chris
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Posts posted by chris
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I realise you don't want the models rigged, but you do want them boned? I assume, if you do, then that they must follow the TSM naming conventions as well. Are there changes to the naming conventions from what they were in TSM 1?
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A:M should have no problem running on that machine. You may want to perform a search in this forum on optimising your machine (there was a thread about that a while ago) to provide the most stable and efficient environment for A:M.
Also, eventually you may ultimately choose to install A:M on your other faster gaming machine for rendering, if you find yourself rendering complex scenes it would help to shorten your render times.
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OK I haven't read every post in this thread but I did quickly skim through it and something crossed my mind. (...with that said I hope I'm understanding this thread right.
)I personally have little interest in importing polygon models into A:M and find it's well worth the effort to learn to model well in A:M especially if your aiming toward animation.
However I think I may have a potential solution for certain types of characters, this idea stems off a suggestion I read for having a type of 3D trace program that would change polygon models into spline models. Although I think a program/plugin that does this would be impossible to write, there are simply to many decisions that require knowledge about how the model will ultimately be used. So my suggestion (though untested) would be to create a "character glove", basically an over inflated generic mesh that you could position over top of an imported mesh, that has all the joints properly modeled etc. Then using the Conform plugin from ZPiDER you could "vacuum form" your A:M mesh to the imported poly mesh. Now when you delete the imported poly mesh you have an A:M mesh left that conforms to the shape of your original model, with a little tweaking it should be ready to bone, rig and animate.
I do own the conform plugin, but honestly haven't played with it to much, also as I satated before I haven't tested this theory out, actually I probably won't test it out either because I prefer to model from scratch using A:M's built in spline tools, though plugins do come in handy now and then.
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Have you adjusted your preroll for the hair? It needs "time" to let the gravity take effect and giving it preroll gives time for the hair to settle into position before the animation begins.
Personally I like the spiky look he has in the choreography picture though.
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Just bumping this thread to the top of the forum again to give JavierP another opportunity to see it again and please his awaiting audience.
Encore my good man, your audience it waiting
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I just ran across this thread again but I missed seeing the animation while you had it up and would very much like to see it as well. Could you please post it again?
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OK click "extrude" now before rotating your camera view in any direction hold down the <Shift> key and hit the <up> arrow (this jumps the cps up exactly 10 points, the same distance, but opposite direction, that extrude offset them). Now while the cps are still selected click the view of the number pad that you want to extrude in and move your cps as you please with either the arrow keys or by typing in the distance, etc.
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I also worked with Big Idea (Veggie Tales) too & will try to get some #'s for you.
I'm still in touch with a few folks there.
Don't know how quickly they will get back to me with the #'s.
I'm somewhat confused now,
I remember hearing that Big Idea Productions filed for bankruptcy back in Sept 2003 and have read serveral articles stating that their assets were bought by Classic Media LLC. But on the Big Idea website it shows there is a new video coming out and according to your quote there are people still working there.I have been a fan of Veggie Tale since 1997, so I am interested if anyone knows what's going on with the company now? Any info???
Is Classic Media LLC now funding them for future productons?
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No, i didn't use an environment map and actually the edges are not showing caustics, they are actually showing a bit of refraction.The edges look pretty good for caustics, and I take it you didn't use anenvironment map.
Also, you have the sun rising in the West because....?I'm afraid you may be missing the point of the test I was running.
This isn't a project I am planning on using for anything beyond this test, and therefore the direction of the earth's rotation wasn't vitally important. This test took only about a half hour to model and setup, I was just running this test strictly for the purpose of running photon mapping in conjuction with the boolean operation and observing how it behaves.My results and conclusion of that test is shown in the above post. Thanks for the reply.
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Would anyone know if it's even possible in some future version of A:M to have it take the boolean operation into account before doing photon mapping (some kind of precalucation maybe)? Of course this would only be necessary if the two are being used in the same scene.
Maybe Yves Poissant might have an idea about this?
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Quick Note: The average frame took 17minutes to render at 720x480. (It's a 2 second animation at 30fps.)
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A month ago I ran across this thread Boolean Globe.
After seeing the thread I started to wonder about using the boolean operation with photon mapping. Would the Photon calcuation take into account the boolean's geometry (or subtracted geometry).
Knowing that photons are calculated before rendering I was pretty sure they wouldn't recognise the booleans geometry properly but decided to make a short animation to test this out. The results are below.
As you can see it apears as though because the photons are calculated before hand they take into acount all the geometry of the boolean model the geometry being subtracted from AND the geometry doing the subtracting.
The above model was created the same way as the thread suggested using A:M version 11 and rendered with the default A:M 3-point light setup.
P.S. It did cross my mind that using Marcel's Conform plug-in might be helpful in producing a similar globe with actual real geometry, but the way the ai plugin imported the world.ai file I thought it might be difficult to get a smooth model.
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Has anyone being doing anything with fonts on your system? If the system font used to display the A:M menu has been removed, deleted or corrupted it could cause the system to pick an obscure font of it's own choosing to replace it (or be using the corrupted font).
As an interesting side note when I first got OSX I was trying to get used to the way it handles fonts and I ended up moving all the fonts (system fonts included) into a different directory through OS9 (not classic). When I booted up in OSX all the icons, menus, file names, everything came up blank. Menus etc would still cascade like they are supposed to but they had nothing written in them. Trying to figure your way around a new operating system blind like that really makes you think about using your keyboard short cuts and where you saw things last or where you put them. I did eventually restore the fonts to their proper folder and everything returned to normal.
The same thing could happen on PCs... I've had a system font trouble (corrupt font) that caused a few display problems with menus before.
I'd check closely into your system fonts if I were you, especially the one that is used for your A:M menu.
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Does your wall object have receive shadows set to "on"?
I don't have A:M right in front of me at the momentto check out my answer (I'm on break at work), but if memory serves me correctly I believe that may be your solution.
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OK, for a moment lets assume I can figure out the driving null information and have applied it to a TSM rigged character and all works well. Will it be possibly to use the TSM rig to add additional motion within A:M to the imported MoCap motion I have just applied to a character? For instance I've just imported a MoCap walk cycle but I want to use TSM to get him to wave at someone. I realise this is just blending motions but I'm assuming BVH works by key framing evey frame, though I believe there is a reduce keyframes option somewhere in A:M if memory serves me correctly, and thought this may introduce difficulties in modifying the original motion.
Any comments?
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Thanks William!
Your tutorial should help a lot!
The free (technically shareware) MoCap utility is called DGeeMe... I haven't had a chance to play with it quite yet but I found someone online stating it exported BVH files... hope this is true. Someone else stated they had trouble with a previous release exporting usable BVH files but I guess I'll see if this has been fixed yet.
I also found a very cheap MoCap program called Visual Marker 2.0. It's only 39.95 and has fairly good reviews about it.
We'll see when and how the testing goes.
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Thought I'd try posting my question here too.
I'm interested in finding out how to use BVH Motion Chapture Data on an already TSM rigged character.
If anyone reading this has any comments please post them here...
Thanks.
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Really Steve? ...I do remember it being a feature of version 8 (I began using A:M in version 7) ...are you saying there were BVH files on the v8 CD? Maybe I'll have to find my old disk and check when I get home.
But I am most interested in finding out how to use BVH data with the TSM rig. Though having a couple of BVH files from v8 may be helpful in figuring out how to do it.
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Hmm... has anyone on this list even done this before?
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I'm not sure how "newbie" you are... so forgive me if this comment sounds insulting I just don't know how far your splinemanship understanding goes.
Sometimes to hook the end of a spline to another spline you may need to rotate your view window or hide underlying mesh so that A:M knows which spline you are trying to hook to. If you don't it may accidentally hook to a spline near by, do nothing, or possibly in your case disapear (which I actually have never seen happen.)
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Yes Vern that is true.
I work at a company with a very large print division and I need to supply them with images often. Even though a printer's DPI value isn't exactly the same as the DPI value on the screen it is however for arguments sake a very good rule of thumb to follow.
Inkjets are especially notorious for interpolating the information say from a 150dpi image on the screen when being printed on a 720dpi or 1440 printer. The inkjets are programmed to interpolate, and the inkjet process also subtly softens the detail and in turn the pixelization more when printing to a higher DPI value than your original image. It's still a 150dpi image you've just printed (you haven't increased the resolution of the image) it's just technically there are 720 or 1440 dot's per inch on the paper.
Laser printers or high line screen (sorry Vern had to bring it up) offset printing is far less forgiving when printing lower resolution images. These processes are so sharp and precise that it often shows both the lack of detail and sometimes even the pixilization of a low resolution image.
Anyway, when thinking about printing an image the DPI should ultimately be chosen based on the distance it is going to be viewed from and the resolution should be based on the size of the final output multipied by the DPI you've chosen just as a rule of thumb. When printing a digital still photo you can see the quality difference between printing a native 300dpi and a native 600dpi image printed on the same 720dpi printer.
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How would you go about appling motion capture data to a character rigged with TSM?
I found a free, small, multiple video source based motion capture application that exports BVH files. What is the proper way of applying those files to your model? Do you create action files with them somehow? How do you make sure tose files are compatible with your rig?
I am interested in using them in A:M for applying to characters as well as for just motion study purposes so I can hand animate my own walk, jog, run, and dance cycles etc. for my TSM rigged characters.
I plan to purchase Jeff Lew's Character Animation DVD down the road soemtime... but I want to play around with this first for a while.
So any tips?
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The thing that got me was why were you multiplying "dots per inch" by inches and coming out with pixels?
The answer is because 1 printed dot corresponds to 1 pixel on the screen.
oops... forgot to mention that part, sorry ...er...uh... people listen to Ken...Ken is wise!
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For those reading this thread and don't understand how Vern is getting those numbers here is a quick math lesson on the subject of DPI and choosing resolution for print.
DPI stand for "Dots Per Inch"
Pick the print quality you want: (to repeat some of what gra4mac said)
- 72 DPI is very low ugly print quality
- 150 DPI is medium print resolution
- 300 DPI is standard print resolution
- 600 DPI is very high print resolution
- 600+ DPI is insane and probably won't help you much anyway resolution!
Now pick the final output size you want your printed image to be
- 4'x6' (Standard Photo)
- 8'x10' (US Letter)
- 11'x17' (Tabloid)
- 12'x18' (Tabloid Extra)
- ??'x??' (Custom Size... like a poster)
Now, first multiply your DPI value number by the height value to get your image height in pixels. Second do the same for the width value.
Quick Note 1: Interpolating up to a higher resolution is MUCH better than scaling up if for some reason you can't get an image the size you need it for print. As Vern pointed out Photoshop does this quite well.
Example:
300DPI 8'x10' image would need to be 2400x3000 pixels
150DPI 11x17 image would need to be 1650x2550 pixels
etc...
It really is just simple math when you understand what you are doing.
Quick Note 2: It may seem to make sense then to choose a higher DPI value for things that are printed larger but the rule of thumb isn't based on how large the printed image is going to be but rather how far away it will be viewed from. A printed digital photo could be viewed from less than a foot away and there for should at least be 300DPI if not 600DPI. A poster viewed from 12-50feet away should be 200DPI-150DPI. Where as a huge movie poster hung on the side of a building might be 72DPI or even less because it will be viewed from hundreds of feet away. Having more resolution in the printed picture may not be visible by your audience from great distances so why print it that way?
This may help you save on unnecessary rendering times and storage space.
Anzovin TSM2 Model Contest
in (2003-2004)
Posted
Thanks Ken, I thought I had read something about that. I guess that means our models should be boneless then I take it.
I was just wondering about things like fan bones and such, they wouldn't be "supplied" so how are they used with the new TSM if it makes it's own bone setup? Obviously you still have to asign CPs to those bones but does it limit in any way your boning options?