itsjustme

Will, you are scary! Fantastic, the face really sells it for me....not that the rest doesn't, but the face and eyes are what does it for me....the skin wrinkles are great.

Here's a rough explanation of the face rig...it may be a little haphazard though. This is a zipped up web page with accompanying files, unzip it to a folder of it's own if you don't want bits of it rolling around on the floor. Once you point your browser at the folder, open the "riggingface.html". -------------------------------- EDIT -------------------------------- I have updated the zip file to include the CP weighting. Since I have exceeded the file size limt, I have had to put up two zip files...they are later in this thread now.

Very cool Dale! You've got a lot of irons in the fire.

Okay, I went back and looked at the bones project and found some eyebrow poses and stuff still in there....so as not to confuse anyone, I cleaned it up and here's a reposting of the same project. I don't think I've ever posted anything right the first time.

Thanks Joakim, I'm going to have Bertram in a 2-3 minute animation once I get everything working the way I want...I'm slow, so it might be a while. I was hoping to get it done by the beginning of March, but I probably won't make that deadline. I'm going to consider the face done at this point, that was one of my major concerns since I had never done anything this extensive before. The setup is available for download in my previous post (feel free to critique). Also, if you use GIMP, in this topic is a Script-Fu for making an iris (feel free to critique that as well). There's not really a "magic" tutorial, but have you gone through Colin's tutorial at http://www.colins-loft.net/new_coop_tutorial/tutorials.html? There's also a good video tute that is older at http://www.shimmyo.com/face_tute.php that might help you. Another good one is located at http://www.ovis.net/~cgroves/tips/toonhead/toonhead1.htm. If those don't help, you might consider buying the face modeling video from Anzovin...it's at http://www.rafhashvideotapes.com/modelfacecd.html. They have quite a few videos that you might find helpful.

In the interest of showing my work, here's a project file that has Bertram's face rig for the bones below the eyebrows along with the audio file (reduced in quality for size) and the face test Action. My animating skills are still in need of work, so please forgive my awkward use of the timeline...I included the actual Action to help illustrate how I used the rig. As always, critiques are appreciated.

Very cool, Noah! I hope you get some animation done with him, he looks like a fun character.

I took longer getting to it than I thought, but, here's an update. There's more cheek movement, nose movement, hairline movement, a bump map for forehead creasing (which really isn't visible in this small of a render, unfortunately), a little different CP weighting and some pose increases. I go back and forth about whether it's enough exaggeration and whether I should increase the hairline movement...anyway, crits are appreciated. Once again, it's a zipped up DivX encoded AVI.

I like what you've got so far, Mike! Very nice acting and lip sync, the only things that I saw were some popping in the skirt that I think is caused by the dynamic constraints you mentioned and a slight slide/slippage in the feet that takes the weight out of the character. The work you've put into it really shows.

Ideally, you'd like to have a front and side view...those are hard to get sometimes. You can do it with a 3/4 view like this, but it takes a whole lot more guessing. With this view you can get the height of things in relation to each other (eyes, ears, mouth, etc) by using it as a rotoscope and then putting markers in the modeling window at each significant feature. If you can't get a front and side view, I would get the front and side view of someone with features that are similar (if they resemble someone famous there'll be a lot more available pictures), make the head based on that and then tweak it to resemble the person that you're really trying to model...it would eliminate some of the guessing. That would be my solution. If you're asking about modeling using a rotoscope, I would recommend Colin's tutorial at http://www.colins-loft.net/new_coop_tutorial/tutorials.html

I'd go with David Higgins' assessment...I can't really add anything except to say that I only had four votes, it was very tough.

You can render Targa images. In the "Output" tab on the "Render to File" menu select "Targa sequence" then in the "Range" pull down select the frame range you want to render out. You can convert the Targas to whatever file type you need in a paint program or Irfanview or whatever.

Congrats to amarillospider and a thanks to Rodney and Hash for the drawing!

There's some cheek movement, but not enough. You're right, I need to have some more going on. I'm doing some experimenting with the face rig and increasing some of the poses. I'll try to have something new up in a few days. Thanks for the crit.

If you need to make some quick iris' for the eye, I have a Script-Fu for GIMP. I tried to get it posted on the GIMP Users Group site, but it never got listed for some reason. I'll post it here for anyone that might want it as well. To use the script (after unzipping the file), put it (irismap.scm) in the scripts folder in the GIMP directory...on Windows XP it would be something like "c:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\share\gimp\2.0\scripts". Once the script is in the correct folder, you can start GIMP and use the script by going to "Xtns\Script-Fu\Misc\irismap". On the menu that comes up, all of the listed variables can be edited by clicking on them. The default settings make one brown iris that is 400 pixels wide and 400 pixels in height with a background color of a version of purple (200, 0, 200). If you uncheck the "flattenlayers" button, the image will have twelve separate layers (so you can tweak individual layers before "flattening" the image). If you want to save your original iris with its' layers separated, you'll want to make it an XCF file. To save the file as one layer for using in Animation Master, you'll have to "flatten" the image by using the "Flatten Image" tool in the image's "Layers" menu. GIMP will use the color you have selected as the background color in your color picker as the background for the flattened image. Using this script you can only get an oval iris and pupil, but they don't have to be perfect circles. The smallest overall iris size this script can make is 400x400 with a minimum pupil size of 125x125...the maximum overall size and pupil size is 9999x9999 at the moment but that was an arbitrary limit I put on it, you can change that size by changing the setting in the Script-Fu if you have a need for a larger iris. Once I get a website up I'll have a home for this script, for now, here it is. ------------------------------------------ Edit ------------------------------------------ This script works with GIMP 2.0.4, and probably any other GIMP 2.0 versions. For a 2.2 version, check later in this thread.

He's looking better, you could probably still get rid of the spline marked in red on the attached image. The high patch count on the eyes is because of the eye tutorial I made...in the tutorial I used a high patch count to easily determine the size of the iris and to minimize the distortion of the eye when dilating the pupil. It's a quick easy way to make an eye and the hit you would take on rendering time is small. A more elegant solution would be Colin's Uber Eye, mine is more of a brute force solution but it works for me. As for the flipping of normals, flip the sclera, cornea and iris normals to point outward and the retina normals to point inward.

Nice start Gerry! From what I can see, I would now go through and start reducing the splineage. I think you could cut the number of splines on the lower lip by around half...I would get rid of the splines immediately to the right and left of the center of the lower lip to start and end some of the splines on the nose in hooks or eliminate some completely so that you don't have quite as much on the upper lip below the nose.

I was looking at it a little wrong initially, but, I would've continued the splines the way this illustrates in red. The green circles indicate the hooks that are causing the flattening. Porcelain (or however it's spelled) would get rid of most of your problems...just set it at "0" with the material applied. If porcelain doesn't cure the flattening problem, you'll have to move a few splines around.

What might help with the torso is to have the hooks that are connected to the patches next to the five pointers replaced with a control point and continue those splines down to where you have the hooks at the hips...making it a continuous spline instead of the hooks at the waist as well (I hope I made sense). The hooks tend to cause some flattening. The lines on the crotch and legs look like a shaded mode render of a model with porcelin applied...or is this a final render? If it's not a final render, see if it shows up when you render in that mode. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the input, guys. If the tongue weren't visible because of Bertram's missing tooth I might've been able to cheat a little, but, it's good for me to practice that as well. I'm doing some tweaking to the rig, increasing some of the pose percentages and some general experimentation...I should have something new posted in a few days. I'm glad you found the eye tutorial useful, Gerry. I don't get much in the way of feedback on it, so it's cool when I find out it helped someone. When I get things finalized on Bertram I'll definitely show my work on that as well...I've got a pretty involved animation planned for him.

Thanks for the crit Matt, I'll have another pass at it to see if I can exaggerate a few things.

Okay, after a couple more passes here's what I've come up with...I think it's a little better. Crits are welcome...zipped up DivX encoded AVI again.

I think I'm #114....not sure if it matters, but, just in case.

If I'm eligible, I'd like to be included in the drawing.

The images I found of a replica of the Hunley show some big rivets, but the hatches are more flattened. Let's see if I can link the image. I found it in the gallery of the site located here: http://www.charlestonillustrated.com/hunley/# The rivets look accurate to me. Very nice model so far and very generous for donating when you're finished.