Simon Edmondson

Rodney Thank you for your reply. I misunderstood your previous message. The frames I took out were during the fall rather than just before it started. I'm acutely aware of the danger of spinal injury as I had a motorbike accident in 1991 that left me paraplegic. There was a bloke I was in rehab with who received SCI when he fell off a stepladder while decorating yet another was in a glifer that got caught in power lines and crashed to the ground. He walked afterwards the decorator did not.. Here's an attempt at Sebastien's suggestion. Regards simonS16E.mov

Sebastien Thank you very much for your reply and your help. You are right of course about the dangers of falling in that way, spinal injury is no joke. I will try a version as you suggest and see how it reads. Regards simon

Rodney I revised it after reading your suggestions. I think it may be a bit sudden now ? Funnier though ! Regards simon S16.mov

Revised it completely as I couldn't get the crawl to work due to lack of references. This still needs some work on finer details like hand and finger movements but they will happen over the weekend. Any critical feedback or comments welcome. Only three more scenes to go! simon S16.mov

Happy Birthday Stian

Rodger Thats a very fine looking model you are building there. Are you going to replicate some of the textured surfaces Hopper used. His brushwork was very 'loose' as I recall regards simon

Mark Thank you for your reply.. I've been out at Cambridge visiting friends as a larger render goes through of both takes, the joys of having V 15 and V17 ! I wasn't sure about the leg movements, which is why the toes are doing most of the work in conjunction with the arms. I'll have a closer look at todays renders. It is the last thing to actually befall him, but not the last thing heading his way. Originally I was going to use dialogue with him and his ex, and may yet do so but, the present idea is to use non word language sounds instead. WWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!! type of thing. I have a friend who is an actor and hope to get him to do it as he loves doing voices. regards simon

Been a bit diverted by other things so a bit slow developing this scene. Heres two takes on the same animation. Any feedback welcome. regards simon Why_16.mov This is a VGA conversion from a 720 render This was a VGA render17_S16.mov

Please excuse late wishes but, Happy birthday to you both. simon

I think you can probably get the z-buffered shadows to be somewhat dark by tweaking the shadow softness and shadow darkness - I changed the sun to be a Klieg, set the softness of shadow to 5% or lower, left the darkness of shadow = 80%, and the light width softness to 0 (probably didn't need to, not sure it had effect). I also did 5 pass, did not see that 16 pass made a difference (1st image). If it's not dark enough, change shadow darkness to 100%. It appeared to me that setting shadow softness to 1% made the demarcation between light & dark too raggy. 16 pass did seem to look a little better in this case (2nd image). Nancy Thank you for your reply and help. Actually I quite like the softness of the Z buffered shadows on the water spot as they worked well against the ray traced shadows of the figures and landscape. Happy accidental finding ! Difficult to test by observation but, how hard would the shadows be on a rising column of water? I still need to learn a lot more about the intricacies of the light settings. Embarrassing because Lighting is one of the things I enjoy the most when watching Film or TV. regards simon

Mack I really like the way you have the toon render setup, there the ambient values ( ?) in the flesh tones work really well. Its something I am hoping to explore later in the year, concentrating on performance and timing at the moment. regards simon

... Do you mean that you also are seeing the same type of bug in v17 when using z-buffered shadows or do you mean raytraced shadows in v17? I have not seen that occur with the z-buffered ones but I have never really used that kind of shadow as much... You don't have to use the OpenExr format (in the compositor) but it might make it a little easier to manage. As for your question about the jagged shadow on your rock... Yes, that is a rendering issue that occurs with the toon renderer. I've run into the same issue as you in my Clark WIP. I've been working with separate render passes in an attempt to get around it but I still have a little bit work to do with that. ... Mack Thank you for your reply and help. No, my mistake. I tried with the ray traced settings in V17 as V15 and the result was the same too. I tried to use EXR and shadow buffers a while back, but it was a bit involved for what was going through at that time, and haven't had the chance to try again as yet. The chance to do that sort of post production work was a little overwhelming to be honest, I'd be tinkering till the cows came home ! regards simon

Following Mack's suggestions, I converted the light to a klieg and used Z buffer rather than ray traced shadows. This was the result. Tried it in V17 and the same problem remained ? regards simon

Mack Thank you very much for your reply and help. I've encountered a similar problem before but can't remember the details. Its not an insurmountable problem for what I have in mind to use it for ( they are going to be 'smudged' in Pshop , but it would be good to be without the bug. In an earlier scene in the short there was a pronounced jagged shadow on a rock and, I now gather it was a problem with the toon render ? Here's the shortened project with everything taken out but the water column. I checked the material settings under properties and the only values set appear to be the toon lines and the bias. There was a roughness setting but I deleted that and it made no difference to the render problem. Thank you for your help. regards simon Water_Spout.prj

Robert Thank you for your reply. The render is still going through but, I will try to do that when its finished. regards simon

I'm rendering a series of frames for the water spout in the current short. The sequence is being rendered as tga files with an alpha channel with the intention of compositing it within the scene. As the render goes through I noticed this strange effect in the shadow and wondered what might have caused it and how to avoid it future ? It appears to be showing the polys the splines approximate too ? The spline rings are far less substantial then the lines suggest. ( think there are 4 in the head of the spout. Multi pass on at 16, toon lines set to 0.2, bias at 20%, default surface properties. OSX 10.68 on Imac, V15. Any help gratefully received regards simon

Apologies for not knowing the blokes name. I looked this morning and I think it is Silvano Fraziano (?) This google page has some of the images in it. simon http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sit...52F%3B192%3B370

Spent today drawing a new splash. This is it. Not very happy with it but any feedback welcome. Why_S15.mov It was based around a model of the column that I animated in the chor. On seeing the results I thought to try a render with the model rather than drawing over the wireframe as a rotoscope. I think I prefer it, although the dissolution at the end needs work. Something to sleep on. regards simon Why_15.mov

Mark Thank you for your reply and help. No liberty taken at all. I drew a perspective box and marked out the increments for the rising column but, now realise, that I was sticking to the rectilinear box a bit too much so will have another go and try to get it more cylindrical this time. I had thought of making it as a 3D splash and scaling the column as a series of poses (?), but think that may be more complicated than the current method. Have to build some lego sets for the stop frame work, so will have a think about it during that. regards simon

Robert I can't remember his name unfortunately but, there was a german artist ( in 19thC I think ) who made sculptures of himself pulling the most extreme of expressions on his face. I think he may have been slightly mad, in a literal rather than jokey sense, and thought the work would exorcise his bad spirits. I don't know if they have them in America (?) but in some parts of the UK they hold what are called 'Gurning' competitions were people literally pull their own faces into all sorts of distorted shapes and expressions. Not something I enjoy myself but used to have a friend who did a long time ago. He was training to be a teacher 1 regards simon http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sit...img.Svz-7ANEozw

Hi Simon- your stuff is looking great! Enjoying the progression! I'd say Photoshop is not the scaling culprit, but I would definitely check your FCP input dialogues... something is amiss there. Mat Thank you for your reply. I'll look at the FCP input dialogues as you suggest. Its a curious problem that I haven't encountered before. regards simon

Take Two on the splash. Still not happy , any feedback welcome. There is a curious effect just as he touches down. I rendered the frames in AM at HD1080, as tga files. Imported those in photoshop and drew a new layer on each for the splash, saving them as psd files. They were then imported into Final Cut ( pro and express had same result ), The saving as PSD files seems to have altered the aspect ratio of the pixels ? When you watch the clip rendered out from Final Cut as a QT file. , the 'letterbox' changes as the PSD files play then go back again with the tga. Even though the file info has them down as the same 1920x1080 size ??? regards simon Why_S15.mov

Mark Thank you for your reply. As I was going to bed, I thought I'd try a perspective approach to getting the splash to rise, then fall back and have it wash outwards on return ? On a trivial point, when I used to watch Stingray and Thunderbirds as a kid the only thing that detracted from it for me was that, when they landed in water, the splash was never big enough for the scale of the object ( submarine or aircraft ) involved. I think the splash here is too large as you suggest. Back to the graphics tablet. I had thought of trying it with a bump map using animated %values. Maybe after the perspective. regards simon

Douglas Thank you for your reply. I like the goat, but can't claim any credit, It was the work of Mark W and Rodney. I'm not happy with the splash as yet, and trying to work out what to do with it. Keep getting strange anomalies when I try to edit it together in Final Cut ( frame size seems to keep changing ). The render works OK but the drawn sections in photoshop keep going askew. Curious. Will try to think it through a bit more overnight. The guitar might take a beating in the process... regards simon

[First proper take on the splash down. Not happy with the splash as yet. Any feedback welcome. simon Why_S15.mov