heyvern

Maybe you could rig a chain of bones for the "tube". Then use cloth for a single spline. Use a path constraint on the bones pointing to the cloth spline. Use incremental settings for the enforcement of each constraint so the tube bone chain is spread out evenly along the cloth spline. Now the tube will act alike a flexible cable but maintain stiffness so it won't collapse. Or maybe changing the collision distance on just a cloth tube will keep it "stiff"... a couple of things to try. -vern

Rodney once again you inspire me. I am thinking maybe we change how we think of "2D" model creation. It wouldn't need to be "perfect". A shape made up of several geometric shapes "stacked" would be just one shape visually. Even using bunches and bunches of 5pt patches could cut down considerably on the patch count. Hooks are a bonus too. Using hooks works perfectly for this technique. The ambiance setting can help however the beauty of using AM for this technique is having access to the same shading and lighting features. Ambiance could blow out some of those crease artifacts but limit some of the rendering options. -vern

That's why I thought this "2D" fill feature would be so cool for AM. With that flash export AM could become a kick arse SWF animation production tool. I mean real vector Flash not VIDEO Flash (someone always chimes in with "But I put AM renders in FLV files all the time!? ). Some people are "scared" of 3D, it would be cool for AM to just stick in this feature to expand their potential customer base.... I say "stick in" which is probably what Martin is mumbling to himself he will do to me for saying this. They wouldn't have to spend any effort to support it in the traditional sense. It would just be another patch option. Flash now has bones... but they stink something awful. Imagine AM bones warping 2D shapes. I see it in my head... I can imagine it... there I go daydreaming again. This is one of my all time favorite ideas for AM though. I would use it a lot more with my current work. Like ten times more. -vern

I made a feature request to Martin a few times for a "flat" fill technique for closed splines. Instead of requiring "legal patches" for 2D stuff like this you could fill any closed spline shape. My pitch to him was a very limited "patch" creation tool, just like the 5 point patch tool. This would only work for completely "flat" 2d meshes. You could select a completely flat closed spline and "fill" it. It would not work if the splines were "bent" into 3D shapes. It would be like "Illustrator" in A:M. I think this one simple feature could turn AM into a kick arse 2D animation program. With all the bones and poses and actions available you could pump out amazing cell style animations. Anyway... I can only dream. -vern

There are a couple of samples of this technique done in two different ways. The first way I did it was to just use images exported from Illustrator as "cookie cut" image decals on very low patch grids. The second way was what you are doing, importing Illustrator and animating the mesh with bones. You have to sort of look for it in this video. Near the beginning are the two very "toon" characters. The first one was done using the image cookie cut technique. Right after that is the guy talking, that one uses the "mesh" AI import technique. I think there is another example at the very end. You can sort of tell which is which by the interpolation. The "smooth" interpolation of the movements is the mesh version. The "step" interpolation is the image version. I used an image sequence for the mouth and face shapes. I liked the mesh technique but it has some limitations. It is very hard to rig the shapes. The mesh has to create a filled shape so you have to have points in the correct locations to avoid creasing but also to allow for proper movement. The image cookie cut technique is very good as well and totally avoids worrying about where the cps are on the mesh since all the shapes are just simple grid meshes. http://www.vernsworld.com/Siggraph_15.mp4 -vern

A 35mm print and a digital image are apples and oranges. They have nothing in common really. A 35mm film image is made up of grains of color from a chemical process. A digital image is made from individual pixels. They aren't comparable. A badly shot 35mm film image, shot on slow film with a cheap camera is going to look like crap next to a digital photo shot on a 3 megapixel high quality camera with high quality lenses, shot in focus on a tripod. You can't really compare film to digital. It's going to depend on the print output device, the type of image. For instance a very dark image with a small dynamic range might not print as well on one type of printer. An image with a balanced range of darks and lights would get a different result. Yes, 35mm default render set up in AM should make a good print at 5' x 3'. Keep in mind it depends on the print device. You could use a cheap crappy printer and it looks bad, or you could print on a very expensive high resolution ink jet on archival acid free museum quality paper in 6 colors. They have ink jets with 6 colors, usually they have an extra "red" ink and an extra "blue" ink to match the quality and vibrancy of film prints. Adding those extra colors gets closer to the color gamut of film prints. At the size you want to print the resolution is not as important as you might think. You could actually render smaller and scale up without loss of quality. No one will look at a print that size from 6 inches away to see if there are dots or pixelation. At that size you would be standing far enough back that no one could tell if it was a digital image or a print from a 35mm film camera printed on photographic paper. You want the best quality print, spend the effort on the print PROCESS. Don't worry as much about the resolution. You could skimp on resolution and still get a better print than having more resolution with a crap printing process (don't skimp too much though. ) Years ago when working in digital 4 and 6 color printing I had to produce an extremely high resolution image for a brand new high end offset press. It used 6 colors at 600lpi. NOT DPI... LPI, lines per inch. That was HUGE at the time and required much higher resolution for the images being printed. The final image required by the "usual" standards would have been more than 1gb. This was like probably more than 10 years ago. There was no way to transport a 1gb image back then... there were no DVDs, no huge hard drives. I dropped the image size or resolution by 50%. No one noticed a bit of difference. Image was sharp and clear. This was a 6 color offset print process that used an extra "red" and "cyan" inks to create richer colors that had a much larger color gamut than traditional 4 color offset printing. EDIT: We use to output digitally created images to 4 x 5 film. At the time many places couldn't handle the huge digital files so this was one way to go. You could I suppose out put your digital image directly to film then use that to get your prints... you see what I mean about comparing apples to oranges. What's the difference really between a high res digital image and a photograph shot on 35mm film? -vern

Vista blamed for "fogginess"? Makes perfect sense to me. -vern

Oh course Ken is the psychic genius who predicted fog... amazing. -vern

Looks like fog is set in the camera properties... the darker area at the bottom indicates that something is there showing through the fog. Still... hard to tell from the tiny screen shot. Any chance for a larger picture? Expand the camera properties so we can see those as well. p.s. If fog isn't activated in the camera settings it could be in the render settings which override the camera settings in the chor. -vern

If you want one image to cover an entire model you probably would want to "flatten" the model if it has surfaces that aren't visible when stamping. I don't think you can animate a decal position... couldn't last time I checked unless this is a new feature. There are other ways to animate an image moving over a surface. You could use an animated sequence. For example, create flat grid with the image, then animate it moving in whatever way you want, render that out as a sequence of images and import the sequence as the decal. Or you could use an environment map, a projection map material I think, and animate the position in the material. -vern

It should be "its" with no apostrophe. "its" is like "yours, his, hers, theirs, ours" etc. No apostrophe. -vern

Jupiter and Venus will align in the sky this evening... maybe there is a connection? Zip the project. Upload it here. We can look at it to see what happened. -vern

I congratulate you on your enthusiasm and the fine results of all the hard work. Great job. -------- On a side note, just a teeny tiny itsy bitsy little small complaint. Automatic playing of music when it is not expected on a web page can cause some folks to experience horrible terror attacks that give us the willies. Often the volume is set too high on our computers and if we don't expect music to suddenly start playing we jump out of our skins. Just a thought. I got home at 11 pm tonight. House is quiet. I'm kind of sleepy. I had the volume way up from doing something hours previously... click on the link... casually looking at the pictures when... GOOD GOD IN HEAVEN AAAAHHHGGGG! I have never been that frightened by holiday music before. -vern

Not enough info. From that description it literally could be an infinite number of possibilities... endless. Make this a guide for the future. The more information provided the more helpful we can be. If it happened AFTER changing settings on something, change it back or revert to an older version of the project to see what might have caused it. -vern

Dagnabbit! I missed the whole thing. I thought this thread was one of the... uh... well.. ToAM exorcises. This was great! I loved the music. Reminded me of that old "Fractured Film" project I did here years ago... only... better... because you guys finished it... and... no copyrighted material. -vern

When dealing with things like Newton Physics it's actually a bit easier. I don't know if anyone has tried to apply that kind of thing to characters... i don't think the accuracy would be enough. You would have to have incredibly small collision radius amounts to give you the kind of "close up" detail needed. Plus it would be a pain doing simulations etc... sometimes doing it "the hard way" is the best way. -vern

bighop, I don't know exactly how they do it at soul cage but in general I don't think there is an easy short cut like a constraint for this. You have to just... make sure nothing passes through... doing it "by hand" so to speak. Rough out the motion then move things so they don't penetrate. Probably some muscle poses, or tweaking bone positions. In a scene like that it is a "one off" kind of situation. You wouldn't have that kind of thing happening all the time. I remember the commentary track for "Over the Hedge". The FX guys who handled hair were constantly having fits and trying to cut down on the number of "hugging" or touching scenes because of how incredibly difficult it was to animate the characters interacting with each other and all the hair. In that "old" 3D movie "Final Fantasy" there was one shot that took more time than anything else in the movie. they spent weeks on this one shot. It was the kissing scene. Two characters lock lips and embrace with a tracking camera move. A real tough shot. I remember hearing about how difficult that was due to parts of each character... uh... penetrating other parts. If however there IS some cool trick for this type of character interaction I don't know about... I too would like to know. -vern

That must be why I never married. Do you want to spend years working on the same animation or do a whole bunch of different animations? Didn't exactly work out exactly as planned... I haven't "done" a bunch of animations either. -vern

Plus, due to the web and youtube the new generation of viewers want shorter content. Short attention spans are the rule of the day. In a year or two you could produce 1 long animation... or... 50 short ones. Going to reach a broader audience with 50. -vern

Dang foreigners stealing all our jobs! That's the problem with the world today. All them foreign people talkin' funny. You want to steal our animation jobs? Learn English dangit. ;) Great work as usual guys. I love that rabbit. Reminds me of the movie "Harvey"... but with out the the drunk crazy guy... unless... Santa was drinking some nog. -vern

Using alpha instead of greenscreen is going to be way better quality. Greenscreen matting is always going to have at least a little bit of quality loss around the edges, plus it is a lot of extra work. Since you want to composite a rendering from AM anyway there is no need for greenscreen. In fact you could import footage of your "desk" or anything else directly into AM and just composite on that rather than using another application. Then you could add the shadows in the render and save a few steps. No need to render with an alpha channel at all. The whole thing renders out of AM. -vern

All over the house? Like... in pieces? Should I be worried? Sounds like an episode of "Fringe" or "Eleventh Hour". p.s. I had a weird idea... sort of like a "Myth busters" idea. We all get really really drunk and then... post on the A:M forum. On second thought, if we did that we might actually do something "all over dons house" or end up "all over dons house on the 23rd". -vern

Don't worry Mark... I... uh... don't have much to offer at these meetings other than boring web demos (I heard snoring at the last meeting. ) the occasional small project and a few funny stories. Did we have a meeting since I created the terminator model? I don't think I showed that off yet... still haven't finished the lower torso. But it should still be fun to look at all the details and get feed back on how to rig it. I am leaning towards the 2008 rig. Wow! New blood! Hey guys, don't give away too much of the initiation ceremony before the meeting. We don't want to scare him off. The last few new guys got scared off during the Blades Of Trust or Death® portion... it isn't nearly as dangerous as it sounds (the blindfold is now optional). Also, contrary to many rumors, we don't use real goats blood for the the pentagram and we aren't waterboarding anymore until the government decides if it's really legal or not. Bit of a gray area there. -vern

Sanctioned by Hash, like the 2001 rig was... I guess it was. All the models and actions on the CD used the same rig. It was like an "official" rig. Is this 2008 rig the one used in the movie (TWO, SO) projects? Or was the squetch rig? Rather than go off on some other tangent I would like to use what the hoi polloi use. I never had much luck with "less popular" or unsupported rigs. TSM is great but... yikes... it's no longer being developed.... it may just die at some future version. Good grief it's 2008 and the 2001 rig was the standard for a long long time. -vern

Read through the instructions.. it all makes sense to me. I have question. How would this rig be a benefit over say... any other rig like TSM or whatever? This is the "official" 2008 Rig? I would like to rig my Terminator model. I am bit... afraid of using TSM for that since it isn't really being supported any longer. I've always liked the 2001 rig in the past. Hope this is okay to post this question here. -vern