largento
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Posts posted by largento
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Hello! Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction here...
I'm making a simple wall clock and would like to animate it so that it does one of those "time passes quickly" gags.
I've set it up with a bone for the minute hand and a bone for the hour hand. They are independent of each other and when you rotate them (from the front view), you can change the time on the clock, so it basically works, but I would like to make it more automatic.
I need to constrain them, so that the hands only rotate around the center pin on one plane and I would like to make it so that moving the minute hand would work like a real clock: making it so that rotating the minute hand makes the hour hand rotate to a lesser degree. (i.e. so if the minute hand is on 12 and the hour hand is on three, rotating the minute hand all the way around to 12, would make the hour hand move to four.)
Is there an easy way to do this?
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WOW... WOW...
That is incredible! Really spectacular work!
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largento
Glad you liked my flick but I fear I miss-worded my comments on rendering on my iMac. The Mac renders fine it's just slower.
What I did to speed my rendering up was to render a few frames on my iMac and merge them with those rendered on my PC. I was hoping that it would be A-OK but I noticed an anomally. If you look closely at the spots on the alien as he walks away from the spaceship they change…
That's why I won't be using my Mac and my PC to render the same scenes. However, I am now very tempted to try Boot Camp because it will run faster and hopefully work with Net Render.
*whew!* :-)
Now that you point it out, I can see a place where it looks like the spots jump. I didn't notice it until you pointed it out, though.
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That was pretty cool! I liked the little step-back he took when the doors opened. :-)
I'm still new to this, so I'm not seeing the difference you're talking about with the iMac render. What specifically doesn't work on the Mac render? (I'm on a Mac and won't have any other option but to use it to render.)
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Name: Mark Largent
Exercise 3
February 8, 2007
Comments: The Rabbit Supper! Decided to take on a challenge with this one. This was a lot of fun and I learned a lot over the course of it.
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Thanks! The music is an excerpt from an old David Seville Alvin & The Chipmunks song called "Alvin's Harmonica." (That's why you hear that harmonica flourish at the end!)
The wmv file referenced in the thread you linked to doesn't seem to be online anymore. I'll check on the extras DVD and see if it's there. QT handled it pretty easily. (There's an "Open Image Sequence" option.)
I wanted to bring it into iMovie, so that I could play with putting the different shots together. The music was an afterthought, but it did help with figuring out where I needed to take out some frames to keep the motion passing through the clips. There's an illusion in the close-up that the camera is pulling back a little which I guess is because the character is moving.
I thought it was probably the file extension that kept it from uploading. The difference between the compression of the mp4 (using H.264) and a mov using Sorenson 3 is pretty large. The mp4 is 480x360 and came out at 568K. The mov I outputted with Sorenson 3 compression (medium setting) at 320x240 was 1.8MB!
I can't take any credit for the page it's on, since it's just a template page in iWeb, but it does give it a kind of feel like I'm keeping a notebook of my class assignments. :-)
Thanks again!
Great stuff, Mark - love the music.You can import tgas into A:M and then output them again - This thread here.
However, iMovie is easier to add music (at least, I've never tried it in A:M, so I'm probably wrong).
If you render in A:M, to .mov, using Sorensen 3 compression, then you get a small movie that can be uploaded to the forum.
Having said that, though - I love the page your movie's on.
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Name: Mark Largent
Exercise 2
February 6, 2007
Comments: Like Tigerblue, I'm using a Mac & A:M 14 (a5) and my curtain looks flat, too. For fun, I moved the camera around and rendered the scene 3 times. I rendered the individual frames as TGAs and imported them into Quicktime and then stuck 'em in iMovie and added a little music clip. Kind of works with it. :-)
I tried uploading the movie, but got a message saying that I wasn't "permitted to upload this type of file." I saved it as an mp4, so it'd be small. I stuck it up here instead:
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Hi, all!
I'm a newbie on my 2nd time around. :-)
I bought A:M for the Mac (v10, maybe?) a few years ago and really enjoyed it, but something else shiny came along and I was distracted away from it. Just recently my short attention span spun me back around and I decided to upgrade.
Wow! I am really having fun with it. I'm sure having a faster computer is a part of the better experience, but it's clear the application has improved, too. The DVD of extras is FANTASTIC! I learned more about A:M in a few hours of digging through the tutorials than I learned in the months that I played with it a few years ago. It's a fantastic resource and big thanks for compiling it and to all the folks who contributed!
I foresee huge chunks of my free time disappearing. :-)
Largento
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Good progress! His arms look a little big though.
Yeah, I'm having a problem there. Looking back at the drawings I've done, I notice that I've "cheated" the arm length as was necessary.
The way the character is set up, he's sort of normal size up top and then stubby at the bottom, so stubby arms don't quite look right.
Yet, in this position, you are right that they look gorilla-like long.
I'm going to see if positioning can make this work. If his arms stay bent at the elbow most of the time and you only see extensions when you can't see his lower half.
Or maybe there's an inbetween solution that I'm not seeing yet.
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Dearmad, if you can remember that ST parody and know of a place I could see some of it, I'd like to. I don't want to make anything too similar to what's been done before, but I'm also curious to see how certain things have been approached in the past.
I remember seeing "tests" for some animation years ago, but it was a guy in Australia (I think) who did all of his characters using "Simpsons" characterizations.
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Thanks for the compliment, Rodney! I hope so! I'm having more fun with this than anything I've done in years. (Probably since I first started using Photoshop.) It's like having a machine to make your own toys and then you get to play with them!
I hope to fix the hands and get the rigging started tonight. I can't wait to move the guy around!
Largento!
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Making progress. Took the advice and went back and removed almost all of the 3-point patches. (I think there might be one or two in the hair, but I figured it was okay, since the hair won't move.)
I also began building the body. I've got to do some work with the hands (probably rebuild them), but I was anxious to see how the whole thing would look.
A:M is a fantastic program! Kudos to all involved with it!
And the talent of the folks working with it is amazing! Very inspiratonal!
Thanks again,
Largento!
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Thanks, guys! Your encouragement means a lot!
Yes, I do plan to animate, but I want to model all the characters' heads first. (I figure once I've done that, I can make one body that I can reshape to accommodate the different characters.)
I'm viewing it like learning to play music. I want to learn all the notes and stuff, before I start playing the instruments.
Here's the 2D version of the character that I was trying to translate. That's why he's got the flattened jaw and the weird scott'sman hair. The hair was a breakthrough, since it was really the first time I was trying to find a way to create something I'd only seen in 2D. I'd drawn the sides before, but never the back. It was sort of like, "Oh, so that's what the back would look like.")
Again, it's far from perfect, but it's at least down the right path...
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Thanks, John! here's a couple of views with the mesh on...
I must confess that most of the work here has been trial and error. Move this point, see what damage I caused!
I also never could tell where I needed to add more splines or take them away. I ended up with huge amounts of them on the nose.
Largento!
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Hello, all!
I just bought A:M about three weeks ago, after reading a press release that an OS X version had been released. I'm not a 3D artist, but I am a graphic designer and A:M seemed like an affordable way to experiment and play with 3D.
Anyway, as I started playing, I decided I'd focus on trying to figure out how to model some of the comic characters I'd worked on in the past and decided I'd start with a parody of Star Trek I'd started as a web comic back in 1996 and then did as a PDF comic in 2000. The character designs I'd used were pretty simple and there was a focus on character to them, rather than striving for likenesses. (You never know what they'll decide to sue you for!)
That said, I've finished my first model of the head of one of the characters, Captain Krok. Having never done anything like this before, I'm dazzled by it's dimensionality, but I can still see that there are some definitely rough areas that hours of fidgiting (sp?) with have failed to smooth out.
Some of the model was done as an afterthought yesterday (like the neck), so I've yet to go back to it, but figured this would be a good stopping point and check and see if you knowledgeable folks could spot some obvious mistakes I'm making and can pass on some tips.
Any comments/criticisms/slight-ego-crushing would be extemely welcome!
I definitely feel like I've been bitten by the bug. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I've lost in these three weeks!
Largento!
Making a Clock
in New Users
Posted
Thanks, Jay! I'm still trying to figure this all out... having fun, though. :-)