gra4mac
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Posts posted by gra4mac
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It's late and I'm tired so I'll get to the point. I'm trying to make this bug character that has an expressive face yet is still recognizable as a ground beetle. I made the face lighter so the facial features, and especially the mouth, were visible. I got the idea from studying A Bug's Life. Overall, I'm hapy with the results, but I would love some suggestions on how to make the face more expressive. I think I should make the mouth bigger, but should it have eyelids that blink and eyebrows? Any other comments or suggestions would be great.
Here is the link: bug test
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I didn't know you could make hooks, on a PC, by dragging with the LMB and clicking the
. That sounds handy. I'm new to using A:M on PCs after several years on the Mac. The technique I use is what I tried after using the Mac where you end a spline with the esc key and hook or attach with the ~ key. -
To make a hook, you need to make a CP near where you want to hook, LMB. Then end the spline,
. Then select the CP, hold it over the spline to hook to and hit the ~ button. -
I don't know why, but the actions from the CD don't have the repeat option. I don't know if there is a way to get the repeat to show. If you create them yourself they do have a repeat.
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Hi Steve392, to get yor usuall render options, you need to check the advanced box. As for crashing, I don't know. Maybe try trashing the preffs file if you on a Mac, or un-install and re-intall if on a PC. Good luck.
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What about turning on the pose in an action and then using Create Pose from there. I have'nt done this, but I assume you get a choice of On/Off or Percentage Pose.
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Thanks for confirming that this works ZachBG. I feel so pleased with my self for figuring it out. I need to tell somone else. Hay Mom! guess what I figured out... No not that kind of dope. Never mind.
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I found I got a satisfactory range of mouth movemant. I am not doing photoreal stuff so close is good enough. I don't think you could lip read it. I hope to have a clip to show later today. I did a quick render test and the 3 pose method rendered about 15% faster than the PB phoneme version.
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Hi. I'm working on a lip sync segment and I have a question on how others do the syncing. I stared with 3 +/- mouth poses, smile/frown, open/closed, and ooo/aaa, then used these to make the 9 Preston Blaire phonemes. After creating the dope sheet, I found it took a lot of tweeking to get it looking good and I got realy confused trying to adjust all the channels. What I ended up doing is not using a dope sheet and just animating to the sound track using the 3 basic mouth poses. This worked better and was much faster; lesson learned.
I am just wondering how others do their lip syncing.
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Assuming that you want to enlarge it when it gets printed, you want to render as big as possible. A:M always renders at 72 dpi, so to get a decent 8x10 print you need to print at least 150 DPI (150 x 8") x (150x 10"), or 1200 x 1500 pixels in A:M. To get a really good print, you might want to go up to 300 DPI. A:M has some size restriction on rendering, but I don't know what they are. There is a program called Eggslice that allows you to print to any size, memory allowing, by rendering your image in sections and assembling them. As for the file type, TGA should be fine, but check with the print shop to see what they like. I hope this helps.
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Hi Mike. I know how you feel. I made the move from Mac to PC about a month ago, and A:M runs not only faster, because it's a faster machine, but there are subtle differences on the PC that I really like. As for tips running A:M on a PC, you might find this page interesting.
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Looks like a neat project. The only adice I have about the cape is to consider not using cloth. I have tried several times to get cloth to work as a cape and never suceeded. The advice I got at the time was to animate by hand. Maybe dynamic constraints could do it, but you would need v10.5 for that. Good luck.
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It looks like something ShaunF could do in A:M.
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The menus along the top of the action window are "File, Edit, Project, View, Action, Tools, Window, Help". Under the Action menu ther is "Clear, Create Pose, Bake". I can't take a screen shot with the menu down on my Mac, and I don't know how to take a screen shot on my PC, so this is the best I can do. Version 10.5r, but I think it has been there since v 9 at least.
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If you search on the list archives you will find some info, but generally, you need to assign the distort cage to a model bone, I'm not sure that the root bone will do I think you need to put at least one bone in your model. Once you have the distort attached to the model, you can distort the cage, and the model, with out changing the model geometry.
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Once you have the action the the way you want, click on the Action menu then hit "Create Pose". To test it, clear the action and open the pose sliders.
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Nice work, reminds me of Teragen.
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Hi Adam. A rotoscope is an image, or video, placed in the background that can be used as a guide for modelling or animating. For modelling it is a great tool. As far as I know, most people use rotos to model from. The roto image can be your own drawing of a character or object, or a photo, blueprint, etc. Using a video rotoscope for animating too is the same idea. I've never done this, I don't have a video camera, but I wouldn't hesitate to. I am not nearly a good enough animater to be snobbish about it. I feel that any useful tool is good. Some animaters feel that using video rotoscopes is beneath them. Jeff Lew says that he used to use video rotos, but now is good enough not to need them. They can be limiting if you depend on them. That's me .02$
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Thanks for the suggestion filipmun.
"I have a question, how to move the bones togather if I have relocated the model?
Thanks."
I'm not sure what you meaqn by relocating the model. The bones will stay with the model if you import it, but if you copy and paste all you get is the geometry.
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Good news William. Is this your first book, and do you get 5 copies for your mother?
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Thanks for the help guys. I did send the project to support, but they could not repeat my problem. I got a list of suggestions to make A:M run smoothy from another user, offline, so I will use them in my next project. Now I have to see if I can recover my last months work.
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Thanks William, I'll give it a try.
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I started this short animation on the Mac, then put it on a PC. Everything was going great for a while, but the more I worked on it, the more often I suddenly saw the desktop. I lost a cho after I baked all the actions. After baking, there were a lot of small screwups in the animation and the next time I tried to load it, I got an invalid file type error. Now, I can hardly work on the project since I see the desktop so much; especially when scrubing the animation.
I'm assuimg the project is lost and I have to start over
, but if anyone has a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. Also, is there a way to set the memory allocation for A:M on the PC? It's easy to do on the Mac, but I don't se anything in the A:M properties window. In general, I preffer using A:M on the PC, I really hope this project isn't typical.Stats: A:M V 10.5r, on a Toshiba P20, 3.2 GHz P4, 512 meg ram, Nvidia Gforce FX card with 64 meg DDR memory, OS is XP home.
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Hi. I have a character appearing to walk down an alley. The alley image is a flat decal behind. I want to render the character's shadow either in the final render, or so it can be comped in later. I have a patch of ground under her that travels with her as she walks. I did this because she changes scale and doesn't fallow a linear route. I have tried to render the shadow using the shadow buffer, but I must be missing something. I would really appreciate any suggestions.
I use V 10.5.
Another bug walk and lip sync
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
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Thanks for the feedback Saun and Ken. I will try a larger and more cartoony/human head. In A Bug's Life they did have eyebrows and they blinked too, I think. They did a good job of characterizing the bugs, but then they have had a lot of practice. I would probably have an easier task if I used a more characteristic bug like an ant or ladybug, and one that wasn't black, although, I'd love to get James Earl Jones to do the voice, if he wasn't dead. However, I chose the Ground Beetle because it's big and common around here, and the point of this is to show benificial bugs, like ground beetles and ladybugs, as good guys in the garden. Hmm, maybe a western theme, or not.