itsjustme

Yessir, there is still some CP Weighting to do...and probably a fan bone or two. Thanks, Robert!

I had a little time this evening, so I did a couple of renders to show the relaxed shoulders. Here are two "T" pose images of Sam, one with the shoulders unrelaxed (the old setup) and one with his shoulders relaxed (the updated model) and an image of Bertram with his shoulders relaxed in the "T" pose. I also rendered out a twelve frame Quicktime to show sort of what Bertram's shoulders will look like when his arms are lowered...there are still things to fix, it's just for a quick illustration. You'll notice from the differences in the Sam images that I've been modeling characters with their shoulders too hunched. I would adjust the shoulders by lowering them when animating (what little I've done, mostly tests), which is not the way to go...a lesson I should have learned years ago. I should have some more time over the next couple of days...I'll see if I can get some work done on the face rig update and add the bowing pose to the Quad feet. Bertram_shoulders_07_08_2009_H264.mov

Lots of great things going on in that image, Sebastian!

Free time has been hard to come by for the past couple of weeks, but I did get a few things accomplished. I updated Bertram's rig to include the fixes up to this point and I relaxed both Bertram and Squetchy Sam's shoulders (mostly modeling, but some arm/shoulder rigging adjustments as well). When I get a chance, I'll post some images to show the differences.

He's starting to round into shape, Tim!

Happy Birthday, Gerald!

Great stuff, Robert! Thanks for posting this.

Looks great so far!

First, if you only have 2MB of RAM, that would be a very old computer. I'm guessing you have 2GB of RAM. A faster processor and more RAM will always help. The amount of RAM in your video card only affects the speed of your realtime rendering, not the final render. Keep in mind that a lot of things affect rendering times...hair, reflections, refraction, raytraced shadows, Ambient Occlusion, Subsurface Scattering, materials, number and type of lights, etc. For 32 seconds of video, assuming 24 FPS, you're getting about 6.4 frames per minute (even less per frame if you're using 30 FPS)...less than ten seconds per frame. I've seen some frames take several hours, so that doesn't sound too bad to me (depending on what your scene is composed of). Hopefully, my math is correct...it's not my strongest subject. Getting a "polished movie look" depends on a lot of factors...materials, texturing, lighting, good modeling, etc. Using multipass on your renders does tend to improve the look of the render (and increase render times), but it's only a small part. Hope that helps.

Very cool model, Eric!

Looks great so far, Mark!

Wow! Once that is dirtied up a little, it will be perfect. Incredible, as usual, Stian!

I finished updating the audio on everything last night, so now I have tutorials for how to use the controls for the legs, arms, hands and spine finished...total running time is around 33 minutes. Once I get the face rig updated, I can work on the videos for the neck, face and on-character switches.

Since my last post, I did a lot of work on the face rig update, but it still needs a lot. I got to a point where I needed to do some thinking about the setup, so I decided to work on a couple of videos for the tutorial. I put two more videos together, but I did a lot better job on the audio on them than the previous videos, so, I went back and re-recorded everything else...I'm much happier with the new audio. Tonight I did the re-recording and clean-up on the new audio, tomorrow I'll edit it into the previously made videos...at least that's the plan. Then, it's back to the face rig update...I think I've got a few of the problems worked out, at least in my head they work. Once I get the face rig update done, I can knock out three more videos for the tutorial, update Bertram's rig with the latest updates and then finish the gut rig using Bertram...which will make it possible to put together another video for the tutorial. Still a long way to go, but I'm slowly chipping away at it.

Looks great, Steve!

Nice work so far, Paul!

If you have the v13 disc, v14c wouldn't work with it. If you have the v14 disc, I think v14c is here. Hope that helps.

You can temporarily rename "head_geom" to "head", install FACE, then rename it back to "head_geom", or you can just add a "head" bone and constrain it to the "head_geom" bone. Or you could do a search and replace in the FACE installation models making "head" change to "head_geom". Hope that helps.

The standalone versions of the FACE controls should work with any rig. The installation assumes that there is a bone named "head". Hope that helps.

Fantastic images, Robert!

Nice hands, Stian! I think Robert's recommendation about the thumb placement is the way to go.

Happy Birthday, Stian!

Very cool latest look, Tim! He keeps getting better.

Very cool, Mark! Extremely good job. You could put another character impacting the ground horribly in the background...maybe with the bungee cord landing on top of him like it broke? Maybe too much work to add it...not as easy as just adding a sign.

I started this week by adding the eyebrow controls to the Quad Rig, that prompted me to add some controls for moving the brows around the face (the eye sockets already had that ability). I then added that ability to Squetchy Sam as a step toward adding it to the biped rig, which prompted me to bring a few more parts of the face into the setup...so, lots of testing and thinking about what can be pushed. I added the ears, nose and mouth to the setup with some adjustable automated movement and then added some manual movement controls. Then, since it was easy to add and might be necessary when moving the brows around, I added a setting that unhides the eyebrow control bones...so they can be animated using either the FACE controls, Pose sliders for the FACE controls or directly. I'm still working on the setup, but here's a quick video clip showing some of the testing. I didn't do any scaling in the test, but that should be possible as well. Sam's face could use a little more CP Weighting tweaks and there's still a lot to work on. I'm thinking it could turn into something to add more toon movement to facial animation using the rig...we'll see how it pans out. face_test_05_29_2009.mov