[Colin made me do this]

Hey John,

 

For what Nancy said give this a try...

 

 

Flare Intensity =

If((Mod(GetTime(),2)<1),Rand(10,20),0)

 

or something like that..

[Colin made me do this]

(monotone voice) Rodneywilldomybidding.. Hewillbethenextonetotrysomethingwithexpressions...andhewillnotrepeateverycommandIgivehim...

 

 

Very cool John, that definately does look like camera flashes at a stadium. Now if you really want to go crazy.. see if you can make them do a wave around the stadium, as if people are clicking right as the Runner/Car/whatever is getting right in front of them. Just kidding.. its awesome.

[Colin made me do this]

Colin aka.. "SATAN!!!" (in my church lady voice).

 

lol.. I like it John. Thats what I'm talking about. Heck for that matter.. you could even make the crowd with expressions ;-)

 

Your experiment also reminds me of a "Will of the wisp".. Try adding a Sin curve to the lens flare intensity for the flash effect or.. just some random noise to vary the flash brightness.

 

I knew I could count on you John. Awesome stuff as usual

[ScareBear Gets His]

Ahhh you see.. in the Coreography I like the purple stripe, it seems more 3d than before.

[ScareBear Gets His]

hmmm.. no I havn't noticed it on Scarecrow..

 

Maybe what made me think of a moire was the way the pattern seems so even accross the bear? Its like a material that passes straight through him instead of wrapping. Or maybe its that the bears size is smaller so maybe the material needs more repeat? which would probably cause a moire .. I don't know.

 

The same thing happens when I look at Op-art from the 70's ;-) My brain stops working.

[ScareBear Gets His]

I'm digging 3 and 7 the most. .but I'd lose the horzontal stripes on 3.. I think they'd moire and have a readbility issue with mid distance animations.

 

Cool stuff as usual.

[Fire Light flicker]

Hey Jerry,

 

there's probably many ways to skin this cat, I just chose the expression rout to see if it could be done easily.

 

What I did was to "bone the snake" lol, as you might normally.. lol sorry, I'm cracking myself up here. Nightdrunk I suppose.

 

Anyway, rig the snake as you would do if you where going to keyframe it, except don't parent the bones that you want to animate with expressions under the main bone. You'll use constraints to do that. Then in an action or in the choreography, constrain each bone to the bone in front of it in the chain using a "translate to" and an "orient like" constraint. You'll have to offset the "translate to" constraint or use the compensate button when you apply it. Then when you want to animate the snake you'll apply a sin curve animation to the first bone you want to animate. You'll apply something like this... Sin(GetTime()*2)*50 ... to the RotateY transform.

 

Then just go back over your orient like constraints and apply a lag to them of several frames. In my case I applied a 10 frame lag, which was about 1 quarter of the length of the Sin curve. The tighter the curve the smaller the arc in the snake's motion, and the faster it looks like its moving, but you can tweek that as well with some extras on the expression. I got it as far as I cared to go with it.

 

You could also vary the lag going back toward the tell to alter the shape of the motion, or put an easy on the curve with some fancy math.

 

Another way to animate the snake would be with a path constraint and an appropriately shaped path. The problem with the path method would be in the number of bones it might take to constrain a cobra with its head up to the path, and that the path itself becomes part of the rig.. not a big deal, but was more work than I cared to put into this little test.

 

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions..

[11.5 - Making a Face]

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[trying to model a new character]

UhOh... I think I see where this is going. This wouldn't be a model with a purpose, say, I don't know.... REVENGE?

[Fire Light flicker]

Thanks guys,

 

Yeah I tried viscosity John.. it sort of helps. What I ended up doing was tweeking the world dynamics to double the y force. Then I increased the Magnitude on the Cone force I used and increased the velocity of the particles accordingly. That seemed to work good. Kind of a hoakie way to do it, but I couldn't figure out another way.

 

Streaks seem to have some elements of their dynamics hidden to the user, vs the way you can tweek things on sprites. ie gravity. He maybe you can tweak velocity over time.. that might do it.. I'll look into that later.

 

Anyway, I had to try one more thing with expressions just to see if it would work. It kind of works but I think with some more thought it'd work pretty good.

 

Its a cobra animated with expressions. the majority of the body can be tweeked by editing one or two numbers.

 

 

[Fire Light flicker]

I think that the lens flare creates the illusion of very intense light, like a welding torch, rather than a log fire for instance.

Yeah I got carried away. I had to see what the weld/flare effect would look like.

 

My only gripe with the whole thing is that the sparks are to slow, but I couldn't figure out how to make them move faster and keep them from blasting way out off the screen. Any ideas on that?

 

Nice !...my first guess used a if else with a couple of randoms also.

 

I named the project firelight also...

 

Hey Great minds think alike John. Maybe I was just channeling your genius. I thought the solution came a little to easy to me ;-)

[Fire Light flicker]

I can't stop myself.. expressions are just to much fun.

 

I had to add sparks (streaks with the same equation on their emit number)

 

 

[Fire Light flicker]

Had to take it one step further.. so I set up a lensflare on the light and added the same expression to the intensity of the flare. I'm loving AM expressions. At first I looked at the syntax and layout and thought, theres not much that can be done here, but boy was I wrong. It only seems that way because of the single line "equation" style of the interface. Adding "if/else" statements that can be nested opens up a world of possibilities, and the "equation" style actually gets pretty intuitive once you get used to it (like and excel spreadsheet style equation).

 

I'm wondering.. is there another scripting option for AM (I remember a python scripter a while back) that allows you to do "for" and "while" statements and create your own variables?

 

anyway.. here's the shot of the lens flare with a camera pan for added effect, make sure you put on your Welding goggles ;-)

 

attachment removed for better version below...

[Fire Light flicker]

I think I got it.. It was much easier figuring it out in AM than the other app (as usual ;-)

 

Here is a screen shot of the expressions and the curve they create. The jist is that the Modulo function splits the timing into two parts so I can use an if statement to creat to slightly different sin curves with random jitter on them. You could nest multiple if statements with Mod(GetTime()) tests to split the curves up into more parts as well, but two is fine for this effect.

 

 

 

Here's what it looks like rendered

 

 

 

and of course the project file if you want to dink around with it...

 

 

 

 

Thanks for all the help guys and girls, I knew coming to the forum was the answer

[Fire Light flicker]

Its close John. I got it working in another program and I'm working on translating my expression to AM. What I did was I started with a sin curve and added a random function to that that only happens every 5th or 10th frame. Then I added another random function with a smaller amount 1,2 to give it a little slight jitter. So that was three levels of animation on the intensity. Then I added the exact same expression to the y translate and another line to it for the x translate.. smaller amount on the x.

 

This all looks good and can be tweeked to animate just about any speed. I also added a second light with the same but slightly varied expressions and offset by 1 unit to get a more volumetric effect on the shadows.

 

I'm working on doing the same thing in AM.. if I get it I'll post the result.

[Fire Light flicker]

I've tried gobos and stuff, but theres one problem with that and this effect. fire doesn't cast shadows unless theres something between it and the surface to cause a shadow.

 

The real effect is actually just the overall intensity and source of the light changes over time. So if everything is equal and there is no object between a fire and the surface it lights.. all you should see is a flicker of the light intensity and the appearance that the light source (ie the flames) is shifting in space slightly. The latter effect is really more noticable in the way shadows get cast by the fire. The shadows should dance, and the light should dim and brighten almost like a sin curve but much more random.

 

I've almost got it with a little expression editing. I'll get it down and if it works I'll post the result.

[Fire Light flicker]

Thanks Caroline, I'll look into that. it might get me part of the way there.

[Fire Light flicker]

Well I'm stuck trying to create the light flicker that comes with fire. I know I could just hand animate the intensity of a light and its position, but I'm wondering if theres a more "automatic" or better way to simulate this.

 

I've tried coming up with equations for odd sin curves to control the position and intensity of a light. I've tried just doing random ranges and having the light flicker, which gets part but not all of the effect. I need little pops and flickers, with smooth rise and fall, left and right, and smooth rise and fall in intensity.. by smooth I mean over a second or two, versus per frame flicker.

 

Any ideas?

[New work]

Awesome!.. 3 cheers.

 

can't wait to see it textured.

[TinOwl]

Ken, ken, ken ken ken ken KEN!

 

You might as well have painted the psychodellic, thigh high, fishnets, with silver tipped razor sharp bra on him yourself.

 

Have at it Nancy.. the guantlet has been dropped ;-)

[11.5 - Making a Face]

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[11.5 - Making a Face]

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[11.5 - Making a Face]

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[11.5 - Making a Face]

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[To split or not to split.]

I'm the 4, 1 so far. Not sure why. I think it must be what I call the Jim Carey phenomenom. I like a face that seems to have a life of its own and making both sides different slightly or allot seems to make the face more believable and interesting to me.

 

The average human notion of beauty seems to gear towards perfect symmetry in the face. However, my notion of beauty doesn't I seem to like slight assymetry, so maybe thats my problem.