sprockets Shelton's new Char: Hans It's just donuts by ItsJustMe 3D Printing Free model: USS Midnight Rodger Reynolds' 1950s Street Car Madfox's Pink Floyd Video Tinkering Gnome's Elephant
sprockets
Recent Posts | Unread Content
Jump to content
Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

ragtag

*A:M User*
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    324

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by ragtag

    Old, but not often repeated, advice....

    in Work In Progress / Sweatbox

    Posted

    MY turn! (Grabs the conch shell).

     

    Another simple trick to speed up actually positioning the lights is either removing all complex materials and textures or scale the textures down to tiny little 16x16 images (make sure to back up the full resolution ones before you do :) ). Textures are expensive to load and render, so you'll get much faster feedback without them. I like to use multi-pass with 1 pass for lighting tests, as it doesn't do any slow anti-alias. Once you've got the positions right, you can use Dearmed's approach to adjust the intensity of each light. (for those without PSP or PS, check out GIMP www.gimp.org or www.macgimp.org ).

     

    Also coloring the lights with very different colors, red, green, blue etc. while positining them can help you see where each light falls.

     

    NEXT person's turn! (Passes the conch shell).

    Weathering Problem

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    NicMacsi: That might be the case. I always work with my models as seperate files from the project. I guess I could embed my model in an empty project, weather it. and then un-embed it. I wasn't really going to use the weathering for anything specific, I just wanted to try it out to see if it could be used for somthing :D . Hmm...must test this when I get home from work (sometime around midnight :( ).

     

    Ragnar

    5 point patches

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    Sometime 5 point pathces wind up facing the wrong way. To fix that simply hit F (Flip Normals) with that patch selected. I alway model with one back face culling on, so I can see what I'm doing. Having all the normals facing in the right direction gets imporant later if you want to use porcelain material or physics (I think :) )

     

    Ragnar

    exporting to game formats

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    What format does the Torque engine support. I couldn't find any info about it on the Garage Games homepage.

     

    Anyways, I'm guessing it's a viable to go via AMxtex ( www.obsidiangames.com ) and UltimateUnwrap ( www.unwrap3d.com ). It works for getting animated characters from AM to Blitz3D, but Unwrap3D supports a lot of other formats as well ( http://www.unwrap3d.com/formats.html ) one of them is bound to work with the Torque engine. Texturing you could do either in AM or in Unwrap3D.

     

    Ragnar

     

    p.s. If you want to test it out without spending money, you could mail me a sample model and I could convert it for you. Also see www.ragtag.net\xternal\blitz\sailor.rar (it's a test I did to get a character over to Blitz3D...it includes both the AM, .X and .b3d file).

    What program to use?

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    Are you looking to make a 2D or 3D game? And how complex is it? A simple description would be nice, as there is a world of difference between making a 3D first person shooter and a simple puzzle game.

     

    I've messed around with Blitz3D for a while (see www.blitzbasic.com there is a 2D and a 3D version). It's easy to learn and capable of making quite advanced games. You can use AM, AMxtex ( www.obsidiangames.com ) and Ultimate Unwrap ( www.unwrap3d.com ), to get animation and models from Animation Master to Blitz3D...or pretty much any game engine for that matter. See the list of supported formats on the Ultimate Unwrap site.

    For 2D games you just need to render the models, without antialiased edges, at least for most game engines.

     

    Ragnar

    Installation?

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    I usually install in a new folder, so I have a 10.5o and a 10.5p and a 11alpha10 folder, and so on. The whole installation is so small, that I don't really mind having multiple copies on my machine. It also makes it very quick and easy to go back to older versions. When I want to remove any of them, I use the Uninstaller in that directory (the Add/Remove Program just shows multiple copies of Animation Master withut any version info :P ).

     

    Ragnar

    Spinning light rigs and multi-pass

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    I don't see any problem using this with animation. Just remember that it needs to rotate 360 degrees within the time it calculates motion blur for. So if you set the motion blur at 10%, the light rig should rotate 360 degrees in 0.1 frames. I think it's easiest to adjust this in Coreography, where you can just tell it to repeat the action X number of times and X times faster than the original.

     

    If you want to check if your rig is actually rotating, you can type in subframe values in the time field (0.1 or whatever).

     

    Ragnar

     

    p.s. Where do you set a specific bone to use Euler interpolation. I only found it in the Options for all Actions. I seem to remember you could set this on a per bone basis in 8.5.

    Spinning light rigs and multi-pass

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    Hi,

     

    I've been doing some basic experimenting with spining light rigs. It's quite easy to set up, and gives you realistic soft shadows (fade away and blur with ditance). Basically what I did was this.

     

    - Created a model (with only the model bone in it).

    - Made a klieg light, set to width 1cm and shadows to 100% dark raytraced ones.

    - Created an action for the model, and imported the light as an action object

    - Constrained the position and rotation of the light to the bone

    - Moved the light 10cm sideways away from the bone

    - Animated a 1 frame long 360 degree twist rotation on the bone (Z-axis), using Euler interpolation.

     

    Now I had a light spinning around a 10cm radius in 1 frame.

     

    I then created a basic Coreogrophy with a character and the model with the action applied. Positioned the bone. I turned on mult-pass to 100 passes (personally I think 64 is a minimum, but I'm weird that way). And turned on motion blur at 50%. This means the motion blur is calculated for half a frame, and in AM I beleve it does this from 0 to 0.5 of a frame. I then adjusted the action in the for the spinning light model in the choreography so that it would repeat twice for every frame (i.e. rotating 360 degrees in 0.5 frames). And hit render.

     

    It seems to work like a charm. It's like having a raytraced light with 100 rays cast, while only calculating 1 light per pass. Of course, to get it even nicer you should have the light move around a circular area.

     

    Have you used light rigs like this in AM? And please share any and all info on it. :)

     

    Cheers,

     

    Ragnar

    Feedback on Alpha 9

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    Tiedybowl: Didn't know the Light mapping was old, as I didn't find it in 10.5o. Though most games still use lightmapping, they only use real-time lights for the few moving lights they need. I think most graphics card have a limit of 8 hardware accellerated lights (not shadows), though I'm not sure. Lightmaps save a lot of work for the graphics card and you can do stuff with them that won't be possible in real-time for at least another 10 years (GI, Final gathering, subsurface scattering and what not). See http://www.frecle.net/giles/ for an example of what a lightmapper can do.

     

    Ragnar

    Feedback on Alpha 9

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    Hi,

     

    I tested Alpha9 for a while last night, and here's my first impression.

     

    Full screen mode is great. I love to be able to work like that, get rid of all of those toolbars and just use my shortcuts, now I only need to rig up a voice command thing and I can get rid of my keyboard too. :D

     

    The personalized menus should not be on by default. The first thing I did when booting up AM, was look for a way to turn them off. Personalized menus break one of the main rule of good interface design, that people learn by location. So they know that this and that is the third menu item down. With personalized menus, they have to look and read every time. Please, please, please...don't use Office or Microsoft for interface design inspiration...they're no good at it.

     

    The tabs for community, timeline etc. take up way too much screen space. They take up a 1 cm strip across the screen vertically and horizontally, even though they're only 1x2cm themselves. Also, and this is a bug, when the tab is visible, pressing Alt-2 only works to open the timeline not closing it again (same goes for community and library). To close it you need to click several times somewhere outside it. Not good. Luckily I found a way to get rid of those tabs, and then it worked like it did before.

     

    Export shadow map. :D Haven't heard any mention of this. Is there any documentation on how it works. I'm guessing it could be used to export a shadow map for use with game engines, excpet you would need to combine all those thousands of tiny bit maps it creates based on the data in the map file, and apply it all to a poly model. Any chance of some more info on this feature. Any chance it can include final gathering and global illumination.

     

    It still crashes a lot (like six times last night), but it's still in alpha so that's to be expected. Just hope it will be as stable as 10.5 by release.

     

    There are probably lots of little things I've missed, but this was kind of my first impression. I didn't play with the hair this time around, I tried it in an earlier alpha and it looks very cool. :)

     

    Cheers,

     

    Ragnar

    Pro Tools

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    There is Virtual Dub http://www.virtualdub.org/ , that can do some very basic editing, but is great for combining lots of stills to an .avi or compressing video files.

     

    There is also Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.com/ an open source project to create some sort of compositor/video editor. I think it's still in early alpha, but it might be worth a look. I've downloaded it, but not had the time to check it out. Both are Windows tools. The Mac, of course, comes with iMovie. :D

     

    Ragnar

    Feature request - Spline IK

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    I did something like this way back in version 7.1 or something of AM. It wasn't a perfect IK spline, as it could stretch (which was what I wanted). What I did was simply draw a curve, and create two bones to control each end of it. I then path constrained several other joints to the curve, and positioned them at even intervals. (Don't remember if I had to add a twist constraint to them to prevent them from flipping, and to control the Y rotation). Then attached the geometry to those joints, and hid them. A basic stretchy spline IK. :-) Ragnar p.s. I think there was a tutorial for this somewhere using a snake or something like that.

    Upgrade?

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    If you got the CD with the Gnome in the underpants :) (Perk holding flower) you should be able to download 10.5o from the Hash website and use it ( http://www.hash.com/support/updates.asp ).

     

    It's well worth it using 10.5. It's not too different from 10n, except you've got multipass rendering which is great and some changes to porcelain (and probably more stuff I don't know about). I think stability is around about the same.

     

    Ragnar

    Modelling for animation.

    in (2003-2004)

    Posted

    I think the only rule is to have a good layout of the splines for nice looking deformations. Think about how the limbs bend, and you'll get the idea.

     

    It can be good to do some quick tests if you're unsure. Throw some bones in the arm/leg/whatever, bend them in a pose and pull at the model till you get it looking nice (scrub back and forth). If you have a hard time getting the deformations to look good, you probably need to change your model. You'll quickly get an idea of what works and what not.

    I spent last night doing this for a face. I'm working on a character that has very few patches, and wanted to make sure I could give him all the facial expressions I need. So I quickly modeled 6 or so different expressions (big smile, anger, an o, closed eye and more), focusing on extreme ones. I didn't waste too much time at this, as if they didn't work I would have to change the layout of the splines in the face. It's just a quick way to test it.

     

    Ragnar

×
×
  • Create New...