Fishman

19th may be iffy for me. My anniversary is the 20th and my wife wants to go out to dinner for it, so I'm thinking the 19th might be her target date. Although if it isn't the 20th, it could be any day, I suppose. All rambling aside, put me down as tentative for the 19th. I'll volunteer to bring something when I know for sure that I can make it. Scott

Hey Don! I don't know why I misssed your initial post, but here goes. The 5th is no good for me, I will be on my way home from vacation. Off the top of my head, the 12th should work for me, but I'll check the family calendar when I get home. Thanks again for leading us! Scott

I am working on a possible mini movie contest entry. The action takes place in a baseball game. I am attaching a short clip showing a possible opening shot where the camera flies in to center on the pitcher. I am also attaching a larger still that shows the lighting in better resolution. I am looking for comments and critiques on the set and the lighting. The characters are not posed in anyway other than a pose that is not the standard T pose. When the camera zooms in the pitcher is very likely to be in a different pose and there will be more players on the field. Also, there be a little more detail on the field such as foul lines and markings on the outfield walls as well as some textures on the walls in foul ground. This is my first work where I am developing my own lighting rather than using the default, so fire away. Thanks, Scott Fly_In_Test.mov

Ross, I don't know if you are interested or not, but here is a version of the Yellow character with a heel raising rig. I did this as a test of applying a rig that Mark Skodacek devised for heel raising. You are welcome to use, ignore or just study it. Hope it helps. Cute animation by the way. Scott YellowDude_HeelRaise.zip

Excellent animation. I definitely agree that the highlight is the joyfull clapping and jumping on the middle. My only criticism would be that when he ends up on the ground he looks unnaturally stiff. Maybe a bent leg and different position for the arm on the camera side. Looks great otherwise! Scott

If you are scaling the parent bones of the eyes to achieve the distortion, then you might have to use an expression that uses the reciprocal of the scaled bone to scale the eyes back down, otherwise I would guess that constraints are the way to go. Scott

Cool! Does it come with two laptops?!?! :-) Let us know how it is. I've asked for it for Father's Day and can't wait to read it. Scott

Upper right corner of the screen. Has a big letter A on it. Scott

Rich, Two resons for no legs. He is based off our high schools mascot and the representation has no legs. Secondly, when I tried to make a version with legs, he looked awful! Scott

Leo, Sorry you couldn't make it, we had a good time. All, Enjoyed the day (sorry I was late, took two hours to get down, one hour to get home). Hope everyone enjoyed the cookies. John and Rich, good luck with your project! Vern, hope you get your mechanical entry done, it looks excellent. Don, muchas gracias again for providing the excellent set up. We appreciate you being our leader. Scott

You can count on my head (and the rest of me). I'll bring cookies. Believe it or not I will actually have something to show! Again grateful to Don for hosting. Scott

I assume that you meant to say shutter rather than shudder. If the desire is to create what I think is typically called the iris effect where a circle of diminishing diameter slowly reduces the visible portion of the screen until it is all black, you can do that. I think all you would have to do is put a simple plane object with a hole in it and then animate the diameter of the hole for the fade effect. Scott

Don et al, Works for me. As always many thanks for organizing/hosting. What can I bring? Scott

Hi all, We seem to have lost some momentum here. I can (in order of preference) make the 27th, 20th, 6th and 13th in May and I can also do the 3rd of June. Scott

That is so cute. I can see why the orange one is stampeding, he's got a hair sticking through his eyeball, that's got to hurt! Love those kows! Scott

I missed the last one and I was really bummed. When is the comic book show? Would a May meeting support your need? I am making the bold assumption that Don will host us again, but May Saturdays would probably work OK for me. May 6th and 13th work best. I might be able to do the 20th and I could also do the 29th of April (if you want to consider that a really early May Saturday!). I'll do what I can to support the next meeting date. Scott

Ross, It looks to me like his hops don't originate in his feet. I think what is lacking is a stretch pose at the point he leaves the ground. You come pretty close when he does his leap to climb the knoll. Solidify that pose and use it as an example for the slightly less powerful ones for when he is just hopping. The other thing that keeps distracting me is the intersections of the feet and the body. Makes it hard to figure out, even though he has no legs how his feet work. Even if you don't show legs, I think you want the implications that they are there. I admire the effort you are putting in to make this work come to fruition. Scott PS: I assume the melon looks more rounded in a final render.

I am assuming that you meant to post a picture. Based on what I'm imagining you are seeing, I'm thinking one of two things. Either you need to go back and make sure the rig is installed correctly or you need to investigate CP weighting. Smartskin should be used to clean up a joint not part of the basic rig. If after installing the rig you don't get reasonable motion, I would suspect either bone location, cp assignments or cp weighting. Your character is basic enough that you should be able to rig him with reasonably good looking motion without smartskin and then clean up with smart skin. Scott

I like the character, but have two comments. Not sure what to make of the white spots on the face. Are they important to the story? If not, there is the possibility that they will be distracting. The second is the thickness of the soles of his shoes and the size of the upper portion make him look a little unstable (which may be your intent). Nice work! Hope you and your team are enjoying your work and that it will be successful. Scott

The length of rendering has little or nothing to do with the number of keyframes. The length of rendering time is a strong function of scene complexity - number of patches on model, number of models, number of fancy render features such as reflections, hair, particles, blobbies, etc. The calcualtions to determine the in betweens are simple by comparison. If you are just posing your character to learn, I wouldn't worry too much about render times. About key framing - one method is to pose your model in the first key frame and force a key frame. When you pose your model the first time your likely to have adjusted just about every bone you need to and that will create a key frame for all the bones without over doing it. Just keep your eye out for bones that get translated only but will be rotate later. If the rotation key isn't set at from 0 then it will be set later which will give you the effect you saw beore. You can always nudge them with a rotation at frame 0 and when you force the key frame it will set you up for later rotations. When you go to the next key frame, force a key frame and then pose it again. In the second key frame any bones you don't touch will automatically get a key frame since they have a key frame at frame 0. This is basic pose to pose animation. Hopefully this makes some sense. I have found this method quite satisfactory for preventing motions that start when I thouoght they shouldn't. Scott

Now that is what I call a screen grab. Your problem is very clear and easily fixed. You need to understand what you did and why it happened. It looks like you start by creating keyframes for translation only. When you first rotate the bone it is at frame 15 and it creates a key frame at frame 15 and frame 0 for rotations. The only keys you had before were for translation that is why there is no intermediate rotation keyframe. When you nudge the bone at 0 do a rotation as well. That will enable A:M to force rotation keys when you hit the force key frame button. Another thing to try is to just have Keekat's model selected at frame 0 and hit force keyframe. I think that will key all the bones in the model. Doing so will also key both translations and rotations from the very beginning. This will create a boatload of keyframes, but will not give you the problem of creating a keyframe late in the animation that has no 0 reference. Here is a link to a tutorial that I have found very helpful. http://www.hash.com/users/ed/tutorials/animtut.htm Scott

Can you do a screen grab of your timeline and post it? That will make it easier to diagnose. If you are only working on one bone, then what your saying does not make sense. If you are working on multiple bones, then when you select a new bone the timeline will show the keys for that bone. You can also select Bones and see all your bone keys. This can be very confusing if you have keyframe many bones. Scott

Just a quick suggestion to help you. Your splinesmanship in the face and the arms to the body are really going to give you problems when you animate. I would recommend studying some of the models on the CD to see how to tackle these areas in a more elegant way. Also, check out the Make a Face exercise in The Art of Animnation Master manual that came with the software (you won't need to be quite as complex as that, but there is a boatload to learn from the technique). Then you won't have to peak splines to try to keep things smooth. Additionally, your body is such a simple shape that you could eliminate quite a few of the longitudinal splines with losing anything. In the future it is usually easier to rig your models hands if they are in the horizontal position with the thumbs facing forward. Most premade rigs are set up this way and will make it easier to adapt the rig. You can then pose it to hold other objects. Good first effort! Scott

For your hair you need to turn on dynamics. It is an option in the hair material. Scott

He's cute. Are the sword and shield separate models that you've incorporated for the render or were they modeled along with him? Have you looked into rigging him yet? Nice effort. Scott