itsjustme

Yessir, at the moment he looks like he's shrugging his shoulders. If you model him with his arms raised as high as the shoulder with his shoulders relaxed, then you won't have to relax them before animating each time and will have an easier time with your CP Weighting. I changed how Squetchy Sam and Bertram's shoulders are modeled and posted some images in this post...the last version of Bertram with his shoulders shrugged that I posted is in this post. Hope that helps, Steve.

He's looking good, Steve! The one suggestion I would make is to relax the shoulders.

One evening...that's crazy. Great job, Stian!

Very cool character!

Looks great, Jeff!

Looks fantastic, Eric!

Today I separated the toe squetching from the foot squetching, made the toe squetching controlled by scaling the toe controls, fixed the 'Z' rotation of the toes and updated the toe add-ons for the biped and Quad versions of the rig. I'll do a bunch of testing and double-checking on the updates tomorrow...and try to get back on the face rig update again. Here's a quick clip showing the toe squetching update. foot_squetching_07_16_2009.mov

I've been working extremely slowly, unfortunately...but I'll get it done one way or another.

Looks great so far, Steve!

Tonight I fixed the foot squetching in the Quad...adding the foot bowing introduced a problem, but it should be fixed now. I also made "human feet" versions of the Quad because the setup I had in there wasn't as convertible as I had originally thought. Now, I'm back to the face rig update again...hopefully, I'll be able to show something soon.

I just shot you some links, Mark. The legs do use CP Weighting, there's a lot of CP Weighting required in the the rig in general. The foot bowing uses the same setup as the calves, so it was a quick addition.

Yessir, the foot will bow/arch on the Quad Rig like the other bowing poses. A quadruped's feet are generally rotated so that the quad is walking on it's toes, so adding the foot bowing helps to give a more consistent look if you are bowing the rest of the leg. Here's a quick example video with the geometry bones unhidden, Steve. The only controls being rotated in the video are the IK foot controllers and toe controls. Quad_foot_bowing_07_11_2009.mov

I got a few things done since my last post. I tweaked the shoulders in the rig a little so that it is now possible to use the shoulder controllers to squetch (previously you had to unhide the shoulder squetch null, now you will be able to squetch the shoulder either way). Because of Bertram's construction, I'm probably going to be using a fair amount of shoulder squetching, so, bonus. I also added foot bowing to the Quad Rig. Tonight I'm going to do more work on the face rig to see if I can get what I'm after there.

You've got a lot of dead-ended splines and bad spline flow in there, Mikal. You could easily cut out about half of the splines you have in there. I circled some of the problem areas I found...I know there are a lot of others that I can't see in the image though. It doesn't look like you are aware of hooks...a way to end a spline without using a control point. You should probably read through the Basic Splinemanship tutorials here. There are more tutorials linked to in the forums and the Technical Reference and "The Art of Animation Master" can be downloaded in PDF format here. Hope that helps. ------------------------- EDIT ------------------------- There are some modeling tutorials that you might find useful here (it's also here) or here. You can also take a look at a few models to get an idea of what good splineage looks like...something like Kong or the Leopard Queen Project. ------------------------- EDIT ------------------------- I did a little double-checking today and added more circling of problem areas...last night's circles are yellow and today's are red. There are still more (along with the need for an overall spline reduction), but that's what I see at the moment (from this side view). Another thing that I thought about looking at the image again...it looks like you have a lot of flipped normals. A description of normals can be found here.

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!