Paul Forwood

"Bill". Ha ha! Looking very good! You could try attaching a dynamic bone, pointing up, from both of the girl's shoulders and constrain the dodos' hips to them, setting the angle to something small and adjusting the amount of influence. It's worth trying but I'm sure you have all the bases covered anyway. All the examples of your animation that I have seen are beautifully dynamic. What is the sound track from? Looking mighty good!

Much the same thing with a static camera: Magic Mouth Motion 2b Once again, just partially blocked. I'll delete the older versions tomorrow. I was just about to do a screen capture of my face rig when I noticed that most of the bones are sitting too low in the face. I guess I forgot to move them after adjusting the mesh. Oh, well. It's a learning game. I will test again and see what happens. Logic tells me that moving the bones up will only have made the problem worse. I'm going to try the pose method soon but first I want to check that the mouth corners are tracking correctly by videoing some extreme poses and tracking them without any filtering. -------------------- Edit: I just moved the bones up and then scrubbed through to the end of the choreography and it all looks much the same.

Here is an example of the previous test but with the Zign Track update to fix the rotation of those bones: Magic Mouth Motion 2 It doesn't look all that different to me and the mouth does something strange in the last few seconds. It is possibly a combination of me not getting the bones positioned correctly and bad miming. I really should finish this model and get the weighting done too. No real animation here. Just a few rough poses at the beginning.

Cool! --------- Edit: I haven't had a chance to play with the new pose feature yet but I think I understand the concept better now and I think it's great. This will enable a single action to drive a wide variety of different faces, human or otherwise.

Hiding the underlying geometry won't help in the long run. It may help you complete a difficult shot but as it is still there it can still snag the cloth. I haven't used cloth for ages as I found it was taking far too long to find the perfect settings every time. I don't know if you have done this yet but if you try to ensure that the cloth and the legs have geometry that is closely aligned there should be less chance that a cloth CP will penetrate the legs geometry. Once a CP gets caught inside the legs it is likely to get stuck there and gradually pull the rest of the cloth inside.

Michel, your animation is superb and oh, so true. I agree that the end would look better if the jerk was exaggerated a bit more. The version with the sound doesn't work for me either. I get the following error message: The movie file "chiffchaff_w.wav" cannot be found. Without this file the movie cannot play properly.

I exported this as an action but I had used the wrong name for the head bone so there is no head motion with this one. Well, I'm going to let Luuk answer all the technical questions because I don't have a clue. I'm just a layman testing this out to make it as fool proof as possible. With animation we are used to seeing facial expressions really exaggerated and this recent example has no exaggeration at all. On top of that Zign Track, being a single camera tracker, does not track forward and backward motion so the shape of the mouth is not correct for sounds that require pursing of the lips. This, as Luuk has explained, can be corrected by using the new pose driving method or by adding the motion by hand after exporting. I haven't done any of that yet, this is just rough and raw output, but I would like to try the pose method to see how well that works.

Just another test for those interested in seeing output from Zign Track: (Video removed. Please see updated example instead). It is time that I put some animation together with the mocap stuff. Maybe next week.

Beautiful! I love the proportions.

Do a Google search for "Eadweard Muybridge" and you should find some old movie footage to use as a reference.

Just doing single pass, shaded renders will speed things up significantly. Save all the final rendering until you have the motion and composition the way that you want it and then you can turn everything on and do your final rendering while you sleep.

I thought that the weathering feature was dropped ages ago. I seem to recall that it was causing problems for a lot of people back then. What version of A:M are you using?

Oops! The cat's out of the bag now! Droevig, Luuk!

Luuk has produced quite a substantial update to Zign Track which some of us are testing at the moment. Export in Zign Track 1.2 has been extended to include the following: Export as BVH. Same as previous versions. Export as A:M Action. This is awesome as it removes the need to use the BVH files completely and, so long as you export using the same bone names as your rig, the action can just be dropped onto your character. It avoids all those BVH containers that clutter up the PWS and also allows you to edit the motion like any other action. This is a great improvement, in my opinion, and will make the whole process much more straight forward for everyone. No baking needed! Export poses. I haven't played with this much yet but I can see that it could be quite useful and fun. Acting out the extreme poses of each facial feature and capturing them as poses. So much to play with! Here is my first test with Zign Track 1.2: I think that the rotation of the bones in the BVH rig has changed and that confused me at first. Once I read Luuk's instructions and rotated all my rig's face bones to the correct positions everything came together nicely. There is still something going wrong with the top lip but I am sure that I will get it ironed out eventually. Great work, Luuk! Thanks!

This all looks great! Looking forward to the gig.

I don't know about TSM1 or A:M15 but TSM2 definitely works with A:M 14. As far as I know TSM2 works with A:M 15 too.

jzawacki, that is a cute series and all achievable with A:M, (if you have the time and the patience and the manpower... and the skill...and the script...and means to survive...and, and, and). Matt, I love the light saber touch. It turns him into a hero in a Hash shell. Robert, I prefer the second tortoise too but there are lots of things that just look too awkward. His extended shoulders are neccesary to give his arms clearance but look wrong. There is a similar problem with the legs. I moved on to a quadruped tortoise after this guy but haven't modelled him yet. Nancy, a little stretching of the shell would probably be okay but originally I was playing around with having the shell form shorts and vest and it just requires too much distortion or restricting the leg movement to avoid the distortion. I wanted his limbs to be very articulated. Oh, yes. Be careful what you ask for, Jirard! I have a ton of test material!

Looking good, Jirard! I am slightly concerned that the characters with legs that taper out at the bottom will be very restricted when it comes to animating but, like I said before, it depends on what you intend to do with them.

Another point to note is that hair can be difficult to groom on 5 point patches so if you can get away with using 4 point patches do so. Probably not an issue in this case though.

Really cold! The best snow effect that I have seen in A:M.

Thanks, guys! These models were never finished. The rigging needs to be finished, everything needs weighting and a new set of textures need to be painted. I decided that I didn't like the design of the tortoise and started sketching out some new ideas but then abandoned the project. jzawacki, thanks for the link. I don't know those characters but I'm sure that I have seen that little duck popping up all over the place. Floyd looks much cuter than my tortoise model. I was going to push him more towards a zaney look than cute because he is a bit of an eccentric. This was another look but it was too dino-like: Having a stretchy shell just wasn't going to work well with textures. There were alot of other little furry creatures that needed to be modelled too and I spent far too long trying to get Hare's fur to look right. I never quite got there.

It might be worth playing around with Newton Physics. If you have an assortment of low patch objects on, or below, the ground plane you could have some hidden object collide with them at the right time or use the aircraft itself to set them in motion. The objects could just be given the same decal that you use for the ground plane or you could get more adventurous and add more detail.

Back at the last mascot contest I started to work on a couple of characters that I intended to turn into a very short short. I did a number of animated tests before deciding to scrap one of the characters and start again. As I was sorting through some folders today I came across some of these old tests and I realised that this stuff might never see the light of day again so I decided to post a sample here incase anyone is interested. and some pre-race warmup:

Another wonderful piece, Stian! I agree that if you were to fix the few problems that you mentioned that this would be pretty believable. Maybe you could also show the landing gear collapsing and some earth and grass being thrown into the air. The biggest spoilers for me are the "blocky" smoke and the short landing. Very promising though!

It sounds to me like you are just starting out so I would suggest that you do all the exercises in "The Art of Animation:Master" first, which will answer many of the questions that are going through your head at the moment. You need to learn about modelling with splines, rigging and animating. Not something that can be answered with a few sentences. Having said that, I will have a go: A bone can be represented by a simple cylinder so draw a circular spline ring, select the CPs and press "E" to extrude it a few times. (Use the cursor keys to move it). Then adjust the control points to give it a better bone shape and stitch up the ends of the cylinder. There you have a basic bone shape which you can now add textures to by using decals or materials, if you wish. Animating the dog is a matter of understanding the rig that you have in your dog model. If you are refering to a model that comes on the Extras CD/DVD then it probably already has a rig in it so just start a new action for that model and play around with the rig on frame 0 until you understand how to pose the dog model. Move to another frame, repose the dog and then scrub through those frames to see the dog move. Repeat the process on further frames until you get a feel for the process. See Spot. See Spot jump. See Spot fly.