pequod

When I first picked up AM, many years ago, my intention was to break into the 3D animation industry. Times have changed and I'm no longer trying to make a name for myself. I'm primarily a hobbyist, that's why I still show up on the forum from time to time. So please don't worry that somehow the Briar Rose project is missing out on some opportunities, it's creators simply don't have the energy to pursue them. So, I've never attempted to sell the idea. Of course if someone were to come along and pay me a ton of money for the rights...... Briar Rose is meant to be smart, I'd say Gordon is the absent minded one, but he ain't no dummy either.

Gathering dust I'm afraid. I'm pretty much a spent force when it comes to big projects like this. I have been toying with the idea of doing a short (very slapstick) episode of the two main characters. Something with a beginning and an end and a story in between.

Steve, if this is anything like the animation, it's going to be a great piece of kit. Love your Hand Gizmo BTW, I'm using it in the TWO rigs.

Go to Hash's ftp site, Plugins/ImportExport and you'll find an OBJ file that you download and stick in your A:M HXT folder. It works reasonably well in v12, I've just tried it.

Hey, that was a quality piece of animation..... I'm well impressed. I like the idea of bowing the limbs, I shall try that out myself. I think some motion blur would improve it even further btw.

That's terrific John, he looks like a REAL tiny pewter model. Will you be animating this card, I wonder how well the displacements will hold up under animation.

Gosh! such debate over poor Briar's big googly eyes As I admitted over on CGTalk, the eyes were an experiment which hasn't quite come off. If there had been a director looking over my shoulder they surely would have pointed it out, instead I easily convinced myself the 'eye darting' was perfect. I think people are right though, the style is incongruous with the rest of the animation. Quite a lot of the animation makes me wince, and actually the first couple of minutes were probably completed 2-3 years ago and I hope I've got better since. I know I have so much more room to improve so this type of criticism is perfectly valid (and welcome). It is odd though, the better you get, the more glaringly obvious your mistakes become and the willingness of people to point them out. Over on CGTalk, there is a very nice short movie called 'Stilt walkers'. I felt the animation was fairly stiff but the rest of it was great. It is curious though how few commented on the stiff animation, perhaps because it was consistent, whereas Briar's eye darting stands out the more I replay it. Anyway, onwards and upwards. Thanks again for all the replies.

Really nice texturing Will. What is this '3Dpainter' I here you speak of?

Yeah lighting is very time consuming and there are infinite possibilities, I have so much to learn. Like many, Yves, I really appreciate the hard work you are putting into these new lighting features. I wish I had had version 13 for many of the scenes. Kevin Waldron's hair shader for one would have been a god send. For the end scene I used a multi pass spinning light trick to simulate AO (thanks to John Keates for the techie info), it rendered quite quickly, but I had to render her hair separately otherwise I'd still be looking at the render progress bar now. Kamikaze - I rendered everything with multi pass (16x). You get better motion blur, less artefacts and better antialiasing. Sometimes, to avoid excessive shimmering on textures or bad aliasing on edges, I would render at twice the size (1600x900) and then scale down in Photoshop. I really should of oversampled on that last scene. Virtually all the lighting was your basic 3 or 4 light setup, no skylights, apart from the multi pass trick I mentioned earlier for the last shot. There was lots of rendering out of different sections from the same shot to be composited later. Average render times - I'm not sure, but I felt relieved if I could keep it down to 15 min per frame, but that wasn't often. I rendered it on a 2GHz AMD computer. Thanks Rodney for promoting it on Renderosity.

I shall do my upmost to see you there Ken, and I'll try not to give you such a hard time this time! Teresa - I'm pretty much self taught, started the traditional route with 2D animation and then discovered A:M way back. I won't be re-entering the Mascot contest with these guys again..... they had their moment in the limelight.

ddustin - Probably a better description is 'anal' I rendered practically all of it on one computer, while on a second computer I did the work. Jim - it also helps if you don't have a life too, and it gives me the week to render out frames that have hair in them

Thanks everyone for the great responses. I've just posted it over at CGTalk, so I hope they like it as much as you chaps do........ but you know how snooty they can be. It is a great relief to finally have something to show, sorry it's taken so long, but there are only so many weekends in the year in which to work on this stuff. Although I have a few more shots which didn't make the cut for this trailer, there won't be any more adventures with Briar Rose and Gordon unless I get some serious funding! I plan on creating a web site devoted to her escapades, which should shed some more light on how the trailer was made and the story created by my friend Edward Blake. Yes, that is Mosey reincarnated as cupid, I intend to give him cameo roles in all my animations from now on, just like Hitchcock used to play walk on parts in all his films. I must thank Carl Raillard for teaching me how to rig and for the use of his chatter buster rig. It might seem odd to say, but I would now like to spend more time just animating. This project was perhaps only 40% animation, lighting and re-rendering for example took inordinate amounts of time. Just recently I bought a LCD screen, and to my horror the extra brightness and clarity of the monitor revealed a number of pass throughs. For a mad moment, I considered re-rendering some of the scenes.... however you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise nothing would ever see the light of day. Dimos - I'd be honoured to one day work with you, we must chat! Okay, if any of you wish me to answer any geeky technical questions I'd be only to happy to oblige...... I love to hear details myself.

Some of you might remember a long time ago I announced my new project entitled 'Briar Rose'. Well, after many years I've finally got together enough shots to make a trailer. Actually, the first 3 minutes is more a teaser for the rest of the short. And of course everything (3D) done in Animation Master, versions 8.5 to 11.1. Here are the direct links: http://www.hash.com/users/milos/BRIARROSE_SMALL.mov You have the option of a large Quick Time movie at 81 Mb (800x450) or a small one at 12 Mb (400x225). I've used the new H.264 codec so you'll need QT7. If you are on a PC it's better to view the large trailer with a player like VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) , rather than QT which plays it very slowly. [attachmentid=19686]

I've just watched your Bubblegum Crisis on A:M films, I can't believe more fuss hasn't been made over this on the forum. http://amfilms.hash.com/search/entry.php?entry=1089 I think it's an astonishing achievement, all the more impressive considering you want to start another huge project so soon with 'Castle of Blood....... good luck.

Great animation, love the incongruous touchy feely actions of the characters.

Fantastic animation Shaun, technically very impressive too. I bet you had a few 'pass throughs' to contend with.

You might be better off using a gradient material rather than hair. I've attached a simple edge gradient material as an example. Have you tried 'grooming' your hair? That will stop it looking too uniformed. They are a few other suggestions I could make, but I'm wondering what version of A:M are you using? [attachmentid=10832] ShortFur.mat.zip

This is so great I can hardly contain myself, thank you Bob. Since the start of this thread I've already changed my rig setup so I no longer have to do any blending, thanks Mike. It just never occurred to me that blending is redundant if you simply switch constraints immediately...... doh! Can we have this new feature in v12?

I apologise if I've got the wrong end of the stick here, but are we talking about an IK rig which has an IK target at the root of a hierarchy, or just a simple IK chain which is automatically implemented in A:M when bones are attached to their parents? As far as I'm aware there's only one way to switch between FK and an IK target, and that is through keyframing and blending. I've tried to set up a rig which had the IK target automatically follow the FK bones, so there wouldn't be any need to position and key the target when the time came to switch, but it's never worked successfully. There is a certain other program which has this ability to jump from FK to an IK target seamlessly, is that what you are after Mike?

I've just received my ticket to Mac Expo, so I'll be going........ Saturday sounds good to me. Shame there won't be any dual core Macs to goggle at though.

I'd like to meet up at least once this summer, then I won't need to bring an extra jumper

I'll be there (said in an Arnie type voice). I've been very lazy, so I won't have anything new to show

Love the style and music. Before I started my Briar project, I toyed with the idea of doing it as a cross between 2D/3D. The speed advantages are obvious and like you've already pointed out, you can concentrate on the animation more and not get bogged down in textures and lighting. I've never really liked the 3D toon look, it always looks too mathematical, but you've hit upon the best option. The squash and stretch has stopped the volumes from being too perfect and there is no cruddy toon line to mess things up. Looking forward to seeing more.

I can possibly make this weekend, although next weekend would suit better and probably help John out too.

February sounds good to me also