Dearmad

The banding or whatever that is... doesn't look so good. And what is the area of interest to the viewer? Why? Seems unfocused in this way to me.

Pretty nifty. I like the bike design and colors.

I'm not inclined at the moment to merely post the material- it's mine for my film for now. And I don't have time to write up a full thing on it... suffice it to say it's two gradients- one along the x, one along the y axis. Each piece of the gradients is further divided into combiners- mostly sine type noise. A few of the attributes in the sine noise combiners are the clouds, the others are the sky colors or cloud edges catching light. I'm sorry, Starwarsguy, but not just yet... Anyway, an update: Because I needed to test something in a final render style (so a quickrender wouldn't work), here's the scene (0402) above with the animation for everything nearly completed- some &very& minor tweaks and this scene is done. Oh, the motion blur for it is ALL SCREWED, ignore that. Rendered without shadows too. The Sweatbox for Ballet Pour Ma Fille DIrect Link to the clip (about 922kb, 25 seconds, DiVX). I did a QT version of this but the smallest it can get is about 3 MB, and I'm just not interested in showing something at such poor quality- the colors get really pale and ugly too. I'm no QT master, and really haven't the time at the moment to mess with it. I have limited webspace and bandwidth, so sorry to the non DiVX endowed. Here's a still from the scene-

Nice. Cute even.

Yup! I sort of pushed the rocking to make it a little silly. I could almost imagine the guys standing around the car pulling and pushing at it.

WOW! That's damn good! The little details you have in the moves are great! How long is the final animation going to be, the entire song?? For comedic reasons I think there should be a SERIOUS amount of smoke coming out of his ciggy... A few leg cuts through quitars, but you probably see that already. The bass drum looks like it's hitting maybe 1 or 2 frames to early- I figure you're wanting it to come in sharp and maybe pre- the sound a little bit, but it looks a *tad* too early to me. IMO. I'm curious why there's no bass line given to the bass player- or is this demonstratig my lack of Stones' knowledge in that among the main members, no one plays bass... Not much of a fan of the stones... but your animation will be a keeper when you get done!

Added a *really* incompletely animated shot to the sweatbox area- Ravel is driving his ambulance over bumpy roads with weak shocks. Only have the ambulance animated- Ravel's reactions are not begun yet. This is a closeup shot, so its only ambulance and Ravel (with some scenery that'll be whizzing by once I get to it). After this shot there's a cut to where we see him driving through the city street. This is from section 4 of 12 sections for the film. Here's a link to the sweatbox: Sweatbox Here's a direct link: Hold on TIGHT! RAVEL! It's in DiVX format, only about 600kb. If there are significant (or enough) complaints, I can post a QT of it, but the compression probably won't allow me to make it quite as small.

That was beyond sane.

Just made a quick lathed object. Hey if they don't look like wood to you then they don't look like wood.

Anime or not... I liked the Eyes closer together. Those far apart eyes (which is NOT the classic anime style, its something I've noticed happening more recently) just creeps me out (When they get too close to the edge of the face, almost like fish). Anyway, looks like a good effort all around- what are your plans for the character?

The textures in the above look a little too closely attached to one basic combiner style, whereas wood has all sorts of little combinations of patterns. Not a crit of the materials offered by Wegg, because those may just have scaling issues (I can't tell), and certainly have made at least one customer very happy, but to me, a procedural wood can look a little more like: And I for one don't mind a little shine to a finished wood used in nice, "high-class", furniture. Forgive me, I've just always had an unhealthy interest for wood procedurals in raytracers. Don't know why. Edit: Forgot to mention, one is an old darktree (available free somewhere I'm sure), the others are native AM ones I've made.

More capsule stuff, please.

It's hard to say. My gut says I won't be done animating until this coming summer. The paltry amount of evidence I can bring to support this is: There are 120 storyboarded drawings. I've finished 40 since last summer (2004). So maybe by this coming summer I'll have animated everything out. (I'm in grad school, and frankly this doesn't help my animation pace). While certain things go much faster now that I've some experience animating my characters, certain other things (like greater quality expectations that result with increased skills) slow me down. So it's a wash, and I don't bank on accelertaing my pace anymore. Anyway in essence this animating pass through the entire film is resulting in a rather complete animatic through quickshaded rendering, which I'm also synching to the music, dialogue, foleys, etc... Once that is done and I'm satisfied, I have two dedicated machines to rendering and a third I can employ. I'll also most likely be purchasing a 4th machine at that time. The film is looking to be about 32 minutes in length (8 minutes completed to date) as far as what I plan to render out (I may tighten it in editing), so about 46,080 frames (24 fps). I'm assuming an average of 10 minutes to render each of the frames- so that's 32 days of 24/7 rendering on 4 machines. At least a month and a half of rendering, is all I'm trying to say. So with all that scientifical evidence I say by Fall of 2005. A little hint: When I'm posting a lot in here, it means I'm taking mini-breaks from working on the film. And when you don't see me in the forums, it means school is making me cry like a little girl.

Definition: "Soulcage." noun. A term to describe the torture chamber you find yourself in when in the presence of superior skills. Skills such that using the exact same tools you use to whittle a stick into... a smaller stick without bark, they've crafted the image of a million angels dancing on the head of a pin. Well I guess someone has to keep the bar held to ridiculous heights.

Starwarsguy: The sky is a procedural. I did it that way so the clouds will animate and look like they're moving/swirling by- just a simple dropped action that moves the material through the surface and voila. And, as usual, it's on a sky dome shape. For this set in particular it is very large, since airplanes are involved. The one in this shot is my "morning" sky- there's a bright yellow area to the right that is the sunrise and darker purple to the left, where evening still resides. I've also got a midday blue sky/white clouds, an evening sunset, and midnight sky with stars. at http://www.applesnake.net/sweat.htm I've posted a sample animation of this morning sky moving. The clouds are moving ridiculously fast in the test animation, but you get the idea. It's in DiVX 5.x.

Ok, only for my fellow AM homey's, I'll share a still from the film with ya: Frame 742 of shot 0302. Shot 0302 is slated to be the most technically challenging shot of the film; AM and my computer (3200+) handled it (but it renders at 2 seconds per frame in LINE MODE! ), so, as usual, the only challenge I continue to face is my own amateurish animating skills! This shot is a 1350 frame long sequence in the film, I'm shooting at 24 fps, so obviously a lot more happens in this shot than what this image reveals. It took 1 week to set up, 1 week to light, and 2 weeks to animate. Actually, this render revealed a few flaws I needed to fix up, but, eh... I'm not doing real final renders yet. I'll be rendering at 2x this size to get rid of the aliasing. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with this lighting set up- it took a bit of thinking but ended up involving only 4 lights for this huge set with a LOT of animated things going on in it, not all of which are seen here. I know AM is improving their lighting, but honestly, I have to say I've enjoyed working with the lighting AM has. I can't believe it, but according to the proof I have on my computer, I've animated 8 minutes of this film. I hope you all enjoy- as usual comments are welcome, crits too. Mostly I hope to just continue to show that dedication can make progress, even if it is slow.

Hey, how did I miss this thread? Looks like a really interesting concept you have going. From the posters and still stuff you've shared, it looks like you may have an intriguing story to tell. Keep the faith and see it through! It may take awhile... d/ling the video now...

This seems very nice to me. What aspect do you think requires further crit? I mean seriously... it's a paintbrush man. I can see that. It has decent bevelling (or appears to), and the wood texture isn't overly "ringy." The colors to it are also pleasingly balanced. I say move on and put together the rest of the logo.

LOL. Being in the middle of a project that''s taking years has made me PARANOID about backups, so maybe I'm extreme, but here's my system: CD-RW: On one I keep a mirror of my work folder for the project. I remove things that won't fit into the CD that are not important to the project such as rotos and test footage, but ALL models, materials, actions, choreographies, material maps (not that many as I use a lot of procedural textures), go in this CD, obviously. Also script versions and reseach images I've used. This CD gets updated about every month with a new image of my critical data. Not so frequently as you might suspect due to: CD-RW: On another CD-RW I keep an image like the above but keep it updated after EVERY time I make any significant progress on my work. So if I worked on an action, or redid a few details to a model, etc... when I'm done at the end of the day, I load up the CD-RW, delete the MODELOLD and ACTIONOLD folders on it, rename the ACTION and MODEL folders to ACTIONOLD/MODELOLD, then drag the ACTION/MODEL folders from my HD to the CD-RW to copy them over. This way I have the last previous version of anything that's changed as well as the latest current version. On a CD-R: I keep staggered copies of my MODELS, ACTIONS, CHOR, and occassionaly the MATERIALS folder. The MAT folder doesn't change much these days. I keep these CD's as archival reference and can consequently go back to any iteration of anything in my project. So far there are 5 of these CD's; not too many for the years of work invested... and certainly no price to pay for peace of mind. On a another series of CD-R's: I keep source recordings for the soundtrack, edited sounds ready for inclusion. One CD is for dialogue, another set is for music and sound effects. These don't need updating very often at all. Backup-backup: I do this data CD-R in duplicate. Procedure: I keep the CD's in a CD travel case that was the best one I could find that money could buy- reason: it has no cheap plastic parts that can scratch the CD's, is constructed in a way that makes removing cd's replacing them minimally dangerous to scuffing them, is waterproof (not too big a deal, but who knows). I TAKE THE CASE WITH ME WHEREVER I GO!!!! Yep, I'm this paranoid. Hey, the house next door burned down a few weeks ago (seriously), so now I even take the damned thing up to bed with me and keep it on the nightstand. If there's a fire, it's the only material thing I have to grab (well, I grab my wife too) and I'm out the window! One duplicate data CD-R stays at home at all times in case I lose or have the travel CD's stolen. Wow... what a process, but once it's all in place it's no big deal to keep up on. Takes about 5 minutes of my time each day at most when I've worked on my film.

What exactly is the difficulty? This seems rather easy to me, so I may be missing writing to the difficulty you're facing. For a side-opening type, think about it from the top view... that wavy line shape to it? Model that spline- then pull it up with enough geometry to deform as you want it to. I'd rig it with bones going from the top down - not sure how many strings of bones like this I'd add, it depends on the size. I'd have these "tail like" bones bunched closer together near the center part, with them spread out more toward the stage wings. That way you can "swish" the bottoms when you take the curtains in and out. I would not simulate it with cloth, but that's just me- I like control. However, curtains could easily be simmed by the cloth capabilities in AM, IMO. I've built some curtains for windows in my current short. They move around in a "breeze" and for those I actually used cloth sim. But I've also got a few curtains for windows that I control with bones. It really depends on how much control you want/need for the scene you have in mind.

Beautiful lighting in the second image- really nice. If you "need to try" more bounces, how accurately is attenuation handled by the mapper? Is it manipulable beyond the radiance attrribute? Is it right to interpret that you need to set radiance for each surface/texture in order to manage that? Or is it for an entire object? If it's attached only on a per object basis, all sorts of strange (unreal) results could follow. Seems like with >5 bounces or so and dimmer lights, you run into perception vs. physics issues- the human interpretation of sensation differs from the "camera", no? Lots of interesting stuff though. Interior designer crit: With the lighting so beautifully done, that grey cabinet sure needs to go down into the garage, really sticks out like a sore thumb with such nice lighting... Needs a paint job!

Wow. Interesting Reevishness to his face. Seems like the overall proportions are going to very heroic too- impressive as it is now. At this point the only thing I wonder about is if his nose weren't quite so- sharpened if he'd still look heroicly handsome and manly... looks a little... um... like there's some vanity to him with that nose. Just MHO.

Do I understand the intent? Water on a pane of glass? The glass is vertical? The water is sheeting down the glass? If I do, I'd suggest you take a look at the effect in real life... you're talking fluid dynamics between a highly adhesive fluid across a non-adhesive surface that develops multiple layers. I can see a piece of the sheeting effect you're going for but the underlying material (the one not travelling down the Y axis) is very distracting and seems wrong to me. And the Y-travelling surface has static waves in it- they need to more dynamic, I think- move that material through the z plane as well, maybe? Water sheeting over glass vertically has wavelets that develop in a pattern regulated by the depth of the water (assuming a perfectly flat surface) as it travels down the surface (these wavelets are the front end of thicker layers of water)- these wavelets can roll over the underlying water with greater velocity than the underlying water- this forms dynamic multiple layers. One layer is adhering to the glass surface while the other is freed to move because it is adhering to only water. This is all a bunch of gobbldeegook, but it's sorta how it works. Simulate something like that- or fake something like that to get an effect closer to what it looks like. You've a tough challenge ahead of you to get such a subtle appearing effect right.... but you're the special effects man, you can do it!

LOL. Funny topic. I want life... can I request that?

Parlo, Mike3dartz, Yves, First of all, thank you very much for the replies. Crits from you guys means a lot to me, and the I take what you say to heart (or head) in order to make changes. Funny thing, Parlo, about that last scene- I completely LOST the animation chor for that scene! LOL. I was SOOOOOOOOOOO angry- I have backups up the wazoo and was just breathless I had lost anything! Anyway I reanimated it and it's improved. Nothing like animating something from scratch TWICE to make improvements! LOL now only because it's been awhile since then. The detail you noted about his head bob made all the difference. The hard part was that his walking pace is VERY slow there because of the mood (walking into a sick girl's room) so any little oddities in motion are so telling. Anyway I've not done much lately since returning to grad school for what I hopeis the LAST F'ING YEAR!!!!!!!- (grad school SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). For anyone wanting to know where this little project is at- I've about finished decorating the next major set and nearly have it lit for the next scene. I posted a small still of it at the stills part of the site: http://www.applesnake.net/ravel.htm Hope I can inspire others to keep on keeping on.