luckbat

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cromulent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromulent

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Thanks. At the moment I've got him grabbing her right wrist with his right hand, yanking forward, shoving his left hand against her back, and twisting her right arm into an armlock.

Tapering = making one end of a cylinder narrower than the other end. You know, like a carrot.

Original design, but at the moment it looks too geometric--a lot of plain cylinders and simple polygonal boxes. Would you consider adding some tapering and beveling?

Also, be sure to desaturate your colors a little, as CGI colors tend to be quite a bit more saturated than colors found in the real world. I much prefer the red one. My dictionary doesn't list "camillian" incidentally--did you mean "vermillion?"

Also, make sure you're saving your Illustrator file in Illustrator 8 format. The plugin can't read newer formats.

I love seeing stuff like this. Hope there's a lot more to come.

I won't have much to show in the next update, I'm afraid, due to a hectic month that included a trip to San Francisco, a series of unsuccessful job interviews, and an in-progress move to a new apartment in Brooklyn. Ah, what the hell. I'll just upload what I've got, since you asked. It's about eight more seconds of shot 11. Hmm. No attachments on the new forums? What's that about? Whatever. Here's a link instead: Shot 11 (16 seconds)

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We're here to help. If you run into trouble with TSM2, just holler.

Basically, TSM2 gives you a generic rig that you fit to your model. It doesn't do fan bones, or CP weighting, or any of the other stuff that modelers need to do to customize a rig to their individual joints. What it does do is create a complex network of invisible interlocking bones that force the visible control bones to behave themselves as you move them around. It also gives you an FK/IK slider for the hands and feet, which I've used countless times (well, for the hands, anyway). Basically, the advantage of TSM2 is that you don't have to personally create the dozens and dozens of constraints and intermediate bones required by a rig--Raf Anzovin has pre-created them for you. My TSM2-rigged models bend and pose elegantly with a minimum of effort; they react to adjustments in ways that I expect them to. I'm sure I could build a decent rig on my own, given enough time, but just like not everyone feels the need to personally assemble their own PC, not everyone needs to personally assemble their own A:M rig. For those people, TSM2 is a lifesaver.

Have you watched the rigging video? http://lib1.store.vip.sc5.yahoo.com/lib/ra...pes/TSM2-01.mov

Yes it is and yes it does. Next question.

Would you consider doing a "mechanical modeling" tutorial? It's something a lot of Hashers struggle with, and I think your techniques would be very well received.

Mesmerizing. So nice to see a clip where it all comes together. Love the secondary motion on the bracelets--your perfectionism knows no bounds. I can't believe you did all that fabric motion without SimCloth! The woman's performance is just lovely. So nice to see naturalistic acting in 3d animation. You must've slaved over it. It was well worth it. One thought about the framing--are you disregarding the TV safe area? Because if not, both characters are looking a little scrunched over into their respective sides of the frame. Even ignoring the TV safe area, the woman seems a bit overpowered by all the movement in the room, especially since the camera begins to edge her out of the frame towards the end of the clip. Is the windiness a story element? The set design, of course, is top-notch. Always a joy to visit this little dollhouse world you've created.

Hi Dearmad! Does this mean you're back?

That's pretty spectacular. It's nice to see A:M used for such slick visuals. I look forward to seeing more.

But you're giving me animation advice. My experience in that field is zilch.

Yes I have. Lango's mainly talking about inertia and voluntary vs. involuntary movement, which I agree with 100 percent. But I'm still not clear on what Katt is suggesting that I change.

Oh, that. He's delivering a (fairly dismissive) line of dialog at that moment. The animation's still a bit rough there, because I was struggling with positioning his head so that it would look correct in both camera angles. Yeah, let's just say wrists aren't exactly my strong suit. The problem is, I'm just trying to convey her hand going from "pointing" to "limp," but when I rotate the wrist much farther, it tends to look like she's catching an invisible fly. I think I need to spend more time studying this one in front of a mirror. Not... really. Could you give me an example? No prob: Ebon animatic: the first 70 seconds

Yeah, I see what you're saying. The pose slider makes her hood retract like the canopy of a convertible. I originally thought she might be able to grab the top and pull back, but her giant cartoony head makes that motion look unnatural. Frame-by-frame muscle-mode animation is probably overkill, but I think I've figured out a way to alter the pose slider to make the hood pull-back a little less shell-shaped. I'll add this one to my list of tweaks for the second pass. Hmm. You may be onto something there. Now that I look over this thread, it does seem like I spend an awful lot of time re-rigging and rendering. The cloak, in particular, has caused me no end of troubles. Could my own pipeline be what's really bogging me down? I'm going to have to look into this. Thanks for the insight, Alonso.

Thanks, vf124, I appreciate that. When I complain about my rate of production, it's not so much that I'm fishing for sympathy. I'm just venting my frustration at watching my dreams slip away. My goal in doing this 2-minute piece was to teach myself the software (and some of the principles of animation) so I could produce a more elaborate 8-9 minute short using the same characters. I've already written the script for that. If I could get my rate to about 3 seconds of finished animation per day, then I could probably put out a 9-minute short with about six months of dedicated work. But at 1 second per day, that same short would take a year and a half, working 7 days a week on top of my day job. And I just don't think I can sustain that. So, that's the reason I bring up "the ratio" so often. It hangs over my every waking moment. If I can't beat it, I'm more or less going to have to throw in the towel.

That's a shame. You missed out on some amazing design work. Er... no pun intended. http://www.mysterium.ch/myst/myst_pictures_e.html

Dude, that's creepy.