NancyGormezano

LOOOOVE the sepia look and Title page! and yes that's plenty good resolution for me as well. Funnneee! Wish you would use a different character for the Bishop character. He's so overused IMO, I immediately tune out of the story when I see him (that's probably just me). Maybe you could modify him to not be so ubiquitously (is that a word?) recognizable? I know you've done other great characters all your own. Loving the animation style as well.

ACK. That's a tough one. Very sorry to hear this. I hope you can keep your spirits up, and hope you do not despair. May everything get back to normal (& better than normal) as soon as possible. Lucky & grateful you had your thumb drives, and that you (and hopefully everyone in your household) are ok?

And thank you Steffen for maintaining the Windows version. You do an amazing job! BTW, when I upgrade my PC system, I will be looking at getting whatever configuration you use, as I saw that you had the fastest render time going for the benchmark project in this thread.

Yeah! Happy day of the deadly! Or...not enough vitamin D...not enough sun.

It's not just models that get saved, but also chors, materials, actions that get saved automatically when saving a project. Currently, it is really better to work with chors while in development (for me), and to understand the hierarchy of A:M, and to deliberately save what I want to save. And to save with versions. I give chors a version as well as models, sometimes actions, sometimes materials. But I use projects only when they are required (sometimes forced, no way around it) by A:M: 1) for rendering with netrender (I believe is still necessary, I don't use netrender), and 2) for setting up the directory where the baked hair particles files are saved (for some reason they are saved in the project directory, when I feel like they should be saved in the chor dir, or be able to specify where they should be saved). 3) And for archiving (embed all final project) 4) and for sharing on the forum a sample, test project As for backups, yes, tortoise svn is way too complicated, but more suited for versioning control with other team members also doing development For backing up everything, ie, all data files on my internal hard drives, related to A:M or not (ie docs, photos, email, bookmarks, etc), I do an incremental backup (with choices) to an external drive every "as often as it's necessary", using the most wonderful, free syncbackse software found here. I don't have it running continuously (it is an option), nor without intervention, as again, it would bog down with crap...but that's my preferred choice. It can be totally transparent. And YES it makes me be responsible or ...reckless, as the case may be, when I let it go too long between backups. I like the version system "save increment" option that Rob suggests for A:M, but I would suggest having it for all A:M data file types (eg chor001, model001, action001, material001, project001). (EDIT: as I reread what Rob said, perhaps he already meant that)

ACK - so sorry to hear you had this happen. We've all been guilty of not backing up our files frequently enough, especially when working on a longer project. Sometimes we learn to never do that again...sometimes we just stay stupid...again...and again...and uh...methinks it's time for me backup again, as it's been only a month or 2 or 3... However, I have never experienced A:M saving a blank file on it's own, without me telling it to. So that was a very curious statement. MY guess is that you had a glitch in your disk access, due to either OS glitch (delay in write) or hard drive funniness (starting to fail? getting full?) or some other system gremlin lurking in the shadows...? btw, I would never-ever use an automatic backup scheme (especially with A:M) -as I do too much experimentation, make too many mistakes, and lawd knows, there would be much garbagiola saved for no good reason. I too, use a deliberate versioning suffix, and a descriptive prefix for my naming conventions. I also never-ever work with projects - as when you save a project EVERYTHING (materials, models, chos) in the project (embedded or not) gets saved whether you want it to or not. And again, I don't necessarily want a garbage model being saved over a good one. Again: So sorry for your loss. I feel your pain.

If you are referring to TSM2, the Turn Constraints is not automatically set to ON after running the rigger (jes' cause that's how the TSM people did it on their planet). But the user can set it to ON (after the rigger runs) and then save the model. However, that only works on this planet.

I like that you incorporated some variation for the lead dancer. The other dancers are a little too much in sync and could use some variation, to loosen things up. Some ways to do it: You could make the dance action for each one take a slightly different amount of time in the chor (eg 135 frames for 1, 138, 140 for the others) and you could slightly change the arms, head for each of them individually just a smidge by overriding the action (for just those bones) in their respective chor action, by layering chor actions at some different ranges (hope that was clear). Might add a bit more life? As for the Nicholas Brothers reference clip - I LOVE IT! Absolutely astonding. I was aware of that clip when I was doing Lothario and Ida dance and thought "How marvelous it would be to do them", but I was having trouble capturing it from youtube at the time AND it was a long, complicated clip, with a complicated set and I was getting worn out by doing only 1 minute....They were unquestionably spectacular. And I think they did their routines in 1 take! Amazing. You are inspiring me by your posts and exercises to get cooking! I can definitely see progress in your pursuits.

That's a terrific link Rodney. I wasn't aware of alice.org Similarly, here is another link for funding an effort (in Mountain view, Ca) aimed at getting 5+ year olds programming robots! I want one.

Looks black to me except where the lights are. I have a crt monitor (which may have aging problems in contrast and towards the dark end). The true proof is the histogram. I do not see the grid pattern at all. When I check the histogram, curves in photoshop, it looks like there is the spike where the lights are and then the rest of the ceiling is in the very dark range. If I adjust the curves in PS then I can see the grid. EDIT: added adjusted image from photoshop

Wonderful!

Nice clip, will be very cute when he burns the bar down! Without knowing your lighting setup, reflectivity values - it is only a guess - but my guess is perhaps your shadows are getting washed out? Perhaps they are there but you can't see them? Here's example showing the difference with klieg z-buff shadows on a front projected, flat shaded ground with NO reflections (ie very dark, obvious) versus ray traced sun shadows on a ground with 50% reflectivity, front projected only (NOT flat shaded) - shadows are more subtle

One thing I forgot to ask: How did you do those white lines of action? Post processing? Loved the effect!

Nah...The way I hear it, at that time, most critters were hatching. Happy Bruce-a-saurus Day!

For the blue figure, in the chor, view the pose sliders (alt+4), look under legs/Right IK leg & left IK leg, should be set ON. I suspect your blue model was not saved with IK legs =ON, or somehow it was set = off (maybe in chor, shortcut to model/ chor action/user properties) Your action that you exported from the chor does not change the IK legs settings, so I assume the red guys have Legs IK already = ON

Yeah, I figured you probably had thought about it, and that you had deliberately done it that way...I probably shouldn't have said anything. I have found (and I believe have read other opinions the same) that if you have text, it will distract the viewer, unless they can read it. It seemed like thetext was very much part of the animation, as the main part ends at around 39 secs and the entire piece takes about 1:17. So the credits/text is taking up almost half the screen time. I don't want to give the impression that I think it is imperative to change...It is an absolutely wonderful piece...no question about it. And again I say: Bravo!

Excellently done. Outstanding look. Terrifically, perfectly animated. Bravo, bravo! My only crit is that the impact of the message might be lost? And not PUNCHY enough? Too much to read at the end, goes by too fast, too small type, hard to read FONT, too many different talking points? If someone really wants to know the message, then they might do like I did: SLOW it down to read. But not all will bother, perhaps. Or maybe they will? Not sure. You might consider changing or adding HEADLINE text to the talking points to summarize it more obviously? And maybe the detailed sarcasm can still be there in the clip (as fine print), or else linked to a website, or included in the descriptions at vimeo, youtube? Summary Headlines might be something like: To summarize my feelings however: This is among the best animations I've seen come out of A:M!

I forgot to say...Yes I thought both the sound track & narration were most definitely excellent! Perfect! (uh...but I don't remember giving you any advice on Trapez? However I will claim it!)

I used IK for the legs always, but I would switch between having them pivot the normal way, and pivoting on the ball of foot. I was using 2 different leg rigs: Ida has lite rig legs, Lothario was 2008 rig legs. I preferred the 2008 legs for this, and in general. I believe the arms were always FK (but not sure). I might have switched to IK when they had to stay connected to each other while swinging around. Both had lite rig arms and torso. Yes, your new video shows the moves better, and I can see it works well to the music, beat. Still: Get those shoulders moving, and some more head/neck action, and overlapping spine motion perhaps. Maybe your rig doesn't have enough neck, shoulder, spine control?

Thanks Simon - that 2nd reference video (whole thing) is a gem! It's great how he explains the moves, and then to see how his personal dance style sneaks in there when he puts it together. Wonderful!

Nice one!

Great look, and terrific camera angles. The story is a bit obtuse, but...hey...it's Kafka! Well done!

I agree with Sebastian. Main observations: I notice that your characters shoulders aren't moving as much (as high) as the reference, and the angle of entire body line, leg line, arm lines (especially when he extends one leg) is also not as pronounced. I would suggest you take each reference pose (that you choose) and try to fully recreate until mostly perfect, before working on the timing, spacing between them. That is the way Keith Lango would probably suggest. Perhaps taking the reference pose still and drawing the line of action on the body, legs, arms, etc before posing your character might help? (BTW, I love the reference video, and would love to give it a try myself, but am leary that I might be stepping on your toes again, since I already stole your reference video of the hand spring to try with my character captn Crazy Pants)

I like! I especially like how the trees are depicted, animated

As Robcat said, that's probably a bit complex for what you want to do. Have a look at this tut based on a SIMPLE way to model any head/face (based on Malo's method of modeling) - it is another example, another way done for a cartooney type head. This method almost guarentees that you will end up with an optimal number of splines. ie least amount for amount of detail. Always a good thing when you want to rig a face, least amount of cp's to weight, bone.