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ZachBG

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Everything posted by ZachBG

  1. Yoinks, that's pretty gruesome. His hands look strange to me. Are they supposed to be bare bone, or skin stretched over bone?
  2. Another slight update. Animation-wise, I tweaked the fall a bit, but more obviously, I added PARTICLES!! They cut out toward the end because my computer was estimating 48 hours to render 2 seconds, and I didn't want to waste that time on a test render. Enjoy... http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/GiantShaggyDown_v3.mov (Could this perhaps be the first part of an epic? Stay tuned!)
  3. Another version. Mostly worked on the helicopter, though I reworked Shaggy's fall a little bit, too. Something went weird with the shadows at the end. Don't know why. http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/GiantShaggyDown_v2.mov
  4. But that would only work with 2-D tracking (like when the camera is locked to a tripod), wouldn't it? Or am I missing something?
  5. I agree. That's what I'm working on now. Er, I mean, that's what I will be working on, once my TWO shot is done, of course!
  6. Oh yes, that'll be coming. I love me some particle F/X.
  7. And here's the latest animation. Probably the last update for a while, because if I don't get back to work on Tin Woodman Martin will kill me. Well, hurt me anyway. Comments on the animation are now heartily encouraged, though there's a bunch of stuff I know I want to fix anyway. http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/GiantShaggyDown.mov (1.7 MB, ~15 seconds)
  8. I have no idea how one would do it manually. I used SynthEyes. In a perfect situation, you just load a movie into SynthEyes, hit "Go," and export a Hash project. In reality it takes a bit more than that, especially for a hand-held shot like this one. You need to identify a few easy visual points in the film that you can follow throughout the scene (or at least through most of it). In this case, I chose the corner of the trash can, a point where the grass met the sidewalk, and a few light spots in the grass. After I told SynthEyes to track those points, and tweaked the tracking so the software didn't lose them, I ran the auto-tracker to add whatever points the computer could find on its own. Then I told the computer which point I wanted to be the origin, which points were on the floor, etc. and solved the camera matching. And that's basically all there is to it. With smoother shots, you don't even have to do the first step of manually tracking points. Then, you open the project in A:M, and animate away. Unfortunately, I can't at the moment render front-projection in A:M with this project (I've got a Report in the system about it), which is why I haven't masked out my son's face or the foreground tree yet. So when I want to render it, I do an alpha pass and a shadow pass and composite them in Quicktime Pro. (I wonder if one could do it with the new Composite feature in AM? Must try that.) I've attached the project file output, straight from SynthEyes, for people to play with. Note that it's 60 frames per second, since I was using interlaced video. I haven't included the movie file because it's huge. (If enough people want it, I guess I could post a compressed version...) Also note that there's one glitch--it's around frame 705 at 60fps--which I had to get rid of manually in AM. Which just goes to show that nothing is perfect. long_library_forhash.prj.zip
  9. Cash, man. Cold, hard cash. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. hope that's OK...
  10. Not too long. Less than a day; probably two or three hours at most. Yes, yes, o yes.
  11. The black line is actually from the original footage; nothing I can do about it. A second or so more, and different movement for Shaggy. Still no masking yet. GiantShaggy.mov
  12. If I can, yeah. There's another 8 seconds of footage that's matchmoved, so there's more to come, but I have to figure out a "story" first.
  13. Hello all. Just upgraded to SynthEyes 2006 and decided to fool around a bit. This is definitely not final, for obvious reasons, but I thought I'd share it anyway. No snide comments on the awful walk cycle, please. frankensteinShaggy_small.mov
  14. Nicely done, especially for a first shot! So when's the film coming?
  15. ZachBG

    Kapsules

    Man, that lighting is beautiful. (The rest is too; I just can't get over the lighting, though.)
  16. You guys are all right. In my defense, though, this was only a first rough pass. But, I did ask for it... Thanks to everyone. Oh, his hands... I'm not sure if they are going at weird angles, it's certainly possible. However, this might be a fault of the design as much as the animation. I thought it might be cool to make a character whose fingers are as long as his arms. However, that makes it very difficult both to close a fist and to read where the hand actually is in relation to the fingers. Whatever. Now it's clear why I don't do much modeling...
  17. Howdy all. Just doing a little exercise in a run to test out TSM2. This was done straight-ahead in choreography, not in a cycled action with stride length, which is different than how I usually work. Enjoy. Comments and crits welcome, as always, the tougher the better. 3 seconds, 120K or so, Sorenson 3 .mov. runalien_sor3.mov
  18. I know you're color-blind, but they're all... um... puke green.
  19. Well, if you're getting a repeatable crash, be sure to write up a bug report at www.hash.com/reports and include your data. As far as copying poses and relationships goes, there's a section on it in TAoA:M--the "Show Some Backbone" tutorial I believe. Just make sure you're doing it exactly as the tute says. (I don't remember the exact procedure off the top of my head, but that's where I found it. Also, make sure you look at the latest version of the manual, because the procedure has changed over time.) Bear in mind, though, that if your phonemes are created with muscle mode, the copying probably won't work anyway, since muscle mode works via CP numbers, which are different for each model. (I could be wrong about this; if so, someone please correct me.)
  20. Maybe this wouldn't work for what you're doing, but you can roll the view so the geometry rotates in relation to the decal... hold down the Control (or Command, I think, for us Macophiles) key when "T"urning.
  21. Most of what has been mentioned I would agree with, but I would also add that the eye-stalks seemed like a missed opportunity for overlapping action. And it would be super easy--just add a couple of Dynamic Constraints on the stalk bones and adjust the Stiffness property to whatever looks good. Incidentally, as someone who suffers from OLSD (overly-long-story-disorder), I very much liked that it was short. It's quality that counts, not quantity. And it was a mini movie contest, after all. (I was kinda surprised when Tom said there was no upper limit, in fact.)
  22. Good, reasoned critiques all. But not nearly enough of this: Come on! Pretend it's CG-Talk!
  23. I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at--er, let me rephrase that--I wasn't sure where my focus was supposed to be. I know that muscle memory would allow him to find the horn without looking at it, but I doubt I would have even noticed that he was squeezing the horn if you hadn't mentioned it in your post. OTOH, this is a movie about Ravel, not a guy honkin' his horn. (Did that sound indecent?)
  24. Thank you, sirs, may I have another? I know I said that would be the only thing I said in this thread, but... I did want to address Mike's comment: I can understand your point, but I didn't "just grab" Shaggy--he was an artistic choice, for two reasons: as someone said (Nancy, I think?), the story would have been just as effective with stick figures, and I wanted the story to be the focus, not the production design. In fact, if I had thought of doing it with stick figures, I probably would have! I wanted to prove that one could make a cohesive, stylish animation without modeling anything. The second reason was partly academic, I admit, but was also a neccessity because I only started, in earnest, about three weeks before the deadline. In total, there were only a few things I modeled from scratch (the windows, some of the doors, and the check and pen from the first shot--oh, and the phone itself, I guess). Two models were re-worked from existing ones: I added clothes to Dex for the "Can you hear me now" guy, and I built the Ford Excessive from Alain's pickup truck on the 2005 CD (or was it the Free Models page?). Everything else came from the CD or Free Models page. In some cases I added rigging (mostly to allow the cars' wheels to turn where needed). But back to Shaggy; I also re-rigged him to use the TSM1 rig, which made the animation far less painstaking, and obviously I fiddled with his color for the various other characters. Consider, also, that for the vast majority of viewers, Shaggy isn't "just a CD character"; how would a non-A:M user know from where he comes? BUT! your criticism is valid, and I thank you for it. edit: I fixed a typo.
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