Rodney

It's great to have you back with us Scott.

Here's a closer view of Dan's image from his previous post. The transparency gets converted to black in the creation of the thumbnail image. I haven't changed anything... just linked to his original posted image.

I'm always good for feedback. What do you want feedback on? (Where did we leave off?)

I believe the classic solution to the problem would be to have the camera move slightly to enhance the perceived perspective. For instance, if the camera started slightly higher and then tracked downward while advancing (zooming) in slightly... following the character... that might give us enough change in perspective for us to 'see' those objects that are otherwise hidden. For one thing it would easily allow us to see the effect of the shadow on the hedge row. This is an interesting/related view of the age old illusion/issue that plagues filmmaking best demonstrated via a spinning wheel with evenly spaced support columns or a fenceline where each of the slats of the fence look exactly the same. Where there is no perceived change there is no perceived depth or motion. Another solution would be to exchange the hedge for a series of rectangular shaped bushes.

If that is indeed a wall then you might want to change the color of it or distinguish it in some other way from the grass/ground. As it is it creates the illusion of his shadow being projected into the distance (I'd say several hundred meters) to the base of the trees. Something that adds to this is the parallel lines/tangent of the top of the wall and the base of the trees. The only real depth cue is the guy's shadow and it reads as if the entire background is on a horizontal plane approximately one foot away. Of course that is where the wall is but... there is nothing to keep us from percieving the depth above that receded back to the mountains. I know there are mountains and trees represented but due to lack of depth cues it could be paintings of mountains and trees. If you decide to keep all the parallels you could gain a lot simply by darkening everything above the wall and lightening everything on this side of the shadowed character. As it is by itself it does not appear that there is any wall next to the character... just grass receding into the distance with an odd shadow falling into the distance as well. I haven't had time to analyze your new standing up animation but at a glance it looks much more smooth of a transition. My thought is that once she commits to turning her head should continue (and look toward where she is going... or the area of interest) while her body continues standing and turning. This is an age old animation principle of the head leading the turn. If we could see her eyes (i.e. if it was a close-up) we would see her eyes lead the turn before her head. This provides an element of anticipation as well.

I won't attempt to troubleshoot your DOF issue... I'm not familiar enough with DOF usage to hazard a guess. I will suggest a quick workaround... compositing. Render the shot twice, once with current DOF and once without. Composite both images together with a gradient transparency controlling the non-DOF layer. This will give you maximum control over the effect. For even greater control you could layer several levels of the same images with varying transparencies for each. The same treatment should work for fog too. On to others more suitably DOF'd to assist you. Edit: At a guess, I'd say you need to render with the Alpha Channel set to on.

Intriguing thus far. The shadows are doing something strange in the first video, making it look like the character is walking next to a wall with a painted background on it. The flashing between trees (on the mountains in the background) I'm sure you are already aware of... In the 'stating the obvious' category: (i.e. what appears to be obvious to me so far) Viewing these videos in order the story I pick up so far is that of a man on his way to deliver flowers to a woman. It appears the woman sitting on the bench is the likely recipient for the flowers... I guess we'll know soon enough! In the third video (with the woman rising from the bench) she does three very mechanical movements from sitting to standing, to turning, then to preparing to walk greet or otherwise do something. Blending that second part so that she isn't performing a military-style 'right face' would seem to be more appropriate. Without knowing her intention for standing up and turning I'd be guessing to say much more. To my way of thinking she should already be turning as she rising from the bench rather than wait until she fully completes the standing up motion. So far so good! It kind of goes without saying but I tend to state the obvious fairly often... I do wish these characters had ribcages of some sort. They are just short of being representatively real but the reason for their diminutive midsections still baffles me. It's not so much that the midsections themselves... it's that there isn't anything else in their design that echos/grounds that particular feature.

Vong has the right idea. Turn those potential weaknesses into strengths. Depending on your story you might even be able to leverage the limited number of zombies to your advantage.

I'm not sure what this one classifies as (besides a cool modeling/AO/HDRI demo): It's one from Stian: M8kLBSklFc8 It even identifies the 'passes' used (i.e. motion blur, reflection etc.)

This doesn't capture Motion Blur in one image but it is a nice (and simple) demonstration of the effectiveness of Motion Blur. This from Vance Gloster: [vimeo]46081086[/vimeo] (from this topic) For the best Motion Blur images I'd say that Marcos's use of his subframe motion blur (using MUFOOF to render multiple images in one frame for propellers and such) may provide some ideal imagery.

There are 64 views of this topic (and counting) so people are definitely stopped by... getting them to comment... now that's a different animal. Congrats on another release. I especially like the thick/deep look of this one. It has a sense of weight that gives this video the feel of a performance in a real world.

Looking very good Mike. I admire the patient modelers amongst us. I like your approach to testing lighting/surface/reflection/HDRI too!

Stian is well known for his highly detailed AO renders: Perhaps you could even zoom in on an image like this to demo the level of detail. (from this topic)

Way back in the day John (Artbox) Henderson created some very nice claymation and miniature looking sets and characters. Here's one that demo's the DOF effect: (from this topic)

Nancy's "undercover" music video captures a few of those (not sure the music can be used for what you have in mind however). It's an example of innovative ways to incorporate particle and geometrically based hair. I don't think there is a particular frame I'd select from the animation to point to which makes me wonder if short animation sequences (1 or more seconds) might serve your needs as well. depK62JXn6M

You've been missed David! There is no doubt that Robert remembers you. Keeping track of you... now that's a different story. You escaped before we could get that pesky GPS tracker attached to you. Do we need to launch another film/short project to entice you back into animation?

More belated well wishing coming at you. Hope you had a happy one!

I just went back and freeze framed some of frames from your animation and I do see that you've got some Wingdings and other non-english characters appearing on ROM's screen. I had missed that when first viewing the animation. If you can make those larger and more pronounced so those alien characters can be seen. You've gone to all that trouble to put it in there... now make it readable! If you wanted to add some in jokes you could probably even add some useful alien languages like Klingon. At least those that have fonts that are readily available.

ROM... awesome. I've been thinking he'd be a great character to model and here you've gone and done it. You've got a lot of animation in there and others have pointed out the main areas to focus on for improvement. I'll add a few of my initial observations. There is a nice sense of clarity in the basic animation that you have here. Namely, an unknown object falling to earth, landing in the desert, ROM rising out of the crater. Reorienting. You've got all those story elements present and reading correctly. The camera pans and moves in ways that don't support the visual storytelling and if those shots were removed entirely the story might still read just as well. My gut instinct would be to remove those and overlay them on the top of the other shots to give further sense of depth. You've got some nice effects work going. You've got them headed in the right direction. I really like the fire effects. Texturing (especially realistically) is tough and is usually best accomplished by layering in of details. For that to happen though you really need to have the geometry and animation locked so that you can use the texturing to further focus attention where you want that attention to be. I'm trying to formulate the right words here so this will be a bit rambling. A related example to the camera movement would be that the camera moves in closely on the burning rocks but then has to move back out in order to track back in again. Here is a thought concerning the ROM model itself: You've chosen to model the toy version of his helmet/head versus what I would call the comic book version. When reading the comics I always cringed when I saw that toy-based head (so my thoughts here are biased due to that preference). Sal Buscema seemed to come up with a nice blend between the toy what looked best for an expressive character with few features and other artists like Michael Golden then pushed that even further. The primary tell-tale sign of the toy design is the LED eyes that stick out from the front of the visor that are stuck in place. IMO the version with the glow of the eyes occurring behind the visor works better. The primary reason for this is one of design. If the lights are embedded into the visor then they cannot move and the character cannot be as expressive. with the glow emanating from behind the visor ROM's eyes are free to scan without moving his head. Moving farther into the realm of speculation... and not so much a commentary on your modeling and animation: I really like your readout at the end but think you could enhance that considerably. I cannot recall this element from the comic book but I think this would be an ideal place to show how ROM assimilates Earth's languages. Let's say that initially some foreign looking elements pop on screen that are hard to understand... perhaps characters that obviously represent a language (or languages) that cannot be comprehended. This would be like ROM is scanning to find the appropriate language for this new planet and it takes a few seconds for his system to accomplish that. Finally, as ROM looks around some familar words appear on screen. We might see some French as he looks north easterly, some Spanish if he looks south and the readout finally resolves to English as the focus changes and he looks at his hand. Again, I don't recall how that played out in the comic book... perhaps they didn't fully explore his transition and assimilation of languages to that depth. ROM is ripe for hollywood movie treatment and I hope that Disney/Marvel can work the rights out with Mattel. (Edit: Apparently not Mattel but Parker Bros/Hasbro) Thanks for the look down memory lane. I'd love to see how you might handle ROM dispatching some Dire Wraiths! You've done a really good job here. Now make it great! P.S. My recommendation for texturing is to forego it as much as possible and just use basic texturing (grayscale and such often works best) then once the animation is perfected focus on the lighting and texturing that will further contribute to the over all cinematic effects.

Nice! I like where you are going with this.

Nice one!

The only way I was able to recreate a similar look on my end was to tweak a Bias Handle while in the Chor. (When everything is selected in Modeling Mode while in a Chor and altering Bias will change the Bias for all splines.) Perhaps you accidentally did that while placing/scaling the Model in the Chor and so it is changing your model each time you open the project. That should be easy enough to check via any Actions that appear to be applied to that Model in the Project Workspace.

I think we are missing some important information here (in your screenshot). At a guess I'd say that most likely the model did not get saved or... you keep using a model with the presaved spline layout (i.e. the Project file perhaps points to an external model that is saved separately. Other things could be going on as well. The model could have been peaked in a Pose, Action or Chor Action or... in some way in time. This is most often the result of changing something on an advanced frame in the Timeline while thinking the change took place on Frame 0. Does the model move at all over time? Also, I'm curious as to why there are multiple splines showing in the second screen cap indicating there is a depth to this box/floor. At any rate, it seems to me that the shape has a spline continuity issue and that may be related to what you are seeing. If all of the splines are really straight you shouldn't even have to peak them. The easiest way to be sure would be if you can post the model.

I'm a little slow to extend congratulations... but... Sure hope it was a happy one!

Nice one John!