Paul Forwood

Woah! Thanks for all the good wishes, everyone! That's enough now or I'll have to start a new thread. Myron, I'll always be a kid to you. Nancy, you understand so well. Mr Bigboot, there is no e in Forwood. Mr. B-i-g-b-o-o-t. Cheers, Matt. Muchas gracias, Nino Banano! Mark, thanks. I noticed the slipping and also the variation in height regarding when the foot should be making contact with the floor. I will see if I can get a better alignment of rigs. The caveman model is based on human proportions and so the BVH rig scaled to a pretty good fit without too much messing around. The alien model has exagerated proportions. I'll see what I can do. Thanks, Robert. Onward and upward! You're only young once.

Hey! Thanks for all the birthday greetings! Rodney, good design choice, leaving out the rest of the candles. Thanks! Cake anyone? Sorry, Gene. You have to create a new Motion Capture Device first. This is the container which will hold the rig and the motion data. Try this: 1) Create new Action for your model. 2) Right click and select New\Motion Capture Device\BioVision BVH File 3) Switch to skeletal mode and away you go.

Thanks, Mark! This model is just 1500 patches and is about as lean as I can make him. I'm going to be increasing the patch count slightly when I give him a pair of antenae, (for the dynamics). Are you refering to his very crouched position, Mark? I quite like the comic quality of that. 1) Import the BVH data into an Action. 2) Constrain your model's rig to the BVH rig. 3) Drop the Action on your character in a Choreography.

I thought that I would try using that BVH file on my alien and now it's turning into a "Pass the Ball" submission. Wrong format and direction at the moment but I'll fix that before the final render. I might not get around to doing any texturing but I should have at least one animated sequence. Fetching_A00j.mov

Add the neck so we can actually tell how pointed the chin really is. Perhaps another spline ring across his forehead but you could produce some animation with the current layout and see where the model falls short of your expectations. Just get the head roughly finished and rig it for testing purposes. It is all good practice and you will learn alot about rigging and splining and can then go back and refine the model. --------- Edit: Oop! You posted while I was typing. It looks like you know what you are doing. Just keep going.

Thanks, George. It's not worth fixing this shot but I would like to have a more planned attempt at this effect later. For now I will leave you with my last tweak: Toon_04.mov Toon03_Feathered_.mov I think I should have turned off hair dynamics while it passed through the clipping plane because it is getting snagged. Next time I will use modelled hair for the toon world and, (as I finally found the lead for the camcorder), I will get some better quality video.

Rockin'! Man, your growing fast!

Here is a toon version of the "Take on me" concept that I was attempting in this thread Much better results are possible with careful planning This was just another quick test of the concept for illustrative purposes: Toon01.mov

Great! Cannes this week, Toronto and Edinburgh next month! Maybe...just maybe I can make it up to Edinburgh for the screening. Congratulations on the continuing journey of Chicory!

Oh, just some ol' boy who works for nothing.

This isn't a white render but it does demonstrate the basic principals of the "Take on me" shot that you have been refering to: Comp_1.mov This simply uses the live action as a rotoscope. A model is animated or tracked to the live action and a screen is placed at the boundary of the two worlds. The screen is just a patch with a surface colour that is preferably absent from all other objects in the sequence, has 100% ambience, receives no shadows, casts no shadows or reflections. This gives the renders a key colour that can be turned into an alpha channel. With a little more care aligning the model with the live action, to ensure that the actor is covered, you should be able to achieve an effect similar to that in "Take on me". Also it would have been better to replace the live action with a still of an empty room once the actor is obscured but this was just a very rough test of concept. --------------- It used to be possible to give image sequences a key colour as far as I can remember but A:M 14 seems to be missing this feature so I had to do the colour keying in After Effects. Perhaps it is back in A:M 15 but I haven't checked.

Can you post a screen capture here? It may help in identifying the cause.

Ha, ha! I usually set the angle limits to about 70 degrees but that normally overrides the grooming and spoils the effect.

I just let it run it's course and then did a shaded render. It all looks okay, dynamic chains are working, dynamic hair is working, there are no erratic hairs sticking out. The only problem now is that the caveman's hair tends to bounce into his head.

A BVH file is basically motion data captured from a real subject. An actor puts on a motion capture suit and translation data is captured and assigned to the bones of a simple rig. The BVH file contains the rig and the associated motion data. In A:M you can import BVH files in an Action and then constrain your own model's rig to the BVH rig, using primarily 'orient-like' constraints. There are a number of sites with free samples of motion capture data. You never know what you are getting, which is fun, but you should be aware that often the motion is captured at higher frame rates than you are likely to need so you may have to scale the data or import/capture again at a different frame rate.

Nancy, the frame toggling didn't work for me, even with excessive bashing of the space bar. So what do you mean " Don't fool with that switch...YET"? What IS that switch? I can't abort.

Pretty cool, Steve!

I noticed a "Particle Baked" option in the hair properties so I turned it on and A:M started, very slowly, to compute dynamics again but this time it is very, vert slow. When I say slowly I mean slowly! About 75 frames in around 15 minutes, so far, and no way to abort unless I use the Windows Task Manager to shut down A:M so I will let it do it's stuff. If the realtime display is anything to go by the result will not be worth the wait though.

Nancy, I have just two hair emitters, one has dynamics but the other does not. None of the hair has collisions turned on. There are no sprites. There is a dynamic chain in the vine and it has collisions turned on. This is what I got from running Simulate Spring Systems, without hair, and then Baking Particle Systems with hair: SimSpringsAndBakeParticles.mov I think that I would prefer to keep the particle hair and just hand animate anything that would normally be taken care of by dynamics. It's a shame. It seems like the interaction between the various dynamic systems is problematic. Maybe it is just a matter of finding the perfect settings so I'll experiment a little longer...

I just tried your suggestion, Nancy, and received a bunch of "Exception 033 Realtime render" errors followed by an "Exception 035 Trouble transforming hair/particle system". A:M didn't crash or lockup so I am rendering a shaded example. It aint pretty. I may have to compromise again and just go back to helmet hair, as Myron suggested.

Nice work, Gene!

I think you mean Steffen, Myron. Stian is busy building cathedrals. Ha! I can't take the credit for that, Kat. It's all Motion Capture data. Nancy, that sounds like the way to go. Thank you again!

Thanks, guys! I seems that hair may be the cause of the problems with my dynamic vine. I rendered with hair off and everything sprung back to life. The following example shows the vine overreacting because I hadn't set the dynamic chain's properties back to something more sensible than the extremes that I had been trying with hair: DynamicsAndHair.mov I'll have to try just turning off hair dynamics and see if the dynamic chain will work like that.

That looks great! How about a little bit of motion in the tail? A two bone dynamic chain would probably be enough for this shot. Anyway, I like everything else about it.

It's just a bit of fun really. The file was there so I tried it. The great thing about doing this is that it is an excellent way of testing a model.