luckbat

You'll understand once you get more experienced with A:M. http://www.eggprops.com/cart.php?target=pr...category_id=256

Uh-oh. You're supposed to assign CPs to the bones before you run the TSM rigger, not after. Otherwise all your CPs will be assigned to the wrong bones. Check out the video: http://lib1.store.vip.sc5.yahoo.com/lib/ra...pes/TSM2-01.mov

Man, that's gonna give me nightmares.

What does "AW" stand for?

Great work. As others have pointed out, the head area is sort of dark, but that's easy to fix. To me, it seems to me like her quadriceps are a little... well, shriveled. I'd give them a bit more fullness, especially since biker clothes usually have a bit of padding to them.

But that's just the thing. Muscle motion is calculated relative to the CPs' default position in the model. So, if you have a pair of eyes that blink, and you scale them up and move them farther apart, the blink pose should still function pretty much as it did before. Even if you change the shape of the eye, the blink movement will still be preserved, although you'll probably have to shift some of the eyelid CPs. There's always tweaking to be done, but like I said, it sure beats building everything from scratch.

Well, it does save time. The model on the left took me about three and a half months. The model on the right, which uses the same mesh (with a few minor changes), took about 48 hours. Obviously, I'll need to scale the skeleton to match, but that's still a lot of time saved. Plus, I won't have to redo all the facial poses from scratch...

Okay, I'm officially sick of working on this bathroom. I've spent seven straight days on this. The fire extinguisher took me way longer than it was supposed to, especially considering it may never even show up on camera, depending on how I end up storyboarding this scene. The last remaining step is decaling--handwritten signs, dirt & grime, detailing. But not tonight. I need a break. I'm gonna switch to doing costume designs for a little while; hopefully that'll recharge the ol' batteries. Purely out of boredom, I rendered this one toon-style. It amused me.

Lots of advice in this thread, but if I had to pick a theme, that theme would be: grout. You people have very strong opinions about grout. Apparently my just-make-the-grout-black strategy failed to satisfy you. You demanded more, higher-quality grout. Accordingly, I've revamped the tile textures with enhanced grout F/X. I hope you're happy. That may be, but geometry comes first. I'll figure out ways to dirty it up once all the props are in place. I'm familiar with that type of stall, but as I said previously I'm deliberately going with a heavier, "retro" look for stylistic purposes. Also, the type of stall you describe typically runs from floor to ceiling, which would interfere with the sunbeams. Good point about the floor grout. I've blackened it. I'll consider the graffiti, but this is a police station bathroom, so I imagine vandalism would be at a minimum. If Rodney knows different, I trust he'll weigh in.

What are you doing? Don't let a tribble in here! They'll fill up the forum within hours! They're born pregnant, you know.

Finished the trash bin and toilets. Technically, I suppose you'd also want to have toilet paper while you're in there, but the camera's never going to be pointed in that direction, so you'll never see into the stalls anyway. (In film-school-ese: The stalls are on the other side of the camera axis.) The trash bin, on the other hand, is right next to the window where the main character enters the scene, so I had to fuss with the garbage bag a little to get it to look passable (no materials, just splines). I think I'll mount a fire extinguisher on the wall near the trash bin, and then I can finally put up some posters--which is gonna be a breeze after all the time it took me to model all those props. Man, that's one grim-looking bathroom.

Minor update. This time I added mirrors over the sinks, re-did the moulding where the walls meet the floor, and added subtle color variations to the tiles. I couldn't really dirty up the grout since it's already black--I tried making it lighter, but it added too much visual noise to the image. Since the set is designed to act as a backdrop for toon-rendered characters, too much realism can actually be a bad thing. Still to come: the stall toilets, a garbage can, and maybe a fire extinguisher on the wall somewhere. Plus, assorted posters and signs. This could take a while...

Legs look great! There's some stride-length slippage, but you've got the rhythm down. Strangely, the "jerk" his body makes whenever his right foot hits the ground seems to be absent when the left foot does the same. Perhaps this is due to the incomplete mirroring you mentioned. The arms seem to be wiggling around like fish out of water, though. Try this: Leave the elbows (mostly) locked in position. Instead, have the arms swing from the shoulders. You've come a long way since the first version! Looking forward to #3...

Oh yes indeed. Whenever you enter a comment, on the row of buttons above the text-entry box, you'll see one that says "http://" on it. If you hit that, you'll be able to enter a link URL, followed by the text you want associated with the link.

I considered using a cinderblock texture, but it didn't look "bathroomy" enough, so I went with brick-like tiles instead. A little unconventional perhaps, but it's meant to fit with the character design--big and blocky, with drab, de-saturated colors. I based the stalls (loosely) on this stock photo:

Aaaaand from the other side:

Well, you wouldn't be as impressed if you knew how many hours it took me to light it. Geometry-wise, though, except for the urinals and sinks, the whole thing's just a bunch of rectangles. The trick is to keep all your textures within the same color family--that's the only thing keeping this bathroom from looking like a high-schooler's Unreal Tournament mod. Wouldn't it? I'll consider doing one if any of the radiosity masters can help me crunch the numbers. Thanks, Colin. Anyone know of a good dirt-map tutorial?

The foot control, but why don't you just try it? I'm not trying to be rude, it's just that going in and yanking stuff around to see what happens is the best way to learn how it all fits together. If you treat your CPs like they're fragile glass unicorns, it'll take you forever. Trust me, I speak from experience. Try this workflow: Before you do something that you're not sure of, save your project, then jump in and start changing stuff. If it works, great. If not, close the file without saving, open it up and try something else.

If they're not connected physically, you could try connecting them visually using a more dramatic camera angle...

I was about to say, "Don't set your entire curves to linear, or you'll wind up with really robotic movement--" ...And then I caught myself. Truthfully, though, you'll probably want your interpolations to be a mixture of 'spline' and 'zero-slope' whenever you do a walk cycle, with the occasional 'linear' whenever a foot hits the ground. Trial-and-error is the best way to develop an intuitive sense of what impact each curve shape is going to have on its corresponding limb. By the way, I highly recommend playing with the BioMotionLab's customizable Walker demo: http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html I would not have been able to complete my first walk cycle without it.

Building a bathroom for a short animation piece. Still plenty of work to do--the stalls don't even have toilets in them yet, among other things. Not really going for photorealism here; I'll be blurring and re-touching the finished render in Photoshop to create a "painted" backdrop for my toon characters.

Incredible! But are you sure it isn't a Star Trek fan film? He looks just like Jean-Luc Picard!

Just not for very long.

I love the purple Krull-looking one. But how do you throw it without slicing open your own hand?

I don't mind sharing the opening episode. I finished the screenplay a year ago; it's basically done. I agree it's a massive project. It's feature length--the script is 94 pages long. To be frank, I wouldn't even consider doing the piece in its entirety unless I had outside funding. I think the first episode could be accomplished as a collaborative effort--only three speaking parts/ten locations--but I'm not putting any energy into that until I complete the scene (from chapter 2) that I'm working on now. Thanks for the encouragement...