fae_alba

The daunting thing about CG is the number of things you have to have "done" before you can "start" "Getting your ducks in a row" is the mantra of the day. Every time I attempt a short makes me appreciate what the Pixars and Dreamworks fellas pull off. Really, the mundane tasks of modeling, rigging, texturing is what makes the end result successful. Without that foundation, nothing is going to come off with the quality I aspire (or expire!) to.

Yes! You mean this Christmas thing is a regular occurrence?!?! Oh Happy Days! Lessons Learned from this project can be summarized like so: 1) always run a project like, well, a project. Set up requirements, expectations, timelines and the steps needed to get to completion. 2) a completed script is needed 3) story boards are needed 4) animatics are needed 5) well rigged models are needed (may seem like a silly requirement but I tried using a model I had only partially rigged, and it was a nightmare 6) honestly, even though we like to think we can do it all by ourselves, that simply is not so. Help is needed. I always hope/plan/expect that anything I do is "broadcast" ready. That is an awful high standard, but I am a perfectionist, and that often gets a lot of projects sent to the scrapheap around here because they don't measure up for me. Another lesson, perhaps the harshest one learnt so far: I am not an artist. While I can do basic animation, I cannot breath the life into a character the way I'd like to. I can come up with the stories, write the scripts, produce/pay for the production; but the work that makes the folks watching go "wow", is beyond me I fear. So for Pappa Bear Studios to do what I want it to do, I need talent, can't do it by myself. I need a plan!

I had been working on this story since before Halloween. In the beginning I felt it should be an easy one to pull off. The original concept contained no human actors, so the animation should be easy, simple sets so that should be easy, short story so no time would be required. Well, that's not really how it worked out. The first script felt too light to properly convey the story I envisioned. Characters were needed, humans. A deeper plot was needed to create a back story. No worries, I had some models built a while ago, not rigged very well, but it should do. So I soldiered on. I thought that I could jump right into the choreography, skip story boards, skip the animatic. Wrong again. Even though I knew the story, even though I was the only one working on the project, I found that it became a very real struggle in building a scene and keeping the pacing consistent from one cut to another, and in hind sight storyboards and animatics would alleviate that problem. So lesson learned. Do it right, no shortcuts, and give myself the time to do a quality project. I still want to tell this story, but I may take a break from it, clear my head on something else, then revisit the story in a month or so.

This is annoying. It just started the other day, in the chor, if I switch to the camera view I see this If I do a quick render (sometimes it takes two times) I see what I expect At first I thought it was the sky dome, but removing it makes no diff.

The tree lot .....

I monkeyed with those movements already, I might just cut them out, and use some close ups that are planned instead. With the render time improvements I'm now actually thinking this one might get done.

Once again this forum comes thru! Here is the latest. This same scene before the addition of the many suggestions, has taken the render from 17 hours to 30 minutes, for a chor that is twice as long. Quite impressive! Truck_Drive_Cut_A.mp4

I think I'm going to go with Roberts' lighting setup minus the fog, since I want that sunny day setting. The last hurdle is with getting clouds in the sky. I have putzed around with using decals on a dome, which look great in the modeling window, but when placed in a chor the decal is completely pixelated. What is the best way to getting a nice partially cloudy day? My last attempt of the sky image is below... edit: here's a quick project. sky_project.prj here's what it now does:

There shouldn't have been hair..at one time the farmer (in the truck) had hair, but I had removed it because it was uncontrollable. Shadows on the dome is something to look at, most likely it has to be corrected. Robert is close to what I'm going for. What I really want is the 3D look but without the harshness that 3D seems to bring. I want that soft, natural look and feel, and I think that is more to the lighting than anything else. I'm going to play with Master Holmens project, though the scene is in my mind a sunny day. But the render times have been getting extreme, and the 7 seconds stated is much better!

So, taking the suggestions: removed the default lighting, added a fill light for the shed, and a sun light. Darkened the ground. Added film grain post effect to the camera. Also added a partial sky dome to bring clouds and to give some depth. That ran into issues, since even thought the decal I used on the model looks perfect, when it renders in the chor it is blurred. I can't figure out why that might be. Rodney, wasn't thinking of b+w, but your input jogged my brain cells to look a little differently, so thanks. Robert, figures you'd notice the truck is driving on the wrong side of the road! Here is a test render of the tree lot:

So I'm trying like the dickens to get this Christmas short of mine done, started rendering and decided that a) the lighting sucks, and I'm not happy with the render settings. For the lighting I'm using the basic default lights from a new chor with the addition of a sun. The sun is set to have a soft yellow color, set at a 100%. I'll confess that lighting and rendering are two areas that I haven't had the chance to experiment with yet, and I'm down to the wire on this project if I'm going to get this done, so I'm looking for suggestions. I've attached the camera presets as well as a base project. Thanks for any suggestions: SampleProject.prj Preset.pre

My new job/life as an "Integration Architect" seems apprapo to the gist of what Pixar is trying to do. In my world, I work to bring multiple disparate data sources together, cleanse the data to a specific standard, then put it all together for business intelligence purposes. For Pixar, it seems that what they are trying to do is build out a solution to bring disparate data sources (pieces that when put together create a scene) and to leverage the open source community to help with that effort. Open source is a great way to generate a great deal of innovation with no cost to Pixar. What I found surprising is that they are relying on prompt based scripting to pull this together. If the goal is to offset the cost of development by open sourcing this beast, then usability should be the primary goal. Cost in these things is always measured in the number of employees required to run the system once done over the long haul. A scripted interface like this precludes that you would need a bevy of techies to maintain it.

From the ashes rises a new truck.

Tactic seems to have some promise, I'll have to look a little deeper at the product. At first blush it feels like it is a WordPress like approach to workflow management. I just might have a go at installing it on my blog sight and see if it works out.

I was looking at not only an archiver but a project management app as well. As Robert hinted at, a simple batch job could be written (for Microsnot users at least) to create back up copies of a folder easy enough, but I was looking to kill a whole flock of birds all at once!

check this one out Shotgun. Fits the bill, but $49/person/month. Pricey. I like free.

So now the creative juices being to flow: I'm wondering if an app external to A:M is created that can be triggered from within A:M that handles archival of a project on the fly. I have always thought that some sort of repository of an animation project that ties everything together, with a nice gui front end would help me a lot. When developing a software project I/we normally go through the following process: 1) gather requirements; what is the project supposed to do? (what is the story we are trying to tell) 2) Functional design; maps the requirements into a mid-level design of the project (script) 3) Technical design; maps the functional design into a detailed design of the project (storyboards) 4) Testing design; maps the technical design into a testing plan (animatic) 5) Development; performs the work laid out in the technical design (modeling/rigging/lighting/animation) 6) Quality assurance; performing the actions laid out in the test design match expected results (editing) 7) product release; The challenge is making sure that everything defined in step 1 makes it to step 7, and there is no loss of the work as we move to each stage. I'd like to see an app that, by way of database driven archival/retrieval, that allows us to maintain an A:M project, with plug ins perchance that allow us to maintain it from within A:M and/or a stand alone web based gui. How about a collaborative project? I have friends on my side who I perhaps can talk into doing some coding (their fee is beer usually). I'd think an open-source project, take donations to help defray the cost of a cloud platform. What I would need from folks here is a requirements list. I truly am a glutton for punishment since I will be in NYC for 4 days next week starting my new job as a technical architect. That transition has got me stressed out a wee bit, but once I've gotten my Christmas short out and the Rear Window project done, I'd like to investigate this, since I'm painfully aware of what happens when things go south with files!

As an update, I did perform the oft suggested practice of saving copies with new names. I had a half model saved off that I was able to use to get (almost) back to where I was on Tuesday. Even added a few additional tweeks. All I have to do is add poses, and the rig and I'm back in business. Still not really sold on svn though. Like I said earlier, while i used it for quite a few software dev projects it always felt like it was more of a pain than it was worth. I'm thinking that a backup hard drive on the network that can be used as a duplicate copy of my local drive, then a regular monthly backkup to cd-rom is a viable solution. That of course precludes getting in the habit of actually doing that!

Simon, unfortunately I've had to go back to 16b on my laptop. When I renewed my license a few weeks ago 17g decided it didn't want to play and the renderer crashed A:M. I simply haven't had the time to figure that one out. If I could get 17g to work in my environment, then that feature certainly would have saved my blood pressure last night..

I always save a model after each change. Like you Robert I got in that habit a long time ago when A:M tended to decide to retire at the most inappropriate times. I also make iterative copies of a model as I progress through the development stage (save as "model_v1, v2 etc.). But, once I feel the model has been "completed" I generally don't make iterative copies. If I tweek a spline in a minor fashion, I simply save the model over itself and move on. That's what I did last night, only this time A:M saved a blank file. Don't know why, and I must say I haven't seen this happen in a long long time.

Rodney, What you say is the rub of it. Tortoise is a passive archive, it waits for you to post file changes back to the repository. With A:M, and in this particular case, the write is a destructive overwrite. So if I didn't manually back up the version into a repository, then the file is lost, kaput. This time around, A:M wrote empty place holders in the model file, nothing else; so there is no recovery. It would be nice to have an archive repository plug-in for A:M that posts the version of a file currently on disk into an archive BEFORE the new version is written to disk. That way, when we all become the dunder heads that I became last night, the A:M gods are there to protect our work.

Ya know, when it rains it pours. I've been working like a mad man trying to get this off the cuff Christmas short done before the 4th of July 2014. Had the set built, had props built, and was ready to put the pieces together. Tweeked my truck model, and was really quite stoked that I pulled that one out of the hat, saved the model, saved the chor, saved the project. I then decided to look at some other human models I had kicking around to see if I had one rigged well enough to do what I needed...found one (yeah for dusty archives!). Reopend my opening scene project, and noticed my truck was missing from the chor, and not even in the objects list of the project. Went to reimport the model, no dice. That's when that cold sinking feeling started to make itself known...I opened the model up in notepad, and find the file empty, completely devoid of model-ish data. It was gone, destroyed, never to be seen again. Of course, the only backup I have is two weeks old, and only a half model at that. Of course I spent the rest of the night in a very foul mood, and of course I have nobody to blame but myself. So I have to ask, who uses the tortoise svn setting in A:M? How does it work, if it does with tortoise itself? I have used tortoise with my software dev projects, and honestly never really liked it, but I need to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, and need something that is done in the background, because it should be fairly obvious that a manual copy of files nightly is not a habit I've gotten into.

If you are referring to TSM2, the Turn Constraints is not automatically set to ON after running the rigger (jes' cause that's how the TSM people did it on their planet). But the user can set it to ON (after the rigger runs) and then save the model. However, that only works on this planet. As I told a buddy of mine, I'm from Pluto, but they told me it's not a planet anymore, soooo.... I'm trying to come up with a different way to frame the shots where those pesky humans are needed to keep the acting to a minimum. I'm feeling the pressure of time so I can't use any of it to re-rig my models. Hopefully the end result will live up to my self-imposed standards.

Ok, so I'm rapidly discovering the advantage of a solid skill set in rigging characters, of which I don't posses. I thought that if my human actors were really seen in closed ups, like feet only, back only, I could get away from spending the time on rigging (of which this project is seriously short on). Sadly I am wrong. This little clip was meant to be a final cut on the opening scene, but in watching it after rendering, I find myself disappointed. opening.mp4 Any thoughts, share them please. I'm about a nats whisker away from asking for help 'cause I really want this short done, dammit! No more half finished A:M projects.

roger, thanks for the tip. I had given a passing thought at trying to calculate the stride and placing the truck on a path, but honestly it made my brain hurt! So I opted for expressions. Once again this forum came through and I found some great tuts on this nifty feature of A:M (thanks!).