimension (that of a plane cut through our initially theoretical color space). I say theoretical because until we know what initial colors we are dealing with we don't have enough information to formulate that space. A third channel then pushes us into a volume of space with additional colors as constrained by our three channels. A linear path could be plotted but we are more likely to see a curvature of color through this volumetric space. (this is rather delightfully demonstrated by rainbows and similar effects) If the value of one relative color changes, our color (the one we are sampling) is very likely going to change. I assume any color sampled along a line or a curve drawn through space created by those colors will be affected by these changes as well. Color is relative and therefore its origin (or origins) traced. I sense that one of the things driving current interest in linear workflow with regard to color space/gamma etc. is that every time we introduce variation we lose information and when we lose information it makes recreating the original (color space) more difficult if not impossible to replicate.

Here's an random example of a sphere in SculptGL that was quickly pulled at from various points and brought into A:M for additional texturing and lighting. Tools like this can be useful for creating things that would take considerable more time to create in A:M... especially if they will never be overly articulated.

Targa and EXR formats store color space in linear fashion. Other formats such as PNG, JPG and TIFF store color space as sRGB (non linear). There are exceptions with some formats but I'm not well enough into this to even speculate. Yes, this is what I believe it refers to. REF: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/render/linear

Much like Scultpris but this sculpting application is WebGL and Javascript based. If you need to make some quick topology for use with the Snap to Surface tool in A:M this might do the trick for you as it exports to OBJ etc. Very interesting. http://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/ Source code is hosted on github: https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl Added: A quick paint job on Thom...

Yup. Accidentally left off a character at the end of the youtube code. Thanks Nancy! Fixed now.

A site I like to keep an eye on is 'floobynooby' which collects a lot of animation related content similarly to sites such as onanimation.com Quite often the links that appear on one site will appear on the other. Every now and then however the content differs and I'm reminded again why I visit both onanimation.com and floobynooby.com regularly. In this case the posting of the first part of a three part analysis of the cinematics of PIXAR's 'Incredibles': http://floobynooby.blogspot.com/2013/12/th...les-part-1.html For anyone interested in filmmaking and animation, the article is well worth taking the time to purview. Folks pay good money for this kind of information.

Aaron has several more Art Tips online which I'll add to the list above eventually if there is interest. His latest is Art Tip 12: The Secret to Creating Clear Expressions S94VIlQyFWo Some key concepts include roughing in expressions and then tying them down with better detail. This translates well into computer animation when we establish the extreme poses first and then go back through the process of breaking down a shot, inbetweening and layering in additional information and detail. For those interested in digital animation techniques Aaron shows a brief but very powerful technique for rapid digital animation at the very end of the video by leveraging the power of compositing/layers. Perhaps the real news with this latest art tip is that Aaron and a few friends will be revamping his site and (like many other artists and animators these days) delve into the instructional realm by offering instruction. As it is often best to get involved early rather than later in such efforts keep an eye open for the initial offerings via the website.

Looking good John!

Nice one. That's a great test. I really like that. This is a hard one to critique without drawing over frames. Two immediate things come to mind... perhaps three... but I need to study what I think I'm seeing. I'll mention them and see what you think. 1. Full extension of the legs. This guy is really running fast and yet we don't much full extension of the legs (the knees remain bent throughout most of the sequence) Note that upon reviewing again I do see at least one section where his legs fully extend so you do have it in there. It would be good to see how much full extension there was in the original reference. 2. The guy seems to move backward at several points. This may be more of an effect created by the camera and relates to number 3 below. It's not so much that it looks off... it looks pretty good from here... but it may be stealing some smoothness of motion from the totality of the frames as they play together. To test this we might look for and track a specific shape on the guy and note how it changes shape and position from frame to frame throughout the entire sequence. For the sake of animation a little reality might need to be sacrificed for the greater good of visual clarity. This is one reason why fast moving shots in cinema are often presented in slow motion... to allow the viewer time to read the imagery. 3. Visual cues (references) that orient the viewer to where the character is in the scene. If this is a 50 yard dash then it might be good to have some lines and/or numbers on the track to clue us in to the runners location and speed. The start and finish is apparent enough but there is potential for loss of orientation as the camera tracks around. Something I really like about this sequence is how you've got that 'banana' shape that allows the perspective to change. I'm not entirely sure you planned it that way but you've got it going on in this scene! If you are curious it's similar to what Bobby was doing in these sequences. All in all I'm very impressed with this test. If it doesn't defeat the purpose of your test you should render it with motion blur on to see how that plays. Nicely done!

I'm not sure what normal is but it is safe to say that I've moved on to many different and more enduring crises. But to answer your question; from the lighting of myself on fire I am fully recovered.

Ooops. I typo'd the RBG thing. Heh... what a doofus I am. Thanks for setting me straight as that order will make a huge difference or result in many a mistake! Regarding the linear aspects of color: Perhaps I'm thinking of Linear Color Space? I'm still trying to make sense of that for better use of the EXR format, which I hope to exploit some day. Thanks Nancy, I've much to learn on the subject. Added: I should note that while I'm interested in all aspects of color and lighting my primary concern is what we can currently manipulate and control in A:M. It's interesting to note that in the color picker we have a means to convert values between RBG and HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminosity). Unless otherwise advised I will now assume Luminosity is another term (or at least fairly equivalent term) for Lightness/Saturation.