largento
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Posts posted by largento
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Thanks, Logrus!
Keep it up, I (being a fan of trek) look forward to seeing the final product (which I hope is an animated film) BTW how are the interior sets coming, or have you worked on them?The plan's to create both an animated short (6 or so minutes) and a "photo" comic.
I've done some on and off work on the bridge, but lately have been focused on getting the models, set and props finished for one scene, just as a test to get my feet wet with animating. This scene takes place down on Vulcanine.
I've got six main characters to model and then a variety of background characters. I figure I'll work on the sets and props in-between them and then finish them up after the character modeling is done.
I'm definitely still in the very early stages of this. :-)
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The audio in the rendered clip is sped up. You can tell that it's higher pitched. On the other version, it's normal. Don't know what would cause that to happen, though.
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Thanks, guys! Your encouragement is really appreciated!
LOL@ "Spott On," Bill. And I did find your Orc Ear on the Extras DVD and looked at it when I went to start to model the ear. It's really well done, but like you point out, *too* well done for something cartoony like this. Something that never occured to me to even try in the drawings is to actually give them the ability to turn like dog ears. With this being animated, I could show the movement and it would be pretty funny. There's the scene on Vulcananine where Spott hears the Marriage Party approaching. I just had him cup his ear in the comic, but I could have his ears turn forward and have him cock his head to the side like a dog. :-)
I've got to go back and fix some of the definition in the eyes, Lee. When I applied the Porcelain material, they lost a lot of detail. Spott's expression stays pretty much the same all of the time, so he's always squinting. I like the idea that it makes him even more alien and weird that you can't see his eyes. (His eyeballs are entirely black.) It also makes him look perpetually annoyed.
I'm definitely in this for the long haul. A little bit each day and eventually I'll get there!
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Still chipping away at this...
Captain Krok is pretty much done. He's all rigged and has all his facial poses and mouth shapes. I'm finding that by mixing pose sliders, I can get some really cool range with his eyebrows and expressions.
Now, I'm working on Mr. Spott. Here's where I'm at with the head. I've got my work cut out for me with the ears. I've also got to work out his hair. The drawings I did always put some gaps in the hair hanging over the forehead and I want to accomplish the same with this version. I also want to try to mess with a specularity map to see if I can get that "highlight ring" around the hair.
It's gonna' be really cool when I can get the two characters together in a scene!
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... picking up dog-doo for money.
You can get paid to do that?
Hmm....
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Let's just hope it's not by the pound...
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I have absolutely no idea if this would work, but I wonder if you could get away with a loop that just moved everything from the current position to one position over...
Like on a gear... if you you can do just enough movement to get one sprocket to move to the position of the next sprocket, in a loop, it looks like the whole gear is completely revolving...
Like I said, I have no idea if this would work, but if it did... :-)
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Thanks for the tip! I'll give that a try next time.
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That's awesome, Al. I love how the fusion core lights up.
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Wow! Just noticed that there's a MirrorBones plug-in in A:M 14 and it works on my Intel Mac!
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Wow, Lee! That's a fantastic job! The model was cool-looking to begin with, but now it's just amazing!
Dark Jedi, I'd totally go with the metal around the face. Makes it look like there's a face shield that goes with the armor that he's choosing not to wear. With all of the armor he's got on, it would make sense that there would have been something to protect the face and this guy is just too badass to wear it.
Again... Wow!
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Thanks, Andy! I found blueprints for it online and was able to use them for my rotoscopes.
I haven't done any animation yet. I've been waiting until I got a character fully modeled and rigged. I haven't started watching the 3rd Training DVD on animation yet, but I think it's going to be the part that's the most fun and rewarding. The modeling aspect of it is very appealing, but being able to bring the characters to life is the real end goal.
Hopefully after I have a few characters under my belt, I won't lose so much time just looking at 'em. :-)
Got to buckle down this weekend!
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Thanks for the links to the tutorials, Chris & David! I really appreciate the help!
I'll check them out tonight when I get home.
Unfortunately, I'm out of luck on the MirrorBones plugin since I'm on an Intel Mac and it says it only works on PPC Macs. Although, I suppose I could load it onto my old computer and just bring it in there when I need to do it... it wasn't a huge production to do it the manual way, but I did some things wrong and ended up having to copy and paste in my relationships and for some reason I ended up with like 20 copies of each relationship and had to spend a bunch of time deleting all of those extras. I wouldn't want to have to go through that again!
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Very cool! - great, smooth looking model and a humorous 'Kirk' pose.
Thanks!
Smartskinning is another aspect of A:M which seems daunting but is relatively straightforward once you understand the process. I'll mention a few tips which I learned (am still learning) along the way. I apologize if I mention things you already have a handle on or seem obvious.Assume I have a handle on nothing. :-)
1) learn and experiment with CP weighting before and during smartskinning2) make sure all Left Side cps and Left Side bones are exact mirrors of their Right Side counterparts (that is, if you want a symmetrically aligned model - your Captain model looks pretty much symmetrical). If anything differs from one side to the other, time-saving tasks such as 'mirror all smartskin' will not work on the mis-aligned bones.
3)When naming bones, follow exact naming conventions from 1 side to the next - Right Calf & Left Calf, not R calf and Lt calf. I know this seems obvious, but an idiot like me can make this kind of mistake very easily.
I haven't done any CP weighting with this rig, although I did mess with it a little with the 2001 rig. That was all stab-in-the-dark stuff, though. This is another thing that I think I'm going to have to spend some more time with to really understand it.
I'm fairly certain I'm in good shape with the bones being the same, since the tutorial walked me through completing one side, then saving it out, flipping it, renaming all the left bones to right bones and then importing it back in. The CPs are only mostly the same. I've since gone back and changed some things, though. I had a couple of 5-point patches in the armpits that were placed badly, so I went in and re-did those to get them into a better spot. I did the same thing to both sides, but I did it individually, so they aren't exactly the same. I also had to re-do his abdomen to make it work better with the legs and did that the same way. I wasn't sure if I could use mirror-mode to delete CPs and re-attach things and didn't experiment to see if I could. But, all of the other areas and joints should still be the same. Any of the adjustments I've made where I was just moving CPs around, I've used mirror-mode.
The only really bad joint I'm getting is the legs connecting to the hips. Especially if I pose him sitting down.
With CP weighting, I'll need to do the geometry bones (since they actually have CPs attached to them), but can I (should I) do the smartskinning with the control bones?
I'm hoping I can finish out this model this weekend, so that I can move on to the next one.
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Thanks for the link, Chris! I've been looking for a smartskinning tutorial.
I bit the bullet last week and went along with Barry's rigging tutorial DVD. Although there was a lot to it, it *did* start to make sense after awhile and the rig works pretty well! I think one of the missing pieces for me was finally "getting" the connection between the CPs and the bones. I guess I had it in my head that I was going to have to work to get the CPs to work with the rig, but it's actually getting the rig to work with the CPs.
I haven't done any smartskinning yet and I still have to do facial poses, but I've been playing around, posing the character and most of the joints seem to deform fairly well.
What was good, too, was that where I was having problems, I now had more of an idea of how to go back and re-do the mesh to fix it. I'm certain this will help me when I start on the next model.
I've gotten over a lot of the sense of terror I was feeling at the prospect of rigging. :-)
I've been having a lot of fun just putting him into poses. I think I'm tapping into memories of setting up my action figures when I was a kid. :-)
Here's the one I was playing with this morning. The background is just something I grabbed off of the web. I was finally able to show him holding the phaser I made...
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Largento,
Thank you for your trouble. This information is exactly what I was looking for. I wouldn't even know how to request a benchmark test.
I'm a little confused about the "jumpiness" you mention while in bones mode - what do you mean by "tumbling"? Is this an 'action' you've created that produces choppy movement while you're scrolling through the timeline in shaded/wireframe?
The render times you mention seem extremely reasonable at that resolution - much better than I expected.
Were I to buy a ModBook, I would opt for the highest model with 2 Gig RAM for sure. I do understand you feeling confined on the MacBook's monitor, but it seems like for my needs as a 'road' computer it might work, even with the compromises it demands.
Thanks again. You've been a great help.
-Chris
No trouble. I was curious about it myself. By tumbling, I mean pressing the "T" key and moving around the model. In bones mode, it's akin to having dropped frames. Instead of a smooth movement around the model, it jumps.
I should also point out that the render was just my character holding a prop, so there wasn't a whole lot of things to render.
I ended up connecting my mouse to my MacBook while I was doing it, because it was a little disconcerting using the trackpad. You can right-click with the trackpad now if you set it up in the systems preferences. You do it by holding two fingers on the pad while clicking the button. Still no way to right-click *while* you're left-clicking. At least I wasn't able to. Maybe if you have really quick fingers. :-)
Glad I could help.
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Well, I've got 13s and 14beta loaded onto my MacBook.
It's really hard for me to judge how well it's working, since I'm having trouble getting past how confined it feels in the 13.3" screen. (I've been using it on a 24" widescreen monitor.) It seems to work and it opens up fine. I imported my Captain Krok model I've been working on and tumbling in shaded mode seemed to move smoothly. In modeling mode. In bones mode, it was really jumpy.
Since I've actually been spending a lot of time in bones mode rigging my character and dealing with a lot more bones, I have noticed that it is slower than in model mode on my iMac, too. Not, sit and wait for something to happen, but tumbling in shaded wirefram in bones mode is NOT smooth. It's even more choppy on the MacBook.
I opened up a cho file that I'd been playing with this morning and rendered out a frame. I did it at 1080 size with 16 pass. On my iMac, it took about a minute to render. On the MacBook, a little over a minute and a half.
It's definitely usable.
If there's some sort of benchmark or test you know of for me to run, I'll try it out.
I should point out that my MacBook only has 512MB of RAM. I'm sure you'd load yours as much as you could.
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I've got a black MacBook at home (the CoreDuo version, not the newer Core2Duo one.) I've not tried A:M on it, but I'll load it up tonight and let you know how it works. The new one will be a little faster than mine, but it'll give you an idea.
It's not going to be that fast, though... and I hope the folks give you a good warranty, since I'm betting the Modbook voids your Apple warranty and then some.
I use my MacBook for writing, surfing the web while I watch TV and reading digital comics. I wouldn't have gotten one as my primary computer.
I remember hearing about the ModBook being shown off at the Mac Expo, but don't think I've visited their site. Can't they do it to a MacBook Pro?
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That's awesome! And I don't think it's making fun of him at all. 'Sides he did that song with Bob & Doug Mackenzie all those years ago which means he probably has a good sense of humor.
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Whew! It's taken awhile, but I'm getting close to finishing Captain Krok. He's changed a fair amount and probably will change a little more before all is said and done.
I'm really feeling good about it. This is the first time I've ever modeled and rigged a character to this point and I'm like a kid at Christmas with it. :-) Rigging was something that was really giving me pause, but I knuckled down and followed Barry's tutorial and I'm now feeling mildly competent. :-) A BIG improvement. :-)
I haven't done any smart skinning yet. Just from playing around with the model, the tough area is where the legs join. When I put him into a sitting position, it deforms badly. I may have to look at remodelling his abdomen to improve that as well as smart skinning.
I'm really looking forward to doing the facial poses, so I can really bring him to life.
As a mini-goal, I'm aiming at doing one little scene from the story first. It's one of the gags during the Captain Krok/Mr. Spott fight. Obviously, I'll have to create Mr. Spott and there's a couple of props and part of the Vulcanine set. Hopefully I can get those finished in the next month or so.
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Myriad is Adobe's default typeface for Illustrator. It's using its own version of it that isn't installed like your normal fonts.
I suppose you could track it down on your computer and make a duplicate to install with your normal fonts.
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Thanks for the input, guys!
I think I'm going to take a little of all of the above and save out a few different versions of the model to try the different methods with. It seems like a smart thing to do to go ahead and follow Barry's tutorial and go step by step with creating a rig first. Hopefully it'll relieve some of the "what the heck am I doing?!" anxiety I've been feeling so far. :-)
After that, I can revisit the 2001 rig and then by that time, the new stuff for the Squetch rig should be available and I can give it a shot.
Baby steps. :-)
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Hi folks, looking for some opinions on rigging...
I'm reaching the point where I'm needing to rig my character. It's a little daunting. Okay, it's a LOT daunting. :-)
I don't really know what all my options are, but from what I've been able to see there's: the 2001 rig, the Squetch rig or create a custom one.
I'm on a Mac and running Tiger, so The Setup Machine isn't an option for me.
I've been messing with the 2001 rig (after doing the boneless thom tute) and it goes okay until I start getting to parts that deviate too much from the default rig or go past the tutorial (like finger bones). Not understanding how all of the various hidden bones work, I'm not sure why they are where they are and where they should be exactly.
So, I thought I'd pause take a break and seek out some advice on how I should proceed.
The Squetch rig looks complicated, but there seems to be a really good video tutorial to follow and I've got Barry Zundel's rigging DVD which walks you through building a custom rig.
Part of me thinks maybe going the custom route would be good for the learning experience of finding out what the bones do and why they are placed where they are, but there seem to be a lot of bells and whistles in the Squetch rig that would be beyond my being able to create on my own.
I'm resolved that it will be something that will come easier with the experience of having done it several times, but I'm hoping you kind folks could point out some of the pitfalls and point me to a better path so that the trip isn't quite so bumpy.
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As a long time Mac user who switched to PC after the release of OSX, I have been contemplating buying a MacBook Pro to replace my Acer Tablet PC but am surprised to find mixed reviews on Mac/A:M performance. The issues you describe above concern me - for a platform that across the board is hailed by graphic artists as THE platform, the Mac's slow response in bones mode and rendering in A:M seems like it would be frustrating - to the point that I can't see shelling out $3k for a machine only to be pulling my hair out while rigging. What is the best solution? I need a portable machine to work on when I'm not at my desktop - my tablet was adequate for a while, but is nowhere near the performance of my tower, and besides, it's losing a lot of it's functionality and needs to be replaced. Any suggestions? I do appreciate the pluses of each platform, and I'd like to take advantage of being able to access both with Apple's new Intel processors, but my experience with Windows XP has been stellar, much better than my Mac enthusiast friends give it credit for.
I'm using it on a Mac (24" iMac Core2Duo) and it works fine for me. Granted, I've not ever used it on a PC, so I can't make a comparison.
As much of a Mac enthusiast as I am, I think if you already prefer a PC, you should stick with it.
Of course, with a MacBook Pro, you could put WindowsXP on it and have both experiences, but if you do that, you'll only end up spending more time on the Mac side and eventually hating your windows machine and having to buy a new desktop Mac and then you will be alienated by your PC friends and branded as a turncoat and Bill Gates will add your name to a list that he has of people to kill first when "Operation Blue Screen" is finally put into effect and activates the Manchurian Candidate-type program that's been secretly hypnotizing every Windows user since Windows 95 to turn them into a zombie army to help him take over the world.
So really, getting a PC laptop is probably the better move for you. :-)
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Oops... double posted...
Stalled Trek
in The Wannabe Way
Posted
Thanks, Tacku!
I hate to say it, since it makes me sound like I'm doing a commercial, but I bought Barry Zundel's training DVDs and just followed along with how he created the character in them. I've found that the basic technique seems to work for modeling anything: you make a spline for the outline of the side view and a spline for the outline of the front view and then work on creating the splines that go inbetween.
The only thing I've done different from Barry's DVD is do the head first and then the body. (He does the body first.)
I really am just a beginner at this 3D stuff and there are plenty of folks out there who are way more experienced than I who should be the ones to go to for advice.
I'm still figuring it out. :-)