luckbat

It depends on where the camera is. Behind the characters? High up looking down? On the opposite side of the foot?

And now that I'm posting again, let's address C-grid's crits: It starts with the taps, hands and the bubble, my advise: split the eye-attraction(hands/bubble) moment over time, or use field of depth(blur). Agreed. I've been using more and more DOF as I work my way through the shots, and I will probably recreate that opening shot with a strong DOF effect, though probably not a rack-focus. Those are cheesy. When the female-character is coming out of the window, there's a strange square on the right of her... That's a compositing glitch. When I do the final layering, I won't be taking shortcuts like I've been doing. ...her feet have no shadow, even later on, when she is walking where the floor is really dark.... I'm not worrying about the shadows too much for these animatics, but I'll make sure the characters cast proper shadows once I do a lighting pass. I already had to render some extra shadows for Monk in shot 12 to better show his spatial positioning. In the 35th sec. she stops walking but it's too abrupt, put some ease in it. That was a bug in A:M v.11.1 that prevented certain kinds of blended actions. Now that it's fixed in v12, I'll be able to ease it out appropriately the next time I revisit this shot. ...if there were this much droplets on the floor, we certainly should see some drops on the hand on a close-up. Pending. This was touched on briefly here: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=126796 ...she is pointing with her finger, although her body moves, her finger has totally no movement... Yeah, that's IK for you. That whole wrist flip segment has never looked natural. I have an idea of how to improve it, though, so when I do a second pass on that shot, I'll probably switch it back to FK. ...the umbrella's on her back aren't moving itself. When I built that walk cycle, I didn't have separate bones just for the umbrellas. I have since added these, so when I get around to re-doing the walk cycle, I'll add a bit of 'brella sway.

Ebon's back, folks. And this time, it's personal. For the last three months, I've been working on the rig to end all rigs: a complex web of interlocking bones capable of deforming my character's cloak into any conceivable position, yet still appearing clothlike while in motion. Two weeks ago, that rig became a reality. It took 212 bones, hundreds of constraints, and an eternity of trial and error, but I did it. Yeah, that's right. I said 212 bones. As rigs go, it's far from perfect, but it gets the job done: No SimCloth. No dynamic constraints. Nothing but Aim At and Orient Like. So now, at long last, it's back to animating. I wish I had more to show than yet another revision of shot 12, but it had to be done, and I really learned a lot while I was putting this together. If you compare it to my first attempt, I think you'll agree that the timing is much better. Another thing I'd been eagerly awaiting was the opportunity to cut shot 12 into the rest of the animatic, which, since it required me to re-keyframe shot 11 using the new cloak rig, was no small undertaking. I had to export the choreographies from shot 12 as actions, then blend them into the end of shot 11 so that the movements would match. But I think it works quite well. What do you think? Download animatic of shots 1-12 (9.2MB, 82 seconds, no sound)

If I needed counter-intuitive transparency like that, I'd composite the layers in a compositing program, so I could assign different behaviors to the luminance and color channels.

You can animate them walking however you like.

I don't see how that's possible. If a green object is 60% transparent, then anything behind it should be 40% green. Right?

"Flexible moving legs" is too vague. The answer's almost certainly, "Sure, no problem," but... Flexible how? Moving how? These legs are pretty flexible: http://home.alltel.net/collinsfamily04/meatbugmapped.avi

Everything else. Greg Rostami rendered that, not me. My own machine is a dual-2.7Ghz.

Well, this image has 154,350 patches, and it was rendered on a 3GHz laptop at 1600x1200: http://www.hash.com/users/greg/Tractor_Abuf_S.jpg Render time: 82 seconds.

Yes, you'd just need to create an equivalent amount of fog in the tripod's alpha channel. That wouldn't be difficult.

Well, the helmet can be transparent if you like, but if you want the face to retain its color, like Ganthofer said, you might as well stack it on top of the helmet instead of beneath it.

The DivX codec isn't included with Quicktime. You have to install it separately. http://www.3ivx.com/

I added more explanation to my post above. Sorry for the confusion. The easiest way to do that is to model the trees in 3d, instead of using video footage of trees.

Can A:M animate convincing giant mechanical tripods? Yes. Can A:M be composited with live-action? Yes. Most definitely Yes. Not easily. It doesn't really matter what software you use. There's no way for your compositor to know how to decide what parts of the image go "in front of the model" and which ones go "behind the model." I mean, if the sky is flat blue like that, you could do a color key--that might work. Or a luminance key if the sky is pure white or pure black. Otherwise you'd need an advanced compositing tool like Combustion to separate the layers. But that's a rotoscoping and layering program, not an animation program. You might need both.

You've got to be kidding. Back in the v11 days, this forum used to be filled with threads from users unable to figure out how to composite their animations with live-action footage. Now it isn't. The problem really lies more with the default Quicktime compression setting. "Animation" supports alpha channels, but the only people who ever render directly to Quicktime are newbies. So it confuses them.

1. The number of splines in a model doesn't significantly affect its rendering time. 2. "Tut" is short for "tutorial."

I always respected DS9 for at least trying not to just be a carbon copy of TNG, but the uneven tone--attempting to mix "darker" with "wackier"--just didn't work for me. True, the Dominion War half of the series was a vast improvement over the first half, but it also forced the show to abandon nearly everything it had tried to establish at that point, switching from a station-based political/religious drama to a warship-based action series with bad-guy monsters. An improvement nevertheless, though.

The more patches you have visible, the slower the playback. One trick I use is to change the character models' default Chor display settings to "shaded" or "shaded wireframe," while the environment is set to "wireframe." Then, I hit the numpad '7' key to switch to Default View. The resulting playback is much faster than when you're in Shaded View. Us Mac users also get a playback speed boost when we hit "play," then Alt-Tab to the Finder while the animation is still playing. Remember: if your model is complex enough to make your GPU chug, you should probably be animating using proxies.

It's the graphics card. Processor and RAM affect rendering speed; GPU/VRAM affect realtime playback speed. Get a 128MB card if you can.

It's a good start, but whenever any character lifts a leg off the ground, the rest of the body has to lean the other direction to stay balanced. Hopefully your rig is equipped for that kind of shifting around.

Here's the quick-summary version: 1. No, A:M can't cut from one camera to another within a single render. 2. But, you can animate the camera, so if you want it to jump from one position to another in mid-animation, just move the camera. (If you set the camera's Interpolation to "Hold," it will teleport from place to place instead of travelling.) 3. You switch between camera views by hitting '1' on your numpad. 4. A:M can also act as a simple video editor, so if you want you can render the animation from multiple camera POVs and cut them together in A:M. 5. VirtualDub is free.

You started a render without knowing the settings you used? It could have taken days! The fastest render preset is "RealTime," but unfortunately an nVidia hardware bug prevents that setting from working on Powerbooks. The next-fastest preset is "Preview." It'll look a little blocky, though.

He means, you can create an account on A:M Reports and give yourself the same username as you use on the forums. You still have to create an account, though.

Select the points of the curve that you want to change, and right-click their bounding box. Change their Interpolation Method from "Spline" to "Zero Slope."

Oh, a word of advice: make sure your story passes the Fantasy Novelist's Exam. I can't stress this enough.