John Bigboote

Caltim--- 2 things... 1) THANKS for that 'horsepowerads.com' link...that is AWESOME! Not so much the animation...it's good...but the fact that the guy is MARKETING to Car Dealers, I want to do the same thing. Car dealers...and cable advertisers in general...don't have the 'big-budgets' that the big chains have. But...with a good ad and some smart media buys they can see their sales MULTIPLY! AND- animators who work expediently and independantly can provide a valuable service and turn a nice profit. Here's a recent similar sample I made in A:M: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ59K_vGRVU 2) I see NO indication on that website that they are using Poser. Are they? 3) NO program will make it 'easy' to make animated characatures. Just like in real life...you go to an amusement park, there's a booth there where you can sit and get a cartoon characature of yourself...you might notice they use pastels, so can YOU just go buy some cheap pastels kit and start drawing characatures...? Short answer....NO. Long answer...YES!-with practice. There is an art and science behind a simple characature...sure it looks easy...but make the nose too big or small and you learn the difference between FUNNY and INSULTING real quick. 4) To answer your general question...yes-A:M is fully able to do what you want out of it...and then some! GOOD LUCK!

Hey...just something I thrutogether yesterday for a DVD menu. Reminds me of the old joke..."I spent a WEEK in Detroit one day..." Try not to get mugged while watching this... Of interesting note...other than the Renaissance Center and one or two other building, the whole city is a copy-paste of one model...the 'Ambassador Bridge' is a model I had lying around, as are all the vehicles and other props. I am re-rendering right now to slow it down from 6 sec to 8 sec...plus I populated it a bit more. DETROIT_ZOOM2sm.mov

NICE WORK! I really like the hairstyle too! Shoulders are always a tough spot, I recommend an intermendiary bone and some adjusted CP weights. To answer your inquiry above...YES! You can adjust CP weights anywhere (model, pose,action,chor) simply by grabbing some points, right clicking on them, and choosing the 'adjust CP weights' option. It has an easy interface that does exactly as you asked...meaning you can set the %'s that you want on a CP by CP OR group basis. I'm working on something along the same lines...(stylized female, that is) a feller can dream...no?

I *think* they do exactly what they say they will do. I use 'Key Model' all the time when I need EVERY bone that I have tweeked to have a keyframe right where it is right now...great for 'pose to pose' animation. Also, if you have hit a pose in your animation that you think you will want your char to return to...hit key model...copy all the keyframes generated, and then paste them when and where you need them. The other 2 do the same thing on a smaller basis, epotimously.

Just viewed it... THRICE!!! GO HEATH! Uhhrmm. I 'm kinda slowwwwwwwww. Could you esplain the Blender joke.... is it...Blender3D???

Now that I re-read Martins reply... I see it in the right light... This was an interesting job. Our sales rep came to me late on a Wednesday (2/28) as I was out the door. Said we had a chance to 'steal the Belle Tire account' if our numbers were right and if we could take-over the 'Tireman' 3D model from our cross-town competitor who made it in Maya. Now, I knew that would NEVER happen...nobody who loses an account sends off their animation models...NOBODY. Our Maya guys gave an estimate of 1 week to recreate 'TireMan' and walked away...I went right to work on it the next day. Good thing. Thursday evening as I had just hit render on a 360 spin of my TireMan model the sales rep burst into my room..."The account is all ours IF we can prove RIGHT NOW that we can do the tireman!" I stopped the render, 1/4 way thru...and played it for him. He demanded I send a Quicktime movie pronto. The next day...Friday noonish-I was playing around with my now rigged model(TSM2) when we heard..."WE won the account!" This was big! It's a LOT more than just animation...editorial,production,sound/radio, media-management...the WORKS! The rest of the job was a dream. A:M performed flawlessly, my client LOVED everything I did, hit the deadlines like butter and now it's on the air all over the place...pure saturation. More spots to come. So I put it on YouTube and saw Martin's reaction (above) and over-reacted and panicked. Figured at least my MOM will like it. Tireman is your usual low-spline A:M model. DarkSim textures give him a nice velvetty rim-lit hat,pants-sleeves. A displacment map puts the tread on him. Lots of bones in the face and pose-sliders for lip-synch, blinks...etc. Rotoscopes were used to match him into the scene, and lighting was 'almost' default. Final touches added in After Effects, and I sent Quicktimes to the editor who used an Avid DS Nitris to finalize the spots. Thanks! for all the interest.

I apologize to Martin and all at Hash. I guess I am a little too 'thin-skinned' and I mis-read Martin's humor for criticism. Thanks to Rodney for reposting the link and for being Rodney. And I am the WORST at using emoticons...but now I see their value.

I apologize to Martin and all at Hash. I guess I am a little too 'thin-skinned' and I mis-read Martin's humor for criticism. Thanks to Rodney for reposting the link and for being Rodney.

I apologize. You can take this thread down.

Seems to me like you might be '1 plug-in over the line'... I can't see why sweeper was used...or SimCloth for that matter. If you just wanted a falling brick wall, all you needed was Newton...no? Cool results though!

VERY interesting! This spurs the imagination with possibliites. Animated spokespersons...whatabout this: Feed 'live' facial data and audio thru HAMR to control a character that can be seen by millions instantly... Anything you could divulge on your process? Do you HAVE to look like a Ninja to use it?

AJ2- Nice work! Done? C'mon...they are never ever really done...we just give up on them! I'd like to see you expand her in a couple directions: -You should learn the benefit of the displacement map. You could add subtle details such as muscle tone, lip crackles, nipple protusion, belly button... -You should also look into using V13/14 's hair feature, which has just recently become quite robust, powerful and dynamic, and dare I say...almost 'photoreal' -Her cape is also begging for V 13's SimCloth feature. Great work!

I'm not gonna ask what you been doin-a-dat-wabbit! A general rule of thumb: If you did something cool once...you can do it again, and again-better each time even. So redo what ever you did with rabbit and when done use the 'Save As' function with the rabbit.mdl file. Have you watched all the great free tutorials on Hash.com? They will get you making cool stuff real quick, the rest will come with further exposure to A:M with time. Do not give up. "Baby steps..." (Bill Murray) WELCOME!

That rocks! I'd like to see the movie a little longer...maybe the flowers recoil as they settle... great test!

I'll try to 'sum it up' in a nutshell for you: Basicly, make a new action, with the character you want(rigged), right click on the new action and select NEW/Motion Capture Device/Biovision BVH file. Then, right click on the newly-made BVH within the action and select 'capture sequence'. You will now have the BVH's skeleton within your action, and by scrolling, you can see it's motion. You will want to scale the BVH to your character, so grab it's main bone and scale and position it to fit. Now, you will want to constrain your character's rig to it. This is all done using 'transform to' and 'orient like' constraints. So, on frame one, select your characters right foot bone...and choose new constraint...transform to...and select the BVH's right foot as the target. Do it again with an 'orient like'...at this point you will notice that you will need to make some 'adjustments'...perhaps the BVH's roll handle was not pointed the same way as yours was, you cant adjust the BVH but you CAN adjust yours, and while you are at it adjust it's placement in XYZ space to the BVH's foot-bone placement. You now have the foot done. Do the same to: 2 feet 2 hands head pelvis torso I use TSM2 rig and also turn ON the knee controllers and give them an 'aim at' constraint to the BVH's leg bone. I also find that things go better by using 'forward kinematics' instead of inverse on the arms and legs. Some BVH's work better than others, some don't work too well at all. A nice thing is that once you have one working you can 'Save As' and then import ANOTHER action and not have to do all the constraints. ADJUSTMENTS are the name of the game, and many need to be done down the timeline to keep feet on the floor and arms from passing thru torso's etc. The BVH contains manymany keyframes on each frame for each bone, and they are easily editable, so if you see a 'pop' in a bone's action you can go in and remove those particular keys quite easily in A:M. Good luck- I hope this 'Reader's Digest' version is of some help in getting some Hasher's onto the BVH bandwagon, now if only one of us had access to a working motion-capture rig, instead of all these 'borrowed' BVH files. Many FREE BVH's can be found at freeBVH.com , and Mr.Bones offers particular BVH packages thru mrbones.com

Wow. This could be the start of something BIG! That seems to work a LOT better than the V14 Hash2Swf exporter...any way to run a rigged animation thru the mill? Quite impressive! MC

The above test worked fine for me in v13.0o on a PC...did you set the constraint to 'spring'? I HAVE been having issues with this latest version and dynamic-constraints that were set-up in previous v13's.

CD= Collision Detection...I don't understand the other Q...(question)

That's the start to a GREAT story! 2 things: The Earth looked a little too 'greenhoused'... and the glass of the spaceship was a little fogged-up. Your fellow hashers can help you in those 2 departments should you want. Cant wait too see more!

If you apply a dynamic constraint to a bone...you will see it has a CD option, though I'm unsure if it is detecting other bones, CP's, or mesh-geometry in general...preferrably the latter. The thing to remenber with collision detection...it's pretty 'hit-and-miss'. (chuckle)

Yes, you need to set the action to repeat...there is a place to set that in the property box right when you apply the action to the character...it's default setting is 1...try 5 and adjust from there!

I've got to go against the grain on this one. Stick with Maya. You proved you can learn it, so keep at it! Most of us are here in A:M-ville because we can't learn that shit. A:M does have ease of use and a better learning curve, some advanced features and a great user-group...but Pixar will ask what application you made your stellar samples in (and they BETTER be stellar!) Maya or Max will mean a shorter training period to get you up and running in the Pixar/polygonal system. A little off topic but- There's a guy I used to work with. He started in Maya about 2 years before I started in A:M...(1998) He wanted to become a Pixar animator...it never happened for him. He recently retired from animation at the golden age of 32. After doing 7 years of what I call 'spinning cars' at $50,000 a pop...pop after pop, he walked away. Said he had made his nutshell, time to do something else. He now runs the video show for his church. You can see a small portion of his work here: http://gracewild.com/divisionx/index.html He is a success story. There is not a whole lot of success stories in the animation business. Things may change, but I think a young person's chances are better at becoming 'gainfully-employed' with Maya or Max than A:M or Lightwave, or any other app. Don't believe me? Check out any jobs site. Best of luck! Knock us dead!

Very good. The eyes are quite captivating.

Looks to me like you have a spline that has been peaked or does not extend it's bias and magnetude in both directions. Tear that sucker apart and make sure that when you rebuild that particular piece of geometry that you make sure the splineage is pure... meaning when you click on that CP... it should show 2 control handles coming of both sides of the spline...if there is only one than the beziers 'perfect math' is being compromised, thus the creases.

COOL! I see you start from a profile, whereas I find I always start at the 'nose' and work my way back. Very interesting!