fae_alba

I was doing a little research on flour sack exercises and saw one post that the tabs, or arms and legs of a flour sack are more for conveying emotion than for a means to create motion. That sort of resonated with me, so I revisited the rig on my flour sack and added some dynamic constraints to the bones for the "arms", then ran a quick test. The result is below. The big question now is, if the tabs, tassels, whatever, are not for motion, then how to we motivate a flour sack to scoot across the screen? https://youtu.be/-hrv65lValY

Not much, this is pretty much Animation 101. The big problem I foresee is scheduling everyone in one place at one time every week. Evenings mid-week are best for me. Since I spend the beginning and end of each week traveling for work, mid-week I'm ensconced in a hotel room with nothing to do. weekends I tend to try and stay away from the computer as much as possible.

I'd be up for it. I got through the first two lessons last time, but petered out after that. Now, I'm a little bit more motivated in honing my skills before really starting work on my Papa Bear short. So I'm in. and thanks Robert for doing this. Now we need a rigging boot camp!

Or we could actually finish one!

Well, I tried. A few weeks ago I dug up from my backup disk a halloween short that I had done 13 years ago. I thought I would simply re-render it, have my youngest write a quick soundtrack, and have a short done for this halloween. Of course, as soon as I looked at the chors I thought, "Heck I can improve on this!" What I intended to do was start off with the typical spooky scene of a cemetery, then have, off screen, two voices swapping silly halloween jokes. Cut to two talking statue busts (think the Haunted Mansion) cracking jokes and being an overall rowdy duo. Then cut back to the cemetery with a closeup of a tombstone, where a skeleton is breaking out of the ground, his repose interrupted by the rowdy duo. He climbs from the grave, grabs a jack-o-lantern and chucks it at the jokers, whereby he can go back to his eternal rest. Didn't get it all done. What I do have rendered off is below. scene0_small.avi scene1_small.avi One of the talking statues...

Sounds like a good decision to me. In all likelihood I'll be sent back down sometime next week and I won't find out till Sunday. makes planning a tad bit difficult.

No worries... I've been busy playing dodge-em with Hurricane Matthew. Was sent to Miami on Tuesday for a client meeting. Upon landing I got a text saying the client is delaying due to the impending storm (but to come in on Wednesday as scheduled and we'll "keep an I on the storm"). I said "not!" scrambled and got a flight out yesterday at 3am.

Hey I needed that on my Papa Bear short for that underwater look.

Rodney I was striving for a film noir detective movie kind of vibe. It will be interesting to see if you can pull it off!

Lookin forward to seeing what magic you work on it Rodney

just sent an archive off to you...enjoy!

Wonder if I could make the Awesome Con....it's on my b'day so I'm sensing a happy birthday present to me (I'll disguise it in a cultural trip, see the sights sort of thing. The wife will never know!)

Yeah, the buildings are just a backdrop. How about this one? Each object is a separate model and I can send you an archive with everything in it.

When I was typing I envisioned a short sequence that includes a backgrond, foreground and middle ground with the various elements involved (all the objects/models) there. This could be a scene that doesn't have any characters in it such as the opening scene. It could also be something that won't appear in the short itself (think of the various film credits that take the audience back through scenes from the film but in a different style than the film itself such as a 3D animated film that has hand drawn scenes recreated for the credits. Barring that the simplest thing would be a model... any type will do to test out the possibilities. how's this...

Rodney, Papa Bear is always willing to be a guinea pig! Do you want a still, a model, or what?

Then that leaves the bit around the eye. But then I'd have to ask what's the advantage? Is it more a means to have a character that is part 2D and part 3D?

the eyeball is 3d.

Timing has been the bane of my existence. I've taken to using a stop watch on my phone, and doing the action to get it straight. I suppose part of the problem is when working in a chor, getting a character to walk up a set of stairs and you look at the timeline, you see all of these keyframes for say two seconds, my brain says, "that's a lot of work, so 2 seconds MUST be long enough!" Ok, back to the topic of the thread....

I know working with A:M can be frustrating, trust me. But to echo both Rodney and Gerald, everyone here is here to help others, and to get help themselves. Otherwise, why be out here at all? Now, I'm a software engineer by trade and training, been on everyside of the fence from design to code, to QA to helpdesk. And I'm here to tell you, if you see behaviour that others don't when doing the same tasks (constraining a model to a path), then any help desk professional is going to first suspect the user. It's a fact of life. The purpose of the questions being asked is to dig into the issue you are experiencing in order to eliminate possibilities, that's how it gets done. If at the end of the Q&A session all of the potential user generated issues are eliminated, then we can look to the software for the problem. You have had some of the best individuals on this forum offering to take time to look at your project and find, and most likely fix, the issue for you. Take Them Up On Their Offer!!!!

I will confess that using A:M and proxies for creating storyboards is not mine. The proxies I'm using for Papa Bear were created by Mark Largent , and what was his idea to use A:M, I'm just carrying on his fine tradition. But, yes, each scene/camera cut is set up in a chor and then a single frame is rendered off. And before you think, "gee that sounds like a lot of work", consider that if you are diligent in saving each individual chor, named for the scene, when you decide that something needs to be altered (you most certainly will) then it is a simple job to open that chor up, make the adjustment, and rerender.

Animatics is an animated storyboard, used to get basic timing down. My personal opinion is that while it can be done in A:M, I wouldn't. My main reason is that you would most likely wind up with one chor for the entire animation, and that gets tougher to manage than necessary. Ideally, your script is broken up into scenes, then the storyboard further breaks down the scenes into the camera movements/framing, then the animatic is simply the storyboard put together in a movie with a simple soundtrack. In A:M, each scene, camera cut is animated in a separate chor. I use celtx for my script writing, story boarding, and animatics. I do use A:M to help with the storyboards, using proxies, simply because I can't draw worth a tinkers damn!

Learning to walk is scary. Our lowly flour sack tries to take his first step. first_try.mp4

No kidding. I just realized I needed to add more back bones in order to get the range of motion I wanted.

The modeling was definitely more of a struggle than I thought it would be. Started out with the mentality of "it's a sack, how hard can it be?" Did one model, rigged it, and then started a walk cycle and realized that there just wasn't enough there to convey life. So back to the modeling window i went. I think the current rig still may need some work, but I'm going to attempt some basic poses and a simple walk cycle to see if that is true or not. Only time will tell.

Starting to get back into the swing of things, after a busy summer (wish it weren't over though!), new granddaughter, and tons of work around the house. Before I jumped into trying to animate Papa Bear, I figured I'd have a go at the ol' flour sack exercise. Here's the model with a first pass of rigging. I'll start some test posing tomorrow.