John Bigboote

We shouldn't turn this into a contest between the 2... but isn't 3DCoat a full 'voxel' modeler too?

SO--- 3D Coat is what... $450 USD?

THATS FUN!

Thanks for all the views and responses! No post-production or compositing... that render is straight out of A:M ( I did use After Effects to mix the sound effects and render the frames to a .mov) Animation Master features used in this clip: -negative lights -matcaps -volumetric light -material combiner thru light on the background layer -Sub Surface Scattering on girls skin -particle baking and collision-detection on girls hair -sprites -animated choreography glow and glow size -dynamic constraints -depth-of-field and motion blur at 9 passes -FastAO CPU rendered to PNG sequence at 4 min per frame ave -constrain to path, Symbiont and gradient texture on snake

I ended-up embellishing the crap out of this... got a cool Halloween animation out of it!

Wow! Great work Rodger... and Kelley! Love looking at this stuff...

That's cool, John. I was just trying to figure that effect out yesterday (hair color from decal) Your project would help other people trying to learn this effect down the line.

HEY! Wow that's cool! You could take it 1 step further and use the 'Push CP's' plugin to add a pose that would make it expand and look like it's growing...

I have a 'Snow' project in the 'Contributors Cue' that is pretty nifty but does not accumulate... maybe it does... I need to take a look.

Looks great! Can it play on a phone?

It's been my experience that different creators of BVH actions do not conform to one another, so bone orientations, names, scales etc are 'off' not only from maker to maler( bio vision, Santa Monica studios, Carnegie mellon, etc) AND even from session to session. So while your idea sounds great in theory, results may vary. Conforming a rig to a BVH action is not a very time-consuming process, about 7 sets of trans-to orient-likes are needed, at minimum(feetx2 hips chest handsx2 head) and then tweak away. Once done and saved, you can try dropping another BVH onto the action... But that does not always ensure immediate success... Results can be quite comical- in my experience.

If the Tom model is rigged at all then he is all ready for BVH. Start with the feet bones and start adding Orient like and translate to constraints from Tom model to the BVH skeleton and work your way up...

Loving it, Marcos... and dig the AO!

AND- turn off specularity for those lights as well, I don't know if they would cast negative speculars (most likely would) but they too, defeat the purpose. Using negative lights in the model like this is a way of 'painting with light' (OR- painting withOUT light...) it's a cheat... but when you figure you can move those lights around in the pose phase... it's quite handy! Thanks, Rodney!

THANKS! No, I just Googled-up a cemetery background for a quickie.

Another one, I wanted to see how it could interact with another character... fun! Diggin' the hair's ability to collision-detect... and the interplay as some of the hair gets brushed by the skull as it lifts. I just wish I could figure out how to get the hair to NOT be so 'jiggery-jittery' as it is at rest against a surface. To get the hair like this, I run a simulation first (Bake Particle Systems) and I activate a pose which 'puts away' any nearby geometry that the hair can get 'stuck-up' on... like the bunny-ears, her real ears and earrings, and even her eyelash geometry- I hide it all inside her head where it is out of the way. THEN- once simulated, I put them back where they go for the render. I may take this one step further and have the girl say 'Happy Halloween' at the end if I can find a wav on the internet that works... skull3.mov

Most of us... with any 3D software, will typically render to an image sequence and make a movie out of it later- in another app OR in A:M.

OH! - and the dark spots in the eyes and mouth are negative lights...

I didn't want to work today... and as I was looking at some artwork by Shawn Dickinson http://shawn-dickinson.blogspot.com/2012/07/blog-post.html I admired his skull designs and decided to reacquaint myself with A:M's great organic modeling tools. The texture is a matcap and the crack is a boolean, 'grunginess' is fastAO-GPU by Jenpy. skull.mov

It says that Houdini is implementing it: OpenVDB will be fully integrated into the next major release of Houdini, the high-end 3D animation package from Side Effects Software. This release will include a suite of nodes for sparse volume processing.

I think all 3 deploy character... btw---GREAT character! (in the 1st shot, something about the angle of his left arm that is odd to me, the left leg is trying so hard to keep him balanced but the arm is not...)

I just noticed that in our latest release (v17.0a SSE4) that this is still an issue... and that my patch images were not included in the bake process, I ran to the forum and did a 'bake surface' search and found this thread.

Yeah-yeah! I am talking AFTER the TSM2 rigging process is completed, all 3 steps. You can delete bones you find unneeded at will.

I mean- you have to let TSM2 give you all of the spine bones... but they are easily deletable, and the ensuing hierarchy will remain the same. I wouldn't delete spine1, but the other 4 are fair game.

I believe that all those spine bones are optional too, in that particular character you may not want to use all 5(?) spine bones- she has a stubby little torso, you might be able to get away with just 2 spine bones.