John Bigboote

Lest we forget, when it comes to Hash MoCap BVH animation, Will Sutton laid the groundwork with his fantastic tutorial and examples. THANKS WILL! His tutorial: http://www.zandoria.com/motioncapture.htm .bvh files all over the internet? Where...? I have only found the 1 (albeit rich) source at www.bvhfiles.com DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYONE WHO HAS A MOTION CAPTURE RIG? Just thought I would ask... If Hash Inc. makes a movie as mentioned in 2006...it would be cool to see some MoCap in it...

Pretty neat David! Looking at the wireframe I'm left wondering if booleans were used at all in these models?

Well- not quite as humorous as a dancing Chewbacca...but what is? I stmbled across a 'boxer' motion capture file and I had recently modelled and rigged a boxer...so I put the two together! http://campbellanimation.com

Yup. THATS FUNNY! MoCAP is making some people think! MY only critique is to add a fill light behind him...those shadows are overpowering. AND it would possibly add to the humor if you gave the eyeball bones an 'aim-at' to the camera... NICE SAMPLE! VERN--- It's "Fat guy in a little suit-fat guy in a little suit!" -Chris Farley

Very cool! Perhaps some of us 'non-fellows' (does that make us...ladies???)should start lumberjacking some trees too! Are you guys gonna put them all together in an available library? That could become a valuable resource! 3D mirrors reality!

VERY COOL! The first thing that bugged me was the rain...it's a cool element but it looks 'pasted-on' instead of being a part of the scene, so when we zoom in to the scene we are not zooming thru the rain... A cool solution would be to render your rain as an element from dogpatch (maybe oversized like 1500 X 1000 px) and then 'multi-plane' thru it in A:M....meaning you make 4 or 5 layers of the rain element and place them at various depths (facing camera) within the scene. Then, as we zoom in to the scene, we zoom thru the rain as well. Another alternative, which would be cool too, would be to start experimenting with Hash's particles...in this case I guess 'streaks' would be in order. Nice establishing shot tho!

Yeah...JIM! Give it a twirl! Actually I'd like to see more folks discover BVH's... even if you think it is 'cheating' as I did...it's a great way to study motion and it will open new doors... I think it would be helpful for newbies as well. Tina Turner? I don't see it...but thanks! My website is 'evolving' lil X lil... the overall size needs to be twerped 'up' a scoatch. My portfolio is a WIP from 5 years ago...mostly the whole thing is an experiment...a what-if...seems to be holding it's own tho...nobody's complaining about 'I can't open this. or that doesn't work' I will consider Colin's advice about switching from QT to .swf for the movie files...I have a utilty called 'flix-lite' (wildform.com) that will help. I need to consider A) file size to quality comparison with QT ... Playback smoothness (QT is pretty good) C) Overall useability and web conformity...

yuk-yuk-----yuch! Paul- Well I've changed the content of my site but nothing technical has changed. I hope my website is not crashing other peoples computers...heck I may take down the whole grid...well...the internet is more of a 'sphere' than a grid-I imagine... I've learned a cool thing about 'tweeking' mocap action and how A:M makes it quite simple to do: You apply the BVH action to your character in an 'action' and then drop the action on the character in the choreography...but you can still animate your character in the chor, so if you put the chor action setting to 'additive' you will be animating 'on top' of the mocap data. A great way to overemphasize actions or put that 'toon' touch on things. STONES. Yeah, the writing and staging is 'suspect' in this. I've showed it to a handful of folks who laughed at the gag so I figured 'good enough'. Move on. One thing cool in there is the way I was able to use TSM2's new 'stretch' feature...on some of the guitarist's riffs and as the Camera Girl is backing away from the approaching Mick... THAT is a great feature built-in to TSM2. Thanks for reply.

Hey Christina- Just popping in for the 1st time on what appears to be an old thread. Great work! I can see a marked improvement from the files at the start and these more recent files...

http://www.campbellanimation.com/ We've been talking about BVH Mo-Cap down in the 'reusable motion' forum, and inspired by Zach Brewster-Geisz and Colin Freeman's cool animations and guided by Will Sutton's motion capture tutorial I was able to browse free BVH files thru bvhfiles.com via their 'BVHplayer utility' , import it into A:M and constrain it to my TSM2 rigged character. My character (Gurly Girl) also has long V11 hair so the effect of the hair on the real motion is...I think...pretty cool. But then, I like bus fumes too. If you were to mix MoCAP and hand animation... whooaaa! Have a look...give me some feedback...bad or good...I can take it...just sugarcoat the bad... OH- and I've updated the 'STONES' movie too... http://www.campbellanimation.com/

Cool! You guys have the good beer! It's funny you mention the Ambassador...I was going thru old files today and found THIS: ambassador.mov

I've totally overlooked this forum until just now... I'm 'beating the bushes' for any Detroit, Lansing, Flint, Port Huron, Northern Michigan, Windsor Ontario, or northern Ohio Animation:Master users... I'm just taking a census to see who we have and where. We'll see where it leads. You can reply in confidence to matt@campbellanimation.com or in public here. Anyone....anyone.......? Buhler?

Hey Colin- Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate. The jpeg on the main page had a 'noise' filter in the gradient...looks like bad jaypegging. I'll look into the scaling issue, think I know how/where to set that in the publish settings. Good to know about the 'big' monitor issue. The whole site is real improvisational. Diggin your avatar! Matt Campbell aka John Bigboote EDIT: Okay...did some revisions. The 'scaling' issue has me perplexxed, between the Flash and the HTML settings nothing seems to work. So I did a work-a-round and reduced the size of all the artwork and images and it seems to appear a bit less 'blown-up'...now to add some more 'content'... I am NOT a web guy...but I play one on the internet! Thanks for pointing that out, CF!

Okay Mr. Jage...point us in a more suitable direction thats more to your liking, why don't you... Sorry if this topic bored you. We look forward to your 'advanced' spectacular displays of 3dimensional wizardry and stimulating writings thereto of...

Cave man! The egg is static...the heavily extruded 'AM' is in motion and passing thru it... VERN: I dont have A:M around right now but I think I remember that booleans show in a preview render (shiftQ?) This shape I am using is sort of a 'mold' as you put it...yes...the 'egg' shape here is actually 'negative' geometry of an egg...like a mold. And if I recall...the logo in the middle is assigned to a child bone of the boolean which makes it unaffected by the boolean's evil powers.

I have a new movie on my webpage: http://www.campbellanimation.com illustrating A:M's 'boolean's' cababilty in motion. This was a test I did last summer during the Logo contest so I used the A:M logo (my entry that is) in the test. Basicly, there is geometry (like an egg, or football) that is cutting and revealing other geometry in motion (the A:M logo)...the light streaks were done in AfterEffects using the 'shine' filter as an afterthought. If there is interest or questions I'll be happy to elaborate. It's actually quite straightforward- I keep referring to various A:M features as 'powerful stuff'...partly because I have been listening to some old 'Fabulous Thunderbirds' albums and partly because...well ---tis POWERFULL! Click on URL above or below OR click on my avatar!

I THINK THAT STINKS! Well, what I mean is, it's SO REAL looking that I can actually smell it...and its stinky! GOOD WORK!

Love that LEG Xtaz...Great site! Your working on a short called 'Duel?' Aren't the Anzovins working on a movie of the same name? Coincidence?

Looking good! Keep us posted.

LOOKING GOOD VERN! Nice execution on the old 'boolean' idea. That is one fine looking bag-0-pea soup!

Nice work Jim- she has a real 'highschool yearbook-photo' feel. There's something about a girl with red hair and green blue eyes...bewitching! The eyes may be a little too colorful...or bright...I dunnoh... Her hair also reminds me of just about every Catholic Schoolgirl I've ever seen...and I've seen a few... I hope you continue to style it...maybe something 'up and over'... or maybe give her some bangs... Great STUFF!

Well thats certainly interesting! Who knows what evil images Vern has envisioned for this in his little brain... did you use dynamics in that test?

Victor- Excellent work as always. I'm sure this recommendation is coming from left-field but...here goes... A possible sight gag: The 'rings' are around the planet to begin with...he flips...and THEN the rings are around his head! I'm sure you prolly already considered that... AnyWAY...I'm diggin the simplicity. Matt Campbell

HER? Oh this is gonna be cool. I like the sprites too but have a small recommendation; Can you increase and decrease the amount as the bike accelerates and decellerates...the only reason I ask is at the end as the bike zooms off the sprites look a little thin. It's got a lreal 'tinkerbelle' feel... I like it!

You've wandered into 'the grey zone' David... Sometimes it's obviously better to render an entire scene 'in-camera'... Sometimes it's obviously better to composite a scene in AE (or like) Sometimes nothing is obvious...the grey zone. I like the light I see on the moon from the particles. Did you render the particles with an alpha? Last I knew particles did not appear in alphas...maybe thats new. What I did back then-when particles didn't show in mattes...was to use a Photoshop action to generate an alpha channel from the particles own luminence. In Photoshop: Open a frame of the particles.Make a new action and start recording. Copy the entire image to clipboard (cntrl-A, cntrl-C) go to channels and make a new channel and paste(cntrl-V) the image. You'll notice it lost its color info as alphas are 256 grey. Adjust brighness contrast on alpha until you have the particles in various whites and greys surrounded by black. Done! Stop recording. Close image. File: Batch: specify that action and apply it to the folder of particle frames...now open trhem in AfterEffects...I think you'll like. Gotta run.