John Bigboote

Exciting news! This may be my new rig... ease of install is one thing, animate-ability is another. Have any sample animations?

The PROBLEM with 'weight first smartskin later' is that under certain circumstances your weighting will perform perfectly as anticipated, but when you try an altogether different action you might find that a different weighting package is needed. I find that I am constantly re-weighting my characters every time I attempt a different unique action. Smartskin is great but I have found from time to time it tends to 'go away' or gets lost from the file and needs be re-programmed, or as I re-weight it becomes something that needs to be deleted. LATELY- my approach has been to get the character weighted and rigged as economically as possible... animate freely without concern for snapping joints or constricting wrists... and then go about the a 'last pass' of correcting 'issues' via muscle-mode animation in the choreography. I believe I read an article somewhere that explained that Pixar employs a team that does similar corrections.

VERY COOL PLUG-IN!

oooh, I can see it- very original! An humanoid figure with arachnid locomotion!

Yes, I remember we have that cool feature. I think the steps would be: -comic book artists draw main layout frame using good perspective and no 3D limitations. -3D modelers generate geometry that matches that art, and project the art upon it, via camera mapping. -camera is then animated to zoom thru the scene. -at certain points it is realized that more drawn artwork is needed- rotoscope frames are generated. -Comic book artists use rotoscopes as templates to draw more artwork into. -new artwork is mapped via camera onto 3D geometry from same frame. -rinse and repeat on other frames as needed.

https://youtu.be/P3BKw9jK-kI Released! Lots of people are very excited about this, lots of folks planning to use it as an alternate renderer from maya, C4D etc. Price is not too bad... coupla hundy.

I would suppose they could map images in at any point of the camera move, generating themselves a reference frame to conform the art to first.

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/kick-ass-animated-3d-comic-book-sequence-breakdown/

That is 'off the hook' silly! Love it, Serg!

Wow! lotsa detail! Great stuff! Planning to use some displacement mapping for some of it?

Nice! I dig the crosseye, it's actually good for my eyes to do that. Love the girl, great Marilyn 'do'... wonder if that is A:M Hair or modelled- can't tell, which is good. THE BIKE- wow- that is a looong chain on those things, why don't they make the front wheel big and have the drive go there with a shorter chain and have the smaller rear wheel steer. Just wondering... I've gotten stuff caught in my chain before... and it needs some tiretread... other than THAT- LOVE IT! Especially the girls eyes, expression, and the way her bending thigh bends, always a trouble area for me! Great stuff Russ!

I like it. Be great to have something like Jenpy's Fast AO... Fast SSS! Don't know if you saw the GPU render demo of Element 3D V2 (due out Dec 2) Go to 20:45 into the movie for some SSS samples. Cool how he uses it on the ferns to lighten them up: http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2014/10/element-3d-v2-revealed/

Not saying it's the best results... I like to push my settings, until I get in trouble. I will also 'help-out' any SSS by placing a 200% brightness bulb behind the character with a light list only to the character(no specularity or shadows needed.) These settings are just where I was last in the program... I am constantly dinking with these in search of 'holy grail' results. This image utilizes SSS as shown, normal smoothing @100%, and the new fast AO in V18.

I did not know that you could 'trick' A:M into showing the 'average normals' feature as far back as V17!!! I have been using SSS and Ave Norms100% and it has been working as I expected it might. Haven't noticed any detriments.

Another GPU renderer to consider, Unity 5.

Russ- anything you can show us from your A:M Messiah pipeline?

Anyone else get these unusual render frames... I left my PC(nothing else running) to render overnight and saw I have some frames that take unusually long... 5 hours 34 minutes when the frame before was 2min20??? A:M V18.0G 64 bit... using SSS hair.

Yeh- that's a BIGGY.

Good news!

I am interested in porting A:M animations to external GPU renderers... have been talking about this in the OT thread called Element3D V2 lately... been following Element V2 which is expected out any day now, and Lumion-an architectural GPU renderer. I have not considered Octane, just looking at it now with fresh eyes. From what I can see- they offer a standalone renderer which claims will 'work if you can use one of the supported file formats' and one of which is obj... which we know exports quite nicely from A:M, so perhaps obj sequences would too. You would need to assign materials in Octane of course... I'm working with A:M obj's in C4D, modo, Element and would like a hero to emerge.

New version of Lumion is out... can't wait for Element... due any day now. http://lumion3d.com/new-in-lumion-5

Wow- NICE Rodney! Way to show the rest of us UP! Happy Birthday, Will! (I didn't make you anything... snurf!)

Cool. Might do. Fun! What, no HATS? "If you want to use the full logo the web link on it" - can you provide this art for us, or are we 'freestyling' it?

I don't have time to DL and view your videos, I apologize- busy day. Coupla thoughts: 1- SimSpring Systems = Bake Dynamic Systems (If it is an older video, it would be called SSS...) 2- When you do the bake, MAKE SURE the red 'A' for Animate Mode is on, or else no keyframes will hold. 3- 'Remove Simulation Data' takes away the keyframes 4- It is good practice AFTER you run the bake operation to delete or disable the dynamic, or you could preview doubled results. I just tested all of this in 18.0G on a 1 bone spring(dyn constr) and it all worked as expected.

ooops... yeah- I see. That can't go away. You can always render without simulating, but- sometimes you gotta simulate! To imitate this error without DLing Jason's project... open-up any boned model or character in your chor... select a bone and apply a dynamic-constraint to it- at this point, you used to be able to run a simulation of all the springs in the scene to see how they would 'spring' once rendered. There was always an issue too, that a simulation seemed to get different results than a straight-out render... but the simulation gave you keyframes for all the axis affected, which you could modify/edit to get more or less effect. A great feature. I seem to remember it working in V17, no? I'll check. This may need a report. EDIT- yes, broken in V17. I can't believe I havent noticed this! EDIT EDIT: I think it is now called 'Bake Dynamic Systems' which is the next choice down on the list... seems to do the same thing. Perhaps the 'Simulate Spring Systems' menu option simply needs be removed programmatically. I would from time to time refer to it as SSS- which has come to mean something else altogether.