John Bigboote

YUP...that toon look works great in motion...nice! THANXY

Nice stuff Mike! Make it move! Make it move!

Thought I'd show how last weeks test ended-up. No matter what I did I had anomolies in the floor from the klieg lights I constrained for headlights si I rendered it without lights and without floor reflections separately and half mixxed the two in AfterEffects. Thought I would put it in the 'showcase' section because I am DONE tweeking on it. This clip shows Miss D. interacting with the car, with V11 hair, dynamics, smoke via streaks which I could NOT get to get any bigger, and distortion/box poses on the car. The animation was rendered at D1 30fps but I have to shrink it to 400X270 12 fps with LOTS of Sorenson Compression to get it under 1 mb. takeoff.mov

I would'nt want to run into THAT in a back alley! Powerful imagery! I'm not good with 'constructive criticsism' either. I always try to complement something I like before jumping all over what I don't, EVERYONES an art-director it seems. I always hear from people who could urinate on Disney's 'Fantasia' with an 'I could do better' tone... Q: Was the depth of field A:M or Photoshopped?

MAN! Is that COOL! THAT is what Animation was made for...do you have any moving samples on your site?

This is a frame from 7:03 in the sequence...is...that a fingerprint? This takes me back to my film days...WHO was eating a peanutbutterjelly sandwich and looking at the footage in the moviola? Could it be Martin Hash's fingerprint?

HEY! I don't know why I always have to make my floors reflective. There's a lot of effects in this test...V11hair...V11 dynamic constraints...V11 distortions within distortions...sprite material used as smoke...volumetric klieg lights... Anyways I used a 5X multipass render (at D1 res) and I think the klieg lights glitched-up the reflective floor. Other than take the reflectivity out of the floor, any suggestions? I'll post a full frame from the sequence in the next reply... Warning: Over emphasized female anatomy. takeoff.mov

YES I am obsessed with that aspect, I can admit. As I am in real life! I...am human--- I was modelled that way by MY creator. My characters are ultra-human. When I saw the Dynamic Constraint THAT was the 1st thing I thought of. NOT a penis swingin in the wind! There's a guy on this Forum using A:M to make a naked 'Matt Damon' crouching in a field... nobody mentions the 'obsession' in that... the 'hunter-dynamics' by Joe Williamsen...whats Yves Poissant up to? (making ultra-real naked FEmales.) Vern- you have a sense of humor...I love it. Your top 10 list the other day had me rolling! But you see a little over-emphasized tittie-jiggle and you revert from David Letterman humor to Jr. HighSchool humor. I only have 1 thing to say: KEEP IT UP! Regards! (Perhaps for the sake of 'political-correctness' I should remember to put a warning on any posts which may contain female anatomy-clothed or not- which may provoke or offend or otherwise draw attention to itself. I recommend others do the same.)

Hey Jimmy- I LIKE this scene...reminds me of every MOTEL-8 I've ever stayed in. MY only input would be to put something...like a gun...on the carpet in the foreground. That would break-up the monotony of the carpet pattern and add to the story... If not a gun than maybe a remote... a magazine... a womans hi-heel shoe... a stack of dollar bills... Just seems SOMETHING needs to be there for composition sakes. NICE WORK.

Nibble- My apology. I had a bad night, came in and thought I saw someone 'pissing' on my work. My response WAS overwrought. No hard feelings. Thanks for your reply. Most people do not take the time, and that is what the 'Forum' is all about...feedback...good and bad. To tell the truth, this test shows 98% preparation and 2% animation, and the animation ALWAYS needs tweeking, as you noticed. I literally animated this scene in 20 minutes. My workflow is to rig,rig,rig...and THEN make a test scene at the last minute to see if the rigging works. Render it overnight. I was quite happy with my results here, and thought I would share. In the future I think I'll post only the more 'refined' of my work for everyone's benefit. THANKS again!

Cool character. Seems to me you would just want to use a klieg and aim it up from just above the ground at the face...

Thanks for the note Nibbler. I can benefit a lot from you and your excellerated sense of the apparent. Perhaps you could post an animation illustrating your art direction. Just keep your keen powers of observation tuned for good- not evil...or we are all doomed! This is a W.I.P. (work in progress) I share my work with the Forum because I feel I can enlighten future animators and perspective customers of Hash to the powers nested within the latest release. When I begin to post in the showcase section, and I will soon, you may feel free to point your pinky at the screen and point out obvious errors and color clashes all you wish. Did you see anything positive in the animation? SORRY. I work with Art-Directors all the time, they grind me up.

Xtaz- Thanks! Did I try to reduce the number of patches? No, is that a feature somewhere in A:M or are you saying to go in and reduce them 1 by 1 myself? The Maya guy did a lot of geometry reductions...and on afterthought he may have been able to do even more than he did. Did I use Weight Mover? No, I bought WM...experimented with it and fell out of favor with it. Even with A:M's weights with the bone falloff feature...I just can't get it to work and have not found enlightening tutorial documentation on it. For my characters I use TSM with fanbones and smartskin.

AND--- this is the updated turntable showing progress on the car WITH CrimeBomb in the hood (to be explained later) HOW DID I GET THE CAD GEOMETRY FOR THE CAR INTO A:M? The car geometry was generated by scanning an actual 2004 Ford Mustang. ..so to be fair it is NOT CAD DATA...Half the car is 'taped' into a grid and touched by the scanner at the intersections forming a mesh. The model was then finished in Maya and used by FoMoCo to sell cars in TV adverts. As a test, my friend who works on this project exported the body mesh from Maya as an .OBJ file. which I imported into A:M. Working on the car is very SLOW...A:M chuggs to keep up during opening, copy and pasting, and modelling. BUT on the other hand A:M does quite well with other aspects such as distorting, rigging, actions and render! The frames from the attached movie took an average of 1 min 30sec at D1 res, no multi-pass, not bad for an overnight render. If I turn-ON multipass to 4X4 it is 8.5 min per fr. Not bad for a weekend render. MsDsSTANG.mov

OK...I had a glitch that was crashing my render and lost a few days, but here is the Mustang again...added more detail- rear parking lights...wheel decals... this test shows some rigging...wheels turn...steerage etc... I am trying to capture in animation some of the 'overboard-dynamics' that cartoonists have been putting in illustrated cars for years. GLITCHES: Ms.D's hair goes thru the roof...I'll have to add an interior roof panel with normals facing down and hope the collision detection honors it. Also, at the last minute I thru in some smoke...which has lots of weirdness...Also, the wheels are off the ground at the start...and the sound is just thrown in... All in all a good test for how quick I set it up last night! carzoom.mov

Yes, certain parts DO tend to get overemphasized....ahhhhh. "I'm not BAD...I'm just drawn that way!" -Jessica Rabbit. I do so much nuts-and-bolts stuff that Ms.Demeanor is quite refreshing to work on, CrimeBomb too! Like most of us, I would like to get into Character Animation as a profession...but I'm sort of different in that I don't want to do cute fuzzy animals or talking vegetables...I want to do CHICKS and CARS! And I think there may be a market for it! Any-Old-HOO! I promised somewhere above that I would post an image of the Mustang as it appeared before I 'dinked' it up. Here is... as I said...it's just the body.

Gra4mac- I use Quicktime with Sorenson 3 compression at about 20% quality. I use Sorenson 3 because that is what Hash asks for if you are gonna post a film on A:M Films, so I figure it must be the most agreeable with their setup. Thru the Forum they give you a 1mb limit, so to put a 10 second clip in I have to drop to 10-15 fps from 30, half res from D1 (720X486) and I have to drop the audio quality as well, if there is audio. If I go 1k over 1mb I am denied upload. I know it's crazy putting CrimeBomb in the motorwell, but stay tuned and on Monday I'll post my weekends render showing it can be done! Can I post an image of the car before compression? Yes, good idea, I'll do that Monday when I get back in... It pretty much looks like a regular modern Ford Mustang tho. I get all sorts of complaints about my compression, but I look for anyone to offer a better idea. You can post yours right here:

Thats a GREAT link! Wish I had that Mustang illustration when I commenced. The car actually started as an experiment with the 'distortion box' feature...I wanted to throw something really dense at it to see if it could handle it, and it did. Yes, the original model came from CAD data from someone on the list named Charles Cronley, whom about 1 year ago he and I were comparing notes on CAD data cars and 'scanned' cars, which my company uses scanned models from Viewpoint data labs. Charles sent me this mesh to show how he was able to use CAD data thru various file transfers to finally get into Hash. I sat on the file for a year, and finally took another look at it when I realised the power of distortion boxes. I am a fan of the 'big daddy roth' cars and had that loosely in mind when I went about distorting, once I had done the deed to this 'stang I absent mindedly started adding windows and tailllights and more and more detail just to see what it would look like finished. The beauty of distortion boxes is that I do not have to stop here, I can do more distorting in poses and actions. Meaning I can have an action where the car takes a hard turn left and really compress the body to emphasize. Another pose or action for a takeoff where the wheels lift off the ground...etc. I admit the car sort of looks like an old AMC Pacer, which is bad. Its one thing though, to 'toon a car in an illustration and quite another to 'toon it in 3D with animation in mind, which is what I'm planning. I also want my characters to interact with the car...cartoony muscle cars and cartoony hot chicks... that's the formula I'm after. Think it will appeal?

Have you tried using lens flares instead? A:M has an awesome Lens-Flare assortment.

Basicly, my photoshop 'work-around' with actions IS a luma-key. It is taking the image and converting it to 256 levels of black to white, so any pixel with a color value will translate to a grey rather than black and will be represented in the alpha by its luminence value. If you wanted to use a 'keyer' filter in Premiere or After Effects it would work similiarly, but frequently an unwanted 'ring' around the effect is a by-product. Any work I can do in Photoshop is preferrable to working in AE or Premiere. Remember, Photoshop is an image manipulation and photo-retouching APP, whereas the others are video based. I see this most via 'scaling'. Take an image and scale it down say, 33% in both apps and compare...Photoshop does a better job.

Yeah- thats the 1 mb limit for you. I had to compress the details out of it. Picture AND sound.

OK- I'm posting 1 more...then I'll leave you alone for a while until I have something more linear. This is ANOTHER test, and as an afterthought I tagged some sound onto it and it 'sort of' fit. If you can get your QuickTime to loop...loop it and this conversation goes over and over like the ones me and the wife have. I rendered this 10 sec sequence with and without porcelin and was able to frame for frame compare it at D1 resolution. The porceline STAYS. A colleague of mine once said..."sound is half the picture." That was the same guy that said "She's got freckles on her but she's pretty. Hope you enjoy. BigEd.mov

And the mesh. Total patches on car: 17,824. Total patches on girl: 2,944

Here's a frame at D1 (digital video) resolution.

Attached loop of a car I am working on for CrimeBomb... I am looking for a Hasher named Charles Cronley. About a year ago Charles and I traded CAD data for Mustangs, I finally took a look at his dense 'paint-only' mesh and decided it was a perfect test for the DISTORTION BOX tool and this is what I have come up with. Just wanted to let Charles know I am using it if he has any objections... I added lights, glass, mirrors, wheels and interior (WIP) I plan to make poses for door and hood openings, steering, suspension, exaggerated distortions for cartoony takeoffs and handling, and an action for wheel spin with stride-length. Then I plan to use it extensively as a CrimBomb prop with Ms. D driving and Crimebomb in the motor compartment making it 'go'... could be humor-invoking... Also- I've discovered 'porceline' material! I added it to my characters and WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT! Can't believe I stayed away from it for so long. I thought it was for making 'teapots' and stuff. Its on the car's paint too. LOOKING FOR FEEDBACK GOOD AND BAD. I value your opinion. Really! LOOKING FOR CHARLES CRONLEY... MsDsSTANG.mov