Drakkheim

I've been playing too much with radiosity lately (this resulting render has been tweaked in Photoshop) Full Size (1280x768) available here. small version raw render available here. -Simon

Beautiful render Bill! couple thoughts for ya, What does the kid want to be when he grows up? How about some toys indicating his interests, or does he only read and play chess? maybe some old discarded toys jammed under the bed and forgotten stuffed animals/action figures shoved in the corner. Couple of those could be gotten off the CD and 'broken' without much trouble. Maybe he has a couple drawings of his on the wall? The kid is kinda messy as we can tell by the open draweres and chess set, but he puts away all his clothes? I'd like to see a sock hanging out of the drawer and maybe some dirty laundry scattered about. I agree about the scaling down of the wood grain and changing the rug. maybe making the throw rug oval and more in the center of the room so the Kid can sit on it and not get a sore butt when he's challenging his favorite author to a game of chess? Can't wait to see how this progresses. -Simon

I just checked the zip archive, its in there.. project file is called modelshopb.prj and turns out there is a second copy of itself in there... you can just ignore that :-D Here's the link again (5.5 mb zip file)

Thanks Iham! I spent some significant time smoothing out the phoneme transitions and made his mouth close properly for the P in parents and M in Me as was pointed out to me in the cgtalk forums. Version 3 (1mb QT sorensen) calling it officially done now. unless I missed something huge....

Bravo! very original character and excellent animation as well! cant wait to see more from you.

The mouth shapes/poses I created for my lipsynch wip, I got from Here. and in case you haven't seen the dopesheet video tutorials here. (Exercise 7: "Can You Say That?") I found it to be quite helpful. My intuition tells me that you're probably not going to be lipsynching english, in which case the automatic phoeneme (probably) won't work, However the dopesheet can be useful for breaking down where the words lie on the timeline. Then just work your way through the timeline first positioning your mouth poses. I hope this helps.

Reworked it last night, this time posing it entirely by hand to avoid the choppy overposed look it was suffering from before. Definatly a lot more natural looking HERE (480Kb sorensen .Mov) made it a quicktime movie this time since a friend of mine had the Divx movie crash his safari browser.

I like it! Especially those eyeballs! They look like they could pop out of his skull one second and the next they're obviously planning something devious.

I've just finished creating the phoneme's for my character and just had to try and figure out how this stuff works, so i Watched the "can you say that" video tut and attempted to make my own, a couple hours later out came this: Clip (890Kb Divx 5.03) Any feedback would be more than welcome I must say how impressed I am with A:M's implementation of the dopesheet etc etc..it was as easy as it appears in the video. However I did wind up with a bunch of keyframes that fall inbetween frames, is that normal? Laters

Had some free time this weekend so i threw this guy together he still needs ears and a body. Spinning head test render (1.5 mb QT sorensen) Enjoy -simon

I'm getting tween 16 and 20 KB/Sec, so the ETA on the download is 20-35 min. I don't suppose you have access to a faster webhost, or perhaps somone would like to mirror it for you?

well im building my parts to fit onto johns griffin parts model. Im not planning on boning the model parts ill leave that to whomever decidest to use them since the structure may vary depending on the parts used in the final critters.

This is very very very nice! I like the zepplin/biplanes a LOT. One quick comment/suggestion, in the first image the dotted line down the middle of the road seems out of scale with the rest of the image, but that could just be me can't wait to see more. -simon

John, Couple points that would help if you could clarify: 1)any chance you can post a model with just the basic connector rings in place? that way everyone's parts start at the proper location and shape? 2)And what's the spline count for the neck ring, i want to do a head or two to get my modeling skills back into practice. 3)version of am? Im currently using 10.5r is that going to be a problem? 4) bones? -Simon

Hey, that's pretty durned neat. So where does one get mocap data files from? (aside from going and buying thousands worth of hardware) -d

Yeah that's what the voices kept telling me... Ok Now that my halucincations have been verified I'll ask the hash guys to take a look at this behavior. As for the render, I'm looking to do the final render (skylights, motionblur, & the whole shebang), I've got a stack of preview renders but the real thing just looks so much better. Thanks for taking the time to take a look at this gang. -D

well originally i had done everything in 10.5p i have since switched over to q hoping that it would fix it. no luck tho. If I start a render at frame 29 it gives me different results.. however starting at 0:00:00 and gradually woking my way up to 29 the position of the particles is different from when i start a render at 29. the frames 29 & 30 are just 2 numbers i pulled out of thin air, the particles jump about at any given frame provided I step up to it from 0:00:00 and then step backwards. ok here's step by step instructions to see 'what im seeing' so we can see if im cursed / jinxed. open up the choreography1 chor punch in 0:00:00 for the frame to jump to. press + on the keypad a bunch of times. Dont press any other buttons. stop when the chor advances to around frame 30 look at where the particles are. press the - key on your keypad once. The program then recalculates the postition of the particles... and they all jump around destroying my continuity. man i wish there was an easy way to show everyone im not crazy..... gonna try a couple other things -d

I havent messed with the preroll thing before.. I'll take a look and see when I get a chance tonight. What my opinion of what's happening is, the collisions aren't being calculated properly. But i've been unbable to recreate it outside of this project. anyway here are some shots showing what the problem Im seeing Is: when I step forward from 0:0:00 to 0:00:29 the particles look like this. when I step forward to 0:01:00 the particles look like this. then when I step BACK to 0:00:29 the particles look like this. rendered frame 29: then when I restart the render on another dat at frame 30 the particles look like this: which is quite a bit different. -D

well I finally got this thing finished. Only problem is, I cant render it. For some reason the particles shift around when I start rendering in the middle. I rendered the first 30 frames at 20 minutes a pop but when I went to start the render at frame 31 the particles are recalculated to be in a different position. And since there is no way I can let the computer render the entire sequence in one sitting I'm pretty much stuck at this point. So I've zipped the entire project and made it available on my website. you can get it HERE(5.5mb) if you want to play around with it. If you want to see the problem you can step forward to like frame 30 in the project. and then hit back.. It recalculates the position of the sprites and they shift around. -D

Very Nice! I really like the outfit. as for adding more character the only thing i can think of is a different haircut. Keep at it, cannot wait to see her move.

ooh good call on the loss of momentum thing.. turns out tehre was a keyframe in there in which the ship did nothing but move directly away from the camera... should be smoother next pass. as for the camera motion im still poking at it. I hadnt noticecd that drop before, ive smoothed it out a little.. thanks

adjusted the particle systems a good bit.. made some changes that worked and some that,... well... didn't ... Looks like im gonna be startting the particles out smaller so they dont appear to pop into existance. but overall I think its a step in the right direction. Have a looksie. -Drakk

Thanks peoples. and have some "camera" shake when it hits. Oooh good idea! definatly gonna do that. kept that in mind as i made some changes... Its currently rendering and I should be able to update it by sunday night if it finishes rendering. heh i agree, but things get more interesting when you strap on some missiles and bombs before slamming it into the ground Thanks again for the feedback

hehe thanks guys. as for the focus barrier... just call that non multipass motion blur. I see what you mean with the smoke rising too fast ..that shouldn't be too hard to fix. And what I had planned on was after the plane hits and slides for a few feet (gotta spray up some dirt and stuff in front.) It would start flipping and disintegrating throwing bits and pieces of itself in every which way, and bouncing like crazy, followed by an even bigger kaboom. :-D but first, i've gotta finish the model and get it textured. I'll post some more wips as that comes along. -D

FYI: This isn't the toon version which im having problems, this version is rendered with an actual skydome and skylight. I think im going to try and see if i can pull the shot off going for that 'realistic' look. Still below --: -Drakk