thefreshestever

just made a test... applied a decal to a peaked surface, then set the curves to smooth again. this is what i thought would happen...

i don´t really know anything about this, because i don´t work that way... but what seems logical to me that if you paint on peaked points the result has to be somewhat distorted after importing it back into a:m as a curved mesh.

in certain industries almost everything is in english, especially in advertising agencies. many people like me sometimes just don´t know the german word for certain things any more, a lot of english words even made it into the german dictionary. for me it´s somehow natural, since i grew up with skateboarding, graffity and hiphop, and now i work with software that requires english, i mainly watch us-shows and movies, and i read english books... sometimes i even catch myself thinking in english and then i think "what the .... is wrong with me" but i have the feeling it´s kinda hip to use german words for you guys, too... more and more often i start to hear german words in us shows and movies, like "schmutz" for instance. could be because of the many jewish writers...

thanks... not really, gig is usually rather used in the music biz, in graphic biz we call it a job. or auftrag, which is german for job or order.

btw... the gig (the reason i initially started this thread) was confirmed on friday by the client. i have a meeting tomorrow where we´re going to make a rough storyboard... it will be more simplified, stylistic, with typographic elements as well... it´s not gonna make me rich or anything, in fact it isn´t paying nearly my hourly rate, but i´m still very happy about it, because the client is really pleasant to work with, and it´s going to be a lot of fun!

I think it works better in wireframe because we have a visible chin spline and no shadow line wandering around. If you really want the chin to be so motionless maybe the simplest thing would be to move the light so that the shadow line is always below his chin and not on the front of it. As the mouth moves around that seems to be shifting the shadow and the moving shadow implies a contour that is moving when really there isn't one there. Or... also... he could have a tiny hipster goatee on his chin to make it obvious that the chin isn't moving even though the mouth is. both worth a shot! thanks.

Can you show a wireframe render of that same chewing animation? there you go... actually the jaw doesn´t move that much at all... it only moves a bit down and to the right, then up and to the left. the rest of the movement is just the mouth wandering around, independent from the jaw. wiretest.mov

lol...YES it's clear. He also looks a bit worried as well as surprised...and yes the cat wants food. This is such inspiring, fun work! thanks... great, that´s what i was going for: surprised and a bit worried/suspicious..

he´s looking good!!!! the only thing that baffled me a bit was the squarish chest definition... and i don´t think you need 3 spline rings for the definition of the shoulder, 2 will do the trick as well.. gives you less headaches while rigging him

thanks @rob: yeah, it´s because of the shading... not sure what to do about it... did a little more animation today. is it clear to the viewer that he´s surprised about the cat? and that the cat wants some food? scene01_test.mov

update. scene01_test.mov

There's something odd about the shadowing on his chin... it makes it look like his jaw is going down while his mouth goes up. yeah, i need to work on the chewing, it doesn´t look right yet...

started animating... this is the first scene, just the bald guy eating alone, bored. i´m not sure about it yet. i want it to be slightly exaggerated, not sure if i should do more or less movement. any suggestions? what do you think about the music? scene01_test.mov

the master of spline efficiency strikes again

works like a charm... thanks mark

it is...

thanks... last but not least: the fat guy in the background... since he´ll be only somewhat further away from the camera, i didn´t decal him completely, just the shirt and the pants. rotation_fatty_low.mov

but IF lines ARE visible in your rotoscope this can´t be possible since am can´t do patches consisting of more than 5 points. so anyway i will construct this model, the splines would never appear like in your roto, unless it´s just lines and no fills...

i wasn´t aware the lines are visible in your rotoscope

happy birthday!

that looks much better!!! yeah, frustrating is the right word. if you can´t figure out what´s causing it, redoing everything from scratch with no difference, and then somehow it works. and you still have no clue what was going on...

yeah, i haven´t used v17 either because it´s really unstable... seems to be just the mac version, otherwise more people would complain about it let´s hope v18 will be better optimized for mac. but i´ve also had issues of shadows not showing up lately, it was really weird... can´t remember exactly what i did to fix it... it had something to do with the combination of lights in the scene... i think i had just one sunlight and one klieg in the scene, and shadows didn´t render... then i dropped an additional sunlight into the scene, turned it off, and then it rendered correctly. something like that.

hmm... i liked this scene with the modeled trees better somehow to be honest. i think it´s because those image don´t cast any significant shadows (the car doesn´t seem to be either), and they are not 100% clean cut out, maybe it helps if you could get rid of the bright edges. i also would increase the contrast on those trees to get them closer to a model train miniature look.

update. rotation_car_low_new.mov

thanks... here´s a preview of the car... it´s actually the first car i´ve ever modeled. still a few things to add and fix, and i noticed i got to adjust the lights for the 360° rotation of the car. the behaviour of the shadowing looks odd that way... the lights more from above should do the trick i think. rotation_car_low.mov