Rodney

Yep... time again to cover some Adobe news that intersects with our interests... Abobe has released the preview of Fuse which we've seen before under a different name. As part of Adobe CC, if you subscribe to that you get Fuse thrown in to the mix. What is Fuse? Fuse is a bipedal (human) mesh generator that has many custom sliders that allow for modification of the mesh. It's primary purposes is to send the mesh off to Mixamo or to Photoshop CC where it can be articulated/animated. Fuse does also allow export to .OBJ format which is useful for A:M Users. While the mesh is dense for the humans the acouterments/clothing are reasonable. Perhaps best yet the whole mix comes into A:M with textures intact. The interest for most will be how Fuse generates characters that can be plopped into Photoshop, posed, animated, etc. Of interest to me personally is how customizable/hackable the originating mesh might be for creating more cartoony type bipeds as well as for adding props and clothing to the collection. The latter I assume is going to be a major player for Adobe as they have stated they are encouraging folks to share their creations but have said rights to those creations will remain with the creators. If nothing else the creations made with Fuse may be uesful for study of how standardized decals can be set to cover a wide variety of human characters. And I suppose best of all, for those that are already subscribed to Adobe CC, Fuse is part of the subscription so you can start using it today. Here's a quick (and very random) two minute creation:

Here's a rendering of Serg's action (from the project) which by itself is pretty neat. Here again I've added a little color tinting (blue) and blur. The primary thing the flocking in the project does is duplicate this object's actions. Note that the diagonal line artifact in thisone isn't from Serg's project but is that old glitch that tends to appear when rendering with patch images (esp. PNG?). I applied the original action rendered out via Action to a patch that I then tinted blue via ambiance color and rendered again. In hindsight I think I should have tinted this guy orange so he'd look like a goldfish...

For those that are technically inclinded (i.e. usually not me) Pixar has published a paper from their 'history of technology' presentation at SIGGRAPH 2015. For those so inclined there is a lengthy section on Open Subdiv. The paper can be found here: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/SigAsia2015/paper.pdf This is the course notes from the presentation. I assume there is a video that goes with this presentation as well but I haven't seen it yet made available.

Flocking is particle based but unlike regular particles flocking uses a model that is referenced by each particle. The flock types are Crowd, Swarm and Bird which each set a general flocking pattern. Serg uses the Crowd type in his project. Tip: The number one reason why folks have problems with Flocking is that they forget to make sure Particles is toggled to 'On'. Tip2: During setup of flocks it is often useful to set the display setting to draw single dots instead of the models. Drawing a lot of models onscreen can considerably slow a system down. Once everything is placed and animated then save... and set the Draw As Dots setting to 'Off'. Added: I should have said that in Serg's project the key appears to be the Action he has created that is then applied to the Flock. It is that Action which does the bulk of the magic. I assume that is the 'smart' that drives the 'smart flocking'. Besides Serg's general skill at putting together projects like this of course.

I've been thinking about this movie quite a bit since seeing it and it amazes me how deceptively simple Pixar makes the film look. It's one of those things where you consider even a simple scene and begin to realize just how difficult/complex completing even a single shot would be (i.e. modeling, animating, texturing... everything). The other day I started doodling an image of Arlo... thinking, 'Just how hard could it be'... and a few hours later I still hadn't produced anything. Here's about the only image I thought was worth sharing out of the whole endeavor. *Almost* makes me wanna go back to drawing with pencil and paper as a similar outcome surely would have taken just a few minutes (he says with supreme overconfidence). At least I'll know a bit more about the approach to take should I attempt to model Arlo again. In other thoughts: It's interesting to see the difference in character from the early promotional material and final characters as seen on the screen. It's pretty clear the design was refined to invoke a younger perspective. Specifically making the characters younger (from mid to late teen to ten/eleven). I think the final age serves the story well. One thing I think might be lacking is that of introducing more characters that only make brief appearances (i.e. perhaps just a hint of a neighbor or two who farm in the general vicinity of Arlo's family. I understand the need to keep the story itself as simple and focused as possible but Disney/Pixar could definitely capitalize on that (young kids... especially boys as they are really into dinosaurs at an early age and it'd be good for them to see and recognize... or at least guess about... those neighbors). Perhaps they will explore that in related commercial endeavors. I do understand the sense of keeping the perspective small (family is everything to a young child) but even a highly sheltered child living far away in the wilderness is exposed to folks living in the greater community. Even if it was that strange old dinosaur that lives in the shack down the road that seasonally might warn, "You papa live close to de riveeer." "Me papa say doooon't live close to dat riveeeer."

Nicely done Serg! The recent commentary on clouds made me wonder what adding a little transparency and blur to your smartflocking might produce,,,

Yes, softer shadows and some sort of AO would be optimal. I don't really understand why you'd run the A:M render without when all the others have it on unless its to say you get something equivalent without.

Whoa... Thanks Luis! You just made my day. I'm loving the lighting setup you have in that project too. Thanks for the BB8 model!

I should have asked... You might have stated it and I just missed it... What type of constraint is this? Orient Like? Also, make sure your interpolation for enforcement isn't set to Hold or something that is driving the settings to someplace you don't want.

My first thought is that where it comes to rotation is that you may need to change the driver to Euler rotation to ensure smooth rotation throughout the enforcement. Otherwise you might be seeing a bit of gimbal lock in that rotation. In other words what you might be seeing is 40% of one axis of rotation but 50% of another... or some mid term blend of both. Added: I have seen some cases where I need to save/reopen a file before rotations appear as I think I've edited them. This includes seeing the channel spline representations of rotations which don't appear until the file is refreshed.

Got a chance to see it today and the rendering was most definitely impressive. The story... I'm still trying to assimilate it. I won't give away any spoilers here. I saw it in a standard theater but this may be one of those movies that is well worth seeing in 3D or better yet IMAX.

And a happy T day right back at you!

I haven't plugged anything from Aaron Blaise in quite awhile (although he's been quite busy). Aaron has just released a video that outlines what I find to be missing from most computer animation lipsync/dialogue and something that quite often character rigs don't allow for out-of-the-box. In short, it's not about the mouth shapes so much as it is squash and stretch and shape change of the whole face and body. Well worth the few minutes it'll take to review the lesson: xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYPx6sGZzow

Very interesting juxtaposition of timing. Disney needs a movie like this in its lineup. *I'm (not so secretly) hoping 'Zootopia' is Disney's ramp up (furry critter tech-wise) to a new 'Robin Hood' feature or better yet... series.

It almost sounds like you are talking about Add Mode (A key) versus Add Lock Mode (Shift A). Both are still in A:M but Add Lock was removed from the menu back when stitching was introduced (circa v11). It can be added back dragging and dropping the icon onto the menu bar. Regular stitching (in my estimation) is so much better though. It'd be interesting to see a screen capture of the problem. I feel like I've stepped through a distortion zone as I don't understand this expression either. What would you change the point type from/to? (in other words, I don't know what a point type is) Fuchur said: Shift-Clicking splines still works to connect non-continuous splines. Those still create patches. So, not sure what you refer to here that wouldn't still be working. I'd be good to solve this mystery. P.S. If you don't have the most current v18n downloaded and installed be aware that the first v18n installer didn't work... but I don't think this is the problem as that would be very obvious by now.

Shift Clicking to create a patch... does not compute. What exactly is it that you are Shift Clicking? Connected splines are what normally create a patch.

I'll have to confirm but I think it was, "You can draw. Why not try?" on the back cover. But yes, that's the book. Keep in mind that Preston Blair created two books on animation... that confuses people, myself included. Multiple editions, a few with title changes, further adds to the confusion. The current edition (mostly) combines those two books.

Here, I believe for the first time ever, is a side by side comparison of one of the comp pages and it's final format. For those of you who were born after Photoshop... this is what folks had to do before the advent of digital compositing.

Here's the final art for the work setup above: And up next, a page on 'The Run' and 'The Fast Run', the latter of which has the character Tom from 'Tom and Jerry'... obviously a copyrighted character that might prove to be problematic.

The book on animation by Preston Blair came up in anther topic. I thought it might be interesting to see some of the original art as it was put together to be published. (I'll try to organize these a bit more later) And here's the place where most folks go to find the books original scans: http://animationresources.org/instruction-preston-blairs-advanced-animation/

This isn't the content of the entire book(s) but it is a side by side comparison of the primary pages under consideration: http://duck-walk.blogspot.com/2006/05/variations-on-theme.html Attached is one of the page comparisons. Original on the left and updated character on the right. I ran across some copies of the original artwork (scans that is) that were up for auction... now that was neat... seeing what was pasted onto the page... what was whited out. it's fun to see the actual creative process. Most of those scans are still online. It's interesting to note how much text was changed from version to version as well.

Thanks. I fat fingered that typo! I'm innocent I tell ya! You should have seen all the typos I fixed prior to posting but that the forum's spell checker grabbed and underlined in red. Hmmm... yes, most definitely... and this may be why enthusiastic/exaggerated expressions in recording sessions are favored as they lend themselves to 'better' character animation. I can't count the number of times I've read/listened to interviews with animators/directors who talked at length about the process of finding just the right voice for an animated character. Then there are the times when an artists praises the work of voice talent by stating just how much was there in the voice that allowed them to express the personality of the character. This relates to Richard William's emphasis on 'progression' in dialogue and how that progression improves the delivery of dialogue. My recollection being that he said he struggled for quite some time with a performance until he hit upon the idea of progression (specifically in that instance of moving the character forward in the available space as the dialogue was delivered).

As translucency is primarily a setting in a Named Group I'd would say that image maps (patch images) can be created to drive that translucency. I don't recall decals specifically having a setting for translucency.

I haven't check out the link yet but decals do effect the SSS in A:M. I'd have to check again to see what effect patch images might have but varying the color on layered patch images should also have an interesting effect. While I know there is some difference to the current approaches when I first saw the idea of SSS being controlled by image maps my thought was... I think A:M can already do that. It's well worth the look into what effect various maps can have. Thanks for the video link. I'll check it out.

Incidentally (although off topic)... It was while working as an instructor in Minneapolis, MN at Art Instruction Inc. that Charles Schulz worked with a fellow instructor Charlie Brown, who along with many of Schulz's acquaintances would also lend their names to the famous 'Peanuts' gang.