strohbehn

Fascinating thread you've got going here, Robert! I really hope you get this done on time. Can't wait to see how the sock puppet works out. Mark

Awesome idea.... and the puppet looks great already! Looking forward to seeing where you take this one, Robert.

Thanks, Gerry. The experience of having a deadline and a lot of critical viewers was a great motivator to actually complete a project and try to make it decent. It was satisfying to finish one, finally. The whole process is good to go through at least once, because you learn so much about workflow. Give it a try in the future if you have some spare time. One suggestion would be to go back to the 11 Second Club archives for whatever month and go through every single animation in rapid succesion. You'll quickly see what sets the interesting clips apart from the others. I found that if they didn't capture my attention within the first 2 or 3 seconds it was too late. Wish I'd done this myself before spending a whole month on the project!

Thanks, Robert and David. I had hoped for a much better showing, but my clip didn't have enough interesting content to make it stand out. It was a great learning experience, though. Thanks, again, for your feedback during the process. The second and third place finishers got ripped off, in my opinion. Both were so much better than the winner, it was a shame.

Are you saying that it may be possible, by the time you're done with this, to install the entire Squetch rig and only one compensate would need to be reset????

Thanks, George. I was looking at some of the previous competition entries and even the middle-of-the-pack animations are outstanding, so I don't have huge expectations. Hopefully it will hold up OK. The 11 second club website has a voting section. You rate each animation (I think over 160 this month) on a 1-10 scale. I think you need to rate every clip for your votes to be registered, so it's a long process. Well, it was your idea. Thanks again for that, Rodney. It'll be fun to see other people's take on the audio clip.

Hey Rodey, your suggestions were great and very timely. I deleted the ground plane and added a large cylinder, shifted off to the side so it looks like they're near a steep drop off. The effect is just as you described. Hopefully it won't be distracting anymore. The entry is submitted and no time for changes now. Funny how the finality of it suddenly gives me a keaner eye for things I would have done differently. My goal for this was to FINISH an entire animation for once! Learned a ton and had fun, so I'm satisfied. Here's the finished piece: may_11_sec_31k_final_with_counter.mov Thanks, everyone, for your encouragement and help. Great people, here!

Thank very much! Hi Rodney. Great ideas on composition. Wish I had an extra 2 days, but I'll see what I can do in 2 hours. Thanks! Mark

Thanks! Robert, thanks a ton for the great critique and video. Awesome! The feet shifting from 208-220 is intentional to show weight. I don't like it when feet are stuck to the ground. There's a lot of small feet shifts that I've noticed in myself, but maybe the clip is too short for this. The big shift on 180 was originally on "see 'em back", but I think what happened (now I see it) is that I did the lip sync exactly to the sound track, then actually slid the sound file forward instead of pulling the lipsync keys back. That screwed up the timing. Hmmm... I think all of the pass-throughs happened after I splined this thing. I should have been more careful to check for that. In the linear stage it all worked. The elbow issues at 290 happened when I was adding more hip movement to the moving hold late last night and I didn't catch it. The right hand slide on 150-175 was intentional, but if it looks like a mistake I'll take it out. Your comments about hip motion from 325 on are great. I worked hard on this up until that point, then dropped the ball. Thanks for catching that! Thanks again for the great help, Robert! I'll fix all of these things tonight.

Here's the latest update. may_11_sec_29n_counter.mov - Fixed moving holds so they don't "hit a wall" at the extremes. - Made some asymmetry in mouth poses and worked on jaw movements. "O" pose still not great. - Worked on eyelid asymmetry and expression (still needs work). - Changed the sign wording. - Improved head movements. I'm open to feedback/suggestions. One day left! Thanks

You're right. I slowed down the head nods and made them more subtle. Also slowed a few of the movements that preceded moving holds to make it look less like he "hits a wall". I decided to just go with a new decal on the sign. Thanks for the idea, though, Steve. Right about the 'O' phoneme. That's one of the hardest shapes for me to model. I'll have to work on the lipsync more tonight. Thanks. I'll see if I have any time left for something like that. It's down to 48 hours. Good idea, Paul.

Hi David. I tried having a guy come down, hit the ground and recoil back up but it didn't work. It was a little creepy. Your idea of having the cord break is better, though. That could work well. I also thaought of having something else fall and hit the ground, as if it fell off the guy during his jump. Thanks, John. You're right, but there's got to be something with more impact/wit than what I currently have there. Any ideas?

He's currently rigged with sculptable eyelids, so I'll work on that tonight. See if I can capture some emotion there. This has been a huge time consumer. Frustrating, rewarding, etc. Definitely tedious, but addicting. Sorry you had to scrap what you started. I've done that several times. Thanks for the critique and the kind words. I wanted a different angle for this sound file than everyone else would be using. Don't know if this succeeds or not. Sometimes what works in my head doesn't translate well for others. Is there a way I can make this bungee jumping gag work better with my existing animation? Possibly something different on the sign or in the background?

may_11_sec_29b_h264_framecounter.mov All major animation is complete. Still needs to be polished.... especially head and eye movements. Most of it is still in linear or stepped, with the body and arms splined. I can still make minor changes, but the major action will stay as is due to short time remaining. My character doesn't have eyebrows and I'm concerned it won't read as well as it should. The eyelids can be sculpted as if they're eyebrows, but I haven't done any of that. The render is very basic. I'd love to try Ambient Occlusion, but don't know if there's time since I don't have a clue about it. I'm curious to see if you all think the concept works. This guy works at the ACME Bungee Jump Co. at their cord testing facility and loves his job. Especially when things go right and the equipment works Critiques welcome. Thanks

Success!!! Robert was right about a 00:00 keyframe anchoring and preventing a shift of keys for these On/Off poses and certain others in the PWS timeline. What worked was to select the desired channel in the PWS, with the "All" folder (at the top of the PWS) selected. Then switch to the "Selected" folder (so now your previously selected channel(s) are isolated from the rest. Then select all of the keys except for the one at 00:00 and use the MOUSE, NOT the arrow key, to move the keyframes to the right. Crazy, but it worked for me. Thanks for the help, guys! Mark

That's exactly what I'm seeing, Robert, but can't figure out a way around it yet. Tried deleting the 00:00 key first, then shifting.... no luck. Tried copying all keys from that channel, deleting old ones, then pasting at frame 100... no luck. hmmmm???

Yes. All of the filters I originally used for keying (everything but muscle and bias) are turned on. I tried turning those two on as a test and it still didn't work.

This should be simple. I started my chor animations at frame 0 and now want to shift everything over to start at frame 100. In the PWS graph I switched to key mode and tried to select everything by dragging a box around all the keys, then hit the right arrow key to shift them. The problem is that there are about 6 channels that won't shift. They are user properties (poses) that turn IK hands on and off, a null's translation keys, and camera translation keys, among others. I've tried everything I can think of, including the "Move Keys" command, and those few channel's keys still will not move. Any suggestions? Using V15.0e on WinXP Thanks!

If you don't already own a 3D mouse, you may want to give this product a try: the n52te SpeedPad from Belkin A couple of weeks ago I bought one for use with my tablet PC and am absolutely amazed with how well it works for A:M. I programmed all 15 keys (on one of three "keymaps") with shortcuts for A:M and can fly around the different views and operations with ease. It's a fantastic way to work, especially if you don't want to be tied to a traditional keyboard. Price is reasonable, too.

Wow! Beautifully done, Luuk. The only part that doesn't completely work for me is the last 1/4 or so where the ball lands on the tail and rolls off. Based on how much he's affected by the ball coming into the scene, and how much effort it takes to throw it up, it seems like the ball needs to show a bit more weight when it lands on his tail. Great job.

Thanks, Mark. Now he needs a body. I may hook him up to your 2008 rig and the Squetch rig next for a nice generic character for everyone to use.

Here's the model file... cleaned up a bit for you all. Just open a new action and rotate the facial controls to see what they do. I used mtpeak's style facial controls because they were quick and easy to set up for testing. There are lots of fine-tuning controls to play with in the pose sliders too. If you want to add a distortion box, open an action and do New>Distort. Then set the target of the distortion box to "Head" bone. Go into muscle mode in the action and pull the distortion box CP's around to change the shape of the head. CartoonHead_Sphere_2_1_09.mdl Thanks, Mr. Simmons for taking a look. You da man! 3DArtZ.... Thanks for the description. I forget now if you posted any examples of that? Did you? I'll have to check the archives. Watch your kneecaps, too. Sounds like they're coming for you.

Thanks for posting your example. Nice demonstration of distortion box use. Particle baking and hair are a couple of those features I've never looked into, but it looks like Martin's team has come through again with some great tools.

Hey Martin, hope you heal up fast. Glad I could bring some fun to your day. Thanks again for an awesome program! Thanks. It's been fun to experiment with distortion boxes. Yeah, you're right. I'm curious to know if he's done anything more with it lately. Could you post some of your examples where you used distortion boxes? The idea was to use a perfectly spherical head so I could use bones to easily make the poses. Any rotation of a bone would leave its' CP on the sphere's surface, and supposedly look OK. This worked really well for all of the poses except the Open Mouth pose where I had to use some bone translation. The bone layout is very similar to the Squetch rig with each CP in the mouth area having its' own bone. Right now the model is sort of duct taped together with lots of afterthought ideas put into action... lots of poor bone naming and disorganization of its' guts. When I clean it up more I plan on making it available to everyone to check out and use. I wanted a generic model to use for lipsync practice and hopefully be able to follow through with some 11Second Club ideas in the future.

I've always liked the squash and stretch look of the Veggie Tales character's eyes and wondered how to do it in A:M. There were several posts on this forum showing how it was done with distortion boxes so I gave it a try. Very cool... then it made me wonder if the same technique on a generic round character head would make it easy to generate a bunch of unique characters very quickly without having to do any rerigging or remodeling (other than a new distortion box). After a little experimentation I came up with a design that works pretty well in most deformations - except for really extreme stretches. The example video shows one model instanced three times in the choreography, each one having a unique distortion box for the eyes and the head. They are all linked to the same action to show how the heads and eyes hold up to different deformations. I didn't animate the distortion boxes in this example, but that's easy to do too. Maybe this is old news, but I think it's pretty slick. The example is simple and I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but see what you all think. WetMouse6.mov (7.16mb) And here's the model file for you to check out: CartoonHead_Sphere_2_1_09.mdl